#1: Andre E (andree) on Aug 12, 2011

Hi WebPBN!

You don't know me but I've been a member for a couple of months now. I must commend Jan Wolter for a wonderful job on creating the site and especially the puzzle solving environment.

A little background:
I spend a lot of time in the day looking at a computer screen. The white background when solving puzzles can thus be somewhat tiring on the eyes. So far I've been using Chrome's "Inspect element" tool to manually change the background to gray every time, but as we know, laziness is the father of invention.

So here's the deal. I made this little extension for Google's Chrome browser that automatically changes the white background around the puzzle to gray (the inside of the puzzle remains white). If you're interested, you can install it on your Chrome browser by following this link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23914637/GrayPBN.crx

Just open the link and Chrome will ask you at the bottom of the screen if you want to install the extension. Click Continue, then Install and you're done! Try it out by opening a puzzle. If you don't like it, uninstall by clicking the spanner icon next to the address bar, go to Tools -> Extensions, find the extension (GrayPBN) and click Uninstall.

It should be obvious that a stranger suggesting to install something they created raises some flags concerning trust. I invite Jan or anyone else to review my code and deem it safe. The link to the source code is the following:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23914637/GrayPBN.zip

Any suggestions and feedback is welcome.

Andre, this looks like something I'd like to try.

You might want to email Jan directly, as he only checks in here once in a while. http://www.unixpapa.com/ I'm sure he'd be happy to look it over and give us the ok.

Thanks for sharing your gadget with us. :-)

Thanks Teresa, I will do that.

Great idea. Thanks for doing that. I'm looking forward to trying it.

Unfortunately Jan hasn't replied to me yet. Any other trusted members of the community are welcome to look at the code. It is less than half of a kilobyte in size and very simple (a single line of Javascript in addition to the manifest file that Chrome requires).

Meanwhile, here's a screenshot of what a completed puzzle looks like with the extension installed:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23914637/GrayPBN.png

The source code is harmless. I don't know how to read the CRX file (though that's the name of my favorite car). Even if I did, the fact that the file was OK now would be no guarantee that it is OK tomorrow.

I have not the slightest reason to believe there is anything wrong with this, and, if I liked the look, I'd probably feel OK about using it on my own computer, but we programmers cultivate paranoia.

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