TimWeb

In today’s mx newspaper there is a completely pointless, but laughable, article titled Singles Dish Up The Dirt which talks about A US matchmaking service (It’s Just Lunch) being sued by its clients because they were sent on bad dates. Most of cases seem to be what you would expect from a blind date, i.e. the person turns out not to be who you were lead to believe they are. While some of them are bad, such as a lady being matched up with an alcoholic (surely these people should be screened out of the service?), there was one mention which seems like It’s Just Lunch were deliberately matching people up with the “wrong” kind of partner.

“Dating nightmares included women matched with married men, and a Minnesota woman who requested no Republicans or religious types only to be set up with a Catholic Republicans and and (sic) Seventh Day Adventist”

http://blog.nbc.com/CreedThoughts/

I always thought that the Windows Sidebar feature, included with Windows Vista, was a waste of space — Well, it does take up valuable screen real estate — however recently I’ve started using the Sidebar on a secondary display. While I would probably still not use the Sidebar on a single screen, having dual screens gives me much more real estate and provides a great location for system information and supplementary windows. That’s where the Sidebar comes in…

Previously on my laptop; I used to use Yahoo! Widgets to display information, such as remaining battery power, WiFi signal reception, etc. I found these extremely useful in the circumstance, because they were individual items which I could make just big enough to see, but small enough to be imperceptible while focusing on the main tasks on hand. When it came to the the desktop, however, I found these to be too disorganized and ended up cluttering the screen — that’s where the Windows Sidebar comes in. Because of it’s dockable “Sidebar” the Gadgets are easily organised to one side of the screen. A great feature with this docking ability, is that if you check the “Sidebar is always on top of others windows” option it will cause maximized windows to only open up as far as the Sidebar, allowing you to always be able to see you Gadgets.

Just like FireFox add-ons, there is a fairly decent array of Gadgets available (however there are a significantly less number of Sidebar Gadgets, 1453, available compared to Yahoo! Widgets, 3808 — *numbers are from the offical download sites at time of writing). So here is a list of Gadgets, with links, that I have found most helpful so far:

• Weather (included with the Sidebar by default) — Great for showing the current temperature. Or, if undocked, a three day forecast.
• Calendar (included with the Sidebar by default) — Excellent in docked view as it shows the current date in large letter, with a nice orange background.
• Multi Sensor — A nice graphical display of system diagnostic information, such as temperature, memory usage, etc. However you do need to be running Everest Ultimate.
• DriveInfo — Displays Free space and drive usage (in percent) of selected drives.
• Network Meter v2.1 — Monitors network traffic and displays the current download and upload speeds on two seperate bars.
• NetGadget — Similar to the Network Meter, however it displays the set and received speeds on a scrolling chart.

One thing that I love about FireFox is it’s vast library of add-ons. Not only does Mozilla provide an easy to search online repository of add-ons, but installing add-ons with FireFox is easy as three clicks. Although there are many useful add-on, there are also quite a few of not so useful add-ons — So I thought that I would share some of the add-ons that I commonly use.

• Clipmarks — Allows you to save sections of a page, without having to book mark the entire page. Useful for saving sections of a blog or news article. *requires registration
• CSSViewer -  A Simple CSS Property viewer. Provides a great, web 2.0 looking, floating window that displays CSS Information about the item your cursor is currently over.
• Dog Ears — Mark important parts of a webpage to easily relocate them. Lets you dog-ear long pages, with persistent marks, so that you can skip straight to those marks the next time you return to that page.
• FasterFox — Performance and Network tweaks for FireFox. I would recommend that you lower the performance increase back from “Turbo Charged” to at least “Optimized”, to help prevent overloading web servers.
• FlashGot — Download helper for FireFox. Absolute must have, especially if you have a download manager.
• GoogCal — A very simple add-on which lets you add a Google Calendar button to your toolbar.
• GreaseMonkey — Allows you to customise the way a webpage displays, using JavaScript. Scripts can be downloaded from userscripts.org.
• Locationbar — Changes the look of your location bar by putting emphasis on the domain.
• PDF Download — Allows you to choose if you want to view a PDF inside the browser, as a PDF or as HTML, or in your default PDF application. Another must have.
• Resizeable Form Fields — Lets you click and drag form fields to increase, or decrease, their size.
• Tab Scope — Shows a thumbnail preview of your tabs, when you hover over a tab.
• View Formatted Source — Displays formatted and color-coded source and CSS information for elements. Great for reading messy or long html source.
• Web Developer — A useful toolbar which gives you various web developer tools. Can also be useful for non web developer as it lets you disable JavaScript and CSS.
• Zotero — Helps you collect and manage citation information. Great if you’re doing research or you frequently require saving citation information.

One of your favourite add-ons not in the list? Post a comment with the add-ons you use.