browser

Following a is a list of cool stuff I didn't have time to write individual posts about.

Random Web stuff

MyOpenID - If you don't know what OpenID is, think of it this way, one sign in authentication process for every website that supports it. Drupal 6 has it, Yahoo has it, lots of places have it - learn more about OpenID and get your own.

Tagurself - enter a feed link or a url and it generates a tag cloud for you.

TeamViewer - excellent remote desktop sharing software - and its free!

Microsoft SharedView - remote connection - sharing applications - great for training people how to do things remotely.

Firefox has several security settings you can use to keep your computer safe. There are also hundreds of extensions that you can add to give you further privacy & security. Lisa Hoover has written a great article on a few of these extensions. For example a good way to protect your computer is to prevent the browser from using JavaScript at Web sites without permission, the NoScript extension makes every site that uses JavaScript ask your permission before running it. It can render some JavaScript-heavy sites unreadable but provides a whitelist of acceptable sites that you can add to speed up your surfing experience.

At Jethro the extensions we always install on any new pc are, Plain old favourites, Session Manager, Tab Browser Preferences and Delicious.

Its happened. Labours new minister for the idiots - I mean Internet, has advised that they will be supporting mandatory ISP filtering - supposedly to protect children from pornography. Download their "plan for cyber safety". The plan starts of talking about the need to educate and a combined approach by parents and teachers - sounds good. How do they plan to do this? By providing a mandatory clean feed. What the heck is that?

Lachlan Heyward from the Herald Sun writes:

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said everything possible had to be done to shield children from violent and pornographic online material.

"We have always argued more needs to be done to protect children," he said.

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Following is the edited text from a conversation with my sister helping her set up RSS feeds for our family blogs. Maybe it will help you.

Jethro the santa (hes not real!) claus says (1:32 AM):

do u have a Gmail account?

u have blogger so I guess you do actually

go to http://www.google.com/reader/view/

login there

in Firefox when you go to a website with an rss feed you can click on it and it will give you the option to add to Google reader automatically

u may need to set it up in the options in Firefox

go to tools and options

then feeds

choose the default application for reader

I use Google reader

yahoo is just as good

means they can be read anywhere - not tied to a computer

just need to login

Rufus says (1:35 AM):

The TouchGraph Google browser is a free Java application that allows you to explore the connections between related websites. All you have to do to use it is to:

1. Make sure you have the latest version of java, Java 1.5
2. Type in your search keywords or a URL, and press "Graph It!"
3. Say "Run" when asked "Do you want to trust the signed applet?"
4. Disable popup blockers to allow launching websites.

Try it out!

I have been using the Australian Tax Office Portal for years now to submit my monthly and quarterly GST returns. Until recently it never worked in Firefox, and I often had all sorts of problems with IE. However the support desk was always able to get it working (except once where they gave up and got me to request new digital certificates). However this time the problem was related to IE 7 and Java 6 on a Vista machine. Too much - poor old IE cant't do it - in their words "it gets confused about where the local certificate store is". Fortunately Firefox is not only a supported browser now but preferred!

My tax will be submitted in Firefox from now on. 

I spent 3 hours in the weekend cleaning viruses and trojan horses out of a friend's computer. They had popups happenning galore and the pc was running so slow because of all the applications that were loading at start time it almost wasn't functioning at all.

The worst thing, they had been sold the PC and Windows XP and Office 2003 by some dodgy backyard bloke who had given them illegal unlicensed software, though they were unaware of that fact.

Do you have a problem with Firefox running slow and want to make it fast without re-installation? You've tried uninstalling the extension & toolbars, deleted cookies and temporary files, cleared up the file download queue and disabled the background check for software updates and still nothing seems faster. Here's a solution that Amit has suggested:

Step 1: Start Firefox and export your bookmarks as a file on your hard-drive (we'll need them later).
Step 2: Type firefox.exe - P in the Run box of Windows.
Step 3: Click the Create Profile button without making any modifications to your existing profile (which is normally called "default")

Now when you Start Firefox in the new profile, you are very likely to be impressed with the speed.