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We finished the first adventure of Charlie Bucket last night having worked our way through about one chapter a night. Alexander seems to have enjoyed the book; first request after we were finished: can we read that again?

Roald Dahl is well-known for his quirky stories and vivid imagination. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the story of little Charlie Bucket, growing up in abject poverty and having to share a two-bedroom house with two sets of grandparents and mom and dad. The only joy Charlie has is to receive a single bar of chocolate once a year on his birthday. The entire family saves up for that momentous event and Charlie is able to nibble at that bar of chcololate so carefully, that it lasts him more than one month. Every morning on his way to school, Charlie passes by the world’s most famous chocolate factory, Mr. Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Obviously, Charlie wishes more than anything to be able to see what happens behind the high walls and closed gate.

As the lot of the Bucket family reaches an all-time low, Wonka announces a competition in which five luck people will be afforded entry into his secret chocolate factory. Five golden tickets have been hidden in five chocolate bars and the race is on to find them.

Augustus Gloop eats a lot and is obese and unhealthy. Veruca Salt is spoilt rotten, whilst Mike Teavee is interested in little else than watching, you guessed it, TV. Violet Beauregarde chews gum day in, day out. With four tickets found, Charlie Bucket has a tremendous turn of fortune. He finds some cash and does what any kid his age would do: buy a few chocolate bars. By finding a golden ticket, he and the other four enter Wonka‘s chocolate factory.

As is to be expected, the vices of all the children, except for Charlie, bring about their untimely exit from the chocolate factory tour. Wonka proclaims Charlie to be the winner – he is to move into the chocolate factory with his family and take over from Wonka once he reaches adulthood.

Having heard the story of Charlie in primary school, it’s a delight to revisit it. Books spanning multiple chapters, various situations and characters are a good start to help build comprehension in little ones. Alexander is used to trying to recite the goings-on from the previous chapter before we get started on the next. I trust we won’t be reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as often as he has watched Cars: paper simply cannot endure that many passes…

Some time ago I posted some notes on how to download content from the Firefox cache using a decidedly low-tech approach. For a long time I’ve used  a very handy Firefox add-on with the name CacheViewer. This add-on does exactly what my manual method does, only far more elegantly and with a lot greater ease. It’s especially useful for downloading video content, something that may be considered questionable, though I consider nothing wrong with the fact that I may want to review something later whilst offline. Before targeting the download of some content, it’s a good idea to clear your browser’s existing cache.From Tools, select Clear Private Data. Make sure Cache is selected, then clear.

Video content in particular can be rather sizeable. The cache may not be large enough to hold everything. In Firefox, go to Tools, then Options. Under Advanced, select Network. Enter an appropriate amount to ensure the content will be cached completely.

Open the location of the content and allow the browser to cache everything. Normally, this is indicated by the text Done in the status bar – even if the actual video footage is still being played back, caching may already have finished. You can activate the CacheViewer. Scroll through the list to view whatever may have been downloaded locally…a preview of images is displayed.

The search field provides a handy filtering mechanism. Entering .jpg or .mov will display only JPG files and video files with the extension MOV, for example.

To save the selected content, a simple right-click and Save as… suffices.