Bad luck in droves

At the end of November all my USB sticks and a 100 euro Alcatel (OT-918) which a nice person bought me were stolen. I should point out I'm living on the Street, and can't get any help from my embassy (I'm in Athens Greece) and I've been struck down with Diabetes and a heart valve problem - so losing what was my "computer" is painful as hell.
I haven't put anything in my blog profile yet about me, but I will soon.

Oh, and BTW I just lost (as in it crapped out and died) a Lexar 32GB USB stick with so many tools etc that I'm crying hard. It lasted a mere 1 month....

Sometimes I think I"m cursed.

Just found a *great* ebook search engine

en.bookfi.org - almost every single tech or textbook I was looking for recently found quickly here (mostly DJVU format, but some PDF).

(mostly I use sumatraPDF (portable) or Evince (portable) to view these as I never use Adobe Reader)

Goodbye Firefox and Hello Seamonkey

I've used Firefox on windows since around version 0.9(something), along with (in more recent times), the following AddOns:

• Adblock Plus
• No Script
• ForecastFox 
• Status for ever 
• (Video) Downloadhelper
• Flagfox
• Down them all!
• Download Statusbar
• Bookmark Favicon Changer (more about this below)

and i've been happy with the performance (initial load, page display). At least, until recently when a discussion on Slashdot.org alerted me to the possibility that SeaMonkey might be better.

A little voice in my head said "No Way" , as SeaMonkey is really a descendent of the Netscape Suite (a "Big  Fat Lady (R) ). I thought it would be slow and bloaty. Nonetheless, I've noticed radical slow downs in initial loading of Firefox from USB, and almost all the "stuff" I carry around with me lives on USB sticks...

(A lot of that stuff is from the highly recommended portableapps.com ....)

Still, I tried it, and was amazed! It really is faster to loading my home page (I use en.wikipedia.org). 

The first problem is that I have many bookmarks in Firefox so I needed to import those into SeaMonkey. Backup from Firefox and Restore to SeaMonkey worked fine with just one little problem - All the bookmark toolbar icons were "Generic". A big problem for me as I abbreviate all the text descriptions to fit as many icons as possible in the main bar. The trick is to install Bookmark Favicon Changer in Firefox, go to its options dialog and check the "embed icon data..." option. That way, your JSON backup has the icons. Install the same addon in SeaMonkey and check the option there. Now, when you restore the bookmarks backup it brings in the icons.

OK, but now we had another problem. I needed to import or install (somehow) the history from Firefox. Some searching with Google showed up that this is located in  the profile directory (which for SeaMonkey is

<drive letter>:\PortableApps\SeaMonkeyPortable\Data\profile\profiles.sqlite)

Copying the file worked fine - I now have a SeaMonkey with all the old information from Firefox.

Rapidshare (back to normal)

Finally! Rapidshare have (quietly) removed the 30KByte/second throttle. I've been avoiding them like the plague for months because of that - so it may have happened ages ago! 

Rapidshare should "Die in a Fire!"

Just imagine that you actually paid for an account on Rapidshare, uploaded files and then got your friends to download. Right now, you get around 30kBytes/second download rate if you don't have an account. In other words, Rapidshare = Slowshare. Totally bogus...

As far as I can tell this woeful situation only started after the Megaupload raid. It doesn't make any commercial sense and has probably alienated a fair number of RS customers - there are plenty of reasons to use RS and similar services for legitimate purposes (as opposed to pirated games).


Right now Mediafire seems to give the best download speed.