Category: Helpful Tips

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a new advanced tool to help users test their Internet connection for bandwidth interference from their ISP.

Called ‘Switzerland,’ the open source, command line tool was created in response to the FCC’s landmark decision last week to fine Comcast for restricting P2P traffic on its broadband network.

Part of the EFF’s Test Your ISP project, Switzerland can detect anti-P2P tools like Sandvine and Audible Magic, and is able to keep copies of any modified data that your ISP injects into your file transfer. This is significant as anti-P2P software typically modifies data being transferred which then tricks your computer into terminating the connection.

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This is an amazing setup of a camera with a laser trigger to take a shot of insects in flight and a water droplets. click here to see how they did this and for more amazing pics.

Share any song in your iTunes library and download any song from your friend’s iTunes libraries over the internet with freeware application Mojo. Essentially, Mojo makes sharing music with your friends through iTunes wildly simple, from its simple interface to its brilliant implementation. If you’ve ever used un apps like ourTunes to download music from shared libraries, you have an idea of what Mojo does, but you should still prepare to be amazed.

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Macro lens are expensive. This how to will show you how to creat a macro reverse ring for almost nothing.

Reverse rings can be used to shoot macro shots using non-macro lens.

The only thing that you need is an old Camera Body Cap, Unused camera lens filter, Some Quick setting glue (Super Glue)
and Some Epoxy Glue.

For step by step instructions click here

In No Particular Order

Adblock - Once installed, it’s a snap to filter elements at their source-address.
Just right-click: Adblock: done. Filters use either the wildcard character (*)
or full Regular Expression syntax. Hit the status-element and see what has or
hasn’t been blocked.

DictionarySearch - Looks up a user selected word in an online dictionary

Google Preview - Inserts preview images (thumbnails) of web sites and Amazon products into the Google and Yahoo search results pages.

BugMeNot - Bypass compulsory web registration via Firefox’s right-click context menu. Compatibile with Mozilla and current Firefox releases. Visit bugmenot.com for full details of their service.

StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for finding and sharing great sites. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for.

VideoDownloader - Download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion… and other 60+ video sites ! And all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc) ! Directly !

Tab History - TabHistory provides two histories of the tabs.

The first history is automatic. Whenever you change tab, the tab you change to will be added to this history. To go back to the previous tab, press Ctrl+, (Ctrl+comma). To go to the next tab in the history, press Ctrl+. (Ctrl+dot).

The second history is manual. To add a tab to this history press Ctrl+Shift+M (think "mark tab"). To go back to the previous tab in this history press Ctrl+Shift+, and to go to the next tab in this history press Ctrl+Shift+.

This saves you from the situation of having many many tabs open and not being able to remember which one you were previously at and thus having to spend ages searching through all your open tabs.

Tab Effect - Add effects when current tab is changed. this extension uses DirectX 8.

Sage - Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox. It’s got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don’t.

Super DragAndGo - Drag a link or anything like a uri (e.g. "abc.com" ), and throw it to anywhere blank on the webpage to open the it in a new tab.

Colorful Tabs - The most beautiful yet the simplest add-on that makes a strong colorful appeal. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface. An essential.

IE Tab - IE Tab - an extension from Taiwan, features: Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox.

FireFTP - FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SSL encryption, file hashing, and much more!

GreaseMonkey - Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.
Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of poular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org.
You can write your own scripts, too. Mark Pilgrim’s definitive Greasemonkey guide, diveintogreasemonkey.org will show you how.

Image Zoom - Easily zoom in, zoom out, fit image to screen or set custom zoom on individual images within a web page. All this can be done by using the context menu or a combination of mouse buttons and scroll wheel. Handy to see the finer details of smaller pics or to make very large pics fit within your screen.

Auto Copy - Select text and it’s automaticaly copied to the clipboard. Like Linux or mIrc.

gTranslate - With gTranslate you can translate any text in a webpage just by selecting and right-clicking over it. The extension uses the Google translation services to translate the text.
gTranslate is not affiliated with Google Inc. in any way.

Foxmarks - If you use Firefox on more than one computer, you’ll want Foxmarks. Install Foxmarks on each computer, and it will work silently in the background to keep your bookmarks synchronized. As a bonus, log in to my.foxmarks.com from any computer anywhere to access your bookmarks.

A simple wizard guides you through the startup process. After that, just forget about it. It’s simple and solid.

URL Fixer

URL Fixer is an extension for Mozilla-based Web browsers that corrects typos in URLs that you enter in the address bar. For example, if you type google.con, it will correct it to google.com (asking first, if you enable confirmation).

Speed Dial

Speed Dial allows fast access to your most visited websites. It loads in a tab, and will show thumbnail views of it’s assigned websites. Those thumbnails will be refreshed automatically in the background.

Firefox Showcase

Showcase provides a new way to manage your Firefox tabs and windows by showing them as thumbnails in a single window, tab or sidebar. Includes a find bar that will filter the thumbnails, and the capability to select the thumbnails in the same way you would select files in your system.

Zotero

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

PicLens

PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. Photos will come to life via a cinematic presentation that goes well beyond the confines of the traditional browser window. With PicLens, browsing and viewing images on the web will never be the same again.
NEW! Immerse yourself in 3D Style.

I will add to this list when I find more my favorite Firefox Extensions.

It doesn’t seem to work in Leopard.

If you’re using Apple’s Safari browser, PayPal has some advice for you: Drop it, at least if you want to avoid online fraud.
Safari doesn’t make PayPal’s list of recommended browsers because it doesn’t have two important anti-phishing security features, according to Michael Barrett, PayPal’s chief information security officer.

“Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers,” Barrett said in an interview. “Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera.”

Safari is the default browser on Apple’s Macintosh computers and the iPhone, but it is also available for the PC. Both Firefox and Opera run on the Mac.

Unlike its competitors, Safari has no built-in phishing filter to warn users when they are visiting suspicious Web sites, Barrett said. Another problem is Safari’s lack of support for another anti-phishing technology, called Extended Validation (EV) certificates. This is a secure Web browsing technology that turns the address bar green when the browser is visiting a legitimate Web site.

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Microsoft, IBM, Google and Yahoo have joined the board of the Open ID Foundation which aims to streamline login systems across the web. The Foundation wants to bring about a system that could mean one ID acts as a guarantor of a person’s identity across all the sites they have signed up for.
Already more than 10,000 websites have adopted the Open ID approach.
Open ID aims to remove some of the need to keep creating new login names and passwords by adopting the approach used by your computer when it looks up a site name you type into an browser address bar.
“Open ID was always intended to be a decentralized sign-on system,” said Brad Fitzpatrick, a Google software engineer who created OpenID while at blog software maker Six Apart. “It’s fantastic to join a foundation committed to keeping it free and unencumbered by proprietary extensions.”

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Read more with video here, Download the app here

Cassette Tape Cellphone Charger! - The funniest movie is here. Find it