I was doing some work yesterday, and realized how much more painful it would’ve been without various extensions in Firefox. So I thought I’d eulogize some of my favorites.

Tab Mix Plus – Gives you near-complete control over how tabs function. Whenever I use a Firefox installation that doesn’t have Tab Mix Plus, or that has it set up significantly different from mine, it drives me insane. I can’t even imagine not using it.

Del.icio.us Bookmarks – This does two things. First, it adds a “tag” button in your toolbar which lets you quickly bookmark any page on del.icio.us. Second, it replaces Firefox’s default bookmarks with your del.icio.us bookmarks, so now when you bring up the bookmark sidebar, you can browse or search your del.icio.us bookmarks right there. I’ve used del.icio.us for a long time, but sporadically, so I’d never be sure if I bookmarked something there or not. Now it’s the hub of everything I’ve ever looked at that I think I might want to ever look at again.

Picnik Image Editor – Picnik is a great little photo-editing site which can do all the basic stuff–resizing, cropping, color balancing, brightening, and even several effects like sharpen, blur, sepia, black and white, etc. It’s lovely for doing basic things to photos without having to open Photoshop (and it imports from and exports to both Picasa Web Photos and Flickr). With the extension, you can take any picture off a webpage, or even the entire page, directly into Picnic and edit it. I needed a screenshot of a webpage one time to send to technical support–no problem. I often grab photos from Amazon.com, but they have an annoying white border–no problem; I can fix it before I even download the photo.

Split Browser – This gives you the ability to split your browser into various panes, in any configuration. It’s indispensable for copying non-cut-and-pastable information from one site to another, or for keeping instructions visible at the same time as you’re carrying them out in another tab. My fingers used to go numb from Shift-Tabbing back and forth between tabs, but no more.

Text Link – This is an example of how the simplest little thing can be such an improvement. Text Link recognizes URLs on webpages even if they aren’t marked up as links, and when you double-click on them, it opens them as if they were marked up as links. Without it, you had to copy the link, paste it in the address bar and hit enter (or click go). Which doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but even a little bit of improved ease of use goes a long way.

And a few I love, but I’m not sure I couldn’t live without them

Zotero – Zotero is a research tool which captures citations from all sorts of sources (being a browser-based tool, it’s particularly good at internet sources and electronic journals and things, which a lot of other bibliographic citation tools are not), but in addition to being a citation manager, it also lets you make notes on the various citations and tag and categorize everything–plus, full text search. The only downside is that it does suck a lot of memory; I sometimes wish it had a standalone client for managing citations and notes, with the same level of browser integration for pulling citations from the web. I’m still looking for my perfect combination citation manager/note taking application–if anyone has suggestions, I’d be glad to hear them.

AdBlock Plus – I struggle with this one, actually. It blocks ads on pages, which is nice from my point of view, but not really very nice from the advertiser’s or the website’s point of view, who depend on ad revenue to keep running–and, to keep it free for me. So, yeah. On the other hand, every time I turn it off for a while, I end up turning it back on to keep my eyes from bleeding at those brightly-colored flashing ads that so many websites insist on using.

Context Search – With this installed, right-clicking on any term on a page will let you search for the term in any of your pre-defined search engines. Like Text Link, this is something that could be done with a few more keystrokes or mouseclicks anyway, but if you can make it easier and faster, why not?

Firebug – If I ever do any serious web development, this will likely move into the “can’t live without” category. It displays all the code on a give page and points out errors, etc. I tend to use it now rather than “view source,” because of the way it separates out all the elements so you can easily see them (plus, when you mouse-over the element in the firebug console, it highlights the relevant part of the page, making it ridiculously easy to tell what does what).

Fullerscreen – Hides everything except the actual window you’re looking at–toolbars, menu bar, even the taskbar. If you need the browser toolbars, you can mouse to the top or bottom to make them pop back out. This is great if you have a lot of toolbars (like the bookmark toolbar, and the StumbleUpon toolbar, and the Yahoo toolbar, and the Google toolbar), or lots of tabs open in layers. Sometimes it’s nice to just see the page you’re looking at and nothing else, and have to do less scrolling.

StumbleUpon – Speaking of StumbleUpon. I’m not really a part of the StumbleUpon community, but I do find the toolbar a really interesting way to find new sites. It’s one of the first places I go when I get bored of the internet I know and want to find some places I haven’t found yet. Some of my favorite videos and humor sites I’ve found this way.

So how do y’all have your Firefox tricked out? If you don’t use Firefox, I’m…sorry. Deeply.

It’s probably something of an exercise in futility to post about Australian Idol, considering everyone I know is in the United States and it isn’t shown in the United States (and I get it via downloads of questionable legality), but I want to really badly. And then I think, well, if I don’t, no one I know will find out how great a show it is. So I will. Probably not as often or as regularly as I have American Idol and SYTYCD, but still. I seriously think that last fall’s Australian Idol spoiled me for Season Six of American Idol, because it’s a better show overall. I gave some reasons for that back here. The top twenty-four they’ve picked this year includes rockers (like you’d expect to see fronting Creed or something), pop singers (nailing Whitney Houston), folksy singers (who could headline Lilith Fair), Broadway babies (straight off regional casts of Les Mis), crooners (bringing Big Band back), and everything in between. It’s beautiful.

Here’s an edited video of all the singers shown in the audition shows who were brought back to Sydney for Hell Week. I’ve edited them some so that it would all fit under ten minutes, but they’re all represented here. I put a title saying “Top Twenty-Four” over the ones who, yep, made it in the Top Twenty-Four. To my mind, the best thing Aussie Idol does and the thing that American Idol most needs to pick up from them is the use of instruments and original songs. Now, if they follow last year’s model, they won’t be using original songs for the competition (they had a special showcase episode where the singers could perform originals if they wanted to), and they won’t get to use their own guitars/keyboards until about halfway through. Still. It adds SO MUCH. Tell me you don’t agree.

Selected full audition videos after the jump.

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Belle and Sebastian

My friend Anne from the UK inducted me into the love of indie music when she took it upon herself to send me mix CDs to educate me out of my Top-40 Radio-induced music mediocrity. Or something. In any case, most of my current favorite bands are ones she included on the CDs, or direct offshoots of them. She’s not a particular fan of Belle and Sebastian herself, but she included a couple of their tracks on two mix CDs, and after I heard them about a gazillion times, I decided that I was a huge fan of them. They only became one of my favorite bands, that is, after I’d heard them a bunch. Sometimes it’s like that. In any case, Belle and Sebastian (named after a French television program, though the band is based in Glasgow, Scotland) is one of my comfort bands. If I feel uptight or stressed or upset or whatever, listening to them makes me happy again.

Belle and Sebastian – Me and the Major
Belle and Sebastian – Another Sunny Day

Camera Obscura

I was looking for Belle and Sebastian-related stuff on emusic one time, and Camera Obscura came up as a recommendation. And I checked them out, and promptly downloaded both of their most recent albums (Underachievers, Please Try Harder and Let’s Get Out of This Country). They’re also Glaswegian, and have shared drummers with Belle and Sebastian on and off.

Camera Obscura – Suspended from Class
Camera Obscura – Let’s Get Out of This Country

(Both Belle and Sebastian and Camera Obscura have other albums besides these; these are just the ones I’m most familiar with and most willing to recommend wholeheartedly).

With less than a month before the fall TV season starts, most of the studios are releasing the DVD sets of last year’s seasons–just in time for people to catch up. Of all the releases this week, I’d recommend Heroes Season 1. It was one of the best new shows last year, following a disparate group of individuals who discover they have superhuman powers. Heroes may have had a plot hole or two, but it more than made up for it with its intricate storytelling and impressive ensemble cast.

This is the first week I’ve done a DVD Pick of the Week, so I’ll also point out that Ugly Betty Season 1 came out last week; Ugly Betty was my favorite new show last year, hands down. Heroes was a close second, but Ugly Betty is pure and delicious fun every second.

Other new releases this week, none of which I’ve seen, so I’m ordering them based on how much I’d like to see them:

• Friday Night Lights Season One (people I respect keep saying how good this is, but I’ve never tried it)
• Red Road
• Year of the Dog
• Blades of Glory
• Offside
• Kickin’ It Old Skool

Since these episodes aired last week and the week before, I’m going to run all the videos together and not do a lot of commentary. Just so the videos are up here in case anyone missed the show or something.

This means there are a TON of videos after the jump. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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I wish that book resources on the internet were as easy to find as film and music resources. Now, maybe I’m just better at looking for film and music information than book information, but I find it odd that for each type of book-related website I’d like to find, I can name an exact equivalent for the film world. For a long time I’ve wished that there were a book database as extensive and dominant as IMDb is for films (there are some vying in the area, like Internet Book List, Internet Book Database and a few others, but most of them are gearing more and more to social networking and message boards, it seems, than to straight information–compare to IMDb, which has a message board, but it’s peripheral). I gave up on that.

Now I just want a site that does for books what Cinematical does for movies–news about upcoming books, rumors, reviews, tidbits about what bigwigs in the blogosphere and media are talking about, that sort of thing. I found a lot of litblogs by poking around various blogrolls, but they all seem to be either personal/review sites (some of which look very good, don’t get me wrong–just not what I’m looking for) or too closely tied to either a specific publisher or a specific genre of book. Now in this case it may just be that there isn’t much information about books before they come out as there is about movies, simply because writing tend to involve only one person rather than cast, crew, studio, and who know who all else–you don’t have “oh, this film is being made” and “oh, here’s the director”, and “oh, here’s the cast,” and “oh, here’s the poster,” and “oh, here’s the problem they’re having with the MPAA,” etc. with books. But still. There would seem to me to be room for a professional-level group blog not associated with a particular publisher or interest group with writers who could each focus on whatever they wanted to in the bookworld (enough writers with different interests that everything would get covered) with news about which writers are currently working on what, reviews of what’s just come out, and features on earlier books perhaps or just general bookworld stuff.

As a side wish, I wanted to find a site that would list the release dates of upcoming books–not just a selection of potential bestsellers (which I can get off Barnes & Noble or Amazon), but of ALL the books coming out. This, again, is ridiculously easy with movies. IMDb has a very nice list of upcoming theatrical releases, and when I wanted to see upcoming DVD releases, a Google search for “upcoming DVD releases” gave me a dozen sites that listed every upcoming release for the next several months. A Google search for “upcoming book releases” or “book publishing dates” or variants brought me to a Barnes & Noble “notable releases”-type page and a lot of individual publisher sites. Is it really true that I’d have to look at each publisher’s list of upcoming titles to get a full picture of what’s being published soon?

What is this? Is it just that there are too many books published in too many different areas by too many different publishers for one site to keep track of it all? Are book publishing dates not as firm as film and DVD release dates? Are books just so completely uninteresting to most of the internet world that nobody cares about book information? In other words, is it a question of lack of coherence in the book publishing world that makes it difficult to produce such an triumverate of book information (database, Cinematical-esque blog, release date list), or is it a question of a lack of audience to make such a venture worthwhile? Related to the worthwhileness, perhaps, is my other petpeeve about book sites in general: Movie sites are pretty, by and large. Compare IMDb to the book databases listed above. IMDB, though not in my top ten of pretty websites, is a lot prettier than they are. Some of the bookshelf collection-tracking sites are pretty, like Shelfari, but I don’t think they’re quite what I want at the moment.

Finally, if anyone knows of such sites as I have outlined here, please PLEASE direct me to them. I would be forever grateful.

This is really, really cool technically, but I’m not at all sure how I feel about it ethically or artistically.

I did not watch or read a lot of great stuff in June. I think I gravitated toward somewhat mindless fare on the movie side due to the effort of reading (skimming?) two novels a week for class, and the reading was dictated completely by the class–which was on Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. I’m glad I read the Conrad and the Lawrence for the experience of it, but I didn’t really enjoy either of them. Woolf, of course, I’m in love with. Her writing. That is. After the jump, reactions to Babel, Pretty in Pink, Dogville, Anchorman, Zoolander, Ocean’s Thirteen, Borat, A Woman is a Woman, Paris, je t’aime, Ratatouille, Nostromo, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, To the Lighthouse and others.

(There are a lot of links in the post…let me know if you try one and it’s broken, okay?)

Click here to read on!