Brain Assassin

I don’t really have time to fix my user­script Tweak Game­trail­ers but I just did any­way. The lat­est changes over at Gametrailers.com intro­duced a new flash player and ban­ished Quick­Time and Win­dows Media Player. In addi­tion with few mod­er­ate changes in the nam­ing scheme my script didn’t work any­more. Now it’ll work again and it’s even smaller than before.

Ah, just to let you all now: Obvi­ously, the guys over at Game­trail­ers made some big­ger changes. Effec­tive imme­di­ately you only need to reg­is­ter to com­pletely bypass the age ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Of course, my script still will take care of that annoy­ance. Have fun!

So, dur­ing the last few weeks I’ve been look­ing for a pass­word man­ager. I recently stum­bled over Robo­Form which is a quite inter­est­ing prod­uct if you’re look­ing for a pass­word man­ager that runs in your browser and acts as a form filler. I tested it for a few days but I didn’t really like it all that much. Robo­Form is con­ve­nient but it only works within your browser. I’d like to have my pass­word man­ager avail­able to me all the time, though. Plus, you absolutely have to pay for Robo­Form after a trial period  of 30 days or it will become seri­ously crip­pled in its functionality.

That’s why I once again turned to KeeP­ass which I’ve used for a short while a few years ago. So, I installed KeeP­ass on my sys­tems and dropped the heav­ily encrypted data­base in my Drop­box account. After con­fig­u­ra­tion I imme­di­ately dis­cov­ered the awe­some poten­tial of a fea­ture called Auto­Type: Just set the focus on the con­trol accept­ing your user­name, press your defined short­cut and the magic hap­pens. KeeP­ass logs you in with the cre­den­tials you pro­vided. Nice, you might think. Well, it didn’t work all too well in the browser. I dis­cov­ered a few scripts on Userscripts.org but not one of them worked as I wanted them too.

No prob­lem, I thought. Just cre­ate one your­self … and here it is: KeeP­ass Auto­Type Enhancer. This script sets the focus on any user­name field it detects on a web page. You can con­fig­ure the script to even focus con­trols that are out­side the view­port so that the browser scroll as nec­es­sary. If you don’t, it will ignore con­trols out­side the view­port. I’ve imple­mented the short­cut CTRL+ALT+S to man­u­ally focus on the user­name field. The short­cut will always set the focus on the appro­pri­ate field even if it isn’t inside the view­port, thus ignor­ing the switch pro­vided in the script. Enjoy!

This morn­ing there wasn’t much to do at work so I tried to make my only User­script — Tweak Game­trail­ers — even bet­ter. This script tries to make brows­ing Gametrailers.com a lit­tle more pleas­ant. It removes the age ver­i­fi­ca­tion and pre­vents Flash based videos from play­ing auto­mat­i­cally. I imple­mented the lat­ter fea­ture today and I hope that I can make it even bet­ter. Right now, it looks a lit­tle like Flash­block. A user sug­gested to start play­ing videos in full screen mode. I’ve looked into it today and it sure looks like I’m going to imple­ment this with the next release.

Funny. I started out with a lit­tle script to make brows­ing Gametrailers.com more pleas­ant and now I’m think­ing about fea­tures I don’t really need. Well, that’s the way it is

Unbe­liev­able! I almost missed this one, can you imag­ine? Any­way, first things first. I already wrote about FarScape a while back. The execs from SciFi canned the show and left the fans hang­ing in the air with a major cliffhanger. Even though it had good rat­ings. And now they’re gonna bring it back? At least sort of, we’re talk­ing webisodes here. Well, that’s a mys­tery to me but who am I to judge. Any FarScape is way bet­ter than no FarScape. And that’s it, as far as I’m concerned.

Still, let’s take a closer look. Over at Gateworld.net I found the first piece of infor­ma­tion which sent me into the depths of the inter­net, look­ing for more infor­ma­tion I could get my hands on. So, SciFi announced that there will be 10 webisodes of FarScape, set to be released on SCIFI.com. At Comic Con 07 Brian Hen­son him­self told the audi­ence that there will be »at least 10 webisodes of Next Gen­er­a­tion Farscape«. In addi­tion, they were talk­ing spin-​​offs or movies but there has only been some devel­op­ment as far as the webisodes are con­cerned. Finally, SciFi has whipped up a site where you can »be first to get news about the web series«.

Sounds good? Well, take it with a grain of salt: Each episode is antic­i­pated to run for 3 to 6 min­utes. »The char­ac­ters, crea­tures, pas­sions, con­flicts and barely con­tained lunacy of the ›Farscape‹ uni­verse have never stopped. We just haven’t had a win­dow into that uni­verse lately to see what’s cur­rently hap­pen­ing there. Well now we do. And it ain’t calm, and it ain’t pretty, and it ain’t like any­thing any­one is going to expect. But it is totally ›Farscape,‹« promised O’Bannon, exec­u­tive pro­ducer. Accord­ing to his words, the webisodes should stay true to the orig­i­nal and be dif­fer­ent on the same time!

I don’t know what to think. The peo­ple in the SciFi forums are quite excited about all this. Even though I feel quite enthu­si­as­tic about the »come­back« it sounds a lit­tle shal­low to me. And who knows what they mean when they talk about it not being »like any­thing any­one is going to expect«? To my mind, SciFi is try­ing to see where the new trend of webisodes is going. Change isn’t going to slow down and you has to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion, dig­i­tal con­tent, and, of course, new mar­ket­ing vehi­cles. Let’s hope they don’t screw it up.

Jakob Nielsen pro­vides yet another valu­able insight for your home­page design. He writes that the usabil­ity of a home­page was com­pro­mised because of fancy for­mat­ting and fancy words. Users ignored a key area because it resem­bled a pro­mo­tion. They looked at the right parts of the page but they didn’t see the essen­tial information.

It’s inter­est­ing how peo­ple ignore things they don’t want to see. I too mostly ignore adver­tise­ments, mainly because I’m not inter­ested in it. Since most sites try too hard sell­ing you some­thing it’s not won­der, I guess. Obvi­ously, less def­i­nitely is more. In order to get the most out of your online pres­ence you should check out Nielsen’s Top Ten Guide­lines for Home­page Design. Even though these guide­lines are clearly aimed at com­pa­nies they are quite use­ful for the aver­age Joe.

What do we have here? A war of some sort? Not quite likely but accord­ing to Danah Boyd there is a rift. Amer­i­can teenagers are flock­ing to MySpace and Face­book and accord­ing to her essay, which go where have some­thing to do with socio-​​economic class. Danah has been try­ing to fig­ure out how to put this divi­sion into some kinda for­mula. Since she hasn’t suc­ceeded yet we can enjoy her obser­va­tions over at her blog. I have to admit, there’s a cer­tain truth to be found in this paper.

In short, Miss Boyd has observed that hege­monic Amer­i­can teens are all on or switch­ing to Face­book. Non-​​hegemonic teens are drawn to MySpace. She thinks that a class divi­sion has emerged which is under­lined by adver­tis­ing or pol­icy deci­sions, for exam­ple. Well, con­sid­er­ing the ori­gin of each site, I find myself agree­ing to her line of thought. But I have to ask myself why any­body should even bother? It’s all just a mat­ter of pre­sen­ta­tion and news. Both social net­work­ing sites embrace dif­fer­ent poli­cies, encour­age dif­fer­ent actions. Is it really safe to assume that MS and FB are the prime indi­ca­tors of class division?