Ramblings of an Anonymous Coward

What Do You Use?

being the resident geek means i get asked from time to time "what do you use?" in reference to applications, web sites, and so forth. i thought it might be useful to jot a few of those down here for those that might be interested.

for web browsing, while i will use internet explorer from time to time, most of my browsing is done with mozilla firebird. that is not to be confused with mozilla which integrates in email, irc chat, html editing and such. firebird is simple the web browser component. one of the nice features are the extensions available for it. i currently have installed:

• editCSS
  this allows me to edit the current css stylesheet and see the changes right before my eyes. excellent for tweaking a site's style.
• mozilla fbrh 0.6.1
  toolbar enhancements
• session saver
  as you'd expect, it will save your session (tabs) and next time you start the browser, you'll be back where you were.
• tabbrowser extentions
  i loaded this so i could reorder via drag and drop my browser tabs
• tabbrowser preferences
  adds gui options to change some of the hidden tab browser preferences available.
• bookmark backup
  automatically creates backups of my bookmarks.
• dictionary search
  highlight a word on a web page, right click and select this and it does a dictionary lookup for you.
• launchy
  allows me to open links with external programs. cool feature is opening up the current page (or a link) with another browser without having to do the copy & paste dance.
• live http headers
  allows you to see the http server headers and interaction between the browser and the remote server. very handy for debugging some web applications.

speaking of web applications, to deal with rss (real simple syndication) feeds, i've been making use of bloglines. it sure makes life easier when there are a lot of news sites and blogs you are trying to keep up with. it will even import/export opml files making it easier to move to/from this excellent service. i have also begun using a new bookmark-like service that i think is smarter than bookmarks, it is called furl. it's kind of a web page filing cabinet and is meant for maintaining lots of links -- you know, like the ones you save off, but by the time you sort of remember them for something and want to go back to it you can't find it. they've tossed a nice search interface on it to find things and allow you to furl pages with a toolbar button. another nice feature since it is web based is that these furl'ed pages are available from any browser anywhere -- home, work, at a friends house. and you can easily share your furl'ed pages with others.

those apps cover the browser, but then we have the wonderful world of instant messaging. since some folks use aol, others msn or yahoo, i found it to be a pain in the ass to have 3 seperate im-clients. the solution: trillian. while there is the free version, this is one application i think is worth paying a few bucks for and that was what i did to get trillian pro. not only does it allow for you to chat with aol, msn, and yahoo! users it does irc and icq. the pro version adds in jabber support via a plug-in. this im client supports plug-ins for a wide variety of functions including im-forwarding, text-to-voice, and more. my favorite plug-in is one that saves off urls. anytime someone im's me a url, it saves it off and i can go back and reference them anytime in the future. the incoming text conversion is nice too... it can swap on the fly those crazy screen names into something more personal. so when your friend with the screenname ib1coolguy writes you, it can convert and you'll see "joe smith" or whatever you want. a new plug-in i haven't tried will do language conversion. neat huh? there are lots of other plug-ins!!!

if you haven't tried trillian, i suggest you take a peek.

that covers browsing and instant messaging, maybe i'll go into a few unix and/or pc based goodies another time. until then...

Posted by ac at January 22, 2004 11:11 PM