Spammers are silly. We already knew this (why do they send females ads for penis enlargements?!) but the proof was certainly sealed for me sometime last week when my inbox looked a bit like this:

Honestly... If you're going to have a sale, at least decide what percentage you're going to sell at. :P

I've seen a few of these sort of posts around lately, and because I can't think of anything original to blog about disagree with them all, I am going to list my own top 5 extensions you absolutely must have. Because I said so.

1. Adblock Plus

   I know, I know. It robs innocent webmasters of their income or whatever but I never, ever click ads. I don't read them, I don't like them, I disagree with them. I don't mind a text link or something but big banners full of "ZOMG CLICK HERE!!1!1" flashing images = big no. I won't block a text ad, but I will and do block images and Flash ads. If you want me to click things, make them unobtrusive instead of blinding me with flashings from all directions.

2. URL Link

   I am far too lazy to copy and paste URLs that aren't clickable into my address bar, so this handy extension does it for me. There is a better one but as yet I've not tried it and I'm happy with the one I've got, so I don't know if I'll use it.

3. HTML Validator

   Because I simply must know whether your site is valid or not. No, really... The most useful thing about this extension is that when you view the source of a page you're working on, it highlights the errors in the source and tells you what's wrong. It'll even tidy the whole thing up for you with one click if you want it to (yes, that's where the extension's library gets its name from - HTML Tidy - because it tidies things up for you. Get it? :P ).

4. Screengrab!

   This one is probably not as essential if you don't need to do screenshots or anything like that, but basically it will take a screenshot of the entire page, not just the bit that's currently on your screen. I like it since I can screenshot a full page of content (useful for people like me whose printer doesn't work and who want to save the current page they're on - yes, you can do "save page as" or print it to a file, but I think this method is quicker and easier, so that's why I use it).

5. Tamper Data

   Tamper Data stopped working for me when I upgraded to Firefox 2, but it's a great extension meant for detecting vulnerabilities in scripts. It's got SQL injection and XSS stuff built in and ready to go to test your scripts to the limit. Of course, if you don't write or use scripts or anything then this extension is a bit useless to you.

Of course, there are the other extensions everyone recommends, like the Web Developer Toolbar, NoScript, IE Tab, etc., etc., which are very useful and which I have, but like I said, everyone recommends those so I thought I'd mention some of the lesser-known ones.

Regarding the last entry, yes, I had written an entry about how my house seemed to have accumulated some bedbugs. That entry decided to disappear off the face of the earth and I have no idea why. Anyway, upon closer inspection it appeared the bugs weren't bedbugs, but carpet beetles and pest control won't deal with those without charging us some hugely expensive fee so I've just gone mad with insecticide and we'll see how that turns out. Urgh.

You will need the following tools:

1. A week-old laptop, present from relatives preferred
2. Um...that's it

Note: no brain is required for the purposes of this tutorial.

Method:

1. Make sure you have finally finished customising and configuring your new laptop after having spent the last week getting lost in its preinstalled Windows Vista.
2. Decide to be geeky and install a second Operating System. You have done this before (it was a fluke, but no one has to know that) so this should be no problem at all.
3. Run through installation of said Operating System, making sure not to miss the part about partitioning the hard drive.
4. Yay, new OS installed. Reboot! Windows will then say it cannot run.
5. Realise you have completely messed up the partitioning and therefore have chopped Windows in half. Rectify this mistake by simply deleting and reformatting the partitions of the hard drive that you want back.
6. Reboot! Your computer should now display a lovely error message saying the boot partition is corrupted or similar. Congratulations, you have now completed this tutorial.

Oh yes, that was me yesterday. I've had this laptop a week and I've broken it already. Luckily I was able to repair most of the damage without reinstalling everything (yay rescue disk) but some things (e.g. wireless) are still broken :( Blah.