Archive for the 'Tabletries' Category

How to Optimize Gestures in Firefox

Published
by
thadk
on 2005/7/29
in General, Link, Linux, etc. and Tabletries
. 0 Comments

Why Bother?

It is nice to be able to flick your wrist to do all the common tasks in a browser without touching menus, reaching for toolbars, or the keyboard. Personally, I’ve got a tablet so the pen is often the most convenient interface. Back, Forward, Next (in series), Previous (in series), new tab, close tab, minimize and maximize all in two mouse moves or less.

I used to use “All-In-One Gestures”:http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marc.boullet/index.html which is a fork of the “Optimoz Mouse Gestures” extension. It was forked before reliable diagonal gestures were implemented though and it has stayed san diagonals for years. Optimoz was broken in Firefox for a time with no maintainers so I had to move to All-in-One, I got used to a few of the bit features and didn’t check back on Optimoz.

I sorely missed diagonal gestures, instead of 4 gestures with one move (Up, Down, Left, Right) I could do eight!, but I tolerated AIO. Two gestures which were especially handy as one move-gestures but don’t fit into the UDLR orientations were Grow Image and Shrink Image. Did I mention the loss was a tad annoying?

A new extension has come about though which adds two more amazingly useful one move gestures into the mixin’s though–”NextPlease”:https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=390 . This extension adds interfaces for Next and Previous page, filling out and in my opinion, fully justifying the diagonals as legit gestures, if there was any question. All-In-One supports these gestures but only for the non-diagonal gestures–Up (Link-in-new-tab), Down (Link-in-new-window or Scroll Down) , Left (back), Right (forward) are already taken with important moves. No flick to next page for you there.

So, how can you flick to the next page?

  2. Install the “Optimoz Mouse Gestures extension”:http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/installation.html
  3. After you restart firefox, click the links below to add the NextPlease gestures to Optimoz:

The other two classic diagonals are all enabled by default–Grow Image is Down and Right, Shrink Image is Up and Left.

Kirinyaga, Kenya, Google Earth, Milky Way Galaxy

Published
by
thadk
on 2005/6/29
in General, Life, Tabletries and Travel
. 1 Comment

I’ve been plugging away with my tablet at Google’s new app. They’ve closed downloads to prevent a server overload (understandable on a mostly server-based, heavy data app) so I’ll mirror the Windows only (as yet) installer I downloaded when I remember.


First we flew half way around the earth

Our Route

No content with a simple route I realized I could get GPS coordinates and elevations for all of the points we stopped on Mt. Kenya.

!http://wiki.wcp.muohio.edu/~thad/photos/qdig-files/converted-images/qdig-files/Google%20Earth%20Renders/med_Route%20From%20Naru%20Moru.jpg!

Point Lenana at 16355ft, Mackinder’s Camp at about 14300, and so forth.

!http://wiki.wcp.muohio.edu/~thad/photos/qdig-files/converted-images/qdig-files/Google%20Earth%20Renders/med_Reproduce%20Landscape%20of%20MacKinder%27s.jpg!

Does this look a little familiar? Definitely not perfect but the EarthSat did a pretty decent job with the topography (that is what they used?).

!http://wiki.wcp.muohio.edu/~thad/photos/qdig-files/converted-images/qdig-files/Google%20Earth%20Renders/med_Reproduce%20Landscape%20of%20MacKinder%20%20%28actual%29.jpg!

Creative Floop

Published
by
thadk
on 2004/12/31
in General, Life and Tabletries
. 0 Comments

Hmm, well I haven’t been as successful as I’d hoped WRT the *creativity!!* but I did finally get my computer fixed.

It turned out 256mb of my 512mb wasn’t seated properly. I’ve been cursing it for about a month now, and just in time for its birthday today, in one of its (now ended) everconstant fits of disk thrashing, I notice it only sees a portion of what it should. Duh.

I now have ceaseless pity for anyone trying to do work on a system with 256mb of RAM as I know how disk-centric you are (dern thrashing disk–kersh, kersht, kersk is all you hear constantly). The trick was that I changed my memory and hard drive at the same time and didn’t consider that the memory might not have seated right when I got it in from the Toshiba recall-replacement service.

I managed to corrupt vital pieces of both my internal and external hard drives in the week following the changes due to my frustrations. Easily enough fixed with chkdsk but still. Ohh the silkyness of this computer I’d thought was strangely slow but couldn’t prove, and now is redeemed. I was losing my edge, the computer was no longer an extension of my physical being, too frelling slow, almost a phantom limb.

Back to the creativity, sort of. Well yah, I could blame my failure there on my laptop too but really it is the fault of a few other computers in the house. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft promised a game where a bunch of Westerners (J. Harnish, Adam B., Jesse, Me, Alex D., et alii) could hang out, not to mention the Techdeskers. My patience with soloing died today as it does with most single-player games after a certain bit of time (I very rarely finish them). I think what I like most is learning about a new game and when all it’s implementation specifics seem to be exhausted, like most things, I am left bored slashing at beasts. My brothers continue playing after I’ve explained every possible gaming tip I could peck out to them. I watch, find a few more and repeat every once-a-while. It’s a nice pattern. I’ll have fun hanging out on it anyway.

Linux is still on the growing todo. I want to reinstall my server and get it working on the laptop so that I can come to school and reinstall it on my desktop. Days are ticking away from my free time, wish I could fully appreciate this blissful stress-free worktime properly. How to generate a marginal amount of stress? I’ve got at minimum three other projects which I’ve promised people and I can’t garner enough to really get much done earlier than 3am, often 5am.

Finally saw Garden state tonight, watched it twice through like my younger brothers are prone to with movies and decided that it was enjoyable like Lost in Translation, but that I am now drama’d out after this and Napoleon Dynamite and I’m not sure if I can survive through Good Bye Lenin, which I also rented.