Skip to main content

Save Some Paper and Ink with Aardvark

I am sure you are tired of printing garbage like ads and someone else's colorful artwork while all you wanted was have a hard-copy of some clean text and graphics. If you are a Mozilla Firefox user, there is a solution that can save you lot of paper and ink/toner. It is a Firefox add-on called Aardvark, and it allows you to selectively remove sections of a web page before sending it to a printer. Here is a little synopsis:
Powerful and user-friendly utility for selecting elements and doing various actions on them. It can be used for cleaning up a page prior to printing it (by removing and isolating elements), for making the page more readable, and (most appreciated by web developers), for analyzing the structure of a page.

To use Aardvark, just right-click on the page and select from the popup menu. As you move the mouse over the page, you will see a red rectangle around the current block element, along with a label showing its type, and if they exist, its id, class, and style. You can then press various keys on the keyboard to do things, for instance W to navigate wider (as shown in the image), R to remove the element, I to isolate the element (that is, remove everything else on the page), V to view formatted source of that element, U to undo, Q to quit aardvark, and H for help, that is, a list of the 12 available keystrokes.
What I like most about Aardvark is that it has worked on all the websites I have tried it on regardless of their content and complexity. Plus, it runs only when you invoke it, not constantly in the background eating up valuable resources. This idea has inspired an plan I have had to block all ad servers. I am honestly not influenced by ads -- why are they wasting valuable bandwidth on me? It is time to block all ad servers from reaching me. If successful, that would be a subject of a future post.

By the way, I came across the Aavdvark info while searching easy blog printing options for my devoted readership of one. A solution to that problem will be the subject of my next post.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Correlation Between Taxes and Social/Economic Programs

I have always wondered if the taxes people pay correlate with the availability of social and economic programs and safety nets, not to mention the military programs that protect them. This idea comes in light of the notion that Europeans are highly taxed compared to their American counterparts, but they seem to have access to free (or almost free) education and health care while the US provides neither. The Europeans live and work at a more leisurely pace than Americans and they have the comfort of knowing that their government has put safety nets in case a disaster. The Europeans do a lot to ensure that all their citizens have comparable opportunities, and thus you are less likely to see a huge gap between the poor and the rich. Perhaps the lack of incentive to excel has stifled entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe to some extent. In fact, Europe has historically high unemployment rates than the US and the size of government there is significantly larger than that of the US....
Post a Comment
Read more

2001 Recession Deferred for 2008?

Most people remember the Dot-Com bubble of the 1990s that peaked in 2000 before bursting in 2001-2003. Considering how the NASDAQ composite lost more than 60% of its value by 2001 alone, the country was about to go into a recession. The 9/11 attacks made things worse too. As the impact of 9/11 and Dot-Com bust were about to pull the country into a recession, another bubble came to the rescue. It was the housing bubble that deferred a sure recession and kept the US in an era of faux prosperity. It gave Bush a reason to soldier on with flawed economic policies as the housing bubble gave the impression that the good economic progress of the Clinton years were being sustained through Bush's years. This time though, there does not appear to be another bubble ready to bail the US out of the recession it is in. After suffering through the I.T. and housing bubbles in just a decade, I don't think investors and people in general will be adventurous enough to create another bubbl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Linux Tips and Solutions

PROBLEM: Audacious on K/Ubuntu Doesn't play my mp3s:: On my kubuntu 8.04.1 audacious is not playing any audiofile. I've tried to run my mp3s with amarok and it works. Also audacity is playing mp3s. SOLUTION: Click on Preferences in Audacious; Select Audio Tab; Set the 'cCurrent output plugin' to 'aRts output plugin'. __________________________________________________________ PROBLEM: File associations in Firefox 3.0 disappear in Kubuntu SOLUTION: Install firefox-3.0-gnome-support . . . more to come
Post a Comment
Read more