Links For You

On 6/1/2006, In Browsers, Free Stuff, Internet, Links, Software, Web Dev, By Will

An update for Fire­fox was released today, bring­ing it to ver­sion 1.5.0.4. I sug­gest you go get it if you don’t use Fire­fox, or use the auto-update fea­ture (Help > Check For Updates) in Fire­fox if you do.

Har­vest is a really frig­ging cool web-based time track­ing appli­ca­tion. I have been toy­ing with the free demo account and am going to set up a full account when I am done writ­ing this. If you do any sort of free­lanc­ing you should check it out.

Today I launched a site I have been work­ing on for a pub­lisher called Enlight­ened Ink. Glad to see it get out of the start­ing gate.

After see­ing my golf balls slice off to the right every time I hit them last week, I started won­der­ing about The Per­fect Swing: Real­ity or Myth?. Check out all the links to tips at the bot­tom of the page.

For­mer AFCCC co-worker Jason seems to have latched onto the won­der­ful world of blog­ging quite nicely, putting together a great site for his family.

For you web devel­op­ers, Vit­a­min seems to be com­ing along quite nicely, with great arti­cles from some of the web’s lead­ing minds. And it looks cool too.

Dell has started ship­ping their higher res­o­lu­tion lap­tops using a default 120dpi set­ting for the dis­play. While this helps the read­abil­ity of text on these sys­tems, it makes an awful bug in Inter­net Explorer 6 rear its head. What hap­pens is that IE tries to upscale gif images in addi­tion to fonts, thus ren­der­ing them very pixel­lated and jagged. This frus­trated me for about a week recently, until I learned the rea­son­ing. If you want to remain at 120dpi but not have the prob­lem, there is a reg­istry hack you can use.

Man, oh man, I want one of these USB turnta­bles so I can finally con­vert my record col­lec­tion to dig­i­tal for­mat. Actu­ally, just to be able to hear some of my old records on a nice sys­tem would be great in and of itself.

Adios.

 
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Internet Explorer

On 3/28/2006, In Browsers, Internet, Security, Software, Tech, By Will

Still using Microsoft’s Inter­net Explorer browser on your Win­dows machine? Stop already!

With the most recent crit­i­cal, unpatched secu­rity exploits run­ning wild, reports are com­ing in regard­ing oth­er­wise inno­cent web sites silently installing mali­cious pro­grams that steal your pass­words and other sen­si­tive information.

Do your­self a favor and install Fire­fox or Opera, both free browsers that pro­vide a much bet­ter, safer Inter­net expe­ri­ence. There is no rea­son not to do this now, unless you like other peo­ple hav­ing access to your com­puter and every­thing you do on it.

If you are still using Microsoft’s Inter­net Explorer on your Mac­in­tosh com­puter, well, you are miss­ing out on the Inter­net as it is today. This browser is not sub­ject to the same exploits that the Win­dows ver­sion is, but it is no longer updated or sup­ported by Microsoft, and doesn’t take advan­tage of many of the newer fea­tures of the World Wide Web as we know it. You too can upgrade to Fire­fox for free.

 
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Targeting Accessibility

On 2/9/2006, In Browsers, Internet, Tech, Web Dev, By Will

The National Fed­er­a­tion for the Blind is suing Tar­get for hav­ing an inac­ces­si­ble web site for blind peo­ple. This is good. If all goes well, this will lead to the pri­vate sec­tor hav­ing to take greater respon­si­bil­ity for their web sites and cre­at­ing them to be acces­si­ble to peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. Sec­tion 508 com­pli­ance isn’t that hard to achieve.

 
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Free Software Utilities Update

On 2/1/2006, In Browsers, Free Stuff, Internet, Software, Tech, By Will

My favorite registry-cleaning tool EZCleaner is no longer free. Well, you now have to sub­scribe to their web site to down­load the ‘free’ soft­ware. How­ever, I found a cou­ple of great util­i­ties that eas­ily take its place. So with­out fur­ther ado, here is my updated list of free Win­dows util­i­ties soft­ware that every­one should use:

  • CCleaner — cleans the reg­istry, cleans up sloppy software.
  • WinASO RegDe­frag 2.0 — Defrag­ments the reg­istry, com­pacts it and opti­mizes it. Run this after run­ning CCleaner above.
  • Win­Pa­trol — Let Scotty the watch­dog mon­i­tor your sys­tem for appli­ca­tions try­ing to add them­selves to your Startup. Works great.
  • AVG Antivirus — Free virus pro­tec­tion. Smooth, lean, and mean. Not bloated and slow like Nor­ton or McAfee.
  • Spy­Bot Search & Destroy — Elim­i­nate spyware.
  • 7-Zip — Like Winzip, but free and with­out annoy­ing reg­is­tra­tion notices.
  • Foxit PDF Reader — We all know it takes Acro­bat about 3 hours to launch, if it doesn’t lock up your sys­tem. Try Foxit instead.

Know of any­thing I missed? Leave your comments.

 
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Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5

On 1/12/2006, In Browsers, Internet, By Will

Thun­der­bird 1.5 is out, and so far I am very pleased with the free email appli­ca­tion. The real­time spellchecker is done quite well. It is unob­tru­sive but highly usable. The junkmail con­trols are help­ful and allow me to inte­grate with Spa­mAs­sasin, which runs on my web/email server. This ver­sion has the improved Updater that Fire­fox 1.5 got, and it installed with­out a hitch. Cool!

 
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A Gift For You

On 12/1/2005, In Browsers, Internet, By Will

Mozilla released ver­sion 1.5 of the ever-free Fire­fox web browser two days ago. You prob­a­bly know how excited about this.

My favorite things about this new release are:

  • Faster page load­ing (the speeds are, like, two froghairs faster!)
  • Improved ren­der­ing engine
  • Improved Options menu
  • Improved tab control
  • Sup­port for SVG and the new can­vas tag

As for exten­sions, there are many new ones that do ultra-kewl things pre­vi­ously unavail­able in Fire­fox. Here is what my stan­dard exten­sions are (for now):

  • Nuke Any­thing Enhanced — Allows you to right-click any­thing on a web page and hide it. Great for hid­ing annoy­ing graphics.
  • Mea­sureIt — Draw a box on the screen and get height/width mea­sure­ments. Great for align­ing page ele­ments when designing.
  • Web Devel­oper Tool­bar — The third most-used tool in my arse­nal, only behind Dreamweaver and Photoshop.
  • Book­mark Syn­chro­nizer — For keep­ing my 1200+ book­marks the same between the office, home, and my lap­top. Requires an FTP server to act as a go-between.
  • Adblock — One of the best exten­sions ever. This reduces pop­ups and ads on web sites you visit. Includes abil­ity to block pesky Flash over­lay ads. Did it miss some­thing? Right-click it and choose “AdBlock This” and poof!
  • Adblock Filterset.g Updater — A com­pan­ion to Adblock, this keeps your list of block­able ads updated behind the scenes. I can’t remem­ber the last time I got a popup ad.
  • PDF Down­load — Lets you choose whether to open or down­load a PDF when clicked, rather than open­ing it auto­mat­i­cally, which is Firefox’s default behavior.
  • Via­matic foX­pose — This must be seen to be believed, and is only avail­able in Fire­fox 1.5. The exten­sion sets up a but­ton that instantly dis­plays screen shots of all of your open tabs on one page, allow­ing you to click the one you want to jump to.
  • Tab Pre­view — This one dis­plays a lit­tle thumb­nail of the tab con­tents when you hover your mouse over an inac­tive tab. Quite cool.

Know of any other good ones I missed?

 
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