Via the Psycho Studio created by Brendan Dawes, you can try your hand at editing the famous shower scene that was drawn up by Saul Bass. (Found at Exploding Fist.) I did it, and must admit my version looked pretty swift. But I think this has nothing to do with my film editing experience and all to do with the nature of the shots themselves. There’s a wonderful sense of composition, framing, and timing inherent in the actual shots that can’t be defeated by mere amateur hands, no matter in what order they’re assembled.
Mozilla and RSS feeds
I seem to be reading a lot of Mozilla-related blog posts lately, extolling the virtues of this open-source web browser, so I thought I would throw one of my own into the ring.
I had resisted the urge to even delve into what is Mozilla, like I resist looking into many things that have a sort of zealotry aura around them (XHTML validation, web accessibility, and in general any writing about Apple computers and and especially its new OS). I only have so many hours in the day…. At any rate, as I suspect has happened with a lot of other Mozilla converts, I kept seeing the phrase “block pop-up ads” pop-up (excuse the pun) repeatedly in these glowing accounts, and I finally determined that I should see what all the fuss was about and download the damn browser already.
Unfortunately it isn’t the godsend to browsing that some seem to view it as, although it certainly has some things to recommend it.
What I like:
* Blocking pop-up ads (duh!)
* The ability to block images from certain servers. This was a feature I wasn’t aware of, but I think I enjoy this almost as much as nuking the pop-ups (and -unders). Certain sites (Yahoo Mail for example) use a lot of big splashy ad jpegs, and it’s nice to right click on the image and choose “block images from this server”. I’ve gotten so into this feature that this afternoon I surfed all the ad-heavy sites I could think of (like Slate and Salon for example) and blocked a whole slew of servers from loading images onto these pages. Great for getting rid of redwoods (industry term for those long narrow ads usually on the right-hand side of web pages) — oops, I’m supposed to be an environmentalist! One thing that it doesn’t too unfortunately is give one the ability to block flash ads, which are quite prevalent.
* Sidebar. More on this below.
What I don’t like or have been disappointed by:
* I use my right-click context menu exclusively for going “back” and “forward” when browsing, and one thing that has always bugged me about IE is that when the pointer is over an image, “back” is not an option on the right-click menu. One has to move the pointer to a non-image part of the page and then right-click back. Unfortunately, this holds true with Mozilla as well. Sometimes images take up the whole page, and so finding a blank spot on which to right-click is well-nigh impossible, and I have to resort to the alt-left arrow keystroke combo to do the trick. Why is this so important to me? Because I don’t use the standard IE toolbar with the “back,” “forward,” “home,” etc. buttons — it takes up too much space, and I want the maximum browsing area possible. Which leads me to…
* I hate that in Mozilla one can’t separate the “button” toolbar and the URL entry field (together called the “Navigational Toolbar”). I don’t need those blasted buttons, and they’re big too! I know that getting rid of them only would give me a smidgen of extra viewing space, but I want it.
* I’m a bit saddened that I don’t have my Google Toolbar anymore. Mozilla does let one use the URL input field as a search tool, and I’ve configured it to search Google, but I miss being able to have my search results pop up in a separate window, which was configurable with the Toolbar. Oh well.
* Also, I can’t adequately use Movable Type’s publishing system, as the formatting icons (for making text linkable, or italicized, for example) don’t show up in Mozilla. I use to create HTML pages in Notepad back in the day, but I’m a lazy WYSIWYG guy now.
* I’ve heard some folks tout that Mozilla uses less system resources that IE does, but I haven’t seen much benefit. Might it be because I’m not using Mozilla’s “tabbed browsing” feature much? I don’t know, I guess I just haven’t gotten used to closing the individual tabs, and often by mistake close the entire window, resulting in the sudden loss of a bunch of web pages I want to read. I’m not quite sure I see the benefit of browsing via tabs versus new windows (other than the possible system resource usage issue I just mentioned).
At any rate, I’m trying to stick with it, and tonight discovered a great reason to do so, the Mozilla Sidebar used in conjunction with RSS feeds (I’m not equipped to explain what RSS feeds are, but you can click on the preceding link and get educated if you want. Or try this recent introductory article at the Guardian.). I’d been flirting with trying to incorporate RSS feeds of various blogs and news sites I frequently check into my custom-made default browser home page (just a boring image-less page that sits on my own hard-drive with most of the links I regularly check). I have been using an external RSS reader called Ampheta Desk, but I don’t like having to launch an external application in addition to my web browser. However, pulling these feeds into my web page requires installing some Perl modules and is a bit more work than I’m looking to do.
Fortunately, through some Google searching I discovered a great workaround: using Mozilla’s Sidebar feature to display RSS feeds. The Sidebar is similar to IE’s “Explorer Bar”, basically a column added to the left-hand side of your browser that allows you to do web searches, access your web history cache, etc. I never used it because it took up space I felt I couldn’t afford to give up. But being able to have RSS feeds there at the ready, using Mozilla, without the need for another external application, I’m willing to compromise.
There are tutorials (like this one) for creating your own custom Mozilla sidebars but these require the Perl modules as well. A better option for the layperson like me is to use a tool like Corvar’s Mozilla Sidebar Installer. You just enter in the source URL of the feed you want, and bam, the feed gets added to your Mozilla Sidebar.
Now the trick is to get more and more folks to include an XML feed link on their blogs. I’m sure many users of Movable Type do what I originally did: say to themselves, WTF is this “Syndicate this site” nonsense, and dump it from their templates. (I have reader Andrea to thank for kindly requesting me to reinstate my feed, which sort of got me on this bandwagon to begin with. Thanks Andrea!). I did get Kiyo of KEC Journal to recently add a feed, let’s see who else I can convert…
Of course, it’s not just blog content that is available. There are lots of news feeds available as well. To wit, I came across this unofficial list of unofficial feeds being generated by the BBC (via Perceive.net) (I should also thank Bill Thomas of Corvar who quickly amended his tool to accept the very long BBC feed URL’s after I emailed him). Kudos to the BBC for doing this, however under-the-table it is at the moment. Hopefully other mainstream sources will be following suit.
For more feeds than you can shake a stick at, head on over to Syndic8.
Yahoo redesign
I see that Yahoo! is contemplating a new design. The most striking thing to me about the new design is the realization that I never look at Yahoo’s front door anymore. I still do use Yahoo, all my email is read via Yahoo Mail, I belong to some groups over at Yahoo Groups, and I do check out their news page as well as their MLB baseball news page. But all these I get to from bookmarks. What I used to use Yahoo for was browsing or searching among its directory. Now I notice with the redesign that Yahoo’s once-vaunted directory is barely “above the fold”, that is to say viewable on normal monitors/resolutions without needing to scroll. They’ve also made the type size of the directory smaller. One of these days I predict it’ll be nowhere to be found on Yahoo’s front page. Meanwhile their Shopping box gets larger and larger.