Toby's Log page 86

Firefox tag groups removed

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Firefox tag groups / panorama has been removed from Firefox proper. Luckily, they’ve moved the official source to a separate project as an extension called Tab Groups. The extension seems to function the same and migrated my existing tab groups to without trouble.

I guess there is benefit to having less code in the core Firefox project to maintain, but this is one of those cool features that sort of set Firefox apart from other browser. There is a Chrome bug requesting a similar feature that has 356 stars and comments praising the feature. Development apparently stopped in Firefox years ago, so maybe this split could actually increase development, but there’s always the chance that it doesn’t get updated to work with a new Firefox version at some point and disappears. At least the code is on Github.

I think the features has issues, such as slowness, moving around of groups when resizing windows, and a bit clunky of a UI, but is the best option I’ve seen for dealing with large numbers of web pages and multiple topics, particularly in the short term. Right now, I have 383 tabs in 28 groups, plus a dozen or so tabs in two other windows. Some of them I probably haven’t looked at in years. I think for long-term storage, local or “cloud” bookmarks are the best way to go. I’d like to work on moving most of my tabs to my delicious account, or better yet, my own site, but even then, I will want tab groups for day-to-day organization.

Finding short TLD’s

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I’ve been looking for a short domain to potentially use for permashortlinks. For a domain to be usefully short, it must have both a short TLD and short SLD. Having three characters each would make for seven total characters (including the period) for the domain. Much more than that and it starts to lose its usefulness. There are no one character TLD‘s (though they’d be great for permashortlinks). Two character TLD‘s are reserved for country codes. I’m a bit reluctant to use a code for a country I don’t live in, and the one I do disallows whois privacy. I’m a bit reluctant to decide that my address, phone number and email address will be “perma”nently available for all to see (assuming I keep the permanent promise of of permashortlinks). So three characters have been where I’ve been doing most of my looking.

There are a number of good lists of available TLD‘s. Indiewebcamp has a list of options with a brief blurb on their fitness and possible problems. It only has country code domains though. United Domains has a list with current TLD‘s and their prices plus soon to be available TLD‘s. It has a page for each with some information about the TLD and marketing-speak thoughts on uses. Name.com has a list with per-TLD pages as well that are often more brief. It’s hard to parse these lists to find just the short ones though.

I found two plain-text lists of TLD‘s (IANA’s and publicsuffix’s), which got me to thinking that I could parse these to find just the ones with three characters. I wrote a script in PHP and modified it to handle any number of characters. It looks like:

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Check request compression savings

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Gzip compression is almost universally recommended as a basic step to improving site performance. It basically uses a little bit of extra processing on the server and client to significantly reduce the transfer size of most text responses. In Apache, this is done with mod_deflate (see the H5BP config for an example of how to set this up).

A while back, I was setting gzip up on my server, and wanted a simple way to verify that it was working and check how much transfer was saved. One simple way to verify it is working is with curl on the command line. If you run curl -I -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' example.com and see the header Content-Encoding: gzip, compression is working. To test the transfer savings, I wrote a simple script using PHP’s curl library. It makes a request with and without the Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate header, and compares the transfer data info provided by curl_getinfo().

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Raspberry Pi: playing with BerryBoot, RetroPie, and OpenElec

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Played with my Raspberry Pi a bit more this weekend. I bought another micro-SD card and installed BerryBoot, a bootloader / OS installer sort of like Noobs, on it.

I installed RetroPie, a project that is built on top of Raspbian but with numerous emulators and a special interface that can be operated by a gamepad. It seems like it would be cool to condense all of my video game systems and even my oldest Mac (an SE) into a tiny box. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do much with it since I have to figure out how to get games onto it. It doesn’t have a web browser or other normal Linux stuff accessible from its special interface.

I also installed OpenElec, a media center. It has a dedicated interface meant to be operated by a remote control, though since I don’t have one of those, it operates a bit slowly by mouse. It has various media applications that can be installed from its interface, basically one for each of any online services. I installed quite a few and watched some old commercials on GetTV.

I’m thinking maybe I’ll eventually get a second Raspberry Pi to use as a media / gaming center. It’s easy to dual boot them using BerryBoot. It would be cooler if I could figure out a way to more easily switch between them, rather than rebooting. opensource++