plugin sought

18 years ago
Here's what I want: when a page contains an embedded movie (QuickTime, WMV, whatever) instead of displaying it inline, I want to click on that and have Firefox open it as a helper app instead, so that it gets fed to Xine or whatever.

I have the Crossover plugins installed, but for some reason, QuickTime has lost its ability to play audio; and even when it used to work, it still leaves the movie as an un-resizable postage stamp.

There are several plugins out there that attempt to make programs like xine and mplayer function as embedded plugins, but what I'm looking for is kind of the opposite: no embedding.

What I end up doing is going to Tools / Page Info / Media, and then scrolling until I find the "Embed" URL and loading that. But that's tedious.

Does such a thing exist?

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Current Music: Front 242 -- First In/First Out ♬

Firefox extensions

18 years ago
Some useful Firefox extensions I've found:

  • Link Toolbar:
    This puts a little navigation bar down in the bottom right of the window, with buttons that correspond to the LINK REL tags in the web page, letting you do forward, back, up, & top. This is handy, because it means that (when people use these tags) the "next" link is always in the same place, regardless of who wrote the page or how it is scrolled. Mozilla had this built in (the "Site Navigation Bar") but it was removed from Firefox.

  • EXIF Viewer:
    When you pop up a menu over an image and select "Properties", this extension shows you any EXIF data in that image: shutter speed, etc.

  • Named Anchors:
    This adds a new tab to the "Tools / Page Info" dialog that lists all of the named anchors in the current document.

  • Moving the Search field:
    Not really an "extension", but it took me a while to notice that it's possible to move the "Web search" field up into the menubar area, instead of having it to the right of the URL field. This is nice because it gives you more space to read long URLs. You do this by clicking right on the menubar and selecting "Customize". The UI is pretty clunky, but it lets you get rid of much useless junk and move just about everything around.

  • Other search engines:
    You can change the set of search engines on the menu to the right of the field by selecting "Customize", but that doesn't work very well (you have to be the owner of the /usr/lib/firefox-*/searchplugins/ directory, I think.) I deleted everything in that directory but Google, and added Webster, IMDB, and the Wayback Machine. Annoyingly, you have to re-do this every time you upgrade Firefox.

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Current Music: Mira -- In the End ♬

today's word is "kancho"

18 years ago
Entertaining blog by a guy teaching English in Japan:

You know what's kind of funny though? Some kids can't say "Good morning", but damn near all of them can ask if I have a big dick. Or, "bigu dikku" in Engrish. [...]

I wish I could say it stops there, but actually, it gets worse. Let me introduce you to a game Japanese kids like to play called "Kancho."

Actually, it's not so much a "game" as it is kids clasping their hands together, sticking out their first fingers, and shoving them up your butt. I'm really not joking.

You know, before we come to Japan, they tell us a lot of ultimately useless stuff. What kind of computer to bring, if our DVD's will work, clothing sizes, that kind of nonsense. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, in the 3-4 months of orientations did anyone ever mention that at some point, a Japanese kid may try to stick their fingers up our butt. That's something I would have liked to know, personally.

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Current Music: Akitaka Tohyama & Kenji Ninuma -- Tsuki to Ouji (The Moon and the Prince) ♬

magic NOSE goblins

18 years ago
Doctors Remove Leech From Woman's Nose

Doctors have removed a leech from the nose of a 55-year-old Hong Kong woman after she swam and washed her face in a stream, a medical journal reported.

The woman went to her doctor complaining of nose bleeds and an occasional sensation that something was blocking her left nostril, the Hong Kong Medical Journal said in its April issue. Her family doctor noticed a "brownish mass" in her nostril but couldn't remove it because of heavy bleeding, the journal said.

The patient was taken to the emergency room, where doctors identified the problem as a bloodsucking leech. They had trouble pulling it out because the 2 inch invertebrate retracted into the nostril and disappeared, the journal said.

Part of the slimy leech was in a passage of her nasal cavity and a larger segment was in her sinus cavity, the article said.

Doctors used a nasal spray to anesthetize the dark brown leech that had a sucker on the front part of its body. "After two minutes, the leech moved slowly out of the antrum (sinus) and was retrieved with forceps," the journal said.

The woman said that one month before her symptoms developed, she swam and washed her face in a stream while hiking. Doctors checked other members of her hiking group and found another leech in the nose of a man who washed his face in the stream, the journal said.

The article said the leech could have caused suffocation if it moved into the patients' larynx, or voice box.

Key words: Epistaxis; Foreign bodies; Leeches; Parasitic diseases; Rivers

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Current Music: Katamari Damacy