I’ve been using Firefox, Ubuntu and Thunderbird for years now and one thing that always irked me was the fact that the “Send Link” option in Firefox was totally non-operational. Ideally, I’d ALT-F - E and bang, a new email would open up in Thunderbird with the page title in the subject and the link in the body of the mail, but no go. Nothing.

This morning, I wanted to email a buddy of mine a link and got to feeling like there must be some fix out there for this, so I did some Googling and after hitting on the sweet search string, I found the answer.

To get Firefox to open a compose window via the “Send Link” option, do this:

1. Open firefox and in the address bar, type “about:config”
2. Right-click within the body of the page that opens and select “New” and then “String”
3. In the dialog box, where it says “Enter preference name”, paste: network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
4. In the next dialog box, enter your path to Thunderbird. Mine is /usr/bin/thunderbird.
5. Hit OK and restart Firefox. “Send Link” should now work with Thunderbird.

Sweet.

I’m completely loving and am addicted to the BlackBerry Pearl I bought last week. It’s my first time owning a BlackBerry and it’s a welcome upgrade as the phone I had previously was circa 2002 (the whole shopping for new phones really pisses me off, and the old phone did still work, technically). After a few learning humps and some tweaking to get things functioning properly, everything works perfectly. I receive email (I have my gmail account hooked up to it) just about instantly. I can log into Gtalk and all the other major IM services; I’ve got Google Maps, which is amazing on mobile, since it basically functions as free GPS; internet—you name it.

I now have an understanding and appreciation for why these things are nicknamed “CrackBerries”.

Jesus-Mother-Humping–Christ!!! This genius off a dude converts a Wii into a VR device. The video starts off slow, but shit…once he demos the VR, my jaw was agape. A-fucking-mazing.

[Link to video]

I love my Wii, but shit…I’ll love it more when it does VR!

Last night, I downloaded “Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream!!” via the Virtual Console on my cherished and most beloved Wii. When I was a kid, it was called “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!”, but I guess with the end of Tyson’s contract with Nintendo and having lost the championship to Buster Douglas, they made some cosmetic changes to the boss at the end (basically making him a white guy) and changed his name to Mr. Dream.

I’d completely forgotten how totally awesome this game was. I’d also repressed how balls-out politically incorrect it managed to be. I guess it was truly a different era, because a game this chock full of blatant racial and ethnic stereotypes would never fly in this day and age. That said, it rules.

The list of fighters runs a gamut of stereotypes. The obese Pacific Islander; the Japanese guy with the rickshaw soundtrack and extremely exaggerated slanted eyes. The drunk Russian (Soda Popinski’s original name was Vodka Drunkenski till Nintendo changed it, since it was a kids game) and more.

In spite and perhaps because of the insensitivity, the game rocks. I’d forgotten how many hours I killed, punching and dodging my way up the ladder, only to get laid out by Tyson in the first round. I don’t recall exactly, but I think I did manage to win the game at some point. So far, I can get to the second fight with Bald Bull. My old school game skills have suffered severely over the years. Still, I have time and a certain amount of thumb-tapping moxie left in me.

Bang for buck, Amarok is the best music player/library manager on earth. But lately, since I’ve been flying Gnome, Xfce and other non-KDE-native environments, I’ve been using Exaile, just for the heck of it. It’s also nice to not have to load KDE libraries, just to play some music. Anyway, Exaile a good program. It’s come a damn long stretch since I first checked it out. It can handle large libraries and with every realease, closes the gap on features that make Amarok the best.

I’ve been using exaile, pretty much exclusively for about a year or more now. I’m not sure what took me so long but I just now ran ‘exaile –help‘ and got the command line arguments. Why didn’t I do this a year ago? I love command line music control. I don’t know if they’re any better, but to me, it’s always much more satisfying to execute tasks via command. Managing my playlist via command line makes it uber.

Usage: exaile.py [option...|uri]

Options:
-h, –help show this help message and exit
-d DIR, –duplicates=DIR
Finds and deletes all duplicate tracks (based on their
md5 sum)
-n, –next Play the next track
-p, –prev Play the previous track
-s, –stop Stop playback
-a, –play Play
-t, –play-pause Toggle Play or Pause
-q, –query Query player
–gui-query Show a popup of the currently playing track
–get-title Print the title of current track
–get-album Print the album of current track
–get-artist Print the artist of current track
–get-length Print the length of current track
–current-position Print the position inside the current track as a
percentage
-i VOL, –increase_vol=VOL
Increases the volume by VOL
-l VOL, –decrease_vol=VOL
Decreases the volume by VOL
–play-cd Start playing a CD
–new Start new instance
–set-rating=RATING Set rating for current song
–get-rating Get rating for current song
–settings=SETTINGS Settings Directory
–cleanversion
–version
–testing
–no-equalizer Disable Equalizer support
–start-minimized Start Exaile minimized to tray, if possible

Awesome. For me, at least.

I’m amused by this:

[Link to video]

I’m totally blown away after seeing this high-definition video of the moon’s surface, taken from the Japanese “Kaguya” probe. It’s balls-out fucking jaw-droppingly sweet. The detail is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Stop a moment and take a few minutes to check it out. It’s worth the time. If the above link to the hi-def video fails to work, either by overload (at this moment, the film’s been /.’d) or take-down, there’s a extremely poor youtube version that has unfortunately been over-compressed and lost most of it’s better details.

One of the ways that I know my brain is in engaged in a slow, synaptic erosion towards a state of oatmeal-like gruel is by my ever worsening skills at video games that ruled my world as a child. I used to pwn Super Mario Bros., back in the NES days. I could win that game on one life (yeah, so I used warp zones…I was still pretty damn good!). Now, sitting in a rank puddle of urine and feces, sweating, swearing and screaming at my television, I’m lucky to get to level 5.

Yesterday, I was reading about how the little-known and rarely seen original Japanese sequel to Super Mario 1, “SÅ«pā Mario Burazāzu 2″ a.k.a. “Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels” had been made available for the Wii’s virtual console. The article I was reading had a lot to say about how much more difficult and maddening this release is and how the creator might very possibly have been in a deep depression that led to his making a release that is a total fuck-off-and-die-trying type of game for all those budding Mario fans out there in the mid 80’s. I decided that I must have it.

As soon as I got home, I ponied up the 600 Wii points ($6) and downloaded it. I can safely say that “Lost Levels” is one fucking ass-rape of a hard game. I couldn’t even complete the first world, though I will keep spanking away at it.

On a similar Nintendo note, while I was browsing the Wii Shop Channel. I nabbed Super Mario Bros. 3, a game I’d completely forgotten about. I spent many, many a completely drugged-to-the-gills evening playing that game in high school. I loved it and now I own it again and can resume blowing away whole nights zoning to it—minus the hallucinations and eventual vomiting. The Wii is the greatest thing ever.

Today, I finally got around to trying Guitar Hero 2 for my PS2. I picked up one of those guitar and game package deals on the way home from brunch (unlimited mimosas, motherfuckers!). I found myself immediately and completely addicted, thwacking away at the fret keys and strumming like a retard huffing gasoline. I’m an unstoppable rock god!

Naturally, I had to choose Lars Umlaüt as my avatar (pictured above), since he’s something close to Black Metal, what with the corpsepaint and shit. I noticed that the third installment is released next week and the track list looks totally sweet. I’m definitely getting it.

The only downside to the game is after a few solid hours of sweating away at it, my wrists are killing me. I think I’m going to be pretty sore in the morning. Whatever, Guitar Hero rules.

I’ve got a lot of good things to say about the eMusic service. I’ve been using it for getting close to one year now and I love it. However, I am totally unimpressed with the new downloader they’re pushing, emusicremote. It’s opensource and cross-platform, which is appreciated, but it’s essentially a customized web browser. I don’t need another browser. I have Firefox. Why would I want to install a whole other program that’s essentially a modified version of the same browser? I want a good, basic downloading program, which eMusic has never been able to deliver for Linux. Instead, I rely on eMusicj which has and continues to work great for me.

I had the same complaint when I gave the media player, Songbird a spin. I don’t need another Mozilla-based browser running. I just need a good media player. Instead of this behemoth of a downloader, eMusic should concentrate on improving the basic program they’ve used in the past. If they want the browser integration, make a Firefox extension.