I always loved the packaging of Adobe CS4 as much as the software
I live in a small, two-bedroom terraced house in the East Neuk of Fife. It is enough for my requirements just now, but I have too many things.
Inspired somewhat by The Minimalists, I’m in the process of clearing out stuff. Objects, belongings, things… clutter that I have carried with me for (in some cases many) years but for which I no longer have a need. As Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus say:
Love people, use things: because the opposite never works
For the last ten years, I’ve been blogging metal, punk, hardcore and rock music reviews at 195metalcds.com.
Besides the main list of reviews, I also created three pages to list the reviews by artist, genre and score. I updated these manually because when I started the blog I hosted it at wordpress.com which had limitations about which themes and plugins I could use. But ever since moving the site to my own paid-hosting account at SiteGround, I’ve wanted to write a plugin or child theme function that could update these three pages automatically. Well, now I have and that’s what this blog post explains.
DevToys is like a Swiss Army knife for software and web developers to help with everyday development tasks such as comparing and converting text and images, testing RegEx, formatting JSON and XML data, compressing images, etc.
Back in the days following the browser wars, there was a new browser that rose from the ashes of Netscape: Mozilla Firefox. I was a massive fan when it first launched. I literally bought the t-shirt. And the umbrella.
But like many, sometime after Firefox 3 or 3.5, I was seduced by the simplicity of Google Chrome and I made the switch.
Recently, however, I have become more aware of and concerned about security and privacy, two things that Mozilla have really been putting in the effort to improve in Firefox over the last few years. I’ve also grown more cynical about Google after they removed their “do no evil” clause from their code of conduct in 2018.
So, this week, after 12 years using Chrome almost exclusively, I made the switch back to Mozilla Firefox. From Firefx v3.5 to v89.
I imported my bookmarks from Google Chrome, logged into Firefox on my Android phone and initiated a synchronised relationship between the two. I have installed my favourite plugins/add-ons and have this gorgeous Quantum Dark theme.
I’m going to give it a go for the next month and see how I get on.
So far, I am really impressed.
Observations
Friday 18 June 2021
I thought I would update this post with any observations that I have during this experiment.
I miss the ability to natively group tabs the way that you can now in Google Chrome. I used that a lot to keep certain collections of tabs together.
I also don’t like the way that Firefox renders Gmail—the internal scrollbars are very intrusive. I spent a little while today trying to restyle them using the Stylish plugin but to no avail.
In terms of speed, rendering pages, and general usability: no problems at all. I actually prefer the tabs in Firefox, and I prefer how it displays when you rip off a tab and move it another monitor.
I am getting used to the inspect source code (developer tools) option not being right at the bottom of the context menu in Firefox, as it is in Chrome.
I miss the JoinTabs plugin in Chrome but I found one with a similar functionality (Merge all windows) which works via the right-click context menu rather than a standalone button on the toolbar.
Coding Fonts is a fabulous resource from CSS Tricks for selecting alternative fonts for your code editor.
While a few of the fonts are commercial, many are open source and/or free.
In Sublime Text 3, changing the font is as simple as downloading and installing the font then opening Preferences > Settings then adding the following line of code to the right-hand pane (within the file ‘Preferences.sublime-settings — User’):
