Bits and Pieces 13

I’m testing a nutritional supplement, recommended to me by both Old Jules and the Mandala Lady. The official name is serratiopeptidase but it’s more commonly known as “serrapeptase”. It’s a body enzyme that fades from production beginning around age 20. The primary noticeable effect of the enzyme is reducing scar tissue, but it appears to affect all scar tissue in the body, even what you can’t see inside your joints and such as fibroids and other little nasties. Further, I noticed it offers a very broad-based boost to the metabolism itself. It appears synergistic with other supplements, typically making them work a little better. However, for many folks it may take 3-5 days to get rocking and rolling smoothly. I’ll update after I’ve used it for awhile.

Because of my computer ministry clients’ needs, I’m running Win7 on my desktop. I don’t like it, but the writing tools are better and it’s a whole lot easier to test software before I recommend it to people. It’s also easier to learn the new tricks I need to rescue systems with real troubles, since the bad guys keep changing their game.

My old favorite browser, Opera, has changed a lot. The newest implementation has shifted over to the WebKit engine so it acts a lot like Chrome. It’s really not up to full production use just yet, but version 16 is a start. However, they also split out their mail client and it’s better than ever. Just look for Opera Mail client, currently for Windows only. If you’ve ever used the older bundled mail client with Opera, installing the new one will automatically pick up your configurations, accounts and mail storage from the older version. Folks, I love this mail client.

But I’m still running Debian 6 on my laptop. I don’t get to use it much, but it’s still much better on that hardware than anything else. Most of them time I drag it along on service calls in case I need to set up a home router or download stuff specially for their machine. More than once I’ve helped someone cobble together a quick webpage as the best way to display a collection of photos or something on their system. I find it easier to use my own familiar software for that than to use Notepad or have to install something they won’t use on their system. I frankly hate how MS Word and Libre Office create webpages, loading them with too much unnecessary crap code.

If you want to try something that makes clean code without having to write it all out yourself, try Amaya. It’s free and runs on all platforms. It’s just a tad cranky to learn, but it’s about as good as you can get with a WYSIWYG editor for webpage code.

For those of you who still like the idea of ripping off YouTube music videos, the simplest path is to use a single tool. However, you get to choose from two versions: Slimbrowser based on the IE engine (Trident) and using many of the same kinds of settings, or Slimboat Browser based on the WebKit engine. Both display a button on YouTube pages (usually upper right) allowing you to download directly. You get to select from the various quality versions and formats, plus you have an option to transcode directly into MP3 format. The first time you do, the browser will probably download a codec for it. It will pull down the video in your chosen format then produce an MP3 from it, leaving you both in the same folder. Both of these come from Flashpeak and I have little idea about the company behind it. And to be honest, I really can’t find much use for either browser aside from snagging music from YouTube.