Something needed to be done. I have become addicted to constant news, updates, the latest gadgets, upgrades, and rumors. I spend way more time reading tips and techniques for improving my photography than I actually spend photographing things. Reading tech blogs does nothing but make me crave the newest gadgets and gizmos. Most of all, I fell prey to my uncontrollable desire to move any progress bar I am given to completion. No matter how much time I spend reading stories, looking at pictures, and skimming headlines, there were always more unread items waiting. If I did actually finish, there would be more in 30 minutes or less. It never stopped. According to Google Reader, my dealer of choice, since October 11, 2006 I have read 285, 079 items. In the last month along I have read 3,599 items. Until today, I had 81 RSS feeds that I was following completely, and even that is down from a much larger number 6 months ago. But no more, I have deleted all but a very few, 3 per week at the most, feeds. Not completely ready to cut ties, I saved off by big list of feeds for now, but here’s hoping that it stays stored away.
This is in addition to a social networking “friend” purge I did a couple months ago. There too I realized I was spending completely unnecesary time being updating on the lives of people that I had had zero contact with for years, or who I had only fleeting contact with but had ended up in the perpetual internet connection. There again, I said, no more deleted 100-150 “friends” and have been all the happier since. I am not wasting the time I was before, and I am less distracted in dealing with the people I actual know and care about.
Let see what productive things I can do now.
A couple of people have asked me about the plugins I use for firefox. I will take this opportunity to tell you that if you are doing something silly like using Internet Explorer, then you should get firefox immediately, and then return here for addon goodness. Otherwise, here is the majority of the addons that I am running. Some of them require a bit of option tweaking before I use them, but you can probably figure that out.
- Add Bookmark Here – This simply adds a link to the bottom of each bookmark menu to give you direct access to add a link at that location. This is particularly helpful in my bookmark system, which I will have to explain another time.
- Tab Mix Plus – Lets you do all kinds of things with tabs and windows. In particular, this lets you revert back to the old way firefox did the close button for tabs (ie. one button on the right instead of the unnecessary button on each tab.)
- Download Statusbar – Shows the download progress in the status bar instead of a separate window. This just makes download less intrusive.
- IE Tab – The unfortunate reality is that some web designers are stupid and intentionally block any browser that isn’t internet explorer. This lets you switch to the IE renderer, thus making those certain pages work, while still staying in the firefox browser. Use with caution however since using IE inside of firefox is just as unsafe as using IE by itself.
- Locationbar – This does some nifty stuff with the location bar like highlighting the domain and making section of the address clickable. This is a preview of sorts of features that will be added to the browser in firefox 3.
- Resizeable Textarea – This lets you make the text area bigger on any webpage you visit, like those annoying blog comment boxes that are way to small.
- Stop-or-Reload – This is admitably a minor cosmetic thing, but it gives you one button for stop and reload instead of two. I like all the screen space I can get.
- Better GCal – If you use Google Calendar, this bundles several helpful greasemonkey scripts together that are useful.
- Better Gmail -If you use Google Mail, this bundles several helpful greasemonkey scripts together that are useful.
- Better GReader – If you use Google Reader, this bundles several helpful greasemonkey scripts together that are useful.
- Google Bookmarks Button – This is one that is indispensable for myself, but probably not useful to that many people out there. Given the fact that in a given day I work on 3 different computers (work, home, and laptop) I find it useful to share a good number of bookmarks between them. This system is far from perfect, but it does me just fine.
- Web Developer – This is an absolute must if you do any designing of web sites. If that fits you and you don’t have this add-on, just go get it.
- Firebug – Here again this is for web designers. It has some overlap with web developer, but I use them both regularly.
I can officially announce that I have moved right on up into the 1980′s. I would say (and I believe most people would agree with me) that I like technology. I like play with all kinds of various objects which in some way consume electricity. It might then come as a surprise to you that I got through my first quarter century without ever actually touching fax machine. I can tell you now that I have become both an expert and lost every bit of the desire that I never actually had to every use said fax machine technology. Fax machines are like email, except I have to print out the piece of paper, walk down the hall, scan the document, wait 5 minutes while it calls and sends just so it will print another piece of paper, which looks like the piece of paper I already had, but worse. Paperless society indeed. Hmmmf.
I recently got a new toy for my computer. I had to wait over a month just to find someplace that had them in stock that was willing to sell it at a resonable price but it was worth it. It is pretty.
For those interested, it is a Saitek PZ30AU, and can be purchased from newegg.com.
joy.
