1. This is the four-minute “super preview” for The Amazing Spider-Man.
2. I kind of half-heartedly object to making reboots of films that were made not just during my lifetime, but during my actual post-college adult years. It hits my “frivolous” button.
3. Seriously, Spidey. What is it with you and keeping your damn mask on?
4. I hope they intend to do some more work in post with the CGI, because it still looks all fake in some shots in the preview.
5. The fact that they had to make a “super-preview” concerns me. It makes me feel like the movie is going to suck, and they’re trying to convince me otherwise.
6. Denis Leary! Yes, I know everyone but me hates him because he’s a hack who steals jokes. I don’t care. No Cure for Cancer was funny.
7. Okay, fucking seriously. They jizzed CGI all over the rest of the movie, but they couldn’t slap some CGI expressions on the mask? The mask has expressions in the comic and no one complains. They have to take it off so the dude playing Parker can get enough face-time?

A person’s choice of Internet browser is pretty personal. Some folks fire up Internet Explorer every time they want to surf the web because that’s what was installed on their computer when they took it out of the box. Other people only ever use Internet Explorer to navigate to the download section of a different browser’s website.

Web Browser Extensions

List of Internet Explorer extensions on Wikipedia
FireFox Add-Ons
Browser Extensions in the Chrome Webstore
Safari Extensions
Opera Add-Ons

I belong to the second group. Internet Explorer is used solely for downloading a better web browser, in my opinion, and my current favorite browser is Google’s Chrome. I used to be a hardcore FireFox advocate, but the last few iterations have been slow, bloated, and crashtacular in my experience.

“But wait,” you say. “What’s this ‘Chrome’ you speak of? FireFox? What now?”

Okay, back to basics, then. A web browser is a program on your computer that you use to access the Internet. There are several different browsers to chose from. If you use a PC, it came installed with Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s proprietary web browser. If you use a Mac, you got Safari. Those aren’t your only two choices, though. There’s the aforementioned FireFox and Chrome, Opera, and a couple dozen more. The three most popular web browsers are Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Chrome.

Pick your favorite browser and give it a work-out. Get comfortable using it. Then ask yourself, “What more could this browser be doing for me?” That’s where browser extensions come in.

Browser extensions are additional bits of code that you can add to your browser to make them do more and/or better things. They’re super-easy to install – generally it’s a one-click process. Depending on your browser or the extension you picked, you may have to close and reopen your browser, too. Something that simple can add a wealth of new features and solve a ton of Internet annoyances – for free!

Let’s take a look at some of the features you can add to your browser:

• AdBlock Plus is a personal favorite of mine. With this extension, available for Chrome and FireFox, you can stop all those heinously annoying web ads. It’s stunning how much one simple extension can improve your Internet experience. Of course, it’s worth bearing in mind that some of your favorite sites may be counting on their ad revenue to keep their site up and running. No worries – AdBlock comes with a feature that allows you to enable ads for sites you love and want to support.
• Facebook Purity, compatible with most major browsers, is another fantastic extension. It acts as a spam-blocker on Facebook, and allows you to almost completely customize your Facebook experience. You can do everything from filter out specific kinds of annoying updates, like game updates, to remove the Timeline view, and more.
• Greasemonkey is a FireFox must-have. This one doesn’t do much in and of itself, but it does allow you to install and run hundreds of very powerful programs, called userscripts, on FireFox, which can do anything from add already-familiar extensions to FireFox, to adding enhanced features to browser-based Internet games, to stripping garbage out of Tumblr, to tweaking Google+, to adding productivity tools to your browser… The options are limitless with Greasemonkey.
• Web of Trust adds ratings to your search results to let you know if the website you’re about to visit is safe or not.
• PriceBlink is the Internet shopper’s best friend for Chrome, IE, FireFox and Safari. As you shop online, it will alert you where to go to purchase a product for the best price.
• YouTube Options is Chrome-only, but it’s handy enough to make a person think hard about switching to Chrome. This extension lets you tweak your settings so videos don’t auto-play on page load, strips ads and those annoying pop-up notes people are compelled to stick all over their videos, lets you pre-load flash videos, and more.

This list doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the tweaks you can make and features you can add to your browser. There are extensions that help you manage your social media accounts, automatically shorten URLs, fix websites so they work better, add productivity features like organizers and to-do lists to your browsers, send web articles automatically to your Kindle or eReader of choice for later reading, keep you safer while you browse, anonymize your browsing, safeguard your passwords, and a thousand other things.

It’s not all puppies and rainbows in the world of browser extensions, though.

Along with all those awesome new features and tricks, it’s easy to accidentally install a malicious userscript or extension. It’s also easy to overload your browser with extensions, bloating it and slowing it down. Extensions can also conflict with each other, causing websites to work improperly or not at all.

Malicious extensions generally don’t last long in official extension repositories like FireFox’s Add-Ons or the Chrome webstore, but it pays to be cautious and check the user reviews before installing a new extension. It also pays to keep a weather eye on your browser’s performance, to see if it begins to slow down or crash more after an extension has been added. This could be a sign that you’re running too many extensions, or that one of them is conflicting with another. At that point, you may need to uninstall them one at a time until you find the extension that’s causing the problems, or weed out a few you don’t use as often. I’ve also had to remove extensions after discovering that they were conflicting with a website itself, causing it to work improperly. With a little care and a dose of good sense, though, finding extensions that make your Internet life easier is simple.

Well, what are you waiting for? Get out there and try on some new browser add-ons!

Via think-progress:

NBC’s David Gregory, host for Meet The Press, is headlining a conference for a major Republican advocacy group. The problem? It violates the journalism code of ethics: 

• Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
• Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
• Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.

Read the rest at ThinkProgress.

image via joeparrie

“Science can tell you how to clone a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Humanities can tell you why this might be a bad idea.”