Archive | June, 2007

Block New Yahoo! Mail Beta Ads

Jun/30 in Greasemonkey, Usability

I have been fighting my own battle with the new Yahoo! Mail beta ads for some time now. Thanks to their partnership with my DSL provider AT&T, I now have the new “ads” feature and for some darn reason I just can not warm up to it. Well thanks to a reader submission I now have a way to ditch them and go back to the clean Yahoo! Mail beta interface.

All you need to do is to pick up this user script for the Greasemonkey extension. The Yahoo Mail Cleaner is a great fix for this really annoying issue.

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Firefox Link Roundup

Jun/29 in Resources

I know I have been a little light on the posting as of late – just been busy with a dozen different things. I am about to make it up to you though by giving you all the links I collected over the past few days and have yet to share with anybody. Your the first to get a look – now don’t you forgive me?

Have any other interesting links you’ve run across leave a comment and let us know. Share nicely!

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Don’t Track Me!

Jun/28 in Security

Track Me NotHey I see you, walking down the street – keeping your eye on me. Don’t think that I am not on to your little tricks, because I know exactly what you are doing. You are tracking me aren’t you?

If you have found yourself in the same boat I am in right now you might want to pick up the TrackMeNot extension for Firefox. Not sure what its about? Here is how the creators explain it:

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation.

You can learn more about TrackMeNot via the official web site as well. This is a great tool for not just the paranoid among us but the folks that want to stay protected as well.

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Add Remember the Milk to Sidebar

Jun/25 in Usability

Remember the old trick to open Google Notebook in the Firefox sidebar? Well the same thing works with the helpful Remember the Milk to do list web site. All you need to do is bookmark this link here:

+ Bookmark This Link or Drag it to the Bookmarks Tool Bar!

Remember the Milk in Firefox’s SidebarThen once it is bookmarked…

Right-click on that bookmark and select “Properties”.

Check the box that says, “Load this bookmark in sidebar” and you are good to go! Go to say I really like this Web 2.0 web site – and this makes it even handier to use. (via AmanGos)

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Firefox Themes Directory

Jun/20 in Resources

Need to find a new Firefox theme, but don’t want a new way to browse through them all? There is no doubt that there are a lot of themes out there to pick from – and the folks at Learn Firefox have put together a really nice way for you to navigate through them.

Welcome to Firefox Themes presented by Learn Firefox! Here you will find screenshots of all themes that are compatible with Firefox 2.0. The link located above each screenshot will take you to the download page on the Official Firefox Addons site.

The new theme directory on the Web site gives you screenshots of each theme and a link to get to the Firefox Addons page about that said theme. This takes a really simple idea and just makes it that much better. Browse through the selections yourself and be sure to let them know you appreciate the time it took to get this all put together!

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Make Firefox Family Friendly

Jun/19 in Security

Glubble - Family Friendly BrowserUnlike most parental software you can put on your PC, I think Glubble might stand a chance to really do some good. Glubble is an attempt at making a kid friendly version of the Firefox browser. To get it up and running, all you need to do is to install an extension. Its just that simple

Glubble Trusted Surfing for children under 12 years of age enables families to be sure they only see the best of the web they choose to allow.

Glubble Altered Search makes Google and Yahoo show results from childrens trusted Glubbleworld instead of the world wide web.

Child friendly look and feel with interfaces for pre-reading and reading age young children.

I have two nephews and a niece, and I think they really should get started pretty soon with being used to the idea of getting on the Web. I might have to give Glubble an official kid test with them to see if it is a keeper or not.

Give it a shot, and for more information check out this article about it via the TechCrunch crew.

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ThumbStrips – New Way to Tab

Jun/18 in Tabbed Browsing

ThumbStripsEver think of your browsing as a movie? Instead of getting big explosions are awesome fight sequences, you get pictures of web sites as your staring roll. Ok, nobody said your browsing would ever make an exciting movie.

ThumbStrips is an extension that lets you view your history in the form of a filmstrip of screenshots. You can save and share filmstrips on innovation.intuit.com as well.

This is a really neat and new way to look at your browsing habits. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think.

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MeasureIt – On Screen Rulers

Jun/15 in Usability

Need to do a little on screen measuring? If you have Firefox then the MeasureIt extension should do the trick.

MeasureIt for Firefox

As you can see it delivers a brain dead simple way of seeing how big that area of your screen is. I could see this tool being really helpful for web developers or anybody else that works with graphics on the Internet.

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Browse Through Firefox’s Cache

Jun/14 in Settings

CacheViewerTrying to browse through your old saved browser history can be a pain in Firefox in comparison with Internet Explorer.

IE has “Temporary Internet Files” – Firefox has a pain in the rear interface for browsing through its cache. One way to fix this design blunder though is do download and install the CacheViewer extension for Firefox.

This extenion is a GUI Front-end of and for “about:cache”. It allows searching and sorting memory and disk cache files. All in all a pretty nice tool to help you get going with browsing through what you have saved from the Web on your PC.

If you’d rather do it without the extension – here is a method thrown out there by the folks at Lifehacker:

If you prefer the old-fashioned way of browsing your cache, in Windows you can navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\********.default\Cache and see the hodge-podge of files that make up your cache. CacheViewer is a free download and works anywhere the ‘fox does.

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Hide Surfing Trails with Distrust

Jun/13 in Security

Distrust for FirefoxFeeling a little paranoid these days?

If people are peeking over your shoulder or watching what you are doing you might need a little help to feel like you are staying secure. I have a Firefox extension in my vanilla colored top secret folder that I am ready to pass under the proverbial desk right to you.

So what is the Distrust extension for Firefox all about?

Distrust is a Firefox extension that came to fill the need to privacy on your computer. Distrust aims to create a silent browsing experience which means that the browser should leave the computer as it was when browsing began.

If keeping things secret is the name of the game, this extension will help you keep things private. Other features include:

  • Disable the cache. (Both regular and SSL)
  • Set the cookies to live until the end of the session.
  • Clean up the history from item that were added after it was activated.
  • Clean up the downloaded items, from the download manager, that were added after it was activated.
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