Ever since I installed noscript I’ve been having trouble with web pages that have embedded movies in them. Firefox doesn’t like them. I have IETab installed so I could quickly bypass a page that was giving me an illegal operation.

Illegal Operation in Plugin
Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library
The plugin performed an illegal operation. You are strongly advised to restart Firefox.

Or it would say

Mozilla ActiveX control and plug-in support error
The plugin performed an illegal operation
Restart the broswer

To fix this I had to install the Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin. If you don’t trust the link you can go to the Firefox Plugin site and scroll to the bottom and click on “Vers. 11 (XP, Vista)” in the Windows Media Player section.

I had some problems with the downloaded exe file not showing up in the Downloads history. I had to go to the folder where firefox saves my files and run it from there. If you are curious if the Plugin installed correctly you can type “about:plugins” into the address bar in firefox and you should see a section that looks like this.

You also shouldn’t be getting any illegal errors.

With the release of Safari for Windows a number of people have labeled its private browsing mode as “Porn Mode”. Stealther enables this functionality of surfing the web without leaving a trace while not having to annoyingly clear all of your private data.

Alex Albrect on a recent Diggnation episode claimed that Safari would be great if you wanted to buy your girlfriend flowers and/or hide your porn browsing from her. Either way you don’t want to leave a trace and you consider completely wiping out the history a trace. The Stealther Plugin for Firefox fixes this problem by temporarily disabling your private data.

If there are times you want to surf the web without leaving a trace in your local computer, then this is the right extension for you. What it does is temporarily disable the following:

• Browsing History (also in Address bar)
• Cookies
• Downloaded Files History
• Disk Cache
• Saved Form Information
• Sending of ReferrerHeader
• Recently Closed Tabs list

Installing Stealther

Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1306 and click the Install Now button.

You may be required to give permission for the addon to install by going to the Tools Menu and then clicking on Options…

Stealther Configuration

To access the configuration menu for Stealther you can go to the Tools Menu -> Addons -> Select Stealther -> Options

You can add a toolbar button by right clicking on your navagation toolbar (back/forward/reload/stop/etc) and dragging the round grey lock to the position you want it on your toolbar. Here is where I put it.

If you want to hide the existence of Stealther you can opt to not install the toolbar and hide the Tools menu entry.

Using Stealther

When you click the button it turns blue and it will force the browser to forget everything that happened once Firefox is closed. There are a number of ways to can use Stealther

• [Tools / Stealther] menu option
• Toolbar button
• Statusbar icon
• [Ctrl+Shift+S] keyboard shortcut (customizable)

Trillian is the best IM client that links together multiple services. I currently use it for multiple AIM accounts, MSN and my old ICQ account. The only problem I have with trillian is that I have to wait for it to reload whenever I reboot my computer. I decided to take action into my own hands and neutred its plugins so that it would load in under a second instead of 5-10 seconds.

In the Trillian directory I renamed all the features I don’t use:

• crypto.dll
• proxy.dll
• plugins\av.dll - by far the biggest slowdown
• plugins\irc.dll - mIRC for me.
• plugins\http.dll

This removed a good 8 seconds off the time required to start Trillian. I’d recommend it for anyone that sees the Trillian splash screen when they start windows. Also remember if you update Trillian you will need to remove or rename these files again.

If you like to stay current you have to read a lot of websites. RSS Feeds are like a gift from heaven because they make it so much easier to browse and ignore content. Using a RSS reader like Google is like reading 100s of printer friendly websites at one time. No outrageous ads and quick, easy browsing. I’d thought I’d share some of the feeds that I subscribe to currently.

• TechCrunch - Just like Mashable but more focused. I’ll read a story here before I go to Mashable.
• Engadget - Who doesn’t like gadgets? I wish they would shut up about the iPhone though.
• Official Google Blog - Keep an eye on what Google is doing.
• Slashdot - News for nerds. Now that JonKatz is gone the site is pretty decent. They could use a spell checker though.
• Digg / Technology - most of Digg is now filled with spam, repeats and bad spelling. Occasionally they have some links that I haven’t seen somewhere else. I do enjoy watching diggnation every once and a while.
• How to Change the World - Guy Kawasaki’s blog. I like to read his insights as an entrepreneur.
• Mashable - I like to see whats new in the web.
• Penny Arcade - Because their comics aren’t daily its nice to see when they put out new comics.

The only complaint I have about Google Reader right now is that you can’t use search. The lack of search makes no sense to me. Where is the text search Google? Isn’t your whole business model ads and search.