The single biggest complaint most Firefox users have about Google Chrome is the complete lack of add-ons. I’ve got to admit that I’ve not missed most of my Firefox add-ons but I do understand the problem. But, there are bookmarklets that will reproduce many of the most commonly used Firefox add-ons out there. Check out this post from Read Write Web for a list a further details.
Especially if you’re a Twitter user, you’re familiar with TinyURLs. Those URLs that when clicked on take you to a much longer and very different URL. While they have their usefulness, they don’t exactly tell you where they’re sending you and sometimes it’s somewhere you don’t want to end up. Firefox users, once again, you’re in luck. Just install the bit.ly Preview Plugin and the next time you see a TinyURL, just hover your mouse pointer over it to see the name of the site you’ll be sent to, the URL of that site, and the number of other users that have so far clicked on that particular TinyURL.(Other cool tools can also be found on the bit.ly site.)
Despite storing all my photos on flickr, I’m sure to have a backup on one of my external hard drives and burn them all to DVD every few months. However, disasters happen and there’s any number of reasons why you may ever want your photos back from flickr. Trouble is, downloading thousands of photos one at a time would be ever so tedious. In this case you might want to give downloadr a try. Features include:
I’ve not tried it personally myself but I’ve got it bookmarked just in case the worst happens.
I realize that in these lean times you’re probably holding on to that old computer equipment harder than ever before. However, just in case you’ve come into a great donation of some new hotness and are looking to score some cash for that old and busted, check out HP’s Consumer Buyback and Planet Partners Recycling Program. Just fill out the form, get a quote, send it in, and get your green. Warning: the program does only accept certain models of equipment. I tried sending back a six+ year old computer and it wasn’t on the list of accepted machines.
Blake has put together the ultimate lists of free software from Microsoft. Choose either the XP list or the Vista list and download to your heart’s content. Watch for future posts in which I might get into detail on some of these offerings.
According to WebiSee, "Windows 7 Beta will be available for all to download via the Windows 7 page on January 9th PST for a limited time to the first 2.5 million people who download the beta." I’ve played with it and I’m already impressed. I’ve got it running on my Cloudbook which has just a 1.2GHz processor and only 512MB of RAM and it’s never run better.
Admit it, you’ve thrown out the manual for your toaster haven’t you? How about the manual for your heated electric back massager pad? Regretting that decision now? Check out diplodocs.com and find almost any manual for any brand of consumer electronics in hand, printable, PDF.
I’ve mentioned online photo editing programs in the past but some prefer the downloadable & installable kind that don’t cost hundreds like Photoshop but do more than Microsoft Paint. So, I offer you MobaPhoto.
MobaPhoto is a nice freeware for managing your digital photos. MobaPhoto allows you to resize, crop, correct red-eyes of all your pictures very easily in "batch-mode". It allows you to create automatically some beautiful photo galleries and upload them on your website without having any knowledge in website creation.
Not impressed with the built-in tiny battery meter icon in the system tray on your laptop? How’d you like one that floats on your desktop and becomes brighter the less power your battery contains? If so, check out the free Power Meter Plus from Matt Collinge.
It seems that someone has been impersonating Twitter direct messages with links to a phishing site. I received no fewer than three of these over the weekend. Luckily, in all cases Chrome reported all the links as phishing sites. (I really did know better but I wanted to see how well Chrome’s phishing filter worked.) The twitter blog has more details.