Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

chronicling life in a digital world

Firefox Updated - Didn’t Ask

So I downloaded the bleeding edge version of Firefox, code name bon echo, to poke around a bit. Seemed a little snappier, but could have been because 98% of the plugins were disabled. Turn it off, open my regular firefox, and without asking me, it upgraded to 1.5.0.3. Bullshit, I say. I don’t want the latest version, if simply for the fact that the reason I use FireFox is the extensions. And this version, the extensions I rely on, are now disabled. So I might as well use Safari. I like to wait until the extensions catch up with the release. And I’m not at all happy with the new RSS icon in the address bar. This really was a bad move, and I’m not sure how it happened. A really bad taste, that’s for sure.

Update So I’m guessing they realized that 1.5.0.3 was borked, because 1.5.0.4 is now out, and my extensions work now. In the meantime, I checked out Camino, a Mac mozilla based browser, and may just well use that for everyday browsing. I don’t like the idea of using more than one, but now that I have Scuttle set up on my site, (I used delicious, but don’t like the idea of Yahoo controlling my bookmarks), bookmarking isn’t as big an issue with the 2 browser set up. Camino is faster, FF offers extensions that make working on web sites invaluable. So I may just become a 2 broswer guy.

Keeping Firefox Bookmarks in Sync via FTP

sendung.de ? Blog Archive ? Keeping Firefox Bookmarks in Sync via FTP had been looking for a way, and finally found it. Works great with both my ibook and mac mini. Will look to install on my Windows box as well.
EDITI found this extension to be a much better version, that works with 1.5.0.3

SpellBound Development Version

SpellBound Development version even works on my universal binary version of FF. Nice to have back.
EDIT* Seems it installed, but doesn’t work as planned on the universal binary. THe deerpark G3 optimized version of FireFox on my ibook it works flawlessly.

A New Desktop Computer for Miklb

So, I’ve been toiling away for years now with outdated G3 macs, and kept hemming and hawing, waiting for the “next wave” of new Macs. Well, I couldn’t take it any longer, and broke down and grabbed one of the new dual-core Mac Minis as I had a 17” VGA monitor for the window’s box, as well as existing USB keyboard and mouse from the old imac. So it’s up and running, albeit I need to find someone locally who can install 3rd party ram, as I’m not paying Apple $300 for a gig stick of ram so than can install it for free. Maybe Comp-USA? Anyway, one thing that I noticed right off the bat was FireFox was not liking running on Rosetta, the built in conversion for older apps to the new intel processor. So I was all but switching back to Safari, as FF was just choking. That is, until today, when I found an “unofficial” build of the soon to be released universal binary of FF. Sweet. All of my extensions work with “DeerPark”, and things load as fast as they should be, no hang ups. (so far). I’m really loving the move to Tiger as well, not to mention the shear fact of having a processor and HD meant for this century :). I haven’t really had to time to play with any of the iLife apps, or use Front Row, but all in due time.
No to start saving for when the new 17” macbook pros come out.

How to Export Your FireFox Bookmarks to Del.icio.us on a Mac

This is intended to be a simple tutorial for Mac OS X users. I’m not a programmer, I didn’t even play one on TV.

First, head over to SourceForge and grab this script. This is assuming your downloads go to your desktop. Second, export your FF bookmarks, for ease of explanation, to your desktop as well(make sure you select all the folders you want to export, by default, the Toolbar bookmarks are the only ones highlighted). You should have a Folder then on your desktop BookmarksToDelicious and your bookmarks.html file (and what ever else you have on your desktop). Now go to your Utilities folder, and open the Terminal application. For those who are not familiar with it, you are now officially venturing into the Unix core that you’ve heard about.
Once the terminal is open, you should see a prompt that looks something like $miklb:~ miklb$. Where miklb is the User name that you use on your machine. The first step is to move to the actual directory where the python script is, which is your BookmarksToDelicious folder on the desktop. Again, this is a bare bones explanation, for non-technical users, so feel free to comment if there’s a quicker way.
To get to the folder, first type: cd Desktop. The prompt should now be miklb$:~/Desktop miklb$. (Don’t forget, yours won’t be miklb, it will be what ever your user name is).
Next, type cd BookmarksToDelicious.
We are now in the folder the file is we want to execute. Almost there.
At this point you need to know your del.icio.us user name and password. For example purposes, I’m going to use the fictional user name of Alice, and password of Wonderland. Again, this is assuming your bookmarks are on the desktop. If not, you need to know the full path to that file. But if you’re following along, the next command to type into terminal is:
python BookmarksToDelicious.py —  — username Alice —  — password Wonderland — submit — debug /Users/miklb/Desktop/bookmarks.html

Where miklb is again the username you have on your machine, which is going to be the same as your prompt in the terminal.
If all goes well, you will begin to a lot of action scrolling down the page, and then the actual bookmarks going into del.icio.us, with a line saying “Getting”, then some code, then & result code =”done” /, & for each bookmark.
The script will put tags on each bookmark with the folder name for that bookmark. So if you have a folder called Apple in the folder toolbar-bookmarks, that will be the tag structure you get for the bookmark. You can then edit that in del.icio.us, or, you can redo your folder structure in FF prior to export, which ever you prefer.
Also note, it’s not neccessary to use the — debug command, I simply included it, as it may be nice to see something happen, and know when it’s done. Working in Terminal, generally speaking, it doesn’t show anything happening, so a new user may not know what’s going on. Seeing stuff scroll down the screen helps. If you run into a problem, you can leave a comment, and I’ll do my best to help, but again, this is meant as a bare-bones-I-couldn’t-find-a-better-option way of doing this, and wanted to share, as I didn’t come across many other explanations.