Month: June 2005

The Comics Curmudgeon is a blog that offers humorous commentary on newspaper comic strips (and the additional comments are pretty good too). As J-Walk Blog notes, the recent entry on Family Circle is particularly funny… 🙂

CNet reports that Namco has more to celebrate than its recent 50th birthday:

Namco was officially awarded for its entrance into the Guinness Book of Records. The company’s classic arcade title, Pac-Man, is being listed in the record book as the “most successful coin operated game” in history.
…
Namco sold 293,822 units of the arcade machine during the seven-year period from 1980 to 1987 when the arcade game was being manufactured.

Cool! I can still remember playing it for the first time in an arcade on the Boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey around 1980… 🙂

The Star Wars Wiki is:

A coordinated effort among Wikipedians to provide more detailed Star Wars content. While Wikipedia is for more general, encyclopedic knowledge, the Star Wars Wiki is for Star Wars fans who wish to learn/provide more about the Star Wars Universe.

This database contains a plethora of spoilers for all released material relating to the Star Wars universe. Read at your own risk.

Speaking of spoilers, Slashdot alerted me to a list of “Easter eggs” to look for in Revenge Of The Sith. I still haven’t seen it yet, but I hope to this weekend…

100fps.com attempts to answer the question “How many frames per second can the human eye see?” The answer is not straightforward:

How many frames per second can the human eye see?
This is a tricky question. And much confusion about it is related to the fact, that this question is NOT the same as:

How many frames per second do I have to have to make motions look fluid? And it’s not the same as

How many frames per second makes the movie stop flickering? And it’s not the same as

What is the shortest frame a human eye would notice?

The article explores various visual and scientific criteria in its attempt to answer the question. Pretty interesting…

GreaseMonkey is a very useful Firefox extension that “allows you to change the functionality of Web sites on the fly–adding new features, stripping out existing ones, and otherwise tweaking a site in ways its operator never intended.” PC World has a pretty informative article on GreaseMonkey, as does Lifehack.

As the articles mention, GreaseMonkey gives you the ability to customize particular sites on Firefox by installing scripts that change appearance, add functionality, etc. Once you install the script (found at the GreaseMonkey mozdev site) and restart Firefox, you will be able to right-click on .js JavaScript file links and choose the “install user script” option, or you can open the .js files and choose the same option from the “Tools” menu. You can further edit and customize these files before you install them if you choose, which I’ve already done for the script I use to automate the addition of del.icio.us tags to my Blogger posts, but for the most part this isn’t necessary.

The GreaseMonkey User Scripts site is continually updated with a huge amount of scripts that are available, sorted by website and beginning with scripts applicable to all sites. Here are some scripts that I find useful:

• Google image search – directly links to images found in a Google image search (rather than forcing you to click through individual pages)
  
• Inline MP3 player – adds a small button next to MP3 links on all pages that activates a Flash MP3 player (see image at right using my MP3 Of The Moment at left as an example)
• Google Butler – “remove ads, add links to competitors in Google search results”
• Amazon “free music” helper – changes “Free Music Download” links to a direct link to MP3
• StrongBad e-mail buttons – adds “previous” and “next” buttons to HomeStar Runner StrongBad e-mail pages
• Add Netflix links to IMDB – useful if you browse IMDB a lot and have a Netflix account
• Add IMDB links to Netflix – pretty much the opposite of the previous script
• Technorati and del.icio.us tags for Blogger – adds a box underneath Blogger posts for Technorati and/or del.icio.us tags, appending the HTML code to the current post (I modified my del.icio.us script slightly).
• del.icio.us skin – make del.icio.us pages look a little nicer

I’ll try and add useful scripts as I find them; let me know how they work for you…

Update: I added a link to a GreaseMonkey inline MP3 player, but by default the excellent Adblock extension puts an ugly “Adblock” tab above the button indicating that you can block the Flash element. So, I unchecked the “Obj-tabs” option, relying instead on the newly installed FlashBlock extension for blocking Flash elements (there is a “whitelist” option to disable the extension for trusted sites). This may be more trouble than it’s worth, but I obviously really like the simple MP3 player button… 😉

Google has released the beta version of Google Earth to existing users of Keyhole, the mapping software that they bought last year which is also the basis for the satellite imagery in Google Maps. This article also has some screenshots, and here are some screenshots at Flickr. Between the reviews and the screenshots, it sounds and looks like this will be very cool, hopefully a lot nicer than the already cool Worldwind software that NASA offers. Now we just have to wait for a release to the general public. I want it now… 😉