Download Squad

There are many applications that allow you to snap snippets of text from web sites and mark, tag, and otherwise share them. It's not a new concept, and truth be told, I wasn't expecting to be too terribly impressed with Deepmemo.com. Their site seemed visually messy, and the mixture of Cyrillic and Roman character sets in the tag cloud area had me concerned, because it didn't seem to change when I selected my language.

The application and delivery of this service, though? Nicely done, guys. You changed my pig-headed mind.

So why does Deepmemo (DM) stand out from the pack? There are a few reasons. The DM toolbar can be used with Firefox, but...hold on to your hats... there is an IE7 version. I know more than a few developers who have no bones saying they'd love to port their add-ons to IE, but it ain't easy. This could be a huge advantage for the DM crew.

It also allows for logins with OpenID, Facebook, or any registered user name associated with a Google service. The caveat is that dm is a third-party application, and it asks for access to your Google (or Facebook) account. If that makes you uncomfortable, it is also possible to just register with dm directly.

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I've never been particularly put out by needing to click the "Next" button on a blog. Sure, there are always exceptions, like when I find sites that archive oddly or only have a few posts per page. And don't get me started on the "Next" buttons and surprise ads (do I want two free iPod Nanos? Only if I can beat the advertiser about the head and neck with them).

LifeHacker introduced me to the AutoPager add-on for Firefox. The idea behind AutoPager is a good one. It takes a web page with continuous content (such as a blog) and allows you to scroll through it all as if it were one page . So that you're not waiting for years for your page to appear, AutoPager allows you to choose the number of pages displayed at a time. It also has a few pre-configured web pages in its clutches, like Digg and Twitter.

The good news is that AutoPager can be set to scroll through just about any site with a next button. The bad news is, it's not really apparent how to do this. I was pointed to the Site Wizard, which worked just as well as many wizards I've encountered -- not at all. I couldn't select the "Next" link, and it kept aborting (and it's too early in the morning where I am to be doing that).

I know little about XPath (the underlying AutoPager mechanism) or how it works, but I did still get AutoPager to give me several pages of Download Squad at once. Truth be told, I'm still not sure what it was I did. I clicked the AutoPager icon on my toolbar, and got a sidebar that popped up in the browser and seemed to autodetect both the "Next" link and the content I wanted to see. I clicked the green checkmark on the sidebar (did I need to? no clue), and we were finally in business.

AutoPager is great for getting your eyes on a lot of information quickly. Once it's configured to the sites you want to see in this manner, it's really handy. But for the first few sites you configure, make sure to take frequent breaks for deep, cleansing breaths.

I have been a Linux user for quite some time -- about eight years. My husband and I have known each other since we were twelve, when our school's only computer was an Apple IIe attached to a dot matrix printer. We grew up together, bought our first computer together, and built our first home-grown computers together.

He has never used Linux. Sure, he's played Frozen Bubble a few times. He's shut down my computer during thunderstorms. That's it.

His desktop Windows machine is older, and truth be told, he uses it for games and web surfing. He just bought an MSI Wind for work and school, and plans on keeping most of the "work stuff" on there.

He is a Windows user, but Windows irritates him on regular basis. He has said (for years) he'd be happy to use Linux for internet and document creation, but he can't part with a couple of games.

Now, the time has come. He is ready. He has asked that his computer be set up as a dual boot machine. How did he reach this conclusion, and what needs to be done to get his computer ready for the Linux invasion? And if you find yourself in this same position, what do you need to do?

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Firefox is like a box of chocolates--

No, let me try that again. Firefox is one of those applications that's so hard to write about, because there may be little tricks and shortcuts I've been using for some time, and someone will discover one and say, "Hey, that rocks! Why didn't anyone tell me?" Then light dawns over my marblehead that it is a useful trick, and I should have pointed it out.

So Sean Privitera kindly reminded me that searching Google on Firefox is easier than it appears. Ever been reading something on the web and you have no freakin' idea what the word or phrase means? Select the word in question (if you really want to try it out, select this word: geoduck. It's not a Pokemon), right click, and wonder of wonders, there is an option there to search Google for the selected word.

See a nifty bit of formatting on a website, and you're wondering how it was done? Select that formatting, images and all, and right click. Then click "View Selected Source" and a window will pop up in Firefox showing you (brace yourselves!) the HTML formatting of the parts in question.

I've learned to love my right mouse button. Seriously, developers hide all the interesting stuff there. Of course, the right mouse button in Firefox will allow you to open a link in a new tab or window. But it can also calm some fears about what you might be opening (and how it behaves). Right clicking while hovering over a link can tell you if it opens in a new tab, what the URL is, and allow you to send or copy link location.

It is the little tricks like these that make a browser really useful, and more than just a vehicle for surfing the web. But like geoducks, sometimes you need to do a little digging to find them.

Here's a question for all our elderly readers: Do any of you remember the primitive era affectionately called 1995, and hearing your college professors speak hopefully (or possibly lament) that soon all the information and media ever created would be up on this web thing and easily accessible and available free of charge? Do you remember how many people went out and bought those state of the art 486s and bleeding edge Pentium I computers, and signed on with AOL or Compuserve or Mindspring to fire up Netscape, stumble on to Yahoo! only to discover the truth.

Even back then, there was a lot of stuff online that was technically information or visual/audible media. It was free, much of it, anyway, as well. I spent way too many hours watching an oddity called a webcam update at shockingly fast one minute intervals, as it delivered grainy black and white stlll images of some forgotten webmaster's painted turtle in California to my desktop in Northern Virginia.

As far as exotic, fine art work or rare, priceless tomes of great knowledge went -- it wasn't all accessible online, or necessarly free if it happened to be available. But for a good portion of the '90s, people who hadn't been online much, or were in denial, insisted it was out there.

There dawns the new century, and the myth of "it's all there, free" started to fade away with the old beige Pentium I and II computers. Things went the other way, though. Every day there was more information on the internet from all sorts of sources, and some of it (shock, awe) was free, or at least accessible to some degree. Is it irony or karma? Who knows? Many people are floored, now, to discover how much useful, cool, credible information is available online free of charge.

So just in time to go back to school (or to impress your friends with your innate intelligence), I've found a few sites and tricks for getting really great information online without additional tuition fees.

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