Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

Internet Tools Divers & Of Excellent Utilitie


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I thought to start a new department, where I will hopefully slowly but surely catalog all the free services available on teh interwebs of which I have come to be most fond (or upon which, most dependent).

For the overarching common denominator, well, see my page on Censorship.  But we don't have to mention that, or world peace, or an end to nuclear power, or other abuses of power.   We all have work to do, and the tools I use daily can help some, one, all, or any of you.  Enjoy, and do leave a comment; as I have perhaps said before,   Comments Thoughtful & Civil are the main reason I blog.

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http://textise.net 
Mnemonic: 
spelled it with an 's' -- so, Text Is Efficient, or, since 'enet' stands for ethernet, Text is Ethernet. 

Will convert (almost) any webpage into text only -- real text only, where the links also are text only, unless you change it in your preferences.  Fantastic for speeding up the web -- even faster than Firefox with no script, unless you habitually hit 'temporarily allow all this page,' which always makes me a little uneasy.  Kind of like John Oliver mentioned in passing about Apple's theoretically hiding Mein Kamf  in the itunes End User License Agreement., knowing we would all just hit 'agree' over and over.  Not good, but who wants to wait to see if they guessed which marketers had to have access?  Well, me, but then so often when on main stream sites (yes I go there on occasion) all my patience is for naught.  Agree, agree, agree.

So send that bad boy through Textise's servers.  They make it easy -- there's a bookmarklet.  There's even a Firefox add-on -- and I myself made sure there was a search-engine plugin. The Curious and Intrepid, such as myself, can easily reverse engineer it to do all sorts of tricks.  Useful when

  • the page is taking forever to load
  • your device (like a phone or old ass desktop) is for one reason or another sloooo o  o   o    o     o     o      w
  • you don't want to contact the servers directly due to their tracking policies
  • you don't want to load the page because you don't trust it
  • you want to skim or scrape the front end of the page and not deal with all the overly ornate or incomprehensible html
  • you are developing software that only needs the text
  • you are writing a blog post and you want to iframe or embed something to quote it
  • you want to link to the information but not the website
  • the website is banned or censored
  • the website has too much crammed into the sidebars and you just want the main content (uh, yeah, this very blog may resemble that remark... guilty as charged, sorry, will get around to it.....)

Perhaps you can think up more ideas.  The webmaster over at Textise is interested; contact him here.

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herdict.org



Perfect for when you suspect a site is down, for whatever reason, from your own network's issues to those involving government censorship.  


Please use them, as it helps to establish a baseline for an easy and swift understanding of the accessibility of the net and any conclusions to be logically drawn therefrom.


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