Congratulations Owen, I hereby award you one Internet. Seriously, this is THE best post I've ever read.

@karstetter: I second Netvibes. I've been using it for a little over a year now and it's great. Does what it's supposed to do with little extra fluff.

I've been doing something similar for some time now. All my navigation buttons (back, forward, stop/reload and home), navigation and search bars are moved up into my menubar. I use the Tiny Menu and the Stop-or-Reload Button plugins to save a lot of space. I also use Searchbar Autosizer and autoHideStatusbar . …

@gdlr: I second MPC player with CCCP. It plays pretty much all of the files I've ever encountered. And for those that don't work, there's a tool called G-Spot that'll analyze the video file and tell you what video and audio codecs were used, so you can go and get them.

I've been using DimSaver on my laptop for a while. Does pretty much the same thing but has more options like fade-in/fade-out time. You can also set it to dim instantly. Check it out:

Could I please have an invite if there are any left? Or if someone could be kind enough to send me one?