Recommended Firefox extensions

I have the following confession: it's hard to write down paragraph-sized blog thoughts when it's so much easier to post word and sentence-sized thoughts via Twitter and Facebook. Pathetic but true.

Image via Wikipedia

Anyway, to buck the trend, I'm here to recommend a few extensions: three for folks who run Firefox on a few different machines (e.g., work, home, in a virtual machine) and one for the dwindling numbers who still blog (though also good for the increasing number of Gmail users).

First an aside about Firefox. I've definitely flirted with a few other browsers in the past 3 months (Safari, Chrome, and Opera) -- primarily for speed. The new Javascript engines in Chrome and Safari are super fast, and you can definitely tell in everyday browsing. But Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is pretty fast too and also offers the killer feature of supporting a wide variety of extensions. So until Chrome or Safari create a rich ecosystem of must-have extensions, I'll always have Firefox on my machine.

OK, onto the extension recommendations. First, for the nomadic Firefox users:

• Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) synchronizes bookmarks (and saved passwords, though I don't use that feature -- see below for why) across IE and Firefox. It mostly just works, though does insist on alphabetizing the contents of your Bookmark Bar which I found somewhat annoying. I use separate work and a home profiles to keep a separate set of bookmarks. For those into the teams behind the features, Xmarks was cofounded by Mitch Kapor, the guy who built Lotus 1-2-3 and was the founding Chair of Mozilla (the fine folks who build Firefox, Thunderbird and more).
• LastPass stores your username, passwords, and profiles (for filling out those pesky forms) "in the cloud" and features browser plug-ins for both Firefox and IE which will leap into action and offer to fill out your password when you hit a site that needs one. When I was on Windows, I used something called Roboform which did the same thing -- but Roboform didn't have a Mac version when I converted. So I gave LastPass a whirl, and it's generally the first plug-in I donwload after I install a fresh version of Firefox. (Try 1Password if you are addicted to Safari and don't need something that works across platforms and browsers.)
• FEBE does for Firefox extensions, themes and preferences what Lastpass does for passwords. It allows you to back them up and import them. Super handy if you find yourself installing Firefox on lots of different machines and dread the task of downloading all those extensions into your brand-new Firefox installations. It supports saving your stash-o-goodies on Box.net for storage in the cloud.

Image via Wikipedia

Finally, here's a recommendation for bloggers or Gmail'ers who want to create fancy email messages. Zemanta is a plugin that will automatically recommend tags, links, pictures, and other resources for your blog posts or email messages as you are typing them. Some might find this a little big brother-ish, but I find it super useful. It might even get me to blog more.

As I've been typing this entry, for example, it's offered to insert links for Mozilla, Mitch Kapor, Foxmarks, Opera, Xmarks, and more. In other words, I didn't have to insert the links manually.

It's also offered to insert a list of relevant tags on ths blog post (not as relevant to me, since this mostly just a personal blog).

And it's recommended a set of images to insert such as pictures of Mitch Kapor and Jon Stephenson von Tezchner, the cofounder of Opera, the Firefox and Opera and Foxmarks and Facebook logos), and so on. When you drag-and-drop them into your post, it automatically inserts the images as well as the reference links below the images. Genius!

Beatboxing flute player on NPR

I've been watching this guy's eye-popping YouTube videos for a while. Greg Pattillo, the "beatboxing flute player" was interviewed on NPR recently.

I'm sure most of you have seen this given that his Inspector Gadget video has been watched nearly 18 million (!) times. But if you haven't, and especially for all my flute-playing friends out there, you have got to see this.



Subscribe to his YouTube channel for more beat boxing, flute playing goodness. Especially if you're also a Mario Brothers fan, because then you'll see his Mario Brothers theme performance too.

Yes I've been blogging less

• Yes, I've been blogging less.
• Yes, I blame it on Facebook and Twitter.
• Yes, I really shouldn't be constraining myself just to the sentence-sized micro-thoughts I can share there.
• No, I don't see it getting much better: it's too easy doing it the other way.
• Yes, the Web browser needs to make it easier to upload pictures.
• Yes, even finding pictures to upload on a Mac using the built in pictures browser is too much of a pain.
• No, Picasa for the Mac doesn't solve this problem because it has difficulty keeping itself synced up to the iPhoto photo database.
• No, Windows 7 doesn't solve this problem either.
• Yes, what we need is a way to right-click upload files to whatever social network/blogging platform you want. Kind of like Pixelpost but built into the file system. And not just for pictures.
• No, I can't think of a way to turn that into sustainable revenue. Otherwise, I'd start it.
• No, I don't know if someone is already doing it. But tell me if they are.

Comcast brought fiber to my neighborhood. Woot!



I wonder if the explains the connectivity hiccup we had last week? Anyway, no problems since then -- though the hiccup forced me to do a big conference call from my cellphone, which really doesn't work well. Oh well, onwards and upwards hopefully.

Happy surprise while breakfasting @ Hobee's

Pictures from Pixelpipe

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Posted via Pixelpipe.

Colin and Cameron on Easter Sunday

Posted via Pixelpipe.

This is one of my favorite shots from Easter Sunday (the rest of the album is at Smugmug). Colin and Cameron are delighted because it's their second Easter egg hunt of the year, they got to leave the Sunday service early, it's the start of Spring Break -- and I've got the week off as well, thanks to HP "recommending" that we all take this week off. What's not to like? :-)

Separate topic, this time on how this photo got published to this blog. I've been searching for an easy way to post pictures from iPhoto to Blogspot (which hosts this blog). I installed Picasa for the Mac, which I like in general. But it was taking a long time to refresh its database with the iPhoto pictures. Plus, I'm not sure I want my entire photo collection re-thumbnail'ed and re-indexed just so it's easier to post to Blogger.

In Googling for a solution, I happened across Pixelpipe, which is a much more general purpose publishing service. I'm giving it a whirl. You'll see this picture here and in Twitter and in Facebook all at once, something I did just by exporting the picture from iPhoto once. Still have work to do on making the posts more friendly (by default it labels your post with the filename), but seems very useful.

On the road to geekdom...

Yup, it started early in our family. Here are the boys visiting their virtual animal pets at Webkinz.com.

Lest you think only the boys are geeks, Katye is in the office playing from our Mac. :-)

Cameron is surprisingly adept at navigating the fairly complicated Webkinz.com world given that he barely has the fine motor skills needed to control a mouse -- oh, plus he can't read.