Then, Gmail arrived and exploded the whole notion of desktop email clients forever, almost overnight. It was fast, robust, logical, and integrated – many things Outlook still isn't to this day (Outlook 2010 + IMAP is pure hell).

Slowly, Google brought out more and more features that made the fine line between web and desktop emailing thinner and thinner, and today, it finally disappeared, at least for me.

The final nail in the coffin turned out to be something I'd desired for a very long time – taking screenshots and pasting them directly into Gmail in the browser window. Inline image pasting from the clipboard if you will.

I take a lot of screenshots of my desktop or certain parts of it when doing reviews or reporting bugs (with OneNote or SnagIt), and having to save the image, find it on the disk, and drop it into Gmail, while relatively easy, was still too cumbersome. In that regard, Outlook was great – I could quickly pump out a few screenshots and send off an email with all of them inline with text in only a few seconds. If I attempted to do that in Gmail, I either got nothing or a little image basically saying how full of fail I was.

It all changed with Firefox 4 (at least that's my theory) – I am now able to take screenshots and paste them straight into Gmail, right in the browser. Let's take a look:

Amazing, isn't it? This does not work for me in Chrome 12 or IE 9 – only Firefox 4 at the moment. I'm not sure how it works or why it started working only now, but I'm sure one of you will eventually come here and provide a sensible explanation.

Goodbye Outlook, I hardly knew ye.

P.S. I'm using Windows 7 in case it matters.

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And then I found it:

Right click here and Save As to download the 1920×1200 version

And that's how you set up your iMac people.

Credit goes to Jonzy from DeviantArt.

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In this review I'm going to take a look at a pair of 2010 thirtytwo Focus Boa snowboard boots that I picked up a few weeks ago, after spending a day demoing them in the snow at a resort in Tahoe.

Even though I am an avid snowboarder (I try to go to the snow almost every weekend during the winter), I haven't evaluated my gear in years. This season, however, I decided to take a look at my options with the snowboard boots.

The Upgrade

It was only after the shoelace on one of my 5 year old Salomon Dialogue boots snapped that I even considered checking out other boots. I was always *kind of* happy with the Dialogues but never really fully happy.

Here are some reasons you, like me, might not be happy with your boots:

• They were hard to get into and yet my foot would move around inside. They were comfortable to walk around in but little did I know that it was actually a sign of the wrong boot size – more on that later.
• The outer lace, which uses this seemingly pretty cool one-pull quicklace, would actually constantly loosen itself.
• The inner lace never really tightened well either.
• They're kind of ugly… Here, check my old ones out.

To cut the long story short, after trying on a few different models and weighing all positives and negatives, I selected the 2010 thirtytwo Focus Boas for my demo day. The next day, absolutely in love with them, I came back and bought a pair on the spot.

Main Highlights

Here are some highlights that make these boots top notch:

• Dual Zone Boa Lacing System
• Fully Heat Moldable Liner = Custom Fit Comfort
• Forward Lean
• Excellent Tongue Strap And Inner Lacing

Here's each one in detail:

Dual Zone Boa Lacing System

The Boa lacing system is what really sets these boots apart from most others, and anything I'd seen before.

Rather than having conventional laces that you need to tie, the Boa system consists of a dial and a metal cable. It is very simple.

You push on the dial to lock it and crank it clockwise to tighten the metal "lace".

When you want to loosen the grip, just pull on the dial and it instantly lets go and loosens the cable.

What this achieves is nothing short of amazing:

• The quickest way to lace up and unlace.
• Having this very durable cable instead of a soft lace makes it almost impossible to snap it (in an unlikely case that you do, there's a spare one in the box).
• It doesn't untie throughout the day.
• Small adjustments, such as tightening the lace, are very easy – I just have to turn the dial a few more clicks, which is possible to do while going down the hill.

Now, note that I mentioned a dual zone Boa. After the original Boa system came out, there were some complaints that it doesn't tie the cable evenly at the top and bottom – some people prefer to have a tighter fit at the bottom and a loser one at the top, for instance.

To address this issue, the 2010 Focus boots actually come with 2 dials and 2 sets of cables – one in the front and one on the side, controlling the top and bottom cables respectively.

I have to tell you – after using them 4 times this season, I am still excited about the Boa. I don't have to mess with my laces anymore, don't have to tighten them, and here's the most beautiful part: when I get down the hill, I unlace and walk around relaxed and comfortable (by pulling on the dials – takes 2 seconds). Then, when I'm back at the top of the lift, a few cranks and I'm back in business (6-10 seconds).

To summarize, the Boa cable system rocks.

Check it out in action in this quick video I shot:

Fully Heat Moldable Liner = Custom Fit Comfort

Another feature of these boots that makes them stand out is a fully heat moldable liner.

What this means is that you can essentially custom mold the inside of the boot to your foot.

It only needs to be done one time, when you buy the boots, and can be done at a local snowboard shop (it costs $10 at Tahoe Dave's, for example but is included for free if you buy the boots from them).

What sets the thirtytwo Focus boots apart from others is that most boots only contain a partially moldable liner. With the Focus, however, the whole liner can be molded.

In order to mold the liner, I had to put on special socks and wait till a special machine heats the boots up. After that, I had to put them on and stand around, flexing, for about 15 minutes. This ironed out all pressure points and eliminated any discomfort.

To summarize, the heat moldable liner is very comfortable and after molding fits your feet like a glove.

Forward Lean

The Focus boots are angled forward for more convenient riding.

At first it may feel a bit unnatural, until you realize that on the mountain most of the time you ride bending your knees a bit and this forward lean is actually much more comfortable than the plain L shape of your old boots.

In fact, because of the Boa system that allows you to quickly unlace when you walk around, this extra lean never bothers me.

Excellent Tongue Strap And Inner Lacing

The inner lacing system is excellent – it locks in very easily, holds all day, and unlocks with a quick pull.

In order to make unlacing the inner lace easier, the thirtytwo folks added a loop to its bottom – pull on it and it relaxes the whole lace from the bottom. I found this very helpful at the end of the day.

There is also a strap going through the front of the tongue, which keeps it centered and snug with your leg.

A Note On Boot Size

I think the biggest mistake you can make buying new snowboard boots is getting them in the wrong size. Therefore, I highly suggest you try the boots out before you buy.

If you get them too big, your foot will move around and you will not have enough control. What's worse is it will most likely cause pain all over your foot and lower leg as you try to steer with a loose boot.

Even worse, if you get it too small, you will probably be in pain by the time you get half way down the mountain.

It turns out my previous boots were a size and a half too big: 10.5. I didn't know what I was doing 5 years back and didn't have the right person helping me out, so I went "safe" with something I felt less constrained in.

With thirtytwo boots, just go with your regular size. I wear size 9 shoes, and the size 9 boot ended up being perfect. Another person confirms the same observation here.

What's In The Box

• boots
• an extra metal replacement cord (don't think I'll ever need it but nice to have just in case)
• a little tool for opening the cord mechanism
• a snowboarding poster
• a hamster (OK, maybe not)

Buy thirtytwo Focus Boas

I hope I helped influence your buying decision in one way or another and that you'll give these great boots a go.

They come in 2 different colors:

• Black/Silver – these are the ones I got
• Green/Black

Here are some places and direct links to purchasing the Focus Boa boots:

• your local snowboard store (I highly recommend Tahoe Dave's in Tahoe City) – these guys usually know what they're talking about and if they have the product on hand, you can try it out immediately
• Amazon.com
• Endless.com
• Zappos.com
• Backcountry.com
• Evogear.com
• SnowboardConnection.com
• ShorelineOfTahoe.com (though these seem to be an older model – 08 or 09)
• ValSurf
• VerticalUrge

Similar Boots With A Dual Zone Boa System

Here are some competitors with a similar dual zone boa system, if you want to check them out and compare to the Focus:

Gallery

2010.01.05 thirtytwo Focus Boa Snowboarding Boots

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My preferred way until recently was Deviant Art, because it had a lot of content and very nice filtering – I could specify my exact resolution.

However, as of some time ago, Deviant Art browsing by resolution disappeared, as evident from trying to find it on their site and from the comments on this post announcing the capability in the first place.

The Solution

Sometimes the solution lies right in front of our eyes – we just have to open them to see it.

A while ago, Google Image Search expanded their support for image size filtering (small, medium, large) to include the actual image size via this query:

imagesize:NNNNxNNNN

And because it's Google, you can add search terms to narrow down the subject.

Here are some examples.

Example 1: "wallpaper"

imagesize:1920×1200 wallpaper

The image size is so specific that it's usually not even necessary to include the word "wallpaper" – most of the results will already be wallpapers, except maybe for a few desktop screenshots.

Example 2: "nature"

imagesize:1920×1200 nature

Example 3: "futuristic"

imagesize:1680×1050 futuristic

Example 4: "cars"

imagesize:1680×1050 cars

Example 5: "babe"

imagesize:1680×1050 babe (be careful if you have SafeSearch off ;-] )

Starter Links Per Resolution

Here are some quick starter links for common resolutions to get you started:

320×396

320×480

800×600

1024×600

1024×768

1152×864

1280×1024

1280×720

1280×768

1280×800

1280×960

1360×768

1366×768

1400×1050

1440×900

1600×1200

1600×900

1680×1050

1920×1080

1920×1200

2560×1024

2560×1600

Conclusion

What sites do you use to get your wallpapers, specifically allowing filtering by resolution? No spam links please.

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Screen is awesome. Once you become comfortable navigating around it, you start using it ALL the time. No more dropped sessions, no having 10 Putty windows open at the same time, no more nohup.

However, with default screen settings I've always felt a bit lost and out of place, mostly because there was no "taskbar" with a bird's eye view of all windows. Pressing ctrl-a, " really does get annoying fast (that's the command that brings up the window selector – screenshot below).

So instead I modded my screen to have a "taskbar" which sits at the bottom of screen and adds:

• the name of each window
• a clear marking of window states, such as
  • the currently active window (* and different background)
  • last used window (-)
  • if you're sharing the current window with someone else (&)
• the current incoming/outgoing bandwidth in bytes/sec, updating every 5 seconds
• the current time
• the load on the server, as reported by the uptime or w commands

Of course, all of the above is customizable to your liking, but this is what I picked for myself.

Without further ado, here's a screenshot:

Doesn't that make you feel much more homey?

Now using a shared screen session for pair programming, as suggested in a recent article posted on Hacker News, suddenly sounds even more appealing.

Installation

Here's what you need to get this bar on your screen:

• download my .screenrc (0 B, downloaded 963 times) and put it in your home directory. Make sure the location of wormulon (installed in the next step) is correct. Also, specify the right network interface (eth0 in most cases).
  Here is the file, for reference:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

# Monitor eth0 bandwidth and update every 5 s
# Assign the output of this cmd to '%1`' and use it in the below hardstatus line:
backtick 1 0 0 /usr/local/bin/wormulon -d 5 -i eth0
 
hardstatus alwayslastline "%{bw}[%H] [%?%-Lw%?%{wb}%n*%f %t%{bw}%?%+Lw%?]%=%{bw} [%1`] [%c:%s] [%l]" # modified from http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/screen-users/2007-08/msg00008.html
 
# Set the scrollback length:
defscrollback 10000
 
# Select whether you want to see the copyright notice during startup:
startup_message off

• download and compile wormulon (wormulon-0.1.4.tar.gz 45.3 kB, downloaded 473 times or from a mirror) – a nifty little program that shows incoming and outgoing bandwidth and is perfect for integrating with screen. You can omit this step if you don't want the bandwidth monitor. I know the name is a bit odd but it's a legit little open source utility – feel free to check out the code.

tar xvzf wormulon-0.1.4.tar.gz
cd wormulon-0.1.4/
./configure && make
sudo make install # this installs into /usr/local/bin/;
                  # alternatively, copy the wormulon binary wherever you
                  # want and update the path in .screenrc

Now restart screen and you're good to go.

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But where was I? I have been closely following Android news since its inception, then the introduction of the first phone – T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream), followed by G2 (aka T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, HTC Magic, Google ION), the introduction of the app store (Android Market), and noticing throughout all this time that Android was still not quite there, not appealing to the masses, and not picking up speed. But then…

The Hero

I believe the market perception of Android is about to change because of the newest Android phone – HTC Hero. Thanks to Phandroid (my favorite Android blog) for the announcement.

Why

Hero has a super sexy Sense user interface. Just check out this video of the European version of Hero running Sense (the US version looks slightly different):

Hero also has:

• Flash support (!) – the one from Adobe, not the one that helps taking photos. That means playing flash games, videos, etc, which iPhone does not support and is not planning to support in the near future.
• First Android phone to support multitouch. It also has a trackball.
• Lipophobic coating – special coating to repel fingerprint oils.
• A speedy 528Mhz Qualcomm processor.
• 5MP camera with autofocus – 5 megapixels is a step up over most of the competition, except maybe Nokia.
• GPS.
• Digital compass.
• MicroSD slot for expanding memory.
• WiFi 802.11b/g.
• Accelerometer.
• Audio supported formats: MP3, AAC(AAC, AAC+, AAC-LC), AMR-NB, WAV, MIDI and Windows Media® Audio 9.
• Video supported formats: MPEG-4, H.263, H.264 and Windows Media® Video 9.
• And of course, it runs Android applications.

Check out this comparison between HTC Hero, MyTouch 3G, Apple iPhone 3GS, and BlackBerry Storm:

When

Hero is already released in Europe and is coming to the US to Sprint on October 11, 2009.

How Much

$179.99 after a mail-in rebate and a 2 year agreement with Sprint.

Speed/Lag Concerns

Initial reviews of the Hero reported occasional lag, especially with a lot of widgets activated on the home screens. However, it looks like the latest firmware updates may have fixed the lag issues. We will see very shortly.

The Chin

The US version of the Hero does NOT have the "chin" like the European version does. Compare the picture of the EU version (below) with the pictures of the US version (further down in the Media section).

Pictures Of The US Version

I'm extremely excited about the Hero. It is the strongest Android contender on the market. Can you feel the excitement? Go out and get yours on October 11th!

Relevant Links

• HTC product page
• HTC Hero on Wikipedia
• Phandroid HTC Hero Announcement
• Youtube videos for 'HTC Hero'

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Introduction

The tricks I am going to describe allow you to create unique gmail addresses that still hit your existing gmail inbox, without actually making new gmail accounts.

This can be useful in a variety of situations when you need to use multiple email addresses without having the pain of maintaining them, such as

• using unique emails while registering for the same service more than once (say, paypal)
• giving out a unique email address to see if you start getting spam to it later – that way you know exactly who to blame for it
• more generally, easily create email rules to sort incoming emails into folders, delete them, mark as important, etc.

The hints are not new by any means but it seems like most gmail users are not aware of them. So, without further ado:

Gmail Ignores Dots In Gmail Addresses

Did you know this? I sure didn't, until today, when I read a blog post by a fellow Russian blogger streetmakarov. Apparently, gmail completely ignores dots, so you can insert them anywhere you want in your email address.

Thus, foo.bar@gmail.com is the same as foobar@gmail.com, which is the same as f.o.o.b.a.r@gmail.com, etc – they will all arrive in the same inbox.

This begs the question – what if I registered foo.bar@gmail.com while someone else already owns foobar@gmail.com? Well, some digg and arstechnica users got their panties in a bunch over this a while ago, just to realize that gmail doesn't allow registering accounts that would clash in any way – so if I already own foobar@gmail.com, nobody can register foo.bar@gmail.com or any other combination.

You Can Append a "+ANYTHINGYOUWANT" To Your Username

I think this trick is even more awesome and flexible than the previous one. If your email is foobar@gmail.com, then you can use foobar+blabla@gmail.com, foobar+monkeybananas@gmail.com, etc and those will still land in your original inbox.

This makes it even easier to track the addresses you give out. For example, when I register new twitter accounts, I enter my email as myrealemail+mynewtwittername@gmail.com and then set up a filter in Outlook to filter those out to a separate folder. Simple, painless, and effective.

The only downside to this method is some sites foolishly (or purposely) disallow plus signs in email addresses. Oh well, you can use trick #1 for those.

Conclusion

Do you know other tricks related to "uniquefying" your gmail address? Feel free to share in the comments.

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I don't know about you, but I'm incredibly sick of Facebook quizzes. Yeah, shit like this which occupies 90% of my news feed:

And to make matters worse, Facebook provides no means to block these quizzes and rid your profile of them forever. The only thing you can do is block each individual quiz. But just like weeds in your backyard, when you block one, three more rise up in its place. I know I am not alone here – there are literally billions of people searching for a solution to the plague.

So, what does the tech community do when it is not happy?

1. Runs to mommy, crying.
2. Drinks heavily, passes out, and comes to work with a keyboard faceprint, dressed as Koolaid.
3. Ignores the problem and lives with it (pussy).
4. Takes the matters into its own hands and develops a solution.

The correct answers are:

1. 2. and 4.

Enter a true geek at heart by the name of Steeev with his Facebook Purity greasemonkey script that was created with the sole purpose of BLOCKING THE FUCKING QUIZZES. Go Steeve Steeev!

Solution

Installation is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Facebook Purity script

That's it. Now go to your Facebook page (make sure you access it via www.facebook.com or www.new.facebook.com and not YOURUNIVERSITY.facebook.com (like ucdavis.facebook.com)).

Check it out – all quizzes are gone, the script even tells you how many quizzes were blocked:

Pure bliss. Rest quizless now, everyone.

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Welcome to part 2 of the Essential Firefox Extensions And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide series. In this article I’m going to describe a number of time saving pragmatic extensions that make me a better, faster, more efficient browser user (browserer?).

Pragmatic Extensions

All-in-One Gestures

All-in-One Gestures introduces customizable gestures for all kinds of actions. To perform a gesture, hold the right (by default) button and move the mouse in the specified direction, drawing the needed shape.

I use it mostly for 3 things: history back/forward and close tab (see below). Once you start using gestures, there is no going back.

Download Statusbar

Download Statusbar is a handy extension that will show your downloads on a dedicated bar right above the status bar. It also adds a much needed “Delete from system” option to each download (why, Firefox, would you not give me an option to delete my downloads at all?). The Download Statusbar only shows up if there’s at least one download not dismissed yet. Double clicking on a finished file will both launch and remove it from the bar.

OpenDownload

Running downloaded files without saving them is probably the only Internet Explorer feature I actually missed, until I found OpenDownload that is. This extension will give you an option to launch a download upon completion in addition to just saving it. I don’t have to worry about finding and deleting it from my system later as it goes to Firefox’s temporary folder.

Tab Mix Plus

This extension is very powerful and versatile. It controls various aspects of the browser tabs, windows, session, and mouse. Here are the settings I find useful:

• open links that open in a new window in a new tab instead
• open all javascript popups in tabs (I hate popups)
• in fact, I enable the single window mode, in which all attempts to open a new window – by webpages or by you, including starting a new Firefox – will be redirected to a new tab
• highlight unread tabs, which would italicize the tab titles of pages that had something new loaded since you last opened them
• show progress meter on tabs
• close tab button on all tabs (instead of a single one on the right side)
• hide the new tab button that occupies extra space
• customize the tab menu options

Here are some option screens:

Google Toolbar

The google toolbar is historically sort of a must for me. It adds a couple of nice features on top of the default search box and frees the latter, so that I can set it to another search engine (IMDB in my case). With the amount of searching one does on google daily, the sheer number of clicks and keystrokes saved will be in the thousands. Daily. I search a lot, OK?

In addition to providing an always present search bar, the toolbar carries a number of useful features, such as live search suggest, instant PageRank (unneeded if you install SEO Toolbar or SearchStatus), search Gmail and News buttons (and many others), clickable search terms good for in-page search, highlighting of the said terms, a simple autofill (though I use an irreplaceable AI Roboform instead), spell check (Firefox has one built-in now), translate (I use the gTranslate extension instead). All in all, one can do without google toolbar, depending on the needed functionality.

Linkification

Linkification is a really pragmatic extension. It hyperlinks any url-looking strings that aren’t already hyperlinked. Take a look.

Linkification off:

Linkification on:

The extension has a variety of options to satisfy even savvy users but I found that defaults work really well. If for some reason you want to momentarily turn off linkification, just tap the button in the tray and the page will revert to its original form. By the way, if you really want to put it to the test, install it and head over to the comprehensive test case list.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is the most versatile extension available for Firefox, as it’s essentially a whole framework for scripts that can manipulate any aspect of any page. Head over to userscripts.org and take a look at the myriads of scripts written and submitted by other Greasemonkey users.

Still not clear what these can do? Let me list some that I use and their brief functionality:

• Digg Top 10 Direct – automatically rewrites the digg’s top 10 links to go straight to the articles, instead of the digg comment page. Clicking on the digg icon still goes to the comments page though, and I think this is the ideal functionality.
• Google Image Relinker – rewrites google image search urls to go directly to the corresponding images rather than the page they were found on.
• YousableTubeFix – adds a small smart menu that dynamically shows which qualities a given youtube video is available in and automatically picks the best one, adds download links to the each quality (FLV and MP4), resizes the player to your liking, and a few other things. It is also quite customizable.

• The now world famous Troy's Twitter Script that I reviewed a few week ago – it does everything Twitter currently doesn't, including Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, and more.
• AideRSS Google Reader Integration – adds AideRSS feed rank to each entry in Google Reader, which allows eyeballing more important articles within a few seconds of seeing a feed. Also available as a separate extension for those not using Greasemonkey.

Show MyIP

Show MyIP does exactly what it says: it displays your current IP. What I like about it is that it queries for it on demand, after you left or right click the icon. This approach avoids unnecessary queries going around.

-> ->

What I don’t like about it is that there seems to be no way to copy this IP to clipboard. Ideally, a right click option would work great (that’s the way the next extension ShowIP does it). I left a comment about this fact on the extension’s page, so hopefully the author will implement it shortly.

Also, if an error occurs, be prepared for some good old German cursing:

ShowIP

ShowIP, in contrast to Show MyIP, actually displays the IP(s) of the website I’m currently on. It then allows me to copy it (or all of them) into clipboard and provides quick information links, such as whois, ip2country, and traceroute.

ShowIP is useful for both developers who want to know which dev server they’re currently working on as well as regular users who are interested in the location or whois of a site they’re visiting.

iimmgg.com Tools

iimmgg.com is a picture hosting site similar to tinypic.com and photobucket.com. Generally, it allows quick picture uploading with thumbnail creation. This extension makes this process insanely simple, I can’t say enough praise how good my user experience was with this extension. Check this out.

The extension has 2 modes:

1. If you right click on a picture, there’s a single option to upload it to iimmgg.com:

As soon as you click Upload, you are almost immediately redirected to a page on iimmgg.com with your picture and thumbnails already generated. Swoosh, that was fast. Internally, the extension sends the user to something like http://www.iimmgg.com/upload.php?u=http%3A//beerpla.net/wp-content/uploads/BenefitsofMUNI_1E7D/image.png&r=about:blank&s=1&t=, which then redirects to the final picture.

2. If you right click anywhere else on the page, there are now 3 ways to capture an image to iimmgg.com:

Select either of the 3 options: Visible Page, Full Page, or Select Area. Let’s say I select Select Area. A resizable overlay that I can drag it around to select the area I want shows up. Brilliant.

After I figure out what I want to capture, I click on the Capture Selected Area button in a bar that just showed up (btw, the styling of both the bar and the selector are very reminiscent of the Web Developer extension):

The next and final prompt shows up with the Image Format selection (PNG – High Quality, JPEG – High Quality, JPEG – Medium Quality, and JPEG – Low Quality), SFW selection, and capture name:

Click Capture and upload (or save to disk, which is not as fun but also useful):

Voila – the picture is ready for sharing.

Remove Cookie(s) for Site

Remove Cookie(s) for Site does exactly what it says – removes all cookies that belong to a domain and all subdomains of the site you’re currently on. Right click anywhere on the page, click Remove Cookie(s) for Site and the taskbar will update with the number of cookies removed.

->

You can also pull out a nice little button to a location of your choosing, like so:

Oftentimes I don’t even bother looking for a logout button – deleting all cookies is a lot faster.

Signature

Signature, as you probably guessed, inserts a signature into a text form. It supports as many signatures as you want. The uses can be versatile, here are just some:

• the obvious “first and last name” signature
• a full signature with your site link which can help in site promotion. Mine, for example, is
  Artem
  http://beerpla.net
  http://twitter.com/ArtemR
• disclaimers
• coined replies to emails
• various addresses
• repetitive urls
• any other frequently used set of strings that you have to continuously copy-paste

QuickRestart

QuickRestart adds a Restart Firefox option to the File menu. This is quite handy, especially when you have a lot of extensions and it may take Firefox 30 seconds to shut down.

The only downside of this is that it seems to lose the protected and locked tab properties set by Tab Mix Plus. Shutting down Firefox and starting it manually does not lose such properties. This is no longer a problem in the latest Tab Mix Plus version.

Resizeable Textarea

Ever seen a comment box this big and got annoyed by the idiot who designed it?

Fear not, as Resizeable Textarea adds resize capabilities to any text area. Move the cursor to the bottom or right borders, or the bottom-right corner, and drag all you want:

TryAgain

TryAgain is a great and very simple extension. It retries loading a failed page up to 5 times instead of just sitting there. This screenshot explains everything:

View Cookies

View Cookies is a simple extension that adds a Cookies tab to the VIew Page Info box. The tab allows viewing, removing, and copying cookie info for the site you’re currently visiting. There is a number of extensions that do similar things, like Firebug and Remove Cookie(s) for Site, but I install View Cookies anyway because its functionality makes sense.

Google Gears

Google Gears is a very useful extension, and it’s a shame that a lot of people don’t seem to understand what it does. Think of it as simply a secure local cache (developed by Google). Quite a few popular websites support Gears, and I think it is best to just give a few examples of actual usage.

• gmail.com – gmail rolled out offline email support quite recently, which is the most useful implementation of Gears to date.
• wordpress – if you host a wordpress blog, you can opt in to cache a few hundred files in Gears that will speed up the wordpress admin interface. WordPress calls this Turbo mode.
• rememberthemilk.com – RTM, the most advanced and functional TODO list site, offers an excellent implementation of Gears. If you lose your connection, you are free to create, modify, and delete any tasks you want – all the changes will be synchronized when you go back online.
• google reader – the reader can download feed items for offline viewing but the implementation is not very good – you have to explicitly go offline by clicking a button, at which point Gears will download 2000 items.

Installing Gears on its own will technically not do anything for you. You will need to enable support for each site individually. For example, Offline gmail is available from the gmail Labs by clicking on in the top right corner.

From a technical standpoint, Gears uses a local SQLite database for storage. The Gears security model is described here.

gTranslate

GTranslate translates selected text into a language of your choice. It can be set to autodetect the source language or forced to a specific one. I must say so far it worked very well and detected the source language automatically without flaw.

Once the translation is received, gTranslate shows it and links to the google translate page:

Additionally, if the selected text is in an editable field, gTranslate will offer an option to replace the selection with its translation:

SearchStatus

SearchStatus is a useful and relatively simple SEO extension. It shows a quick roundup of page rankings for the current page from Google (PageRank), Alexa, and Compete. This lets me quickly check how popular [or lame] the site I’m on is and keep tabs on my own online properties. Right clicking each metric grants access to a few useful shortcuts and for the lazy pragmatic, right clicking the little symbol has such links as Show Whois, Show robots.txt, Show sitemap.xml, and others.

Another not so obvious but useful feature of this extension is the ability to mark rel=’nofollow’ links. You rightfully obsessed SEO junkies can quickly see which parts of your site leak the valuable link juice and which ones don’t. Take a look at these nofollow links that SearchStatus marked with light red background:

SEO Toolbar

This toolbar is probably going to be useful for relatively hardcore SEO fiends as most people would do just fine with the above SearchStatus extension. The toolbar seems a bit bulky and slow but has a ton of SEO related functionality. It is, of course, free. It shows Google PageRank, Yahoo linkdomain, Yahoo page links, DMOZ directory, Yahoo directory, Best of the web directory, Archive.org, Compete uniques, and SEMRush traffic value:

It also links to a bunch of tools, like quantcast analysis, google trends, and alexa:

For a quick, more in-depth, exportable overview, press the info button :

However, the 2 most useful to me features are probably the Rank Checker :

and Compare Sites :

End of Part 2

This marks the end of part 2 in the series. I expect this page to update pretty often, whenever I find new extensions, so bookmark it using your favorite method by clicking the button below.

The next part in the series (available soon) will describe a number of useful web development extensions.

• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips
• Skype Extension For Firefox Is A Piece Of Crap – Leaks Memory, Hangs Firefox, Clubs Baby Seals
• Firefox Being Slow, Especially Switching Tabs, High CPU Load, Memory Problems? Are You Using Firecookie For Firebug?
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• Thoughts on Google Chrome

In this article I’m going to discuss a number of useful Firefox extensions and tips. This list is not a “COMPLETE GUIDE TO FIREFOX!!!111!” but a collection of some, albeit many, extensions and techniques I find useful, with detailed descriptions and illustrations. I try to make my reviews as personal as possible and express my own points of view, so I will not be using any boring official descriptions altogether. Short, concise, and useful – that is my goal.

Right now I use 53 extensions in total. If you think that’s a lot, you might be right. However, because Firefox is so mature and new extensions come out every day, it is not as crazy of a number as it was 2 years ago. Firefox gets faster, I download more extensions, and the end result is I’m happier as a user because Firefox suddenly provides me with a lot more features at approximately the same running speed. I plan on continuing to increase this number.

Here’s a quick slightly obsolete screenshot of the extensions I’m using:

Firefox Tips

Before describing extensions, I wanted to mention a few tips about Firefox itself. If you are interested in extensions, proceed to part 2 right away, however I urge you to read these too.

Using the bookmarks bar and shortened names

You can fit a lot of quick bookmarks on the little bookmark bar if you shorten the names to 1 or 2 characters.

Using keywords for bookmarks

A little less known trick is to use the keywords property of your bookmarks. For example, here I assign a keyword ‘d’ to my digg.com bookmark. Then I can just go to the url bar, type in ‘d’, Enter and voila – digg starts loading.

Protecting and locking tabs

Protect a tab will prevent you from closing it.

I use this functionality on my most frequently visited sites – so frequently that I never want to close them. They include the iGoogle homepage, Google calendar, Remember The Milk TODO list, my Trac tickets at work, and a few other things.

These protected states are saved even if you close and open Firefox (but unfortunately, not if you use QuickRestart described in part 2). Protected windows are marked by a symbol.

Locking a tab is similar, but instead of not being able to close it, you are not able to change the url. Any url change attempts will produce a new tab. I personally never use this feature but some may find it handy. Locked windows are marked by a symbol.

Note that you need the Tab Mix Plus extension (described in part 2) for these tricks.

Restoring sessions

While Firefox 3 now has a built-in session restore feature, it’s not very robust. That is why I still use the Tab Mix Plus (described in part 2) session restore feature set. TMP’s session manager remembers protect and lock statuses, tab history, selected tab, and everything else about the session. I will describe TMP in more detail later.

Using keyboard shortcuts

In my experience, keyboard shortcuts are primarily used by power users, while the rest of the population uses a mouse. However, shortcuts are immensely effective time savers and, if you mouse a lot, will provide a relief for your wrist. Let’s take a look at a few easy and important ones.

Ctrl-L and TABs

Ctrl-L will put the focus on the url bar, no matter where you are on the page. It is equivalent to F6 in IE, except it’s actually robust. So, when I’m ready to type in the name of the site, my fingers are already on the keyboard. Ctrl-L doesn’t even require extra movements.

TAB (the key, not the Firefox tab) once after you’ve pressed Ctrl-L and you’re in the Firefox search bar (the one I set to imdb a bit later in the article). TAB twice and you’re in the Google toolbar, if you have it installed.

Ctrl-Enter and Shift-Enter

Ctrl-Enter is a tremendous time saver. It appends “.com” to whatever you have in the url bar and prepends “http://www.”. Type in “google”, press Ctrl-Enter, and voila, you’re at www.google.com. Similarly, Shift-Enter, appends “.net”.

Ctrl-T

Ctrl-T opens a new tab.

Ctrl-Shift-T

Ctrl-Shift-T opens the last closed tab(s), in the order they were closed.

Ctrl-Alt-T

Ctrl-Alt-T duplicates the current tab. Yet again, this is a feature of Tab Mix Plus (described in part 2). Oh how much I love you, TMP.

Ctrl-TAB, Ctrl-Shift-TAB

Ctrl-TAB is probably the most frequently used key combination. It cycles between tabs forward while Ctrl-Shift-TAB does it backwards.

Ctrl-W

Ctrl-W closes the current tab.

Space

Pressing space is a quick way to scroll down one page. It’s a lot of times more convenient than finding the small PgDn button, especially if you have fat fingers.

Setting the Firefox search bar to IMDB

Because I already use the Google Toolbar (one of the most useful toolbars out there) there is little point keeping Firefox’s default search box set to Google. I prefer IMDB (Internet Movie DataBase) myself but you can easily set it to another search engine.

End of Part 1

This marks the end of part 1 in the series. Proceed to part 2.

• Delicious.com [Quietly] Rolls Out Domain And Url Searching/Filtering. Finally!
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions
• Firefox Being Slow, Especially Switching Tabs, High CPU Load, Memory Problems? Are You Using Firecookie For Firebug?
• Some Useful vim Commands – My vim Cheatsheet
• Thoughts on Google Chrome

You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Once you are done with the above steps, head over to twitter.com (there’s no need to restart Firefox). You will then be able to enjoy the following enhancements, which I ordered here in terms of usefulness to me:

Autocomplete

Do you have a few friends with names so complicated, you can’t type them out by hand? Troys script autocompletes your friends’ names – just type @ and a few letters of their name. This is my favorite feature.

Before:

After:

Search Bar And Favorite Searches Saved

A search box is added to the sidebar. You can make a number of favorite searches, which then also remain sticky on the sidebar above the search box. When you click on a search term, the current page is updated without reloading the whole thing. Note that the favorite search terms are saved locally in your browser and won’t show up on your other computers.

Before:

After:

Auto Expander Of Shortened URLs

Automatically expands url shorteners, so instead of seeing a load of tinyurls and bit.lys, you see proper urls and their native page titles (neat!).

Before:

After:

Auto URL Shortener

Updated: The URL shortener auto shortens urls as you type them but only if they will overflow the 140 character limit, otherwise they stay as they are (it now works flawlessly).

Before:

After:

Auto Pagination

As you reach the bottom of the page, more earlier updates are automatically loaded after a few seconds. This means you don’t need to click or leave the page in order to see earlier updates. It could get a bit annoying, so I requested an ability to turn off certain script features. Update: you can now turn off every feature of the script individually.

Auto Media Embed Expander

Pictures and videos are automatically embedded.

Before:

(Uhmm, I don’t know why I highlighted “sack” but I don’t feel like retaking the screenshot… Yeah…)

After:

Retweet (RT) Button

Adds the missing RT button to each update.

Before:

After:

Autopopulate Bios on User Listings

Updated: This function will save you hundreds of clicks – when viewing someone's followers, rather than just seeing their names, the script adds their bios.

Before:

After:

Hyperlinked Hash Tags

Hash tags are now hyperlinked to the twitter search page. Seriously, twitter can’t do that by default?

Before:

After:

User’s Local Time

The script adds a user’s local time. See the example below using the profile of a lovely Kamikazekitty. This feature seems unpublished and I found it by accident.

Before:

After:

Nested Replies

This is a great feature – it gives context to @ replies. For example, @ev’s reply to kevin is boring and out of context until you see what they’re talking about, all without looking up @kevin’s updates.

Before:

After:

Mutual Friends Marked

Updated: This is a new feature. People who you follow and who also follow you back (mutual friendship) are marked with a little smiley face.

Before:

After:

Auto @fxxxmylife Expansion

Updated: Woot! Following the infamous @fxxxmylife is no longer annoying: all posts get auto-expanded. Brilliant. For those who don't know, FML is a site collecting short stories that all start with "Today," and end with "FML". Here are the top FMLs to get you started [hooked].

Before:

After:

That’s it for now in the current script version (6.5) but what a world of difference, isn’t it? Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)

I’ve been watching and anxiously awaiting the release and, while the final release date is unknown at this point (I'll update the post when it is announced), I’ve assembled a list of current Starcraft 2 facts, summarized as bullet points.

But before I get into that, here’s the most important part you need to know to be able to get your hands on the game right after it’s released and play online ($49):

• There will be 3 separate Starcraft 2 games (take a guess why 3 and not 5 or 2).
• You will be able to play as any race online via battle.net using any of the 3 games in the trilogy. Good, I was wondering about that. Now that I think about it, being able to play only as Terran for months would be kind of weird.
• The 1st game will center around Terrans and will contain a Terran campaign. It will be called Wings Of Liberty.
• The 2nd game will center around the Zerg race. It will be called Heart Of The Swarm.
• The 3rd and final game will center around the Protoss race. It will be called Legacy Of The Void.
• (Those are some f***ing well named games. The best thing I could come up with was “Starcraft 2: The End Of Korean Economy”)
• Each campaign will have 26-30 missions, rather than 8-10. This is done with the sole purpose of getting me fired for not coming to work for 3 weeks.
• Again, the final release date is unknown at this point but there are rumors of an upcoming beta. You have to be a God level human to get your hands on it, so I don’t qualify [yet].
• Some units are new, some are removed, and most of the others have modified abilities and stats.
• Development of SC 2 was announced on May 19, 2007 under the codename Medusa but was originally started in 2003.
• There are plans to include VOIP (in-game voice chat) into the game. Oh noes, did we not figure out how bad of an idea it is yet? Ever tried playing Counterstrike without turning off voice for 2 minutes? I dare you.

So, who else is psyched?

While we are all forced to twiddle our thumbs waiting for the release, the least I can do is provide these carefully picked HD videos to ease your misery:

• IT'S HERE. STARCRAFT 2 IS ANNOUNCED (VIDEOS)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Portal By Valve – The Most Entertaining Game In A Long Time
• Saw III Is Coming. Mark Your Calendars For October 27, 2006!
• Cambridge, UK, Week 1
• Google Helps Break Down The Language Barrier (In A Brilliant Way)

'Carwars' by Funeral Party

• Is Your Simplifymedia For Winamp Broken On A 64 Bit Windows 7? Here's How To Fix It
• Jocko Sims’ (Panic’s) Rap On Starz Show Crash – Head Up (MP3)
• DJ Tiesto Elements Of Life 2007 Tour Live in San Francisco
• Most Awesome Halloween Costume. Signed, Apple Fanboy.
• Weird Al Yankovic – Ridin' Dirty (White and Nerdy)

For the past month I have been exploring options and building a perfect Home Theater PC for my 50” Vizio plasma. Besides the obvious, it has to play movies, youtube videos, etc, I had a few concrete goals in mind. Here they are:

• it absolutely had to handle 1080P h264, specifically movies encoded using x264. An average movie size for this format is between 8.5 and 13 GB. There were 2 problems to overcome: the CPU had to be able to handle the decoding (my desktop dual core Conroe barely kept up) and the network had to be fast enough to stream in real time from my storage PC a floor away.
• I needed to have the easiest control over the whole thing. VNC wasn’t good enough, because I don’t always have a laptop lying around.
• It had to support 7.1 sound.
• It had to have excellent picture quality on the TV, preferably during both movies and regular browsing/reading, etc. HDMI/DVI was optional, depending on how good the analog quality was.
• It had to be as cheap as possible but still good enough to do the job really well.
• It had to have a serial port (most micro ATX motherboards nowadays do not, which is upsetting).
• It had to look slick and unconventional – unlike a regular PC.

Setup

After lots of research, I used the following components from the following sources (best deals I could find):

Processor

Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2200 Processor, 2.2 GHz, $79.99, no tax, and free shipping. I decided to go for a relatively cheap but still very powerful CPU and the results exceeded my expectations. More below.

Motherboard

ASUS P5KPL-CM LGA 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard, $67, no tax, and free shipping. Also available on Newegg for $54.99 + tax + $8.97 shipping. It has on-board 7.1 sound, 2 PCI slots, and a serial port (for my good old Packard Bell serial remote control). No HDMI/DVI and no onboard RAID but I didn’t need those.

Memory (RAM)

OCZ SLI-Ready 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Memory (OCZ2N800SR2GK). $38.99 + tax, free shippping – $25 rebate. Also available on Amazon.

Case and Power Supply

Antec New Solution Series NSK2480 Case, $107.99, no tax + $17.82 shipping – $8 coupon (code: TAKER). Even cheaper on Amazon. The case already comes with a 380W power supply, so I didn’t need to buy a separate one. It provides plenty of power for the HTPC. Also, there’s a lot of space inside for ventilation, and I didn’t get a crammed feeling when installing my components. Ventilation is a separate point I’d like to highlight with this case, as it came with 2 120mm fans and 2 extra ones just in case. The lowest of 3 speed settings has worked great for me.

Wireless HTPC Keyboard + Mouse

DSI 2.4GHz Wireless Keyboard with Optical trackball, Black, FK-760, $52.99, no tax, and free shipping. Inspired by the famous mysql geek Jeremy Zawodny here and here.

Wireless PCI Card (802.11N)

Airlink AWLH6080 300N Wireless-N & G PCI Adapter for Desktops, $44.99 + tax, no shipping as I picked it up at a local Fry’s. I needed to start experimenting with 802.11N because I didn’t want a swarm of network cables laying around. More on this later but I can tell you it’s great. Also available on Amazon. Windows 7 picked it up with no extra drivers to install. Perfect. If you can't find any Airlinks around, Amazon has plenty of other Wireless N cards to pick from (I would try to match the router brand, btw).

Wireless Router (802.11N)

Airlink AR680W 300N Wireless-N & G Router, I think about $50 + tax at Fry’s. Also available on Amazon. Or, again, if you can't find Airlink available, there are plenty of other Wireless N routers.

Speakers, Surround Sound

Logitech Z-5500 505W 5.1 Speakers, on sale at Dell for $170 a few months ago. Also available on Amazon.

DVD Player/Burner

LG Black DVD Burner, $25 or so. I picked a cheap and good one, and it’s worked flawlessly. I decided to skip trying to match the silver shade with the case and just go for the black one. I am not interested in Bluray players but if you are, you are welcome to substitute this DVD player for one.

Graphics Card [OPTIONAL]

MSI GeForce 9400GT 512MB PCI-Express Graphics Card for $60.43 with free shipping and no tax on Amazon. Optional because the motherboard already contains a VGA out which proved to be personally enough for me. However, this card is awesome if you need more performance for gaming or more than just VGA – for example HDMI or DVI. Check this out. This 9400GT has HDMI, VGA, and DVI outputs!
Update: Kyron in the comments mentions a trick to allow passing sound over HDMI using this card.

Sound Card [OPTIONAL]

Diamond Multimedia XtremeSound 7.1 Sound Card with Dolby Digital Live (XS71DDL) for $50, free shipping and no tax on Amazon. If you need a digital optical out or decided to go with another motherboard that doesn’t support 7.1 sound but want to have 7.1, I found that this sound card works really well.

Hard Drive

Some old 60GB hard drive. I’m planning on streaming most things, so it’s not worth spending any money on this item. You can pick a 1TB Western Digital Black drive on Amazon for about $100.

Operating System

Update 5/12/09: Windows XP 7. The new Windows 7 is still in RC at the time of this writing but it is so good and so ready that many are already using it in their day-to-day systems. I put Windows 7 onto this HTPC a few days ago and I must say – I am very-very impressed. There's not a single hiccup, bug, blue screen, or hangup. The OS is beautiful, sleek, fast, robust, and operational. It even comes with its own Media Center but it didn't seem to detect any of my media on remote servers. I highly recommend Windows 7.

If you're not afraid to try Linux (you shouldn't be – it's great and free), I recommend Ubuntu or OpenSUSE.

Verdict

The final product exceeded my expectations. Not only did it play 1080P h264 perfectly, it didn’t even need a separate graphics card to take over the load. The CPU usage is about 35-40% when playing 720P and 40-50% when playing 1080P. No need for DVI or HDMI input – the standard VGA connector is very crisp and provides much better fine print and detail than HDMI. I can read and browse small font without any problems. The sound is superb as well, after all the tweaking, so no additional sound or video cards were needed. Using the wireless ultra light keyboard as well as the remote, I am now able to control everything on the screen with ease.

Temperatures, Ventilation, Cooling

The case provides excellent ventilation, as I already mentioned. The CPU idles at about 30C and goes to 45-48C when playing the highest quality 1080P HD video I could find. In short, the case is cool and quiet.

Wireless (802.11N)

After playing around with the 802.11N (or at least Airlink101’s implementation), I have to say I’m quite impressed. I get speeds of between 3 and 5 MB/s (Megabytes per second) and all 720P and most 1080P content streams live. Some really hi-res 1080P movies require to be downloaded first, which confuses me. During streaming, instead of using 4-5 MB/s, VLC (or MPC, or any other player I’ve tried) uses only about 1-2 MB/s and starts lagging. I don’t yet have a workaround for the player to utilize 100% of my bandwidth and stop lagging. Do you?

One thing I really hated about Airlink101 is their software (the firmware seems great so far). It’s the most basic piece of crap software accompanying hardware I’ve ever seen. Absolutely no thought and effort went into it – I believe it’s still on version 1.0 or 1.1. It’s so bad, even the Windows default wireless manager is better. The final straw was the absence of a setting to connect to preferred networks only. After I found my computer randomly connected to some open netgear network one day, I decided to not use Airlink101’s software for a long-long time, maybe ever.

The Sound

ASUS’ onboard 7.1 HD audio delivers very decent sound. I’ve installed the latest drivers, enable virtual fill (so that 2 channel sound gets automatically distributed to all speakers), and hooked up the Logitech Z5500 5.1 and another Logitech 2.1 to form a pseudo 8.2 speaker system. This thing has thump!

A note on VNC: I ended up not using it as it was creating sync issues while playing video (vsync?). If I turn on VNC while playing a video (and even if I turn it off), the vsync issues are quite apparent. The wireless keyboard is a better solution anyway, so I am quite happy with it (though it could use larger operational range).

HTPC/Media Center Software

Network file sharing + file manager (Total Commander or any other) + Media Player Classic + ffdshow codec set have worked very well but I still wanted to find the perfect media center program for visually pleasing media experience. It turns out there are a few candidates. Here they are:

• XBMC – free, not bad at all, but it was too buggy and couldn’t find my network drives.
• Mediaportal – also free and also buggy. It couldn’t play a lot of video files.
• SageTV – not free. Worse than the 2 above. Absolutely no reason to pay for something this bad when free alternatives are available.
• MeediOS – free. Too buggy to even run.
• Boxee – free, there is an alpha Windows version but it’s quite buggy. Boxee is probably the best one of them all, at least looking at all the recommendation on the web but the software isn’t very stable yet. It’s very socially oriented, which I like a lot. They’re active on twitter.
• GB-PVR – a Windows PVR and Media Center. Haven’t tried it as I’m now convinced I’m better off without a MC.
• Anything else major I’m missing?

So, as of this time, Total Commander, Media Player Classic, and the ffdshow are still my preferred method of watching videos. I don’t feel that any of the programs I’ve tried are ready for prime time yet.

Remaining Work

• I’d like to figure out how to wake up the machine on keyboard event. I don’t think it’s possible with the wireless keyboard like that, but I’m not 100% on that.

• I’d like to know how to stream videos utilizing full network capacity rather than buffering what's needed and hiccupping when a slowdown occurs.

Pictures Of The Final System

And I couldn’t resist:

• How To Play FLVs In Media Player Classic (Including Fast Forwarding), Or Forget You, VLC
• How To Download And Install Windows Media Player 11 Bypassing WGA
• Wireless Headphones Are Nothing New – What About Wireless Earbuds?
• Is Your Simplifymedia For Winamp Broken On A 64 Bit Windows 7? Here's How To Fix It
• The Most Awesome VPN Tip: How To Make Windows Automatically Use Your Local WiFi/LAN Connection Directly For Requests That Don't Need To Go Through VPN

The option is right there, in the middle, Sorting Directories. The default is Always by name. Change it to Like files (also by time) and you’re done.

• How To Show Hidden/Invisible Files In Total Commander, Both Locally And On An FTP Server
• [Perl] Finding Files, The Fun And Elegant Way
• Watch – A Useful Linux Command You May Have Never Heard Of
• Mass Renaming Directories And Files Using Total Commander
• How To Check If The Local SVN Revision Is Up-To-Date

2. I don't want to use some crappy FLV player that only plays FLVs and has an interface from either 1995 or 2034 – I want to use my favorite player, like Media Player Classic.

3. Yes, VLC plays FLVs but it can't fast forward or rewind them. Yes, mplayer plays FLVs but I want a GUI. Yes, mplayer supports GUIs but they all pretty much suck. I don't particularly like VLC's or mplayer's interface – want to fight about it?

Enter the latest version of ffdshow. ffdshow is a decoding filter – think of it as a set of codecs for your media players. It supports FLV1, FLV4, H263, On2 VP6, H264, WMV, DiVX, XViD, and anything you fancy. I tried playing FLVs encoded to FLV4 and VP6, and both worked great in MPC, including fast forwarding and going full screen. Just download and install it, and everything will magically work – no reboot necessary.

As a bonus, here's a handy screenshot that I took of everything ffdshow supports:

• Building The Perfect HTPC (Media PC), Capable Of Playing 1080P H264
• Is Your Simplifymedia For Winamp Broken On A 64 Bit Windows 7? Here's How To Fix It
• How To Download And Install Windows Media Player 11 Bypassing WGA
• [Updated x3] Goodbye Outlook, I Don't Need You Anymore – Gmail Now Lets You Paste Images Directly From Clipboard
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You can browse the latest releases or the top sellers, or perform a search and get hundreds of book covers, uncluttered by any text (until you click on any of them). The interface is amazingly friendly and simple, everything is draggable and zoomable – hence the name Zoomii, and here's the best part: it doesn't use Flash, everything is in Javascript. You can buy books without leaving the site or reloading any pages (of course, how else would they make money?). I think it's better explained through a couple of screenshots I took or by going to Zoomii itself:

My Search for 'Perl':

The Fiction bookshelf (It has Everything is Illuminated, weee!):

What a breath of fresh air, don't you think? Credit to MakeUseOf for the tip.

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• 23
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The main reason to use Digsby

1. Digsby saves all information, including IM names, groups, nicks, its own client settings, themes, etc (of course this excludes the password). If I'm logged in from two places, Digsby shows both away messages (at least in the widget). It just god damn works. Remember Trillian or Pidgin? You make 10 groups on your home PC, stick 50 people in each, then go to your laptop at work and nothing is the same as it is at home! Digsby to the rescue.

Notice how I'm logging into a Digsby account, which will be used to retrieve and sync all of my settings.

Other reasons (everyone on Digg loves top 10 lists, right?)

2. Digsby seems to have great fast developers really in touch with the community. Any time there is a problem, they push a message to all users that comes in a form of a Digsby announcement popup. They try to fix problems and usually do it fast. There are bugs here and there but they're nothing critical. If you tried Digsby a few months ago and didn't like it for some reason, I encourage you to give it another try – they really do develop fast. From revision numbers, it seems Digsby developers use SVN in the 15,000 revision number range (that sounds pretty active) – hooray! I can monitor how relatively active Digsby is by comparing this number from time to time. When was the last time Trillian released anything that wasn't a miniscule bug fix? Trillian Astra reminds me of Perl 6 (ha ha, programmer joke).

3. For the first time ever I feel comfortable combining the same people that have multiple IM accounts into one entity (and renaming them whatever I want). I don't really care what IM pops up on their side as long as it reaches the destination. I can also arrange the IM accounts for that person in the order of IM preference, so if AIM is on top and MSN is on the bottom, Digsby will show the AIM icon next to their name, and if they're not on AIM, then MSN. You get the point. I can always pick which account to send from and to at any point during the conversation.

Thaya, you're now popular (Sorry!). And a freak, with so many accounts. Do I give a crap which of his 7 accounts Thaya is logged into? That's right, I don't.

4. Digsby supports Facebook chat just as if it were AIM or MSN (except people sign on and off a lot more often and you can't delete them from the list). It also supports Facebook, twitter, and MySpace (ugh) mini-feed-like updates straight to my desktop. In fact, I get to actually see every Facebook update, which is not the case with the mini-feed (it filters way too much). Additionally, I can set my current status without logging into facebook.com.

5. The Digsby widget, yeah, check it out on the right. There's no need for you to be logged into anything to send me a message. And the cool part is that all visitors show up right in my list the moment they enter the site and disappear the moment they leave, so I know how many people are online at any given time. Feel free to try it out. I already had a few interesting discussions with visitors who are complete strangers and I'm loving it. You can even consider it a mini live tech support.

6. I LOVE how you can customize where and which icons show up in your IM list. Online status, IM network, and a mini buddy icon, left, right, any combination. Such a fine grained seemingly small feature but a very nice touch.

7. Reply box in IM popups. I just type my short answer in there if I don't want to bother popping the main chat window back up. Now if only there was a keyboard shortcut to activate that little box (who wants to mouse any more?)…

8. The first client where updating my Winamp status to all the networks actually works. Yes, others may have it too but so far everything I've tried was buggy. For example, Google talk updates once, and then forgets about it. Digsby never forgets.

9. Skin support with many customizations. http://digsbies.org/site/project/Skins is a good place to start.

10. New email notifications support for Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, IMAP, and POP3. The last 2 are of special interest.

Now my wishlist

Come on Digsby, you can do it!

• a Linux client. It's supposedly coming soon, but how soon? Windows is the only platform supported today.
• Edit: steve from digsby messaged me with this: MSN reconnect bug is fixed and will be pushed in the next update. Reconnect doesn't always work when I get my network back or come back from sleep mode. Just make it work, Digsby. Especially bad is MSN, it just never wants to reconnect (but hey, that was my main complain with Trillian for the past 3 years). I see this a lot:

• RSS feed integration, similar to how Facebook integration works. I want to read planetmysql.org posts as soon as they get there.
• transparency. What's up with that? I want everyone to at least squint trying to read my messages behind my back. Ideally, a window would solidify when it gets focus and go transparent again when it loses it (put it all into settings, though, let me control it).
• I can't italicize, bold, etc a word or a selection. It just does it to all the text I'm typing. That should be common sense.
• Added 06/15/08: off the record mode + encrypted conversations would be really sweet.
• sometimes the contact list changes don't sync fast enough, so if I close Digsby and reopen it, they won't be there. I'd like to see a live save status, something that turns green once everything is synced.
• minimize to tray. I can already close to tray, but I want to minimize to it too – hey, I'm used to it from AIM. Wanna fight about it? Fixed a long time ago.
• I'd like to have a setting to not show Digsby in the task bar, like Trillian. There’s a setting for this already that I missed, it’s under ‘Buddy List’, thanks steve from digsby.
• It's not always obvious inside the chat window when a friend goes offline, for instance for AIM. It's also not always obvious if you're IMing someone who is not available (there should be a warning back in response to an IM).
• it's not clear if a person who IMed me is in my contact list. I'd like to know that, as well as which group they belong to.
• the close button that suddenly shows up on each tab when I hover is very annoying and sometimes I close IM windows by mistake.

So take Digsby out for a spin, I guarantee you'll like at least something about it.

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