Tom Charman

I don’t normally post about things like this, but as it’s swallowed an hour of my night, I thought I may as well share it with the world. This post is only interesting if you:

• Have a Mac,
• Use Firefox — specifically, 3.1 Beta 3,
• Use Arronax’s Firefox Themes, and
• Use the Delicious Bookmarks plugin.

Alright, so now that I’ve narrowed my audience to something near zero…

One of the cleverest things about Arronax’s themes is the way they grab ugly extension toolbar icons and wrap them in a nice button. For example, the big ugly delicious.com tag gets put in a square icon like so:

But that wasn’t enough for me. I’ve seen much nicer tags elsewhere. So took a picture of one and made the toolbar look like this instead:

You like? Here’s how you do it. First, grab this image and put into your Firefox profile’s chrome folder. That’s something like this:

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[SOME RANDOM GUFF]/chrome

Then, edit a file called userChrome.css in that folder in whatever text editor you have to hand (there may only be a file called userChrome-example.css there — if so, rename it, then edit it). Put in the following CSS:

toolbar[iconsize="small"] #del-button-tagPage { list-style-image: url(delicious-icon.png) !important; }

Then, quit Firefox, relaunch it, and make sure you customise the toolbar and select the “Use small icons” checkbox. Ta da! It’s not at all perfect but I’m no expert at this. I’d like it to be slightly bigger, but as it stands I can’t be bothered. We now return you to your irregularly scheduled reviews.

Six and a half hours to get across Melbourne. Well planned, journey planner.

Things are quiet around atypicalreview, and it’s my fault. I’m a bad person. I can’t blame it all on my broken chair. It’s not like I’m not watching TV that I could be writing about. Dollhouse is steadily improving, and is supposed to get awesome next week, or so they tell me. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles continues to engage me, and I’ve scientifically proven that it’s not just because Summer Glau is in it. I like the general idea of John Connor and Skynet both reaching back through time, trying desperately to create themselves and destroy the other. Battlestar is one episode from ending and has staged a most unexpected comeback.

I should have reviewed Doctor Who‘s 2008 Christmas special as well, but ultimately it was just a little unremarkable, and so I’m having trouble remarking on it. There was a giant frickin’ robot stomping over Victorian London, and I can’t think of anything to say. That’s disappointing.

I still love those dots. I could change the subject to anything at this point and no one could argue. Unluckily for you, I’m changing it to the size of text.

I’m in the middle of a disagreement at work about what size text is ideal for a website, and what size is ‘standard’. A quick survey revealed that most of the more famous sites these days don’t drop below 13px. The Age hits 15px, as does The New York Times. Some have said the standard is 12px, but I don’t see the evidence, except in old timey 90s sites. Somewhere along the way I think everyone realised that there was no point in squinting. Or, more likely, we got bigger screens and so weren’t that fussed any more about squeezing everything in. Or, perhaps we actually decided to try to come close to vaguely respecting the default font size specified by the user.¹

1. Which is a bit of a joke, of course, because your average user probably never even thought about specifying the font size. And, if they did, they’d have to specify it at 20px just to get 16px on most sites. ↩

I don’t know if anyone knew this, but if you did, shame on you for not telling me. After Richard Marsland’s death last year, Tony Martin and Ed Kavalee (and Matt Dower) reunited to pay tribute to the great Armitage Shanks.

My chair’s broken, and when I sit on it, it sinks all the way to its lowest point. Consequently, I’ve not been writing much recently, as it’s not that comfortable. Oh, and I’ve been addicted to Fallout 3, too. But I’m clean now. I’m giving that shit back to Jackson. I won’t touch it no more, or at least, not until it gets some more DLC.

Anyhow.

It feels a little odd reviewing a seven year old TV show, so I won’t be. But permit me some waffle. I picked up the first season of The Wire from JB Hi-Fi the other day, for the princely sum of $15. Having heard Tony Martin go on about how awesome it was on ‘Get This’,¹ I decided it was probably safe to make the investment. Three episodes in, In a shock twist, it turns out that it is awesome.

It tells the story of the drug trade and the police in Baltimore, Maryland. I went there for two days once, so I know all about it already, but it’s nice to get some extra perspective. It’s certainly more entertaining than Underbelly: A Tale of Two Titties.² Perhaps partly because it’s not burdened by telling a real story, the characters are genuinely involving, on both sides of the law. And because of this, it’s gripping. I’m desperate to see if the noble but kind of pathetic Detective McNulty gets to actually bring down his target. Likewise, I can’t wait to find out whether D’Angelo will be able to improve things, or whether he’ll just stop caring.

And there’s no annoying voiceover, either. I’ll stop the Overbellly³ comparisons there, because it’s not strictly fair. They’re very different beasts. The Wire just feels a lot more mature. Or real. Or something.

Disappointingly for me, the later seasons are now trading at closer to $50. But to be honest, if they’re anything like the first season, then they’re worth it.

1. Oh, how I miss ‘Get This’. And Richard Marsland in general. ↩
2. Do you see what I did there? Fnar fnar. Yuk yuk. ↩
3. Zing! ↩

Often I’ve justified my rather dubious TV downloading practices with the excuse: if I had a way to get it legally the week it arrived, then of course I’d use it.

Now, the iTunes store in Australia is selling Battlestar Galactica episodes as they’re shown in the USA, and I find myself having to put my money where my mouth is. Unfortunately, whereas iTunes music has recently and wonderfully become DRM-free, video content is still bound up by various restrictions. The most annoying of these is that I can’t watch it on my television without buying an Apple TV. As I’m already the owner of an Xbox 360 and a Playstation 3, I’m reluctant to purchase yet another device.

Meanwhile, the iTunes solution is highly tempting as it’s in iiNet’s Freezone. And it comes down hassle free, and knows its episode name, and I don’t have to worry about seeding to people. But on the downside, there’s something vaguely irritating about paying for content which I know I’ll be buying on DVD or Blu-Ray later. If only buying a season of TV gave you a reduced price on buying such things later. At $3 dollars an episode, a 22-episode season becomes $66, which is often more than you’d pay for a nice, unrestricted, playable-anywhere set of DVDs.

Even once you get past the DRM and cost, there’s a few annoyances to iTunes television. For a start, there’s no way I can see to get notified when a new episode turns up. Apple have an RSS generator, but for some reason you can’t make a “Just Added TV” feed. The best I can find is the page in the iTunes store which shows you the most recent TV shows. But since you can’t bookmark the iTunes store, this isn’t super helpful either. And the update schedule seems poor. ‘The Oath’ arrived in the store on 30 January, and eight days later, the following episode has yet to arrive. This may sound like whinging, but one thing that your regular TV does usually manage to do is get a new episode for you every week.

Ultimately I’m not sold on iTunes TV. It’s super-easy, but restrictive and kind of expensive. Hopefully, at some point we’ll get some competition in the Australian marketplace, and things will take a turn for the better.

New Zealand has two islands, and the ferry that crosses between them goes from Wellington (reasonably famous) to Picton (not very famous). Picton’s a touristy sort of place with parking for $2 a day and lots of nice crinkly coastline nearby.

As a result of the coastline, there are a lot of winding roads about, with 50km/h speed limits. Some people liked to sit up my arse as I traversed them. A special place in hell is reserved for these people. Hopefully, they’re stuck behind people like me there, too. Driving presented another challenge when I discovered that New Zealanders give way to right-hand turners when turning left. This at first created many awkward “you go!” “no, you go!” moments. This is nothing though, when you consider the terrible peril we’re in if any New Zealanders come to Australia and assume they have right of way turning right. What? I’m being told New Zealanders can come and go to Australia as they please. What happened to deciding who would come and the manner in which they did it? Madness.

Back to Picton. It’s a big port. It’s also a big tourist destination. Disappointingly, this means the restaurants are often over-priced and not that good. When your main consumer base keeps shifting every year, you can get away with this. If you are in Picton, I hear that Spinnaker is nice. We meant to go there, but never found it, instead opting for a few not completely impressive places. In general though, I never had a steak I didn’t like, so you can be reasonably comfortable ordering them from anywhere. Be warned; some places won’t serve you coffee unless you’re getting food. Tremendously uncivilised. We did however stop in at Alan Scott Winemakers on our Wine Tour and found the food there to be pretty awesome.

Our place of residence was A Sea View B&B. I have no idea why they called it this.

If you like amazing scenery, cooked breakfast every morning, handy local knowledge, and chickens, then A Sea View is the place for you.

The best thing about Picton is the stuff nearby. You can go kayaking, you can drink yourself silly in the Marlborough wine region, you can hike along the Queen Charlotte Track.¹ Our kayaking was with the Marlborough Sounds Adventure Company, who took us around the Kenepuru Sound, which is rather pretty. The day started off relaxing and interesting, but got a little intense at the end when we needed to do a big open sea crossing to get back in time for our co-kayakers to check out of their hotel. Pah!

I’m already getting annoyed by rating towns out of ten, but I’ll do it once more; eight peaceful tourist towns out of ten.

1. There’s more, I’m sure, but we only had four full days. ↩