A moment ago, I was blissfully exploring the vast wonders of the World-Wide-Web.
The reason of my bliss? Nathan Milstein’s bow navigating the curves of Bach’s Ciaccona.
As always, I had a hard time keeping my attention on my screen for Nathan’s deft yet vigorous arpeggios were about to blast my mind off to Parinirvana. Yes, I could feel the rushing melorgasm coming, like a a wave washing away all the petty dullness of this grey day away… I was almost there…
And then…
I clicked the fucking link.
Oozes of MIDI pseudo-piano cheeeeese came blasting through my dear Ciaccona’s sacred fabric - a musical rape, no less. Quickly did I press the back button and from this HELL of soniferous glurge did I escape, but alas, it was too late. Beauty had been soiled.
I sought to expurge this Heaven-forsaken MIDI streaming function from the bosom of my internet software, for frankly, I was pissed. I should have known, though, you can’t.
So my message to you, yes, you who thinks shitting sentimental synthetic cheapo sonic cheeeeeese (from HELL) all over your web page is going to make it… whatever… my message is: repent and redesign, you fuck, for you have commited a crime onto Web.
Proxo is better than the other pop-up stopping programs because it lets you kill tons of other annoying stuff as well – like embedded MIDI and (shudder) the hated blink tag.
I have filters that, among other things, kill the stupid Yahoo/Geocities add-on ad box and Slasdot page widening troll posts. It rocks.
I like adding filters. Just for a laugh the other day, I told it to replace all occurences of the word “Scientology” with “Ass Clowns” and then surfed alt.religion.scientology. Doesn’t take much to amuse me, I’m afraid…
“In a stunning blow for the Church of Ass Clowns, John Travolta…widespread belief that Ass Clowns will revolutionize therapy…etc…”
For what it’s worth, if you’re using IE you can disable MIDI and Sound in webpages (on IE 6, anyway, probably on 4 and 5 but I don’t have them handy).
Go to tools/Internet Options from the menus and click on the Advanced tab on the dialog window. Scroll down to the multimedia section and there’s a checkbox where you can disable sounds in webpages, which includes embedded MIDI.
Proxomitron works by rewriting web pages on the fly. A filter tells the program to watch out for a certain pattern of words and characters and then replace them with something else. To set one up, just click on the tray icon once, choose “web page” from the menu. Type in a title. In the second box from the bottom, type in what you want to replace; in the box underneath type in what you want to replace it with. Exit out, save your changes, and then place a check next to your filter (I labelled mine the “Scientology Truth Filter”).
Without using wildcards, it’s a bit easy to hose a web page with it. For example, the way I did it, if I tried to go to www.scientology.org, it would turn into www.Ass Clowns.org. So, I keep it disabled most of the time.
Just to follow up on what slortar says: Proxomitron filters can get pretty involved – if he wanted to, slotar could write the filter so it doesn’t affect the URL and only the page content. You can also set up exception lists for web pages you don’t want a specific filter to apply to, or for those pages you don’t want filtered at all. And you can turn individual filtes on and off as you wish as well.
There’s a good Yahoo Group dedicated to Proxomitron filters. In the files section, you can find plenty of premade filters if you don’t want to roll your own. And the Proxo distribution comes with 99.9% of all the filters you’ll ever need – with the exception of the Geocities filter I mentioned above (which I got from the Yahoo Group), all of my filters either came with Proxo or are tweaked versions of those original filters.
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