reesesWeb

I never trust the iCal Dock item today, because 17 July is the date displayed by default if iCal is not running. Those of you who are Mac users are nodding right now, and the rest of you are thinking WTF?

See, instead of displaying a generic logo, the iCal application instead displays a misleading date that is wrong at least 99.726% of the time. As you see, the month is written quite small, so the chance of catching it is less than 100%.

On other news, I think I've sort of switched back to Safari, despite some complaints or disadvantages mentioned earlier. I just can't stand the UI sluggishness when I open a window, open a tab, or switch tabs. With Firefox, there's this annoying little...lag, of just under a second, when I do each of these things. With Safari, there's not.

Of course, functionally, Safari just lacks some things. The biggest items for me are Greasemonkey and an interactive Adblock, where I can click on an item and remove it from the window.

PithHelmet lacks the latter, although its default ad blocker is actually far superior to Adblock.

I was moaning to myself about the lack of Greasemonkey, since an equivalent is available for just about every other browser. IE has Trixie, Opera has User JavaScript, and Safari has, what?

It turns out that PithHelmet has a quiet feature called "Machete". Great name, but what Machete amounts to is a filter engine for web pages. If a Machete script is registered for a URL, PithHelmet will pipe the page through it before rendering in the browser.

As far as I can tell now, any executable will work, as long as it ends in .pl, .py, or .sh. I've ported a few Greasemonkey scripts to Ruby and Python, and put them up online. You could probably use them with Proxomitron since it uses a similar proxy model, but I like the idea of being able to undo my screwage by hitting a key combo.

Machete is not a full replacement for Greasemonkey. If nothing else, the process/pipe model of Machete is a heck of a lot slower than the in-process Javascript interpreter leveraged by Greasemonkey. Machete has the ability to wedge custom Javascript and CSS into a page, but my Javascript skills are very rusty, and I didn't want to waste an entire weekend just bringing myself up to speed.

In addition, the fact that I think there are about twelve trillion times more Greasemonkey scripts floating around out there (even though only about 20 are of interest to me), puts Machete at a disadvantage, albeit a remediable one.

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