Happy Rawr

Happy Rawr everyone! Rawr is the new alternative to Christmas, Hanukkah, etc. It rules. You will celebrate it a lot. LOADS. Happy Rawr everyone.

It's over!

So, I'm done with lectures/lab time for the year. Happy? Damn right. I'm heading back home on Tuesday, if all goes well, and I should be back about midnight. Sure, I've got this coursework booklet thing to do, but that shouldn't be a problem.
Feelings on going back home? Should be fun. Going to have the standard parent problems, but oh well, I'll get over that. Should be able to head down the pub at least once, and hopefully I won't try and kill anyone over Christmas. Or the other way round...

Firefox!

Firefox! Yay! I'd expect just about every windows user to get it, except maybe those who use Opera. Maybe. Forked from the mozilla code (which, if I remember correctly, was in turn forked from the netscape code), Firefox is a lightweight, yet powerful browser with plenty of customisation options. You've also got superb tabbed browsing, and it's finally being supported by people doing major sites. Sadly though, my bank still doesn't see it as a supported browser. Bastards.
What customisation options, I hear you scream? Extensions, themes and search integration are the three categories that pop into mind, although I generally find that the default theme and search engine do pretty well for me. Extensions, however, I use a lot. Yarr, time for a list of the extensions worth meantioning that I've got at the moment.

• Adblock Plus
  It blocks ads. What more can I say? Lots, actually. It's very useful for getting rid of image and flash based adverts, as well as blocking bits of javascript and the like. Certainly cleans the web for most.
  
• Browse Images
  Let's you... Browse... Images... Yeah. Self explanatory, up to a point. Most useful when you're browsing galleries. Has functions to save images, open them all in one/separate tabs, and a few other things.
  
• DownThemAll!
  Great little download manager, supports resuming far better than the built-in one, as well as mass-downloading of stuff, multichunk downloads, the works. Get it.
  
• FireFTP
  Nice little FTP client, means I don't need a separate program to do it.
  
• Google Browser Sync
  Essential if ye've got more than one PC. Syncs browser settings, bookmarks and all that between instances of Firefox. And it's Google.
  
• StumbleUpon
  Click stumble, see a site, rate it. Etc.
  
• Stylish
  Lets you add custom CSS snippets for specific (or all) sites. My personal favourite is cleaning up the google custom homepage.
  
• Web Developer
  The web developer toolbar! Very useful on its own to find little problems with sites. Allows you to do stuff like outlining block level elements, labelling classes and IDs and putting the site through a verifier. Very useful for coming up with CSS for Stylish, I find.

All of the above should be findable at the Firefox addons site, or are at most a quick google away.

Free Software I Couldn't Live Without

I was stumbling around the net today and I happened upon a blog entry regarding someone's list of "essential" open source software for windows. Feeling rather argumentative, I'd like to point out that this guy puts on his list several items that do the same thing. That, and some of them are just a bit crap in my opinion. So here's my top 10 pieces of free software I couldn't live without:

• Firefox
• PSPad
• The GIMP
• PuTTY
• XChat (see here for free windows builds)
  
• foobar2000
• VLC media player
• 7-Zip
• CDBurnerXP
• K! TV

Well, there's GMail too. But that's hardly actual software. And I hit my 10 anyway. So there. GET THEM ALL.

It's almost christmas...

Ok, I'll admit it. It's getting close to christmas. Season of goodwill and all that. So who, you may ask*, is going to get a present from me? As it stands, nobody. I'm a tight bastard. Christmas cards you might get. But nothing else.

Last week up here before said christmas. Woo.