quietmint

Make Gmail Your New Year's Resolution

2009-01-01T12:38:00.006-07:00

Welcome to 2009! If you haven't joined the revolution, now is the perfect time to switch to Gmail. With the best spam filtering in the industry, instant search, built-in video chat, intuitive message organization using labels and conversations, free POP and IMAP access, and virtually unlimited storage, why use anything else?

Unless your using Hotmail or Yahoo Mail (sorry!), chances are high that you can even forward your old e-mail address to your new Gmail account. If you're still not convinced, consider this: Gmail users are younger, richer, good in bed and have higher credit scores.

Make Firefox Look Like Google Chrome

2008-10-11T13:42:00.005-06:00

As cool as Google Chrome is, many of us have been reluctant to switch due to the lack of AdBlock Plus. With a few quick tweaks, however, you can give Firefox some of the same look and feel:

Of course, you're not getting Chrome's performance improvements by doing this, but it's at least a start. Shown above is my Firefox 3 looking like the Chrome browser [running in Linux with the chrome-like GTK theme and the MurrinaChrome Emerald theme]. Here is what I did to achieve this:

Change the appearance.
- Install the Chromifox theme for the overall look and feel
- Install the LocationBar² extension for address bar highlighting
- Install the Download Statusbar extension for Chrome-like download tracking
Unify the address and search bars.
- Get rid of the search box. From the View menu, select Toolbars > Customize and drag the Search box off the toolbar so it disappears.
- Change the address bar search behavior to show results: In about:config, change the value of keyword.URL to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&q=
- To restore the functionality of your search plugins, create Smart Keywords for your favorite websites.
Speed up cross-site browsing by installing the DNS Prefetch extension.

quietmint's AdBlock Plus List

2008-08-21T18:57:00.005-06:00

I've launched an AdBlock Plus filtering list. If you're using AdBlock Plus, click below to add it and catch some text ads and other annoyances not found on the included EasyList.

Subscribe

Just Add Potato

2008-07-28T02:07:00.001-06:00

I was recently taken to a new low looking through this weekend's newspaper. I am now the shamed owner of a coupon for a product called Potato Finishers.

All-American Potato Finishers ("Great on baked and mashed potatoes!"). This is exactly what America needs. How have we been eating potatoes for all these years without this product? Basically, it is a bag containing cheese sauce, shredded cheese, and bacon bits. It's not like you could buy cheese sauce, shredded cheese, and bacon bits in already-prepared, individual packages and then apply all three items to a potato separately. Moreover, it's not like you could buy a chunk of cheese and shred it yourself, or buy packaged bacon and cook it yourself. The fact that the main ingredient is missing from the product should be your cue to run in the other direction. If that's not enough of a hint, seeing that the widely-publicized coupon allows the "savvy" shopper to "save" $1 on this item, the price should scare off the rest of you; I'd guess $3 - $4.

Perhaps even more disconcerting than the Potato Finishers themselves is the fact that a Google search for "potato finishers" returns eBay auctions for the very coupon to which I earlier referred as the first result. It's not enough that our planet is littered with this coupon in who knows how many newspapers across the country; people are now selling this same coupon for actual money. There are presently 8997 food coupons listed on eBay. You probably had no idea that there is such brisk trade in food coupons happening right under your nose. Is there really a market for mass quantites of useless food coupons? I am also unsettled by the fact that a single product line now merits its own domain registration (thank goodness sargentofinishers.com was available, imagine the horror if terrorists had snatched up the domain and our All-American Potato Finishers couldn't have their own website) and web design efforts. As the nutritional information and even the list of ingredients is conveniently absent from this special website (it's a food product, what else could the website legitimately have?), what does appear on the site is laughable. I'm not sure I'd agree that pictures of fake cheese mixtures on top of various degrees of fried potatoes qualifies as "exciting serving suggestions". Not to be outdone, the hidden nutrition facts are equally bothersome: 1/4 of the small pouch is considered a single serving and has 23% of your daily saturated fat intake and 25% of your daily sodium. Ah, America owes you a vote of thanks, Potato Finishers.

The FBI Is Now Your Fairy Godmother

2008-03-24T00:29:00.002-06:00

Hey keys, now having your home raided by the FBI and getting arrested is just a click away! Add illegal hyperlinks to the exponentially-increasing multitude of dangers to avoid in our modern world:

The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them. [...]

Federal agents knocked on the door around 7 a.m., falsely claiming they wanted to talk to Vosburgh about his car. Once he opened the door, they threw him to the ground outside his house and handcuffed him.

It's been quite a frightening week, but this is still the scariest thing I've read in a while. It's more upsetting than knowing thieves can hack RFID credit cards for $8. It's more distressing than Verizon giving the government direct access to all customer's mobile voice calls, text messages, and physical location data. It's even worse than Comcast being able to watch you through cameras they're putting into their cable boxes. Why? Precedent is so important, and given that the government doesn't even understand what the Internet is, they are in absolutely no position to be criminalizing it. I'm not defending child pornography, but the Internet browsing I do in my own home is absolutely none of the FBI's business. Clicking on a hyperlink should never be considered a crime, and it should never cause authority figures to show up at your door, grab you, throw you in a van, and haul you off to jail... or worse. What's to stop them from extending the illegal hyperlinks baiting beyond porn?

I'm so glad that the government will be able to pair this technique with the Patriot Act to keep America safe from all those ~~ordinary people~~ terrorists searching the Internets for "weapons" and "drugs" (nevermind they were actually looking for "history of Japanese weapons" and "cancer drugs and treatment options"). Of course, the private sector and their lobbying showboat wouldn't miss the party, either; nothing would please the RIAA or MPAA more than having armed officers dispatched to your door for attempting to download music or movies online. Ah, freedom! Don't you feel better already? :-p

Fat America, Meet Web 2.0

2008-03-16T01:43:00.007-06:00

What is the world coming to? Does anyone else find the idea of a calorie-counting Firefox extension as hypocritical as it is undeniably disturbing?

Google Maps Bookmarklet

2008-03-15T01:34:00.000-06:00

Make getting directions easier with a Google Maps bookmarklet; just drag this link to the Bookmarks toolbar in your web browser. Now you can highlight an address on any webpage and click your shiny new Map It button to instantly see the place on a map! :-)

Map It

Label All Forwarded Messages In Gmail

2008-03-05T01:49:00.007-07:00

If you're like me, you've gotten tired of checking each of your multiple email accounts and have finally decided to have all of your mail forwarded to your main Gmail account. You login to the extraneous accounts and set them to forward to you@gmail.com. You login to Gmail and setup filters based on the To: header so your forwarded mail is automatically colored orange. It sounds like a great plan -- and it is -- until you discover that only some of the forwarded messages are getting labeled. Huh? As it turns out, those mailing list messages are addressed To: mailing.list@school.edu and those viral marketers can't be bothered with the To: header at all, so your filters aren't very effective.

Fear not, however, because there is a simple solution to this problem! This trick works because of plus addressing, a feature in Gmail that allows you to create an unlimited number of email addresses by adding a plus symbol (+) after your username. In other words, all mail sent to you+anything@gmail.com will arrive in your inbox. You can take advantage of this when aggregating your email accounts by having your secondary accounts forward to a unique plus address. For example, set your school email to forward to you+school@gmail.com and set your spam account to forward to you+junk@gmail.com.

Now for the real key: Gmail has a secret "deliveredto:" search operator that will catch all mail arriving at the given email address -- whether or not you were listed in the To: header. In other words, this will even apply to messages from mailing lists and bcc emails. To automatically label you forwarded junk mail, for example, create a new filter and type deliveredto:you+junk@gmail.com in the Has the words textbox. Congratulations, now all of your forwarded email will be automatically labeled! [Update 3/28/08 (thanks Phil): The deliveredto: operator expects you to enter the entire email address, but if you want to filter on just a portion of the email address, you can place it inside of double quotes (for example, deliveredto:"+junk").]

[Update 3/5/08: Wow, what timing! An Official Gmail Blog post about plus address appeared about six hours after this was published. Although plus addressing is nothing new, this is the first time Google has publicly acknowledged its existence on their blog. They didn't mention the real secret to making plus addressing work, though, which is the "deliveredto:" operator.]