How I Use Things

I remember my first CD purchase being an interesting experience for a number of reasons.  One, because it was the Jane’s Addiction ‘Been Caught Stealing’ single, and for basically mainstream music, they were pretty interesting.  Two, because it was my first introduction to a format shift.

I was too young to be aware of the VHS v. Beta conflict or to recognize the meaning of its outcome, and I’d grown up buying and receiving music on cassette tapes rather than vinyl (with a few exceptions).  What surprises me in hindsight is that I don’t recall any anxiety about adopting the new format, Compact Disc, only a sort of confusion and consternation about what to do with all of my newly obsolete media.

My eventual resolution was one I’m still pleased with: I gathered up all of my tapes and took them to a local music store, where I got a little store credit for my old music, which was converted immediately into a couple of CDs.  What I like about that process was, if there was an album I didn’t care enough to re-buy in the new format, I hadn’t lost anything by selling it away, I’d in fact gained more room in my collection for something I did want.  Win.

In fact, I feel so good about how that works, that I’m doing it again.  There are CDs in my collection that I haven’t listened to in years and they’ve been doing nothing but taking up space on a shelf for all that time, as well as maybe confusing the guests who happen to scan the contents of those shelves.

In addition, I don’t even have to re-buy whole albums if I was only holding on to a CD for a track or two.  This is more common with people who enjoy pop music, I’m sure, but I have a stack of compilations that definitely fit that pattern (I’m looking at you, Flipside Desert Show with only the two Babyland tracks at the end).

But there’s more to gain with this format shift.  I’m not just making room for more and better music by dumping my CDs, I’m making more room for anything at all.  I’m increasingly fond of living a more simple, uncluttered lifestyle and the appeal of digital music in that regard is I’m sure quite obvious.  There are plenty of environment-related wins when leving behind physical media, of course, but I won’t bore you by enumerating them here.

All in all, I feel there is a lot to gain by moving to digital music, especially now that most shops have come to their senses regarding the evils of DRM and the shabbiness of low-quality compression formats.  But those are topics for another time.

Trevor Bramble music digital music

If you’re at all like me, trying to throw all of your needs into the hands of one little browser is really just asking too much of it. That’s why at the time of this writing I have five (5!) separate Firefox profiles set up and in use.

It’s true.  See?

Allow me to explain. First, I am a heavy user of Firefox extensions, so at one point I realized I was harming my browser experience in all tasks by piling on so many of them. Second, as I do a lot of web development work I require separate environments (development, production, etc.) to be available concurrently with no overlap or conflict.

So the default profile is my everyday, usually open, random and habitual stuff profile. It’s loaded with extensions like one that gives me an easy way to allow cookies for a site (by default, I don’t), another for Delicious Bookmarks, another for blocking ads, and so on.

It has a companion profile, called “Private”.  This one is set to always use Tor (via FoxyProxy) and never hold on to cookies or history of any kind. That profile is for overthrowing corrupt regimes. Or something. Moving on…

You can’t miss that I have three “development” profiles. These are loaded with a thousand (approx.) extensions for web development, from Firebug to MeasureIt. There’s one each for the development and production environments at work, and one for everything else.

All of the profiles share collection of extensions for modifying the Firefox UI in ways important to me.  I’ll detail one in a little bit and leave the rest for another time.

There’s a great write-up on how to create multiple profiles on Lifehacker, one of my favorite places on the web. I did find some differences in that article versus what worked for me, so let me give a quick run-down. This is from an assumed fresh install of Firefox, so modify as needed (use your brain).

First I installed all of the extensions common to the profiles into my default. After that was all done I cleared history and so forth, modified settings as needed, and exited Firefox.

Then I navigated to the directory of Firefox profiles and set about copying my base profile to a few new names. In my case that was “Private” and “development – home”.

Because a link isn’t installed for accessing the profile manager by default, I punched in the following at the command line:

If you just get a new browser window, you didn’t close out of Firefox first.  Do so and try again. Once you’re looking at the profile manager, go ahead and add a new profile.  Select one of your new profile directories and give the profile a corresponding name.

At this point what you do depends on your goals.  For me, I had two sets of similar profiles to create.  So I created just two cloned directories and added them to the profile manager, “Private” and “development – home”.  I load my developer profiles heavily with extensions, so I didn’t clone that profile to the two work-related profiles until after I’d added Firebug and half a dozen or more other extensions to it.

From there of course I wanted an easy way to load each of them, and that meant adding them to the Gnome menu. By chance, my Google search for a tutorial to provide turned up one specifically about Firefox.

In the end, that’s what my set of development profiles looks like.

One last thing. If you’ve got a few of these profiles loaded at once, it may become difficult to tell which is which. By installing the Nightly Tester Tools extension, you can set your titlebar to display which profile is loaded.  (Previously I used Titlebar Tweaks, but there isn’t a 3.x-compatible version.)

Best thing? You can load them by keyboard with Gnome Do.

Don’t worry, Windows users, you have an awesome, all-keyboard graphical tool to do this sort of thing too!

Trevor Bramble firefox firefox, profiles

Like many swift, loud fads, I initially ignored Delicious (then annoyingly titled “del.icio.us”).  But as you can see, that’s no longer the case:

So why the turn-around?  Well, originally I was using Google Bookmarks and for a number of reasons I wanted a replacement.  Delicious has great Firefox integration and is fairly popular with other people I wish to trade links now and again.

In fact, the way Twitter is sometimes used as a conduit for easy linkdumping is much akin to how I use Delicious to flag links as something I think my friends should give a look.

I’ll generally ignore the suggested tags if they conflict with what I’ve already used, and I’ll be judicious when selecting friends to tag :for so they don’t end up ignoring everything I send their way.

Usually I don’t spend any time on the Delicious site unless I’m cleaning up duplicate tags (merging “rubyonrails” into “rails”, for example) and instead I make use of my collection of links via the Firefox extension’s sidebar.

While I do find some things about Delicious irksome, using them for my social and personal (but not too personal) bookmarking needs works out very well!

Trevor Bramble delicious bookmarks, social, twitter