My favorite browser extension for quite a while has been Greasemonkey (GM), I loved how simple it made customizing the web with JavaScript (JS) which allows all users to both filter out the crap that site owners try to provide us (ie: ads, share links, suggested junk) and add new useful features anywhere you that wish. Greasemonkey allowed us to customize the waves as we surfed the web, as well as making a few modifications to the board, and I loved it for that.

Some problems arose with Greasemonkey though, because it was built for Firefox (FF) 1.5, and even the latest GM version (0.8.6) claimed to support 1.5, which meant that Greasemonkey the GM maintainers did not want to introduce new features that would not be available in FF 1.5, and they did not want to take advantage a of newer version, like say FF 3.0's JavaScript Modules (JSM), which would allow GM to use much less memory and improve performance when a user is using multiple windows, and on startup because less JS would need to be loaded at startup.

The good news for GM is that with the next major release, 0.9 (which contributors including myself have been working on for quite some time now) is that the minimum version of Firefox that Greasemonkey will support will be FF 3.0, which means it can now take advantage of the benefits that FF 3.0 offers, finally. The trouble I found while trying to contribute to GM is that the maintainers don't really want to alter the code base, they're actually seem to be fine with doing the minimum necessary and bug fixing for the rest of the future, at least that is how it seemed to me after writing quite a few patches which were rejected, either outright, or by degradation (meaning I would have to basically redo everything, on crappy architecture, because they've sat on their hands for so long). Patches such as using JSM, reg exp @includes, @icon, and a few more.

So the reason that I decided to bypass Greasemonkey and start working on a fork, which I now call Scriptish, is because I was tired of beating my head against a wall, I wanted to have and use the Greasemonkey that I always wanted asap, so I'm making it now. I've always enjoyed working with others, and I hope that I can convince some GM contributors to start working on Scriptish in the future.

Scriptish

Scriptish is a fork of GM, you can think of it as a superset of Greasemonkey, it can do whatever GM does, and more. Some of it's new features are:

• @author - displayed to users in the addon manager
• @contributor - displayed to users in the addon manager
• @homepage or @homepageURL - displayed to users in the addon manager
• @icon or @iconURL - Include a icon for your user script which is displayed in the addon manager and for notifications from the script.
• @screenshot - displayed to users in the addon manager.
• @match - a include pattern introduced by Google Chrome user scripts.
• @noframes - a simple way to prevent a user script from running in iframes.
• GM_worker - use a Worker within user scripts.
• GM_notification - send a Growl style notification to the user.
• GM_setClipboard - save data to the clipboard from a user script.

Other changes include major reorganization of the internal code, using JSM, in a way that only loads code into memory that will actually be used, by loading the req'd code the first time that it is going to be used. I was also able to remove a bunch of legacy code, because Scriptish will only support Firefox 4.0 or higher for the moment.

Give it a try!

If you'd like to give Scriptish a try, then you can download Scriptish here. If you want to get involved here are some links for you:

• GitHub: http://github.com/erikvold/scriptish
• Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/scriptish
• Issue Tracker: http://github.com/erikvold/scriptish/issues

I hope you like it, I'll be working on it for the next few months at least, pretty hard I imagine; I'd like to make it restartless, and implement user script updates & communication asap. If you think you'd like to open it up and hack on it, then please do!!

I've been using BookMooch since May 2007 and I think that BookMooch is a fantastic online tool for trading books and getting rid of the books which you no longer want to hold on to.

How It Works

For the official explanation of the point system go to the BookMooch About page.

Giving Books

Sign up for BookMooch, then add some books to your inventory that you are willing to trade away, and you will get +0.1 points per book. If someone from your country asks for the book, then you can mail them the book to receive +1 point, and yes you pay the cost of postage, and if the cost is too large then you can decline the user's request. If the user is outside your country then you receive +3 points, and the cost of mailing is higher. When you're paying the postage to give away your books for free think of it as prepaying for books that you will receive later. Once the user that requested the book acknowledges receiving the book you will gain another +0.1 points.

Receiving Books

To request a book from someone within your country you only need 1 point, to request from outside your country you will need 2 points. Once you request a book the book's owner will either send you the book free of charge, or give you a reason why they cannot send you the book in which case you would not lose any points.

Librivox is an amazing website that I have been watching for a number of years now, and it helped me out enormously in those awful required Art classes I took while at UBC. Now the site is far more interesting to me as I have some time to read what I wish, and because I find listening to audiobooks, and switching to reading every now and then to be the most efficient way for me to digest a non-technical book.

Librivox is basically just a repository of free audiobooks that were made for free by volunteer netizens like you and I. All you need is a computer with some recording software which is ubiquitous at this point, in fact the iPhone Voice Memo app (which is also available for the iPod Touch) is a great way to do this from the comfort of your favorite chair and couch.

Remember not to be an dick! OK please.