21 Tips to Deal with Info Overload (2)
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Leo Babauta (53)
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5 days, 14 hours
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The problem with being constantly bombarded by information, as we web workers are, is not so much that we can’t deal with it, or that it distracts us from our work, or that it shortens our attention spans or stresses us out. It’s that we have allowed that information to control our lives. We’ve discussed this at length in the past. We can argue endlessly about whether a high amount of information and connectivity is ...
WebWorkerDaily » Archive Mozilla Tips its Hat to This Year’s Top Firefox Extensions « (10)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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1 week, 6 days
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Every year, Mozilla runs a contest called Extend Firefox, which is designed to name the best Firefox extensions created in the previous 12 months. This year’s list of winners is out, and one of the winners was previously written up here a while back: Pencil. In his writeup, Mike noted that Pencil works by marrying Firefox’s Gecko drawing engine with the ability to display, save and load an external canvas with a palette of shapes. ...
USB 3.0: Likely to Bring Many Conveniences (6)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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2 weeks, 3 days
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The next generation of Universal Serial Bus (USB) is upon us. The final specification for USB 3.0 is due in the fourth quarter of this year, and Intel has delivered a key part of the draft spec. I’m betting that version 3.0 will make life easier for web workers in many ways. That’s largely true because of the many conveniences that I remember USB 2.0 introducing. USB 3.0 has been widely interpreted as a way ...
Use iPhone Optimized Web Sites On Your Desktop For Greater Productivity (7)
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Scott Blitstein (7)
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2 weeks, 6 days
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We’ve talked about Site Specific Browsers like Bubbles in the past and while I have found them to be useful in some instances, it’s only with the proliferation of web applications with iPhone optimized interfaces that I have really started using them. I have found that setting up multiple SSB windows ,each containing the iPhone view of a web application, allows me to create a dashboard of sorts on my spare monitor. At a glance, ...
McAfee Site Advisor Ferrets Out the Funk (5)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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3 weeks, 1 day
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This week I’ve been using an interesting, free Firefox extension called McAfee Site Advisor, which you can download here. While Firefox 3 has new features built into it designed to identify potentially malicious web sites, I’m betting that McAfee has a larger knowledge base about these site than Mozilla does. McAfee Site Advisor shows up as a green icon at the bottom right of Firefox, as seen above, and warns when you arrive at a ...
Keep an Eye on Your Software Updates (1)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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3 weeks, 2 days
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Users of the Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008 suites for the Mac will want to get a hold of newly issued updates for each suite. They’re available for download now and Microsoft confirms that they enhance not just security but stability and peformance. It’s also increasingly a good idea to track where you can find out more about the updates you receive, as they arrive. Remember when Apple landed in hot water a few months ...
OperaTor Anonymous Browsing: Interesting, but Not Speedy (3)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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3 weeks, 3 days
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Do you ever need to surf the web anonymously? Do you like to keep useful applications on a USB thumb drive? If so, look into OperaTor, a free download that delivers a portable version of the Opera browser incorporating Tor (an anonymity network that keeps your traffic protected through proxies). As the folks over on Download Squad note, it slows your browsing down, but that’s also exactly how you can tell that it’s doing its ...
Online Meeting App Study: GoToMeeting Tops Yugma? (4)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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3 weeks, 5 days
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I’m a big fan of online meeting and collaboration tools. Among other things, they’ve saved me from some of the many flights and hotels that I used to have to put up with. I found this comparison of online meeting tools interesting. I’m always wary of whether these kinds of studies may be funded by vendors rather than independent. However, the results of this study–at least among the winners–lined up at least reasonably closely with ...
Your Web Tools Are Built For You: 7 Free Examples (11)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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4 weeks
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You don’t have to be a literature buff to know about the scene in Tom Sawyer where Tom, faced with the daunting task of whitewashing a fence, finds a way to get his friends to whitewash it for him. For web workers, there are countless sites and resources you can reach for that can save you from building complex things from the ground up. Here are seven good ones to know about. Do you use ...
5 On-the-Fly Efficiency Tips When Using Windows & Apps (2)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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4 weeks, 1 day
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Windows, as well as the browsers that Windows users use, offer lots of under-the-hood productivity and efficiency boosts that you can deploy if you know about them. Here are five tips that I use all the time. Quickly Go Back to the Desktop. Do you have so many applications and windows open that you don’t want to minimize them to go back to your desktop? Press Ctrl+Esc and then Alt+M to pop up the desktop. ...
Why Switch to the Mac? Five Top Reasons (15)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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1 month
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Although the types of tech writing that I do require me to spend the majority of my time on Windows PCs (and some on Linux systems), I also use a MacBook, and have accumulated a list of Windows-vs.-Mac gripes over the years. I know that a lot of readers of this blog use Macs, but quite a few use Windows machines, too. If you’re considering switching to the Mac–and more people are than ever–here is ...
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Rob said:
I switched from a Thinkpad with XP (downgraded from Vista) to a Macbook Pro in February of this year. I couldn't be happier. It's not just more functional, but is actually a joy to use. Unlike the PC, the Mac is near the top of the list of "technology I love" ... right up there with my Roomba and Tivo.
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Brian M said:
Just a few of the reasons I just made the switch.
The Netbook Competition Continues: Enter Lenovo (1)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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1 month
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Have you thought of adding a netbook to your portable computing arsenal? I’ve been using Linux-based Asus Eee PCs at home now for months, and like them very much. Today, Lenovo announced that it is entering the netbook space with its small, light $399 IdeaPad S10 models. We covered the news over on the Ostatic blog, and if you’ve been thinking about getting one of these, you have more choices now than ever. As I ...
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Brian said:
This is quite interesting. I'd like to test one out and see it's capabilities.
Setting Reminders in Resnooze and Outlook (4)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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1 month
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Do you ever send e-mails to yourself to remind you about tasks you need to get done? I’ve done that a lot, but it’s a very inefficient way to schedule reminders, especially if you want recurring reminders. Calendars are more efficient, but I happen to like getting my reminders right in my e-mail inbox, since that’s where I am a lot of the time. I use Outlook a lot of the time, and have mastered ...
IBM’s X-Force Security Report Details Security Trends (2)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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1 month
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There’s an exhaustive new security report out from IBM Internet Security Systems: the X-Force 2008 Mid-Year Trend Statistics report. We’ve analyzed it over on the OStatic blog from the perspective of several open source platforms arriving on the “most vulnerability disclosures” list for the first time, and web workers will find quite a few points of interest in the report too. The X-Force report tracks trends in malware, phishing, most vulnerable software vendors, and even ...
IE Tab: Jumping Between Firefox and Internet Explorer (1)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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1 month
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Recently, over on the OStatic blog, I covered Sleipnir, which is a popular browser in Japan, but few people outside of that country use it. It has one primary claim to fame–an unusual one–which is that it allows you to switch between the Gecko rendering engine using by the Mozilla Firefox browser and Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. This means that if you run into a rendering problem in Firefox, for example, you can take another ...
FireTune: Free Performance Boost for Firefox (5)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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1 month, 1 week
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Want to improve your Firefox performance. Before the latest version of Firefox arrived, I mentioned a great, free utility that you can use to soup up the browser, called FireTune. I’ve been testing the new version with the new Firefox 3.0.1, and despite the many under-the-hood performance improvements in the new Firefox, this utility will still boost your performance. If you’re familiar with working under Firefox’s hood, you know that if you type about:config into ...
Launchy: Take Me To My App (3)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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1 month, 1 week
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Lately, as I’ve bogged my computer down with with a bunch of new applications, I’ve gotten back into using a little Windows utility that I used to use all the time: Launchy. Launchy is a free, open source utility for launching applications or going to web pages on the fly, and you can download it here for either Linux or Windows. Launchy has the slick look of many Mac applications, and you can pop it ...
http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/07/27/7-ways-to-manage-your-passwords/ (29)
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Mike Gunderloy (159)
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1 month, 1 week
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One inescapable facet of web work is the need to come up with, and remember, usernames and passwords. The days when you could get away with picking a single combination and using them everywhere are pretty much gone: that strategy reduces your security to that of the weakest site you use. It’s simply not worth risking that the person who gets hold of some Web 2.0 startup’s database can also get into your online banking. ...
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vasta said:
This post could have dropped every other suggestion but 1Password. Greatest software application ever.
Google’s Knols: Will These End Up in Our Search Results? (4)
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Samuel Dean (75)
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1 month, 1 week
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While it was initially announced in December 2007 and covered on our parent blog GigaOm, Google has just released its Knol service to the public. As noted on the Google Operating System blog, Knol appears at first glance to have a lot in common with Wikipedia–a centralized repository for sharing units of knowledge–but may be more comparable with knowledge-sharing sites such as HubPages. Unlike on Wikipedia, authors of entries on Knol are identified by name ...
