cool links -♡- vegetablearian.com

Link to my site!

No hotlinking please!

I should make some new buttons...

My shrines:

I have a bunch of tumblrs which function as shrines for Fallout, Star Trek and Dragon Age :)

Links!!!

Website resources
PC resources (firefox, other programs)
Interesting things to subscribe to
Interesting articles

Website resources

Graphics

It's not part of my site right now, but I was a pixel doll fanatic. Read about the origins of this hobby and maybe download yourself some little dollz :)

They are on my credit page already, but I love voyagergrafx. It's not all Voyager/Star Trek/space-themed, but mostly!

glitter-graphics.com has a lot of cool mid-retro stuff (I'm inventing that term here) - my favourite artist there is chibiville

If you want super retro animated greetings-cards-ish gifs, complete with glitter and a very large credit, you can't do better than chromaluna

For (pixel) art, web materials, backgrounds, (pixel) fonts and more:

PC resources

How to change shortcut icons in Windows Vista, 7 and 8

Useful programs

I made this site with Notepad++, a free text editor for Windows. Everyone needs a program like this and this is mine!

I write my fanfics, as well as attempts at original fiction, in SmartEdit Writer. It's free and I recommend it to all Windows users who think they might benefit from the ability to rearrange scenes, and to be able to write directly into their plan. It also has great note-attaching behaviours.

I use LibreOffice for all kinds of things: mostly making huge 'spreadsheet' tables to plan my erotic fanfiction, fictional family tree 'flowcharts', and drafts of my fics to email to my poor husband. I'm sure you can use these programs for other things, too.

I have a complicated upload process to AO3 where I paste things repeatedly in and out of SmartEdit Writer, LibreOffice Writer, Notepad++ and AO3 until I start to cry, toggling AO3 between HTML and rich text as I go. It sounds really good and fun and easy right? So maybe I will write a tutorial some day so you can do the same.

For organising notes I've started using CherryTree, which I mostly love apart from one thing which is it's full of shortcuts (good) which it expects you to learn for an easy user experience (fine) and they are NOT ON THE BUTTONS!!! Wtf?! Seriously!! You're meant to just learn them by trial and fucking error I guess. Otherwise - love it.

My music player is foobar2000, and I love how customisable it is, and this thread has some useful info on the default columns and other stuff

Firefox resources

I have a real love/hate relationship with Firefox. It's kind of my least hated browser so I recommend it all the time. Anyway, it's awful out the box, so here's some help:

(not Firefox-specific:) directory of search engines

Set a local page as your homepage

userchrome.org is full of help for editing Firefox's userchrome.css, ie, how the browser looks and how its UI works! I love that we can change this in Firefox. I hate how necessary the devs make it recently...

I refuse to link to reddit on general principle, but if you're searching for help with your userchrome and the results are on /r/firefoxcss it's actually pretty good advice over there :)

Firefox also lets you change every site's css (globally, per site, both! Groups of sites, specific pages, subdomains, literally anything you can imagine!) with the usercontent.css. You probably need to re-enable your ability to use this because, again, the people in charge at Mozilla have something utterly wrong with them.

Some extensions and userscripts I use:

Basic privacy/security: AdBlocker Ultimate (great for hiding annoying non-ad elements too, especially if the selector is complex), Decentraleyes and LocalCDN 'cause I can never decide which is best, and NoScript.

Tab organising!! Simple Tab Groups is so nice for keeping lots of tab-pots on the tab-boil, and makes archiving stuff you're not getting back to soon as a folder of bookmarks super easy.

Customisation: Greasemonkey for userscripts (and Greasy Fork is the best place to find them nowadays. Btw I recommend not allowing auto-updates on your installed scripts! Manually update if they stop working). FoxReplace for replacing text strings (not really played with this yet, forgot what I wanted it for after choosing it!)

Specific site improvements: Google Hit Hider (includes DDG and others) to minimise or totally obliterate domains you're sick of seeing in search results; Old Reddit Redirect so you can use the least annoying version of the site (there's a userscript which I use on my phone but the extension is faster/cleaner to use)

AO3 improvements (all userscripts): AO3 savior to block tags, authors, keywords, etc. and highlight author fandoms to make it easier to see on an author's profile if they write fics in your fandoms :) (Though, I use my skin now for the latter! More fiddly to set up but mobile compatible too.)

Youtube improvements: BlockTube to block channels, videos, or certain videos by keyword (even eg from your subscribed channels, which is what I use it for!); Improve YouTube! and Unhook, which are similar enough to be kind of incompatible (I can't get my default video centred if I use both) but each have missing features. Maybe you will prefer one or the other, they're both great at making youtube less obnoxious. Also, either Improve or the combo conflicts with YouTube Video and Audio Downloader slightly - you need to fullscreen the video to see the download panel (I don't use the client, I only ever want a low res complete video or mp3 audio!)

General browsing improvements: Delete History (great for removing search results, tumblr dashboard pages etc. - everything that accumulates quickly. Auto remove blacklist on close is patchy but the manual works fine. Can be tricky to add a referrer kind of site to the blacklist 'cause you can't type them in), Don't accept image/webp to set a preference for other image formats, Video Speed Controller which does what it says on the tin

If you struggle with using certain sites or maybe the whole internet more than you ought to, you should try LeechBlock if you haven't already. Even if you have already, give it another go with new settings. I gave up it on for years 'cause I used to use the per-day time limits for things like tumblr/reddit but I always overrode them. I am much happier blocking all of reddit unless a thread accessed through DDG/google, and tumblr most days of the week apart from 2 mornings and all sunday (which I now generally don't even use!)

Firefox Translations is a work in progress. It recently stopped working for me, but it was cool when I did get it to work. I hope eventually I can rely on it instead of google translate!

I can't forget Web Developer, even though I often forget to use it hehe.

I have seen people mention some of these as really tricky to use and that's just not true at all. I can use them easily!

RSS/Atom Feeds & Mailing Lists

I read all these in my excellent email client Thunderbird.

Feeds

The feed links are not really designed for clicking on - copy them and subscribe to them in whatever feed-reader you use. When you set up your subscriptions, take care with the update frequency. For most blogs and small sites, once a day is more than enough.

Archive of Our Own tag feeds - this isn't a link to a particular feed, but instructions on how to subscribe to any tag you want! Here is the Natalia Dubrovhsky feed, for example.

You can subscribe to any wordpress-based blog or tumblr by whacking a /rss on the end; a /data/atom on to a dreamwidth; youtube channels are a bit more complicated: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[get this long random id by clicking the channel name from a video]

Subscribing to feeds is fun! I got the tumblr and youtube tips here, and I'm always looking for more. For now, here's some of my personal recommendations:

Ginnie's Sims Community Finds - I actually follow this through my dreamwidth reading page, but you can subscribe to the feed instead. She posts new cc for Sims 1, 2, 3 and 4. I play TS1 and TS3 and I would never find the TS1 stuff without her. The TS3 coverage is very thorough, too!

Slashdot - this is the main news feed. Slashdot used to call itself "news for nerds". Idk if that is the best description any more (they don't seem to think so?), but it's mostly tech-related news. Sometimes the summarising is very lazy, and it's worth reading the comments just to get a better view, but they're a bit of minefield. That's categorically better than a cesspit, FWIW. If you venture on to the main site from the feed - the nested quotes don't render properly, which makes it sometimes worth clicking through - I recommend blocking all the 'Here's what's making other people angry:' "suggested" crap. It's fairly easy

I find gHacks a good way to keep up with email- and Firefox- related news. No actual ads in the feed, but they promote some odd stuff sometimes. But, one woman's odd is another woman's lifesaver, ofc.

Low-tech Magazine's solar powered blog feed - obviously the meaning of "low tech" here is not really low tech, but this blog has some great articles about both technologies and our concepts of technology

CRPG Addict - fun blog about old cRPGs

OS/2 Museum - not just about OS/2, but old computers in general

Two-Bit History - more computer history, with more recent history too

Computers Are Bad - this is a great blog for technology criticism

Feed for The Cheapskate's Guide to Computers and the Internet which is pretty self-explanatory. There's also more general articles about the web and other technology

The Aesthetics of Joy - articles about, well, joy. And its necessity, and its accessibility.

Mailing Lists

Maangchi's newsletter - monthly, recipes by Maangchi along with her responses to readers and a few personal thoughts. I love Maangchi, and this email always makes me smile.

Pen International's newsletter - updates from the association for writers' rights

NHBS newsletters - these are pretty much all adverts, as NHBS is a shop. The main newsletter also covers some nature/conservation news (probably totally UK-specific), but my favourite is the monthly edition for nature book releases and reprints! They have a great mix of extremely specific textbooks through to popular science paperbacks. They sell things other than books, too, and thanks to these newsletters I'm bizarrely and unnecessarily well-informed on bat survey equipment. I bought my hand lens from there :)

D B Borton's mailing list - to keep up with her new releases mainly. I love her Cat Caliban mystery series.

I love to subscribe to things!!!

Articles

Rediscovering the Small Web - an essay about the web I remember, which we can recreate!

This article about bloated web design is very funny, and I like its recommended balanced web pyramid very much.

Digital Wellbeing - a page with a lot of useful information on getting a healthier relationship with social media and the internet. I don't think all the suggestions are practicable or even necessarily helpful but there's lots of food for thought here.