Latest Posts from Download Squad

Userscripts.org is a great site, but can be difficult to find all the great scripts that are available.

1. YouTube video only: This is a very small script that eliminates everything on a YouTube page but the video itself.
2. Auto add to Google Reader: Bypass the page where you click "Add to Google Reader" or "Add to Google homepage" page and adds your desired feed right to your Google Reader.
3. Textarea Backup: Provides a backup of text you entered into text boxes in case of the event of a crash. Just go back to the page and the text will be there waiting for you. This one is great for bloggers or frequent commenters.
4. Googlenlarge: A great Greasemonkey script that allows you to hover over an image from a Google image search and an enlarged preview of the image will pop-up on the same page; Allowing you to preview any image search result without having to actually go to the page that contains the image.
5. Google Homepage Resizeable Columns: Pretty self explanatory; just click and drag in the white areas between the columns of your Google personal homepage and you can adjust the width of the columns.
6. Digg.com comment helper: A great digg script that highlights the most popular comments on a digg story. Perfect for finding those user-submitted links to mirrors or the extremely hilarious comments.
7. Digg.com washer: Another one for digg that allows you to add words that the script will then block the stories containing those words. Access the options for this one by clicking on the "Show Options" link on the digg front page right above the top story. You can also toggle the digg side bar on and off with this one.
8. Google Reader preview: This one will allow you to view the originating website for a story in one of your feeds. Just go on over to the "List View" and click on one of the stories.
9. Gmail macros: Adds some more keyboard shortcuts for gmail as well as allows you to create your own shortcuts.
10. Google Auto Pager: This is a great script that eliminates the need to keep hitting the "Next" button for some more Google search results. It automatically loads the next page's results at the end of your current page. It also works great with the Firefox extension Google Preview.

*Bonus script*
Pagerization: This one is just like the Google auto pager script, only it works on multiple search pages. It is a bit buggy still, however, but might be worth it to keep your eyes on this one.

We figured, "Why not start the week off right; With a Time-Waster?" Bowmaster Prelude is a great flash game that is like capture the flag with experience points, upgrades, gold and castles. Kill more people and structures to level up and get more cash to get more upgrades. Upgrades range from better types of ammo to shoot from your castle to armies to help defend your castle and capture the enemy's flag. Extra points and gore are awarded for head shots.

As you might be able to tell, we are avid Firefox fanatics at Download Squad. However, there are still a lot of people who don't use the entire Mozilla suite and are using Outlook for all their stand-alone email needs at home and at the office. This is due to the fact that most companies use Outlook and, as such, people are familiar with it. At Download Squad we like to say, familiarity breeds contempt.

So, here's an alternative. What's the word? Thunderbird.

You might have a puzzled look on your face right now. Maybe you even use Thunderbird at home but, at work? That's nonsense you say. Your IT department configures your Outlook client to work with the Exchange server. Fear not! It is now possible to use Thunderbird at home and work and still get all of your exchange server email as well as your company's Global Address Book.

First up, download Thunderbird if you haven't already, version 2.0 beta 2 worked best for me and has an up-to-date user interface that resembles Firefox's UI.

Full instructions after the jump.

Read more »

Today's time waster is a tail of death, money, death, weapons and death. In Andy's Death Quest you have the option to play in two different modes: Story mode or death match mode.

In death match mode, you start out with easy opponents, no cash and no weapons. Working your way through your choice of death match gets you more money. Which, in turn, gets you more cash, allowing you to buy different and better swords, guns and/or bombs. The more it costs, the more it will help you through the more difficult levels.

Story mode was a bit of a let down. After Andy made his way through the game unlocking all available death matches, he's able to bring in his own weapons (Shotgun and Laser Sword are Andy's favorites) and had his pick of whatever type of villain he wanted to fight. However, in story mode you have a very limited spread of bad guys to test your strength out on as well as a limit on the amount of money received. Death match mode was much more entertaining for Andy. That and the pool of blood after a glorious victory of a savage battle!

[via digg]

Red Interactive Agency, an internet website designing company, has seen the future and it's a whole new level of interactivity on the web.

On their little test site you're a randomly generated avatar with a generic username. From there, if you wish, you're able to choose an avatar of your choice as well as a username and your location. After all that, you can roam the site as you please. There is also a small chat window for you to talk to your fellow wanderers.

The true interactive fun is with the special keys that do other things. The home key makes your avatar do a little jig, and different avatars do different jigs. Press the up arrow key and you take off like a bat out of hell! Press the combo control along with shift and you break combo punches on nearby faces. Hold down the shift key while walking for a boost of speed, and page up/down to strafe up and down on the path. There are also built-in profanity filters to encourage others to be a bit more polite.

This level of interactivity could make visiting your usual sites much more fun. Just imaging flying around a tiny world, viewing pages within a site's structure!

CrossFTP is a 2 pack of FTP goodness. As separated programs, they keep Firefox more stable and reliable for FTP tasks. It comes with an FTP client as well as a server application and only needs the latest version of JRE.

This one is very different to FireFTP because it can run as a standalone program. So, instead of opening up Firefox and going through the pull-down menus all the time, you can just visit your desktop for a quick double-click to FTP your heart away.

The default version is FREE, which provides full function general FTP tasks and local resource/archive browsing. The Pro version requires a license fee after a one month evaluation period, and includes multi-threading, secure transfers, and FXP file transfers.

With the craziness continuing to skyrocket, Twitter is getting more and more popular as the days go on. One terrific addition that can be added to this craze is something called microblogging, where you give your twitter account a short update about what was just posted to your blog, and Paul Stamatiou has managed to find a way to make this cake for anyone.

With the 2 PHP scripts available at Paul's site, all you need to do is find a good RSS feed URL, a web host that has PHP and curl support and you're all set. After tinkering with various websites it was found that using Yahoo Pipes to create that RSS feed URL will work more often than just grabbing the RSS feed URL from the site you want to microblog about. Your results will be an update to your personal twitter account that contains the full title of the site's post and then a tinyurl that links to that post. Just a little something more to help spread the word about either blogs you are interested in or your own personal blog.

Today's add-on is a unique one for Firefox. Its actually an add-on that can install itself into Internet Explorer. FirefoxView will add a shortcut to the context menu of Internet Explorer, not Firefox, that will provide you the ability to view your current IE page in Firefox. This shortcut will also appear when you are in an IE Tab in Firefox. This one would be helpful for those of you that fix all your families computers out there. Just quickly tell your 80-year-old aunt to right-click and select "View This Page in Firefox" to quickly walk her through the problem.

[via Scot's Newsletter]

Recently we complained that the number of Firefox add-ons we use were causing grief with pop-up windows. We recommended ResizeIT to ensure that everything in the a pop-up window is visible. Now, we've found a different solution: StatusBars.

Stackable status bars add a ton of flexibility to the way you work. If you're in a Google mood, you can have a Google status bar that contains things such as Google Notebook and Gmail Notifier. Or, create a status bar for when you're doing normal browsing, with add-ons like No Script, Adblock, and FasterFox.

StatusBars isn't the easiest add-on to configure but, it does scratch a particular itch; Creating different status bars with different combinations of add-on icons.

Still not satisfied with the new Google Image search page? This Greasemonkey script should make things a bit easier. With GoogleNlarge, you just need to do your Google image search as you normally would. Only now you only need to hover your mouse over the google thumbnail image and leave the rest up to the Greasemonkey script.

Hovering over the thumbnails will make the full sized image appear on the side of the screen. The only thing you need for this script is Firefox and Greasemonkey... and obviously Google image search results, too.

[via Google Blogoscoped]