I logged in this morning and noticed that my XFCE weather applet had disappeared. I moved the pointer over to see what was up, or at least open the menu to add a new one...

A tooltip appeared that said, “fog”.

Russel notes a discussion of the problems with embedded media. I've been using a Greasemonkey script for a while to linkify EMBED tags for easier non-embedded downloading, but this doesn't help much on Flash sites such as YouTube. I haven’t installed Flash in years, but I got sick of slinging URLs around and/or giving up and being the unpopular kid, so I took some other Greasemonkey code I was hacking on and mushed it all together:

http://www.red-bean.com/~decklin/userscripts/unembedtube.user.js

(I get a perverse sort of nostalgia out of bringing back the "puzzle piece" for links, and mocking people with it.) YouTube embeds will appear to work like any other, but the URL is changed from the Flash wrapper to the FLV file, which can be opened in MPlayer/Totem/whatever. Since we can figure out this URL, it is also, of course, possible to make such the link back into an embed usable by mplayer-mozilla or a similar plugin.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to look up how to add a configuration menu, but this line of JS does have a certain charm to it:

var evil = 0; // need to make this user-settable

You know what to do. If you want true evil, there are some pointers in the comments. For YouTube videos embedded from other sites, the best I can kludge for now is link to the video's original YouTube page. If someone would like to write a routine to snarf that page with XMLHTTPRequest and yank the necessary arguments out, I would love to add it.

(Insert five-page “think piece” here about the lost dream of MIME and the sad fact that the rise of “Web 2.0” has been driven more by the fact that native installation is irreparably broken and pointless anyway on most PCs than it is by the fact that JavaScript actually works now and the implications of this for the Free Software movement especially in light of the fact that we are still human beings who occasionally do social things like sign up for Twitter even though they're running on some proprietary code base.)