Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Monsie]

Hi all,

I decided to start this thread in hopes that it will become a useful resource for the Community.

Recently, I was looking for a World Clock that I could use in Wary Puppy, given that my daughter lives in Chile... and depending on the time of the year, the Chilean time zone can be three, four, or five hours ahead of where I live in Canada.

After a fair bit of searching, I found FoxClocks. It is an extension that was developed for Firefox and which happens to be compatible with SeaMonkey --not all Firefox add-ons are compatible with SeaMonkey. You can set it to display single or mutiple time clocks from around the world based on your needs. I am especially pleased with this extension because it is up to date,,, This year Chile came out with an amendment to its time zone, and FoxClocks is showing the correct time

Summary

SeaMonkey 2.6.1
FoxClocks 2.10.85
Wary Puppy 5.3

Here is a screenshot of FoxClocks running in SeaMonkey.

Monsie

[Makoto]

It might be a good idea to link to addons.mozilla.org's Seamonkey lineup of extensions, even if it does sometimes get confused and think I'm running Firefox 2.13.1, rather than Seamonkey 2.13.1.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/

[Monsie]

Ghostery is another SeaMonkey extension that I am currently testing...

As you might have noticed, surfing the web can be a bit frustrating as we wait for all the trackers to connect while a web page loads. It is often a waiting game. Even though one can set the Tell websites I do not want to be tracked checkbox in SeaMonkey preferences, it does little good because those involved in the data mining business, change their specs, find workarounds... hence the need for a third party extension to try to block this activity.

Ghostery is one such third party blocker, and there are others. One thing I like about Ghostery is that it provides frequent definition updates of trackers in attempt to stay on top of this stuff. In the browser menu, --> Tools --> Ghostery --> Update bug lists and you can check for and download the latest definition file from the database --kind of like updating an anti-virus application.

It's not that I object to advertisements per se. I think ads are important especially because they can be useful sources of information, and potentially help to keep the cost down for the Internet consumer. However, as many will agree, I have some concerns with privacy vis a vis the data miners that attempt to get a handle on my preferences, interests etc, and, I find that surfing sometimes slows to a crawl while I wait for the background activity to complete so that I am able to navigate the web page. At times, I feel like I am on a dial-up connection all over again.

Is Ghostery the perfect solution? No, I don't think there is a perfect solution --it's kind of like fighting spam... it's always a struggle. However, so far, I have found that it does make a difference and that it has improved my surfing experience.

Here is some proof: while testing Ghostery, I went to various websites with various amounts of tracking activity. At http://www.ehow.com/ Ghostery found and blocked 10/10 trackers, and the web page finished loading in about 26 seconds. I then removed Ghostery, cleared the browser data, restarted SeaMonkey and went to the same website... This time, it took about 58 seconds for the page to load before I was able to navigate the site.

Here's a screenshot of Ghostery in SeaMonkey.


Monsie

[vicmz]

Some extensions popular to Firefox are available for Seamonkey, too: Flashgot, Ghostery, DownThemAll!, SpeedDial, Adblock+, etc. I don't use Adblock+, Puppy has a builtin adblocker that works for all browsers (PupAdvertBlocker). I also use Ghostery. I'm on mobile GPRS, which is very slow. Blocking ads and trackers doesn't make my Internet lightning fast, but helps very much to make it reasonably faster. Right now I'm testing Flagfox, an extension to learn where is a website server located and what laws may apply - but it seems a waste of time, almost every website is hosted in the USA, maybe I have fun finding out which websites are hosted in other countries.