Dana’s Mixed Bag

You may recall my series on souping up Firefox 2. Lifehacker now has some tips on modding the new Firefox 3.

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Engadget recently posted a story about the BuzzBall from Evento. They describe the toy as a personal rollercoaster, enabling riders to have fun on flat surfaces or even hills. This looks like fun and the seed to a new field sport.

via Bornrich

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I’ve certainly loved having my Treo650 for the past 3 years. It’s allowed me to carry all of my contacts, do-lists, calendar, and phone wherever I go. Frustrating, though, is that it seems like a piece of technology that hasn’t evolved in over 10 years. Vista users, imagine still using Windows 95 for everything!

The Palm was a big step up in convenience from my 5.5 x 8.5 Covey-based planner that I constantly forgot to bring with me. After reading and appreciating David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, I’ve come to realize just how outdated Palm’s organizational tools really are. (If you haven’t read that book, BTW, it’s great. Amazon has it for $9!)

Here are two minor changes that would revolutionize the Palm platform:

1. The ability to tag ToDo list items and Calendar items with more than one category. This would allow sublist items in a project tag to show up in a context list where the task needs to be done. For instance, “buy streamers” is a “+Reunion” project item, but needs to be completed in the “@Errands” context. When I’m getting things done, I refer mainly to my context lists. When I check the item off, I want it gone from both the context list and the project list.
2. The ability to have multiple calendars, each acting as an overlay. If arranged like Google Calendar, the Palm Calendar would allow me to walk around with my local minor league baseball and soccer schedules without them cluttering up events on the calendar such as important meetings and appointments. Of course, each of these sub-calendars should be synced with Outlook’s subcalendars, and Google Calendar should also sync with Outlook’s subcalendars. This way, we Palm users could find a publicly shared calendar at Google Calendar (such as the complete ACC football schedule or complete CBS TV listings), add it to their Google Calendars, sync it to Outlook, then have it appear on the Palm. A simple check-box of viewed layers would allow people to easily temporarily view the non-important subcalendar.

The chances of Palm waking up and realizing their software shortcomings are slim-to-none. Microsoft released information to developers about programming for Vista in the Summer of 2005. Palm didn’t release a Vista version of their desktop software until January of 2008!!!

The iPhone’s quickly developing ecosystem and semi-open SDK make it a promising device. To date, though, the $500 phone doesn’t even have a ToDo list, much less a crappy one! The iPhone would be a $500 downgrade for GTDers who want to run local organization applications. Chances are, though, that an excellent set of organizational applications will accompany the new G3 phone this summer, and blow away Palm’s family of devices. As annoying as Apple is, I won’t shed any tears.

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Last week I upgraded Vista to SP1, but found a new problem after the upgrade: no sound. My speaker in the tray had a red "X" through it, but the drivers didn’t seem to have any problems. When I tried to automatically upgrade the sound driver, it told me that I had the most up-to-date driver available. When I went to the Control Panel’s "Sound" applet I was able to select sounds, and had the option of clicking the green play button, something that isn’t available when the driver is wrong.

I’m just using the on-board sound that came with my motherboard. I have an Intel DG33BU, and the Intel site offers no help on the situation. Hopefully the Googlebot will pick this up and help others with Intel SP1 Realtek sound problems.

I was able to get the sound working by disabling the front panel jack detection. The way you do it isn’t intuitive:

• Open Vista’s Control Panel (Window | Control Panel)
• Open the Realtek Audio Manager (not "Sound")
• In the navigation bar in the far right, there is a little yellow folder icon. It is just below "Device advanced settings" and above "ANALOG". Click the folder icon.
• Click "Disable front panel jack detection" so that a yellow check mark shows up. Hit "OK", and close the Realtek HD Audio Manager. That should re-enable the sound.

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It’s a shame that global warming has made it quit snowing these days. Here are some pictures from Watertown, NY which only got 146" in 2 weeks this year.

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We laughed at loud at this Will Ferrell commercial as Jackie Moon, for Bud Light. I didn’t see this version until the next day:

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Tonight is essentially the first of three tests to see who gets the NCAA Raleigh seed in March. The Heels enter the game without their first and second string point guards, so it is up to Quentin Thomas to lead the Heels. To add to UNC’s misery, Duke has been playing better than Carolina lately. Of course, we will see a barrage of Hansbrough (pronounced HANS-bro - just two syllables) right baby hooks with a foul to the left shoulder (it’s his go-to move).

The key to the game is Thomas’ ability to handle Duke’s perimeter overplay. Carolina needs to extend their offense far from the paint, and exploit Duke’s overplay by going back-door and setting picks. Duke, on the other hand, needs to pressure Thomas and beat Carolina with their running game.

So, it is the matchup of all of college basketball, but why does the media insist on insulting us with this "Tobacco Road" thing? While the region has a history of major tobacco production, it is a totally outdated concept, and equates the area with the abject poverty portrayed in Erskine Caldwell’s novel. It’s time to dump this moniker for something more accurately portraying the area’s education and healthiness (there are 15 states with higher smoking rates than North Carolina).

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Check out the interesting pictures of the new aquatics center to be used in the upcoming Olympics. This blog entry at DailyDoseofArchitecture has many more images, including some indoor shots.

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Google maps has been around a few years now and has a nice set of hacks out there. My favorite involves hijacking the title of the pushpin marker balloon as shown in the photo below. This is a pretty easy hack, to be honest:

• Zoom-in to the target location on the map (pick any view)
• Right click on "Link to this page" and (left) select "Copy Shortcut or "Copy Link Location"
• Paste the link into the Address Bar (Firefox users click Ctrl-lv) and do not click "Enter"
• Find the coordinates in the long text pasted into the Address Bar (some string like 35.782171,-78.638763)
• Drag-select both coordinates and Copy them.
• Paste the coordinates into the Google Maps Search Bar
• After the string, hit the spacebar, then "(". Type the title of your balloon, then ")" and click "Search Maps"
• To copy this map as it is, copy the new URL from "Link To This Page" (as in Step 2) and paste it into any application.
• Better yet, paste the URL into tinyurl.com and use the URL they give you!

Pretty easy, huh? You’ll find this as a great way of labeling an exact location for someone.

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Another great link from the Waxy.org mini blog takes us to an mp3 of David Lee Roth’s vocal track for one of the first Van Halen hits, "Runnin’ With The Devil". This thing sounds like a medley of about 50 great possible ringtones. Yeeehoowww! Aaaaaeccccgggguh!

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I found a link to a funny scene-by-scene remake of Journey’s "Separate Ways" video!

• Original video
• Remake

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Installing fonts in Windows is a little tedious. Many times one is installing these from a CD or a downloaded file and it takes a while to find that \Windows\fonts folder. By installing a shortcut to the Fonts folder in your Send To menu, installation can be done without all of that hunting.

• Find the "C:\Windows\Fonts" folder. Open Windows Explorer (Windows-E). Make sure you have "Folders" selected in the toolbar and you can see your folder tree in the left pane. (A shortcut is to click WIndows-R, then type "fonts", then click the "Folders" button in the toolbar.)
• Right-click on the Fonts folder in the left pane
• Select Send to… | Desktop (Create Shortcut)
• Find your "Send To" folder in your Documents and Setting profile. (A shortcut is to click WIndows-R, then type "sendto", then click the "Folders" button in the toolbar.)
• Drag the Shortcut to Fonts shortcut created earlier from your desktop into the sendto folder. (You may need to reposition a few windows to get clear access to both. One way is to minimize all apps by hitting Windows-D, then restoring the SendTo app from your taskbar).

Now fonts are easy to install. Just find your new .TTF file, right click on it, then select Send To | Fonts. The font installs and is instantly available in any application you have open!

This works in XP and Vista

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Check out the rock in rural Iowa. Neat story.

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Watching recorded TV shows with a mobile device (like a Treo 650) can be done easily and cheaply! The quality is good and better yet, each episode is free.

The method I’ve found to work required that one has Windows Media Center (on XP’s MC editions, Vista Home Premium, and Vista Ultimate). Next, install Makayama’s Mobile TV Center. This plug-in to Media Center takes any recorded show from MC’s PVR function and creates a mobile version which is automatically downloaded to flash memory once it is sensed. The plug-inhas a free trial and is $40 for a license.

Next, load the free TCPMP Core Video player on your device. For the Treo, it’s a simple matter of opening up the .ZIP file and putting tcpmp.prc as well as any necessary codecs in Palm’s Quick Install folder. Now, I cannot remember which codec did the trick. I believe I installed mpeg1, avc, and mpeg4 codecs, but I can’t remember.

So that’s just a couple of easy installations, really. I simply record shows/movies on Windows Media Center. At least a couple of minutes after recording is done, I’ll pop my 2GB SD card into my computer’s card reader, and the Mobile TV Center will offload all of the shows it can to the card. If I put the SD card back in the Treo, I’m back in business to watch the shows out and about.

My favorite thing to watch out and about is not from TV, though. I really like the series of shows at Revision3.com, especially Tekzilla and Diggnation. Fans of the old Screen Savers show on TechTV are sure to love the informative tech geek shows on Rev3. Now, I don’t mind waiting for people!

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Keyboard Shortcuts

There are a few keyboard shortcuts that when mastered, can really make you fly in Firefox:

• Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v: Good ol’ Copy and Paste.
• Ctrl-h: History - Start typing in a search query or hunt with your mouse
• Ctrl-b: del.icio.us Bookmarks - After installing the del.icio.us extension, this gets fun. Search for bookmarks by typing and watch the instant results in the bottom pane.
• Ctrl-l: Move cursor to address window - start typing a website. Use Ctrl-Enter to autofill the www. and .com parts
• Ctrl-k: Move cursor to search window.
• Ctrl-[1-9]: Directly select one of the first 9 open tabs.
• If you get really good at combining these, your skills will soar through the roof. For instance, clicking Ctrl-l-c will copy the current web page’s URL!

Don’t forget that the center button (pushing the scroll wheel on many mice) will open the selected link in a new tab, and the selected Firefox folder in tabs.

Those are the shortcuts I use most, but there are many, many more that may suit others better at Mozilla and at Lifehacker.com

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"Say, how did you get that active tab to be so pretty?"

I agree. It looks great; almost velvety. This, like the changes in Part I, is a UserChrome.css tweak. Simply put this text into your UserChrome.css file:

.tabbrowser-tab[selected=”true”] > hbox,
.tabbrowser-tab[selected=”true”] > .tab-close-button {
background-color: #000033 !important;
color: #fff !important;
}
.tabbrowser-tab[selected=”true”]:hover > hbox,
.tabbrowser-tab[selected=”true”]:hover > .tab-close-button {
background-color: #000099 !important;
color: #fff !important;
}

[source]

Notes:

• Be sure that the four instances of "true" are surrounded by quotation marks. The source site has this mistakenly posted with two apostrophes.
• Pick your own colors. The 00033 color creates a dark blue, but any hexidecimal color can be used. (the second half sets up the color used when hovering over the tab)
• Your UserChrome.css file can be found by clicking Start | Run, then
  "%appdata%" and press "Enter". (In Vista, simply hit the Windows button and type the phrase). Drill down through these folders: Mozilla | Firefox | Profiles | crazystringofletters | chrome. Double click UserChrome.css in the ..\chrome folder, copy, and paste the above text. You’ll need to close and reopen Firefox to see your changes.

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Now that we have the real estate cleaned up in our Firefox application, let’s really make this thing cook!

This is my Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox and it allows me to hit several sites quickly.

Group 1

• Gmail: I use Gmail and have it as a direct link from the bar. Any web-based mail client (like Yahoo Mail, HotMail, etc) can be bookmarked here, but I recommend putting it first in the bar since it is the most used. Simply go to your mail site and add the bookmark to the “Bookmarks” folder. It should automatically select the icon and will place text there. Hit OK. Now right click on the item in the toolbar and delete the text (Do I really need explanation of that great icon?)
• Google Reader: In order to scan through about 50 different websites each day, one needs to be proficient at reading RSS feeds. More on that later, but since it is my second most used site, I put it second in the toolbar. No text needed since it has a unique icon.
• Tiny: TinyURL is a great service for converting great big website addresses like: “http://maps.google.com/maps?q=raleigh+nc&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wl” down to just “http://tinyurl.com/2jxv45“. This is key for sending people links in emails that would normally wrap onto numerous lines, possibly rendering them useless. TinyURL simply databased my link and assigned it a preset in their system. With 36 characters per position, you can catalogue many entries without having to use more positions. These links actually go to TinyURL’s servers, though, so if their service is down (and I’ve never seen it go down), your link doesn’t work. Also, always be careful about clicking masked URLs. One could easily link a malicious site to an innocent looking tiny url entry.
  The TinyURL button I used is the company’s “button” from this page. Simply drag their link to your Bookmarks toolbar and edit the text to say “Tiny” instead of wasting space with URL. Now you can click that shortcut any time you want to quickly make a URL tiny. They actually have a Firefox extension for TinyURL, but I have found that piling on extensions can really slow performance down. This way works just as well..

Group 2

The second group of icons are folders of sites I use frequently. The first group, “D”, is daily sites I check. “W” is the group of sites I check weekly. In Firefox, you can hit any of these folders with the middle button and open all the links in tabs. I have eight sites in my “D” folder, and the Open In Tabs shortcut insures that I actually will check these 8 sites.

For more than one computer, though, things get complicated. I want my desktop and laptop computers to always keep the same population automatically. If I add a great site on my desktop Firefox, I don’t want to hassle with wondering later where I put it, so I have identical installations on each computer. There are Firefox extensions to handle this now, but I found a fantastic system that not only keeps my computers in sync, it also allows me to access them from someone else’s computer.

del.icio.us

While we are familiar with .com and .org sites, most don’t ever come across sites with the .us extension. This is one of them. Del.icio.us is a site now owned by Yahoo which allows one to store bookmarks on Yahoo’s server. In the old days if you saw a site you wanted to bookmark, could could copy the URL, login to your del.icio.us account, and post the link with subject-related tags. Better yet, these posts are public, so society’s popular links can be found easily through del.icio.us’ page.

I don’t deal with the social aspect of del.icio.us very much, but do use it as a razor sharp bookmarking tool. The key is that each search result in del.icio.us has an RSS feed*. When one clicks on a tag (listed on the right of the screen), del.icio.us returns a list of all of one’s bookmarks associated with that tag. Since the result has an RSS feed, one can use Firefox’s Live Bookmark feature to create dynamic bookmark folders! Simply copy the del.icio.us search result’s RSS feed to a new bookmark in Firefox, and Firefox will update the folder each time it launches.

If you look at my toolbar again, you’ll see a “D” RSS feed. When I launch Firefox, it goes to del.icio.us to check which links I’ve tagged as “Daily” and lists them in my “D” feed. So, I have a quick, up-to-date folder for my Daily, Weekly, basketball, and blog-related links quickly accessible.

Adding links to del.icio.us is a snap with with the del.icio.us Firefox extension. Not only does it put a quick tag icon on the toolbar, it also has a fantastic replacement for the bookmarks sidebar. If I click Ctrl-B, two panels open on the left side of the Firefox browser. The top one of the two displays all of my tags in del.icio.us along with a Search box. The bottom panel shows search results. The search entry box yields instant results below, so if I type “drill”, for example, I see two results in the search instantly: a link about picking a drill bit for a given screw size, and a link about basketball drills.

I’ve bookmarked 831 sites in the last 3 years and have command over all of them!

Next up: Highlighting that active tab so you can actually see it.

*RSS Feeds: News sites and blogs usually have a pattern like headline, story, headline, story…. If a website creator sets up the site with an RSS feed, one can use an RSS reader (like Google Reader) to quickly crawl out and grab these headlines and stories and put them into a consistent, easy to use application. It is almost exactly like USAToday’s and Wall Street Journal’s front page quick top news sections.

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I switched to using the Firefox browser several years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I found myself getting through massive amounts of info with time to spare. I follow about 50 web pages a day and get around 100 emails and I finally have a system that tames all of this very quickly. The first installment of this series gets your Firefox viewing experience maximized.

There is a great article at Lifehacker.com about cleaning up the top of your Firefox window. I followed her advice and am stunned at how much more efficient this is. After getting used to this layout, it is hard to use IE7 without noticing how much valuable real estate is wasted.

I won’t duplicate Gina’s article, but it instructs one how to get rid of the navigation toolbar by getting rid of unnecessary icons like back, forward, and stop when you don’t need them. I was never a big user of the Bookmarks toolbar, but after seeing how she both created folders instead of true links and abbreviated the titles, one can see how efficient the bar can be.

In the next installment, I’ll explain how to really make the Bookmarks bar even more powerful than Gina’s.

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Firefox users can paste addresses in multiple lines into single line search boxes (like those in Google Maps). According to this article at Lifehacker.com, simply follow these steps:

• Type "about:config" in the location bar.
• In the Filter field, type "singleline"
• Double click the editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines entry and change the value to "2"

A couple of other Firefox tricks I’ve adopted are two keyboard shortcuts:

• Ctrl-L: Moves the cursor to the Address box ready to replace the current address.
• Ctrl-K: Moves the cursor to the search box.

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