I remember randomly running across this awesome Firefox extension called Scrapbook. Back then it was still in a very early phase of development, but now the thing is really awesome.
From the developer’s website:
ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and manage the collection. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are:
* Save Web page
* Save snippet of Web page
* Save Web site (In-depth Capture)
* Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks
* Highlighter, Eraser and various page editing features
* Full text search and quick filtering search
* Text edit feature resembling Opera’s Notes
Pretty much says it. You can use it to save any webpage instantly. Or any part of a web page. If you want to save an entire website, you can choose a more advanced feature and tell the extension to save every page and every page that it links to (to itself). This is the in-depth capture listed above. Basically, it is like photocopying an exact copy of a webpage instantly. A feature it has now that it didn’t have when I first used it was a note-taking feature, which is really growing on me.
After the extension is installed, you can place the scrapbook button on your toolbar or use the menu option at the top of the browser. When you click the toolbar button, a sidebar appears on the left side of your browser. I’ve bookmarked quite a few things as you can see in the following screenshot. One of the coolest features is the highlighting and inline annotations features. There is also a sticky annotation feature and a DOM inspector that allows you to see different elements of the web page and remove them if so desired. In any case, here’s a screenshot of a Batesline post about the tea parties. (I’m sure Michael won’t mind being a guinea pig!) 
Note the different highlighting and the annotations. (Click for bigger version)
Groovy, eh?
(did I just say groovy?)
I can think of a million applications where this extension would be useful. One, in particular, would be saving a political candidate’s website – in whole – to hard drive. That way you can show them their promises in full color when they pull the site later.
meeciteewurkor geek extension, firefox, scrapbook
We’ve been hearing a lot about meth lately in the news. Seems everytime I move my eyeballs across my Google newsreader, there is something about meth.
I got to messing around with Google’s advanced search features and ended up with this query to see how many hits (pardon the pun) I could end up with:
meth AND tulsa site:tulsaworld.com OR site:kjrh.com OR site:newson6.com OR site:fox23.com OR site:ktul.com
Not that I particularly endorse any of those news sites, I just used them as cute little lab bunnies for my experiment.
The above query returned about 20,000 hits. Ok, granted there are not that many news articles alone for meth in Tulsa. So I hit the “news” tab for the same query. On the left side of the resulting page I chose articles from the “past month”. That gave me about 50 generic results, most of which contained quite a few news articles.
Hitting the image search tab made for some amusement.
I didn’t watch any, but the video results page was good as well.
Now to the meat of the article. I clicked the “shopping” tab to see just where one can purchase meth. I was disappointed.
meeciteewurkor Tulsa, geek meth, Tulsa
I’ve had a dual-boot system for quite a while now, because there are some things that I just have to do in Windows that I can’t readily do in Ubuntu.
Primarily, I use Ubuntu linux and have to reboot into windows for VPN sessions I use frequently. This really got cumbersome to do, and I got all geeky and excited when I discovered Virtual Box from Sun Microsystems. Turns out this was available to me the whole time. I just didn’t look hard enough, I guess.
It is, however, kind of weird. Imagine: you boot into your primary Ubuntu system, you run Microsoft Vista within Virtual Box, and then connect to another machine running XP from the vista platform. All without the need to reboot anything.
Then I got to thinking.. the whole passage of internet connections for this setup is really odd:
Firestarter Firewall –> Ubuntu OS –> Virtual Box –> Windows Vista Firewall –> Windows Vista OS –> VPN –> Remote Machine
Of course, you don’t have to be using Linux to utilize this cool virtualization stuff. You can download a windows version and then run Linux from within Windows. Or you could run Windows from within a Mac system.
Crazy.
Clear as mud?
meeciteewurkor geek geek, linux, sun microsystems, ubuntu, virtual box, vpn
UPDATE: Toward the end of this post I mentioned you can use a coffee can to store small amounts of your soap in. PLEASE USE A PLASTIC COFFEE CAN or other plastic container. Metal coffee cans corrode badly with this detergent.
I’ve probably written a post about homemade laundry soap three times already. Since I sorta started with a clean slate on this blog again, I figured I’d rewrite another, but this time with pictures.
Laundry soap is expensive. I mean, seriously. Have you looked at the prices lately? Even the cheap stuff (which doesn’t work worth a flip) is expensive. And the stuff has so much gunk in it, it is no wonder it makes you itch so much. Plus, when you make your own, you know it’s not harmful to the environment, and it is so hypoallergenic you can use it on most anything, even baby clothes. This is a giant plus to me, because my oldest has pretty bad eczema and keeping the clothes itch-free is a very high priority for me. Read more…
meeciteewurkor geek, thrift borax, cheap, homemade, laundry detergent, super washing soda, thrift
It has been quite a long time since I’ve looked at the software behind WordPress, the blogging platform that’s been behind mcw since the beginning. Read more…
meeciteewurkor geek blogging, software, wordpress
