Friday. I haven’t looked forward to a Friday this much in quite some time. It’s been a rough couple of weeks. I’ve not been working out as much as I’d like and since I was getting angry at myself and aggravated at my lack of progress, I decided to take this week “off”. Come Monday, I’ll approach from a different angle and make it work for me. More running, more Pilates, more weights. It can be done. In the meantime, fun stuff!

• PAPERCRAFT STEAK DINNER?!??!? Yes. Fire up your color printer and assemble a paper steak to delight your friends and family. The site’s in Japanese, but you can figure it out.

• CROSS-STITCH! I’ve been thinking that once I finish knitting this baby blanket I’m making for my friends, it might be time to take up a new craft - like cross-stitch. To that end, I’ve been checking out the cross-stitch kits at my local craft stores. They’re all rather corny and so not me- “Footprints”? Precious Moments characters? A bald eagle against the flag? I’d prefer and old school grandma sampler, honestly. But that’s me. My aesthetic runs in a different vein. Just imagine my delight when I discovered this cross-stitch generator at Dark Lilac! I can upload a picture I create in Photoshop or a favorite image and it will generate a cross-stitch chart including the colors of DMC brand embroidery floss you’ll need. I have plans to create one of my gimpy wrist MRI (just have to resize in Photoshop) as well as one of brussels sprouts or other such food.
• SHRINKY DINKS. I stopped at Michael’s on my way home from work with my friend Krys. She was picking up scrapbooking supplies; I went in to buy unnecessary stuff. Craft stores and Target are perfect for that. I found they were selling packs of blank frosted Shrinky Dinks and my childhood came rushing back to me - like the fumes generated by sticking sheets of plastic into the oven to watch them shrink. That said, I bought a pack. I have colored pencils. I have an oven. I have jump rings. This means I can make pendants and keychains and other random crap - but however I want to do it. Crafty crafty! ($4.99 for 10 sheets)
• Summertime = bright nail polish colors. The new Essie colors for this summer left me a little underwhelmed. There was a color near the display, though, that attracted me. It’s not new for this season, but it fits right in and it’s awesome. It’s called Calypso - a bright fuchsia. It garnered compliments and that’s always nice.
• After much deliberation and whatnot, I’ve finally selected and ordered my new cell phone. Not a Blackberry, not the LG Voyager, not the Samsung Glyde. There were issues with each one (bulk, size, price, less than stellar reviews) so I did a Goldilocks kind of thing. In the end, I checked the Howard Forums and reviews for the phones I was considering - these led me to several people raving about the LG enV(2). It also had good ratings from c|net. It’s not as sexy as the others - it’s not a touchscreen phone; it doesn’t have a huge display on the front. But that’s OK. I wanted a full QWERTY keyboard - it’s got that. I wanted a larger display for web browsing and email composition - it’s got that when you open it up. I wanted a phone that’s easy to use AS a phone - this actually has a number pad for regular old dialing. And it cost me a whopping $49 after my upgrade discount. It arrives on Tuesday. Yippee!
• I’ve just pledged to be a part of Firefox Download Day 2008. It’s not a pledge to do anything other than download the newest version (that would be version 3) of Firefox on the day it’s released. Love love love love love. I love a browser. Hmmm. This might be part of the reason I’m single.

No comments

I ordered some new glasses today. I took a cell phone photo of myself trying on the frames and sent it to my sister for her opinion. She texted back, “They look kind of nerdy, but that is you!” (She liked them overall.)

I arrived home and sat down at the computer… some of my Firefox plugins/add-ons updated automatically when I started it up, and this made me think it might be a good time to explore what sort of new add-ons are available (unplanned vacation day boredom). I started with the category of “Interface Customizations.”

About halfway down the page, I saw Hyperwords. I clicked.

Hyperwords: Interact with all the words on the web, not just links.

Select any word or words on any web page. A menu pops-up. Choose from any one of the many powerful commands. And that’s it. Fully customizable menu and behavior. Short Demo Video available on YouTube [and a link to the video]

Well, that sounds like something I pondered or wondered about a few weeks ago (whether in my head or in a work email or here, I cannot recall). An evolution of hypertext, where EVERY WORD could be linked to information somewhere else - just the best thing ever for info addicts like me. Watch the short demo video - the first 20 seconds are boring shots of a trade show, but when the guy starts talking along with the screenshots, damn. This is so cool.

OK. Benefits.
So, you don’t have to cut and paste something into Wikipedia or Google or Flickr or Babelfish… highlight a word or phrase, right-click, and you have various Google search options, choices to search for references on Wikipedia or define it (in a neat little pop-up box) on dictionary.com, translate it, check stock prices, hear the word SPOKEN if you’re not sure how to pronounce it, search for images and video on Flickr, Google Image Search, YouTube or Google Video, copy references and links in full, or have it email the info directly via your email client (Gmail is supported- though Gmail is currently acting a bit strangely for me; it keeps telling me it couldn’t load the page and to try again later) without you having to copy references, links, etc. into a new message.Here’s a screenshot of me highlighting “hypertext”, right-clicking with Hyperwords installed—and some of the results, including the dictionary.com definition box right there:

You have to be using Firefox, but you should be doing that anyway.

Install it. Take it for a spin. I’m excited over this. So much.

No comments

Yesterday at work, I participated in a presentation about blogging. My portion was about using an RSS reader - why it’s handy and helpful, how to get yourself all set up with a slew of subscriptions, etc. During the presentation, I recommended that everyone install Mozilla Firefox just because it’s good - more secure, the original tabbed-browsing browser, and because it has the super handy live bookmarks feature and RSS feed options that make using a reader (like Google Reader or Bloglines) ridiculously easy.

Afterward, I got an email from someone telling me that she had been using Firefox at home for a couple of years, but was suffering through her work-day with IE because she thought that she’d get in trouble for installing it and using it - but that she was going to install it now since I’d “come out” about my Firefox use. Yay, evangelism!

The very first thing I did when I started at this job over two years ago - before I inquired about getting a nameplate for my cubicle - was to ask the IT guys if I could install Firefox. They said it wasn’t a problem, except that our corporate intranet/portal isn’t built for Firefox, so some features might be buggy. Eh, I thought - so I’ll use both: IE for intranet viewing only, Firefox for EVERYTHING else.

[Just so there's no confusion, I'm not a high-functioning computer geek (HFCG); I leave that distinction to people who do actual programming and engineering. Dude - I was an English major. The HFCGs are the people I call when I've tried (to the best of my ability) but can't figure out why the hell my redirect has turned into an infinite redirect, and when I realize that my limited knowledge of Linux commands (cd, mv, chmod, chkconfig, and, uh, exit) won't be enough to solve the problem at hand.]

Tonight I read about a cool new plugin for Firefox and thought, "Damn, there are lots of helpful ones." So here's my round-up of Firefox add-ons (or plugins or extensions - whatever you choose to call them) that I find really useful, handy or just nifty:

• Web Developer: If you’re a dabbler in web design, want to learn more about it or an intermediate user who sometimes sees a page with a really cool layout, tackling a problem you’ve been running into, or doing something that you totally want to jack and use on your own, the Web Developer plugin is invaluable. You can view the CSS for a page, but also highlight individual elements and see “how they did it” - like an amped up “view source.”- read more | install it
• AdBlock Plus: Right-click on a banner ad, choose “Adblock” from the menu and you never have to see it again. - read more | install it
• Forecastfox: If you (or a co-worker) ponder, “I wonder what the weather’s supposed to be like tomorrow…” you’ll have the answer right in your browser status bar. - read more | install it
• PDF Download: Checks if the page/file you’re about to open is a pdf. If so, it lets you choose whether you want to open it in your browser, download it or view as HTML. - read more | install it
• Greasemonkey: There are two ways of interacting with Greasemonkey - writing scripts for it or maintaining an ignorant stance and just running other people’s scripts. Essentially, Greasemonkey lets you adjust the way a webpage behaves and looks. There are over 11,000 user-created scripts out there. - read more | install it
• Google Preview: When you do a Google search, thumbnail images of the resulting pages will appear on your search results page - read more | install it
• URL Fixer: If you ever get sausage fingers when you’re typing too late or too fast, or suffer from that weird tic wherein you become incapable of typing without making tons of errors if someone’s watching you type, or if you just find yourself typing amazon.xom a lot… this is good. It will automatically correct “.con” to “.com”, and you can teach it to correct things that you do constantly and uniquely - esp. helpful if you visit a lot of non-US sites. - read more | install it
• Screengrab!: Sure, you can do the old Ctrl + PrtScn trick and then play in Photoshop or some other app, but this allows you to right-click on a webpage, and save either the entire page, the visible portion or a selection as a .jpg right there. The entire page feature is nice. - read more | install it
• Personas: This is the one I learned about today. It allows you to apply skins to Firefox (not to be confused with themes) without restarting the browser. You can skin Firefox with seasonal images (reindeer, snowflakes), sports images, or relaxing things like blades of grass or bamboo. It looks way cooler than I can make it sound. - read more | install it

So that’s my piece on Firefox and extensions/add-ons and how they make the internet a better place.

No comments