Firefox fiddling

Herewith, the few (Windows) Firefox tricks that I find particularly handy, and a small rant.

You know how IE could be set to make each new window load whatever you'd been looking at in the last one? To make Firefox do the same thing with a new tab, make your new blank tab with ctrl-T, then press ctrl-Z to paste the contents of the last tab's address bar into the new tab's.

Troubled by drop-down autocompletion menus (for login names, for instance) that contain useless relics of past mis-typing...

Unwanted autocomplete options

...or evidence that you've been doing lots of searches for things that would make the rest of the National Association of Evangelicals very angry with you?

Cursor-down to any entries you don't want, and press shift-Delete. Bing, gone.

Also, you can cycle through tabs with ctrl-Tab and ctrl-shift-Tab, and close tabs without bothering to select them first by middle-clicking them on the tab bar (and, of course, ctrl-W closes the current tab).

That last trick isn't actually especially tricky, but it lets you do everything that the new Firefox 2 tab close boxes do, while leaving the close boxes turned off so you've got more room for actual tab text. You can also make the tabs work pretty much exactly as they did in Firefox 1.5, if you don't like the new horizontal scrolling and List All Tabs button - that's mentioned near the top of this Lifehacker piece.

The comments on that piece point out that the new "prefetch" feature is (a) not actually new, and (b) not as brillant as you might at first think. No, Firefox 2 (or various versions of 1, or Google Web Accelerator...) does not dumbly preload whatever the first link on the current page points to, or some such goofy thing.

Right now, I bet prefetch actually still doesn't do much at all. I suppose some sites must use the <link rel="prefetch"... syntax needed to make it happen, but it's not exactly rife. If prefetch ever does become really popular, though, it could indeed be a definite pain for dial-up users. Just because the browser's idle doesn't mean nothing else needs bandwidth, after all.

Oh, and people in offices with strict browsing policies could be in for all kinds of fun if some random page decides to invisibly prefetch a few porn and shock images, just for fun. Not that you can't do that already in several ways, but prefetch is the most 11-year-old-h4XX0r-friendly way to plant filth in someone's cache folder that I've yet seen.

Do not be the unplugging

The instructions for the fire syringe I bought from Educational Innovations are quite entertaining.

Helpful instructions

I've only used the syringe (a.k.a. a "fire piston") with bits of paper or cotton so far. They work, but they're not very exciting. This page suggests match heads or flash paper (or "punk", which I'm afraid only means stuff that smoulders, not what you might think).

I, of course, have some flash paper, which I keep in the red-painted ammo-box along with my other Stuff That's A Bit Too Much Fun (it's flash cotton, actually, but that's the same stuff).

So I anticipate being struck on the chin by the rapidly rising piston of my fire syringe in the near future.

I'm dead philosophical, me

So I was reading The Daily WTF again (shut up, I understand some of it), and it led me to the Wikipedia page on anti-patterns, which all right-thinking people should find at least somewhat entertaining. Most anti-patterns are applicable to all sorts of systems beyond programs and office processes.

Take the Big Ball of Mud, for instance. It's what you get whenever anything - a program, a business, a house, a war - is built and fixed in a completely ad hoc fashion, with no overarching plan or control structure. Letting stuff just grow works fine for small and simple things, but if you let a major project of any sort go to seed, unspeakable abominations will, inevitably, spring forth.

Anyhoo, the Big Ball of Mud concept reminded me of the shiny-ball-of-mud, or "dorodango", an unusual pastime that swept the blogs a while ago. Instructions, relevance to developmental psychology, Zen, et cetera.

It just strikes me as rather neat that it is both literally and figuratively possible to polish a Big Ball of Mud until until it becomes very attractive, and may even seem quite valuable.

(Insert link to Microsoft and +5, Insightful moderation here.)

Whack! Smoke. Whack! Flame.

My (previously-mentioned) fire piston does not, usually, produce an actual flame.

You whack the plunger down to compress the air around the little tuft of cotton you've put in the bottom of the cylinder, and you get some smoke in the cylinder when the plunger recoils. More whacks make more smoke. That's it.

When it does manage to produce a flame, though, the flame always occurs on the second quick-succession whack of the plunger.

It took me a moment to figure out why this was, given that the first whack obviously uses up some of the oxygen in the cylinder and thus makes it harder for any combustion to happen the second time.

The reason must be that the first whack starts the cotton smouldering, and the second whack actually achieves visible ignition. Mainly, presumably, of the flammable partly burned smoke from the first whack.

If you had a smouldering coal in the cotton in the first place, you'd probably get more of a spark on the first whack.

Ideas, involving glow plugs, electric matches and dropping burning stuff into the cylinder, suggest themselves. Or you could just use a more robust cylinder that supports a higher compression ratio. Tim smacked his with a sledgehammer.

(More discussion regarding gas-compression-related fire-making widgets can be found on the site that used to be trackertrail.com. I've very little interest in actually roughing it, but a lot of the techniques and technologies involved are very interesting nonetheless. And it certainly doesn't hurt to know.)

[The fire-piston also has amusing instructions!]

Hang a lantern on the magical computer

Today, I have spent quite a while reading the TV Tropes Wiki.

It is informative and hilarious.

Thank you.

Very important pictures of spaceships

Here is a huge Lego spaceship which I just found myself looking at again because I'd filed its bookmark in the wrong folder.

On my wall, however, I have a four-up picture of sets 918, 487 and 497 from here, along with this, partly because it's more authentic to the Classic Space theme (kindly commence your choruses of "I had that one!"... now), but mainly because it's another nice render on a dark background, so it matches the other ones.

Thank you.

(P.S.: No mention of the Galaxy Explorer would be complete, of course, without pointing out its only predator.)

(Oh, and you can find a good primer on really big Lego models, next to which 10030 looks like a rowboat, in the fifth issue of BrickJournal.)

Wallpapers!

I've made a page with a bunch of my old free-gift wallpaper images, and a couple of new ones. Enjoy!

Today's Companies That Really Really Want You To Rip Off Their Products

Microsoft and Sony (best comment so far).

Honestly - with publicity like this, who needs a crazed bomber driving a truck full of ANFO into your corporate HQ?