Back from Tech Limbo

[resonant]

Have reformatted hard drive and upgraded system software. Only needed to call ISP twice to get me back on the internet. Adore Panther. Adore Safari.

Adore the new iTunes. Haven't set up the iPod yet, because I'm the personality type that goes, "Yay! I get to attach ratings to all 3,000 songs! I can't wait!"

For those of you who use Safari, questions: Is there a shortcut to halt animations? Is there any way to "subscribe" to pages, the way IE can? Do you turn on the pop-up blocking option, or do you leave that option turned off unless you're looking at a notoriously poppy page?

In other news, last night I had a very disturbing dream in which I was a post-Halloween Sirius Black, and I had this plan whereby Remus would bite this girl who had offered to help us, and the bite would somehow mysteriously be transmitted to Peter and kill him. Only it turned the girl, instead, and she was trying to kill us both.

Er, it was a lot scarier than it sounded.

Comments

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I now have a new Mac at work and it has Safari. I'm still a bit bamboozled. But basically, I want to steal work-Mac and exchange it with home-Mac.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Eep. I thought I knew Safari pretty well. But I've never even asked myself any of the questions you've asked. I guess I must not get many pop-up pages, the sites I visit.

[everythingisaid.livejournal.com]

I have had Safari for about two months, and I have the pop-up blocker on. It's never stopped any site that I wanted to visit or pop-up, so, it seems to work. I don't really know what you mean by halting animations, so I've never done anything about that. Don't know anything about subscribing to pages, either. But I never did that on IE, either. So. I do know that the tab bar is really cool, where you can have all of the pages open up in the same window and just click on their tab to see each one. Now that I love.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

What is "subscribing" to pages? Sounds cool.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I don't really know what you mean by halting animations, so I've never done anything about that.

Well, like, if I'm reading a story in someone's LJ, and down below someone has commented on it with an animated icon, then I'm going to find the animation really distracting while I read. I had heard that some browsers had a keyboard shortcut to turn animations off temporarily.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's terribly cool (though not cool enough to make me go back to IE, needless to say). You could mark a page and instruct the browser to check it every so often (once a day, once a week, every time you opened the browser, whatever). If the site had changed, there'd be a checkmark next to it in your Favorites list.

I used it all the time. Enough so that I can tell you, for instance, that there was no point in subscribing to a Tripod or fanfiction.net page, because they changed constantly, for whatever reason (probably loading a different ad for every visit).

[terrio]

You might want to take a look at Firefox, a freeware web browser from the fine, friendly folks who also bring you Mozilla. I know it has the option to run animations only once, and it has a very sophisticated pop-up blocker/un-blocker. It also has an optional extension that lets you block ads in general on a site-by-site basis, and another one that replaces flash animations with a button you can click on to run the animation. (This is especially useful when trying to read yahoogroups via the web interface, where the animated ads used to drive me nuts.) And it has tabs. And subscriptions. And the cutest. icon. ever.

Firefox and its extensions can be found at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

[conversant.livejournal.com]

I've got no answers to help you, but I feel wildly hopeful that you might be able to answer a couple of my questions. (What a jerk, I know.) I've just made the PC to Mac shift and I'm being driven nuts by the lack of a proper delete key -- what I mean is that the key called delete on my Mac keyboard erases characters to the left of the cursor (like the backspace key on PC keyboards), which is fine, but sometimes I want to suck up the characters just to the right of the cursor without having to move the cursor, or highlight text with the mouse before deleting. Is there a solution?

I'm also missing the right mouse button which made cut and paste operations (and other things) possible without moving the arrow cursor to use the toolbars (it's a lot of extra mouse manipulation if you are doing much of editing). Are there keystroke shortcuts for the functions that PCs allow via right-click?

[balfrog.livejournal.com]

--
HI,
this is a completely unrelated comment-post,
but I'm a long time fan of your HP fic,
and another fan, skuf, on the topic of amazing original work by our fandom writers, mentioned your Exog.
Now, so sorry to butt in like this- but would it be alright to share files, or point in direction of where I might find it?
(if it's all right with you to view it- if you're tidying it up for pub. then, whoa- i'm all hands off here)

thanks ~~

FS

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I don't have it up on the web anywhere, because I'm currently sending it around to publishers. But if you'll e-mail me at resonant8(at)att(dot)net, I'd be glad to e-mail you a copy.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've heard those things are rough on people who switch from PC to Mac. I don't miss them because I've never had them.

I have no ideas for the right-click problem; maybe if you posted in your LJ, some actual knowledgeable Mac users would be able to help you.

As for deleting forward, in most programs you can select characters to the right of the cursor by holding down the Command key (the one with the apple on it) while pressing the right arrow. When you get a block of text highlighted, you can just hit the delete key. Not elegant, I grant you, but at least it lets you stick to the keyboard and not have to go to the mouse.

[isilya]

Dude, I hope in the meantime someone has helped you out with these questions, otherwise:

a) Forward-Delete can be achieved by pressing fn-delete. There is also a Forward-Delete key on every full-sized Mac keyboard (not on the portables). It's near the Home and End keys. However, you can also achieve a forward delete affect by pressing shift and then the right arrow key over the text you want to delete and then delete.

b) The right mouse button is achievable by pressing Ctrl as you click. However, I'd advise buying a mouse with two buttons and scroll wheel, as then you have left click, right click and, most important for browsing, command-click with the scroll wheel (to open a link in a new tab)