TenFourFox 6 Beta

TenFourFox 6 Beta is here. It's based on Firefox 6. Are we already at Firefox 6? Soon it'll be 7, 8, and I'll feel like Keir Dullea in the last part of 2001 where he's the old man in the pristine white room whose world has passed him by. It seems like just yesterday I was oooing and awwing at version 3.

Anyway, the results so far are all good with one exception. The non domain name part of the url is grayed out in the address bar. It's kind of annoying at first, but it's easy to get over. Memory usage seems to a tad less than version 5 but not a huge difference. Speed? I never know if it's actually faster or if it's just the placebo effect of taking a nice new spiffy browser out of the box. But it feels zippy. Oh, and plugins are disabled by default, so if you want them you have to manually enable them as described here.

The best part, though, is now Twitter works again. They rewrote their website and it suddenly stopped working in 5. It was a javascript problem, and now it's fixed in 6. The whole debacle actually pointed me to a useful extension called YesScript. It's kind of like NoScript, only the complete opposite. It's not mind-numbingly complicated, and it enables you to blacklist individual sites instead of the entire internet. I used it to blacklist Twitter temporarily so I could at least read individual's pages with javascript turned off, but now all that's a moot point. Still, YesScript is a nice find and I recommend you try it out.

Oh, and I've been pointed to a highly experimental add-on that lets you play h.264 video in a Quicktime window. So if you want to turn your beta into an alpha, download it and install it per the instructions here.

Top 10 Secret Features in Mac OS X Tiger

In honor of Lifehacker's Top 10 Secret Features in Mac OS X Lion, I think it's only fair to go back and compile a list of the secret features in Tiger. But don't tell anyone, 'cause it's a secret.

Anyway, here goes:

1. It won't eat your young when it takes over the pride.

2. You can run your old MacOS 9 applications in Classic mode.

3. An archaic Folders --> Files filing system that proves surprisingly useful. Go ahead, try it.

4. It doesn't require a minimum of 2GB of RAM to run. Shhhh. Don't tell anyone. Hardware manufacturers will throw a fit if you found out it's all about the software.

5. No longer supports Flash. Tell me that's obselescence and I'll go home and sew my mouth shut right now.

6. Free of touchscreen "features" for computers that are NOT TOUCH SCREEN.

7. Mail.app is feature frozen. Because it's just email, people. Stop with the mission creep!

8. Runs the latest and greatest in web browsers, TenFourFox.

9. Runs the latest and greatest in office suites, LibreOffice.

10. Not tethered to a ridiculous upgrade cycle where every couple of years you upgrade your system to play with the new toys only to find out after a couple of days they're completely useless.

11. The updated EULA requires the user feel a definite sense of superiority.

Too Much REM Sleep

I had a dream that Apple announced they were going back to the PowerPC architecture and I ran this video as the final post of this blog:



Oh, well. We can all dream, can't we?

Making ATI Cards Sing on Debian Linux

If you've installed Debian "Squeeze" on your laptop or desktop with an ATI card, you may have noticed that your graphics performance wasn't all that it could be, or more artfully, it's in the toilet. You may have investigated this problem by googling and peeking in numerous forums, always feeling you're so tantalizingly close to solving the problem that you could forgo posing a question to the grep nazis at the Debian forums for one more day, just one more day, and you'll have the answer. You pull your hair out and bang your keyboard. Soda cans and junk food wrappers pile up on your desk. You start bizarrely rocking back and forth in your chair thinking it can get you closer to your holy land. Well, before you go that far and embarrass yourself and, well, me frankly, take a look at this page.

Hint: install linux-firmware-nonfree.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for promulgating the above link so that anyone out there wouldn't waste hours of their time editing xorg.conf files and reading logs and mesa-utils outputs while the rest of you are no doubt sunning yourselves, making love, and biting grapes off from the stems like they did in those old Roman movies.

Thank you.

A Newish mplayer Build For PPC and Tiger

So you may still be having nightmares at my previous post on mplayer (I know, it was as rambling as a terrorist manifesto), and you may remember I was using an mplayer binary from 2006 and I threw in some big talk about how I was gonna compile my own to bring it up to date. Well, someone else saved me the trouble. Sort of. This site has made available a GUI wrapper for mplayer, and, well, I'll let them explain it:

This is simply the MPlayer binary wrapped inside a MacOS X application bundle, allowing for drag and drop, file association and opening videofiles directly from the Finder. It is based on the application bundle from MPlayerOSX and the mplayer binary compiled from SVN@mplaerhq.hu (09.09.2009):

svn co -r29662 svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

This adaptation allows simple functionality like drag and drop, "Open with", file associations and opening of the MPlayer program without a graphical user interface. The mplayer binary itself provides with 300 video codecs and 141 audio codecs, the ability to open a wide range of movie files, streaming protocols dvd disks. In addition to the usual mplayer keyboard commands, there is support for the Apple remote.

The application comes with a bunch of configuration files that you edit manually, but since that requires a learning curve of, oh, about 5 minutes and I already know how to use mplayer from the commandline, I just extracted the binary file from the app package and used it in the Terminal. So now I have an mplayer binary from September, 2009. Not 2011 current, but it does much better decoding newer AVC files the 2006 version choked on.

So download it and use the GUI wrapper or whatever. I think you'll be pleased with the performance.

An ATI Radeon 9000 Upgrade on a Sawtooth

I'd long wondered how much of a speed boost a new graphics card would be on my Sawtooth over my old, decrepit Rage 128 Pro. Seriously, the thing was actually turning gray, and it wasn't just the dust covering it. So when thinking about a replacement, I'd mentally settled on an ATI 9000 with 64 MB of memory. Now there are reasons you wouldn't want a 9000 on a Sawtooth, namely the ADC port won't work. Unlike all later Power Macs, the motherboard doesn't supply the ADC port with power, so unless you have an (expensive) adapter for the DVI port, you can't use an ADC monitor. Also, dual monitors are a no-go. But since I don't have an ADC monitor and made this far through life never having the urge to have dual monitors, I figured the 9000 would be an ideal upgrade for me because of the modest cost and lack of a cooling fan. And if you've ever had a graphics card fan wear out on you, you know what I'm talking about. (One more note: Linux has quality drivers for ATI cards, not so much for Nvidia cards, so if I want to boot Linux on this machine I'm gonna want an ATI card.)

So after looking on and off for a few months, I saw a 9000 on ebay for $0.99 plus $8.00 shipping and won the auction as the lone bidder. I also had to get a DVI to VGA adapter since my monitor is VGA, and that was it's own kind of adventure. Long story shorter, you need a DVI-I adapter, not a DVI-D adapter, which are sometimes referred to as DVI(24+1) as opposed to the DVI-Is which are sometimes referred to as DVI(24+5). Got all that? Now back to the 9000.

So I got all the stuff in the mail and installed the new card and fired it up. So how was it? The first thing I noticed was the mouse cursor now had a subtle shadow around it that wasn't rendered with the Rage 128 Pro. Then I did some speed tests on tasks that involved graphics and video and was pleasantly surprised at the results.

First I tried out an abandonware flight sim I like called OSX Skyfighters 1945. On an 800 X 600 resolution, frame rates were about 15% faster. Not a huge deal, but on a 1024 X 768 resolution, frame rates improved by about 35%. Video playback on vlc and mplayer was about 15% faster, and frame rates in the astronomy sim Celestia were between two and three times faster. Also, and I didn't expect this, frame rates in games played in Classic Mode improved as well.

Probably the most striking difference was with MacTubes. With the Rage 128 Pro, the videos would skip frames when displayed at 200% and stuttered in full screen to the point of being not very watchable. Now with the 9000 that's all gone. There's no frame skipping, not even in fullscreen. So now I'm watching fullscreen youtube videos on an eleven year old computer and having the last laugh. You have not defeated me, youtube. You have not defeated me.

Unfortunately, though, and this was the only disappointment, flash playing in a web browser showed no improvement, and that was with Hardware Acceleration in the settings menu switched on and off. But flash is evil, so we'll ignore this.

So the lesson here? If you have an old Power Mac with a Rage 128 Pro or, god forbid, a GeForce 2MX, a graphics card might be a cheap and easy upgrade well worth your time. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go watch MacTubes and make the 21st Century my bitch.

A Tour Through TenFourFox's about:config

One of the coolest things about Firefox has been its about:config feature and its near endless array of preferences. You simply type about:config in the address bar, and it's like the keys to the kingdom. Turns out TenFourFox is no different and even has a few custom preferences of its own, so I thought I'd take a brief tour through some of the settings with an eye on speed enhancements.

First, type about:config in the address bar and make the obligatory promises not to break stuff. Then find the following preferences:

javascript.options.tracejit.chrome

This is set to false by default. Double click on false which changes it to true, and you might notice the interface seems a little snappier.

browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting

When true, this raises the download manager window when a download starts. However, on my Sawtooth I noticed that blue animated progress bar takes about 20%-25% of my CPU, so rather than keep closing the window after it pops up, I just have it not open at all. I already have MenuMeters in my menubar telling me my network activity, so I already know something's downloading.

browser.tabs.animate

Don't want animated tabs slowing you down? Set this to false.

Speaking of tabs, here are a couple more:

browser.tabs.tabClipWidth

This clips the width of your tabs when you have too many open, but it also eliminates the close tab button from all tabs except the one focused. The default value is 140 pixels. I switched mine to 80, and now the close button remains visible on all tabs.

browser.allTabs.previews

Set this to true and click on the list all tabs button at the right end of the tab bar.

And one more:

image.animation_mode

Change the value to once. Then animations will only play once and won't loop and slow down your browsing.

There are also a few settings that are unique to TenFourFox. Just type tenfourfox in the filter bar and you'll see there are three for now. They have to do with disabling certain troublesome plug-in features, and the developer has promised there will be more settings unique to TenFourFox in the future.