After the opening speakers the music got started. Literally everything was if not the best at least enjoyable to listen to! In particular performances by Louise Kent, Andrew Ascenzo, and Molly Johnson stood out. Louise performed a single song, Some Days, which was uplifting and convinced me to buy her album (a rare thing as I usually only buy songs individually). Andrew was a part of the Victor Cheng jazz trio - I didn’t expect a particularily memorable piece  as jazz is not one of my favourite genres, but the songs here had the amazing quality of constantly moving between classical and jazz genres, along with a great piano accompaniment. Finally, Molly Johnson brought the night to a close with some jazz tunes but more importantly plenty of character - the way most events should end. I fully expect a 2010 Music for Change and will gladly attend.

While it’s a lot less important or amazing, I do have a few other topics I’ve been waiting to post about. First is a small Windows game called Infiniminer, made by Zachtronics Industries. It’s available for free and while the servers seem to have quieted down the past few days I still recommend everyone gives it a try. I’ve been making a lot of changes and submitting them to my Git branch; this being the first time I’ve used Git, I’ve found it very useful but not at all user friendly. Anyway, Infiniminer is a 3D mining game whereby a couple teams compete to try to dig down, retrieve loot, and return to the surface. there are four classes specializing in digging, building, exploring, and just blowing stuff up. More interesting than the main game is the sandbox mode, whereby you have unlimited resources and can build hold underground cities and roads and such. I once saw a server that had the entire underground carved out (the server was set to have no lava, which is a very dangerous problem otherwise) so that they could have mid-air walkways and flying temples - crazy stuff. While the game has its rough edges, which I’ve slowly tried to fix with my repository (seriously, it’s got a lot of fixes and features that improve gameplay), I still say that everyone should give it a try, especially if you have any LAN parties or similar events.

The final comment I want to make is something that has struck me as odd for a while - in Windows 7 the Notepad++ find window doesn’t close properly and instead obscures the window, half-transparent and unresponsive. For anyone else having this problem, I just found a solution by this blog post; just disable transparency or set it to “always on”! I didn’t even know Notepad++ had the ability to make the find window transparent when it uses focus! Excellent fix.

Just before I do, a quick reminded; Wolfram Alpha is having a preview this Friday @ 7:00 PM CDT. I’d recommend checking it out. For those unaware, Wolfram Alpha is a knowledge search engine that can also perform calculations and display relative information. It can display graphs of population, retrieve information like the GDP of France, show molecular information for chemical compounds, etc. Unfortunately there haven’t been any more off-the-wall searches publicized but I’m sure they’ll be brought up this Friday.

Without further ado, the list:

Must-have

• Adblock Plus
  • By and large the most important of all my addons, after browsing ad-free its hard to go back. Adblock Plus works extremely well at its core functionality without much tweaking, making it possible to go months without seeing a single banner ad on any websites. In addition it makes it easy to add new entries and use wildcards to make them always work, even once the ads change. Not much more explanation needed, aside from a big thumbs up.
• Greasemonkey
  • One of the hardest addons to explain, Greasemonkey lets you install javascript files that then further modify your browser but without the bloat of more addons. I’ll list some scripts at the bottom of the post as I’ve got several installed and examples are the best way to show what this addon does.
• Download Statusbar
  • Similar to (and predating) Chrome’s download bar, this prevents popups when starting downloads and instead shows a convenient bar containing all your downloads’ progress, speed, and estimated completion time.
• LastTab
  • Falling under the “should be the default” category, at its core LastTab does one thing: it makes Ctrl-Tab move through tabs in order of most recently used instead of left-to-right. A few other features here and there but that’s the gist of it.
• OpenDownload
  • Another “should be the default” addon, this makes it so that every download has an “open with OS’s default program” option.
• PDF Download
  • Not a necessity if you have something like Foxit Reader but convenient nonetheless. Whenever you browse to a pdf file instead of immediately embedding Adobe Reader this lets you choose to download, view as html, cancel, or embed.

Still a Good Idea

• FaviconizeTab
  • Mostly convenient for always-open sites (like gmail or google reader) and an excellent companion for Greasemonkey, it lets you delay closing a tab without taking up so much room.
• Ubiquity
  • Like Greasemonkey, Ubiquity lets user-created javascript files enrich the browsing experience. Unlike Greasemonkey, Ubiquity focuses on a Spotlight-style functionality whereby you can call it up instantly whenever you need it. It’s useful for mashups like embedding maps in email messages or translating page content, but the best way to figure it out is to give it a try.

Mostly for Tablets

• FireGestures
  • If only for one gesture FireGestures makes tablet browsing a lot better - the link down gesture. With a single right-click swipe from a link to the page below it it will open in a new tab. This one requires some experimentation as documentation is thin but important gestures include DR (close tab), UR (next tab), UL (prev tab), LR (new tab), and RL (undo close tab). All of the gestures are fully customizable too.
• Gesso
  • Mainly a fix, it makes the windows TIP properly appear on text fields. It’s still a bit buggy with password fields unfortunately.
• Grab and Drag
  • By mimicking Adobe Reader drag-to-scroll, this makes browsing websites on a tablet pc a lot easier.

That’s the core list. Finally, onto Greasemonkey scripts:

• HTTP-to-HTTPS redirector
  • Makes sure that you never use google services on an unsecure protocol.
• TinyURL Decoder
  • With the advent of twitter this is a requirement, as it automatically replaces shortened links with their full equivalents. I’ve made one main modification to this script, line 112 though that’s probably 2 off: “_node.innerHTML = ‘*’ + finalUrl + ‘ (’ + _node.href + ‘)*’;” - makes it more obvious which links are expanded
• Gmail FavIcon Alerts 3
  • Goes nicely with FaviconTab by making the gmail icon show unread message counts.
• GReader FavIcon Alerts
  • Shows unread item count in the Google Reader icon.

I think I’ve been posting too many lists recently, though it’s for a very simple reason: to get the software I use out into the world. These packs of addons, utilities, etc. have taken years of experimentation to finalize. I’m just hoping this information helps someone else save time in making browsing easier or fixing computer problems.

For the low price of free ThreatFire uses only 2 MB of memory to protect your Windows computer from viruses and malware that may not even appear on you virus scanner’s database - while it doesn’t replace the traditional scanner it is an excellent addition. It received a 4.5 on PC Magazine and appeared on their list of 11 Critical Security Security Apps. False positives are low and successful identifications are high, making it an easy choice to install. While my own testing has been much more limited than PC Mag’s I’ve still found it to be successful and it’s on my list of must-install applications, which can be seen here.

Aside from testing ThreatFire I’ve been trying a game called Combat Arms. It’s another free-to-play Nexon title, meaning you’re sure to see people who’ve paid for customization; however no gameplay-modifying items are cash payment only, so at least there’s no trouble there. While the game seems to have a lot more camping than I’ve seen in CS:S I’d still say to give it a shot, especially if you have some friends with mics (though you’ll need Skype or another VOIP client). At time of writing I’m still only at Private rank but I’m slowly working my way up. I’ve also written a scraper script that can get info from the Nexon profile pages - I’m planning on making it store info in a database and generate graphs, of KDR statistics for example.