Configuring Opera

Opera remains my favoriate web bowser and today I installed it on yet another computer. For the most part, all the settings came the way I wanted them. there was one thing that I had to change though, and that was the ram cache settings. I only have 16mb of ram on this machine, so that’s something I have to turn off. This machine is a little slow. I can type stuff and it takes a while for the text to appear, but it all gets there. Anyway, I’m glad I don’t have to sift through thousands of extensions to find the features I want. Add on capabilities are a good idea, but lets face it, basic functionality really needs to come be bundled.

Configuring Firefox Yet Again

Somehow the latest software update has rendered my copy of portable firefox useless. I had to delete and reinstall. So, now I’m browsing through thousands of exentions again trying to get it back the way I had it. I have to rebuild my bookmarks after this. Anyway, I’m finding some rather humorous and superflous ones that I just might try. Getting this thing setup is a lot of hassle.

Finished my first Space Empires Dark Nova game

Apparently I became too much of a threat in the game and everyone declared war on me at once. Of course, the AI overlooked that they were dependant on my trade to keep their economy going and they were unable to build anything new or properly maintain their ships. My cloaked ships hidden in their territory plagued their planets and it actually took a while to get the whole population rioting. I noticed a few things while I was attacking. They don’t use the more expensive cities that produce three times as much as the facilities do and they don’t upgrade their facilities. In this mod upgrading is more important because there is a huge difference between the early models and the later ones. It’s on the magnitude of a few times more production rather than less than half, which is still rather significant. I wasn’t even attacked once during the entire offensive. This really isn’t a good single player mod, but I suppose the multiplayer wouldn’t be too bad. There are still plenty of useless weapon mounts and stuff, but people can evaluate those themselves. Also, the gatling mounted plague is quite impressive. The game just marks the planet as infected and there isn’t really a measure of how infected the planet is. Of course, the AI just treats it as just another weapon and will dance around making multiple shots at a single planet when there’s two on the battle field, which really isn’t the mod’s fault, but a general AI thing. The AI will also let stationary planets take out moving ships that can easily slip into range to fire and out again before the planet has a chance to fire, which is nothing new.
Personally, I didn’t really like the cities. A planet with a capacity of 25 facilities takes at least 25 turns to fill. With the cities that take around 5 turns to build depending on which one, racial traits and space yards, you wind up with over 125 turns of production. It just takes too long.

Space Empires IV mod Dark Nova V4.22

Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Space Empires IV just to pass the time. I decided to try out the dark nova mod that is supposed to one of the better ones. It has a lot of neat interesting options. One of the ideas that I really liked is the gattling mounted weapons. Basically, a tenth the size, tenth the damage, tenth the supply use. If you’re up against something that’s hard to hit, you can fire a large number of shots at it and hit it with a few shots rather than shooting a few shots and missing all of them. Though because of the rounding, some weapons become more deadly, others become less deadily and some will let you shoot them without supplies. It’s an interesting little quirk. There are also some strange things that happen when you fire them at planets. After the cargo is oblitherated, the number of points of damage a planet can take is determined by its population. The population is counted on a different increment so all damage is rounded up to the nearest 200. This is a pretty major balance disrupter for the AI.
There’s also some features which I’m not sure work at all. This mod lets you do stuff like produce resources in space without remote mining. There’s orbital research facilities and components that have features that say they just generate resources. I built a couple of orbital research platforms and a few ships with components that are supposed to produce minerals and they don’t show in my accounting.
There’s also a few discrepencies in the description of some of the mounts and what they actually do. It’s a little surprising for such a late version mod.

Firefox Web Browser

Somehow, I feel like I’m the only one who isn’t amazed by this. To me, version 1 and before never felt like a finished browser. There are some nice technical merits to it, and it beats IE. It also kind of frustrates how people tell me that IE is horrid when I say that I don’t like firefox. There’s a big difference between firefox being better than IE and firefox being better than everything else, a very big difference. That’s another story for another day. I seem to have a habbit of never installing the same program on any two machines that I use and early on opera became my browser of choice.
Tabbed browsing is very nice and has been a part of opera since I started using it, which would probably be around 98. I’m not sure. It’s designed to function as a tabbed browser. New windows open as tabs, popups open as tabs and the main window as a whole remains untouched by common web functions. The latest version of firefox isn’t too bad when it comes to tabbed browsing. It’s not really a default, it’s a mishmash of styles that defaults to seperate windows when the tabbed browsing menu doesn’t give you an option. New links that open in new windows can be opened in tabs, but there’s no option for pop-ups. I can’t seem to force them into a tab. Granted, it’s better than the earlier versions where pop-ups would resize the main browsing window and any scripting meant to close the pop-up closed everything else as well. I haven’t found any websites to try the scripting part on yet.
The human factors have improved quite a bit since people first started raving about it. It took me about an hour to find all the add-ons that I wanted to make my life easier. One of them is the session saver, so now I can close the browser and have all my tabs ready to go again when I open it. Notably something you don’t have to look for in opera. Mouse gestures is another plug in that I simply can’t do without. In the latest itteration, gesturing over images actually does something besides bring up the standard right click menu. Once again, something that opera has had for quite some time. I also installed the tab switcher only to discover that the default settings on that meant that I can’t use control-left and control-right to jump between words when I’m typing. I tried assigning , but it doesn’t seem to work. One add-on feature that I really like that I haven’t seen in another browser is the Control Tab Preview add-on, which shows a little preview of the tab when you switch using the control-tab key combination. I have however seen that on various desktop managers though.
Right now, I’d say that it’s better, but still has a lot of little annoyances. I still haven’t figured out which of the various add-ons that I installed brings up some html comment line when I hit alt-t to get to the tools drop down menu. It seems to attempt to be a browser that can be customized to anybody’s preference, but not everyone will have the patience to go about doing that. There isn’t really anything that makes it really stand out as being good or bad. The only thing that I feel is really noteworthy about firefox is how people seem to feel like they’re a part of it and fiercely defend it against any and all criticism, which as mentioned earlier is something that annoys me.