Tech

Some small tips and tidbits on bytes.

Themeing Firefox and Thunderbird

In past posts I have covered add-ons for both Firefox and Thunderbird, here I want to tell you about themes.  Now themes may not seem as useful as add-ons to you but they do have an important purpose. They do more then just change colours and icons within the program. They allow you to blend the program into the rest of your computer environment.  For most spending any time selecting a theme may seem like a waste of time, but for me it is as important as making changes in my physical environment around me.

Let me explain by giving you the example of what I use for a Firefox and Thunderbird theme.  The theme I use for both is called PitchDark.  As the name would suggest the theme is dark, in other words instead of being brightly coloured with lots of white areas the theme changes most of the colours to darkgreys, browns and black.  Now as it turns out this is not an easy thing to do.  There are many dark themes that fail to maintain readability when recasting the colours.

So why would I choose a dark theme? Well I spend too much time in front of a computer, 8+ hours at work and then a few hours each evening at home.  For me staring all day at a computer screen is pretty painful on the eyes.  Over the years I have found that if I make the background of most my programs black then my eye strain seems to be greatly reduced.  For my most often used programs I try find a theme that is dark or some settings that allow me to adjust the colours to reduce the glaring white areas.

Another reason to theme and make that theme match the rest of your environment is a bit more subversive. I imagine most users of Thunderbird or Firefox could identify them running on a computer screen from some distance. What they recognize is the standard theme.  Change the theme and this will trick a few people.  Select a theme that will make the program look like most of the other programs you are running and it becomes a bit of a challenge.  Maybe this is desirable in a work environment where they really are not paying you to surf the web or read personal emails.

So if you spend a fair amount of time in front of a computer I suggest spending the time at getting themes that you like to look at.  For Firefox and Thunderbird you can start at the Mozilla theme site.

Google Trends: Election 2008

Polls have become the addiction of the election world and I am hooked. After last nights debate I found myself scouring the web looking to see if there was any change. A few points shift here or there but nothing yet that indicates the debates had a major impact on the election.

So with polls not showing much I went looking for something else.  If you have yet to see Google Trends let me explain.  It allows you see graphs of what people are searching for on Google.  You can chart search terms against others, for example cat vs dog, and see the trend of searching over a period of time. You can even narrow it down to a specific country or region.  The amazing thing is the sample size compared to polls that usually only ask a few hundred people.

What can Google Trends tell us about the election?  Well take a look at the data that compares the 4 main national parties.  Interesting to see NDP and Greens well above Liberal and Conservative. Not really sure what it indicates.  Maybe people no less about the two smaller parties. The parties attract more young people then the other two, I figure more young people get there news via the internet then traditional sources.  It won’t probably help predict the winners but I find it interesting.

Google Trends: “Conservative Party”, “Liberal Party”, NDP, “Green Party”.

Google Trends: Harper, Dion, Layton, May.

Google Maps

Google Maps I believe has constantly set the standard for online mapping sites.  I stopped using all the rest simply because they could not keep up.  Thought I would point out some cool new features.

Street Numbers

When looking at streets in a city (works for Ottawa), once you zoom in enough, you will see the starting and ending house numbers for every block.

Bus Stops

You will also see bus stops displayed on the map (again works for Ottawa).  Clicking on an icon brings up route information and departure times.

Leave The Car Behind

Now when getting directions from Google Maps you can select your mode of transportation: car, walking and public transport.  A few tests on the public transport option showed that it even had updated routes based on road closures.  One thing missing would be a bike option.  If your city has a lot of bike paths then this would be very useful.  Currently if you select walking it does not seem to have information about walking or bike paths and instead sends you marching along the roads.

Picking a good password

Security and privacy of information on the Internet is all over the news these days.  Yet I am still amazed at how little the general public knows about selecting a good password.  So if you have an online email account (Google, Hotmail) or a social networking page (Facebook, MySpace) then please take a moment to look at the list of things you should do to make a secure password.

  • First off please don’t use your middle name, street name, city, favourite spot, dog, cat, kids, etc.  This are easy for people you know to guess.  Some of the informaiton can also be found online, like you address on Canada411.
  • A common trick is to pick a phrase you like and use the first letter of each work to create a password.  For example, from the movie Austin Powers “Why must I be surrounded by frickin’ idiots“, would give you the password WmIbsfi.
  • Mix up the cases.  Notice in the example above I used a capital “W” and “I” in the password.
  • Add some number to the beginning or end.  Like your weight or shoe size.  Now the example password is  WmIbsfi11.
  • Finally if the site you are using lets you add one or two special characters in.  You can do this by adding something at the end or beginning.  Better yet replace certain letters with a special character.  For example make an “s” a “$” and an “a” a “@”,  the example password is now WmIb$fi11.

So simple and now you have something that would be next to impossible to guess.

I know remembering several passwords can be a tax so people will often have a favourite that they use for everything.  Can I at least suggest creating two good passwords.  Use one for all your ultra secure needs like banking and Paypal, basically anything that will cost you money or severe headache if someone gets into it.  Use the other for all your fun stuff like Facebook or Hotmail.  This way you aren’t likely to accidently give some web page access to your money.

Final thing (I have been told I write too much), if you are saving passwords on your home machine via Firefox then please go enable the Master Password.  It will stop someone who uses you machine from being able to login to your accounts.  To set up a Master Password goto Tools->Options… then in the pop up window pick Security tab.  Hit the checkbox for Use a master password.  It will prompt you to enter a Master Password.  Make it a good one!  Now everytime you first start your browser up and go to a site for which you have a saved password then it will prompt you for your Master Password.  Just remember that if you then leave your computer with the browser running anyone can access to saved password sites.

Firefox 3 is here

Well sadly this post should have been made several weeks back, but summer is here in Canada which means sitting in front of a computer is the last thing on my mind.

So if you missed it Firefox 3 is out.  If you are running Firefox 2 at the moment, check Help->About Mozilla Firefox, then you need to upgrade.  Sorry this is not something that Firefox will do on its own.  So go here to get the latest version.

There are many new features in version 3 that I am sure you will like.  By far my favourite has been the changes to the URL bar, now called the Smart Location Bar.  This is the bar that displays the current sites URL.

In the past you could use the URL bar to jump to a page that you had already been to by starting to enter the sites URL.  This was ok but I rarely used it and often it was hard to remember the sites URL, even with the browser trying to guess based on what you had entered.

Well in version 3 the URL bar has become my most oftened used interface to find a site.  I rarley have to got to my bookmarks or into my history to find my most often used sites.  Instead of matching on the URL of the site the locaiton bar matches on the page title and other meta information from the site.  So you type “news” and up comes the list of all the news sites you visit.  It also learns by what in the list you click on.  Your most common choices will be at the top of the list.  Very cool.

Other features to try:

  • One click bookmarking just click the star on the end of the location bar.  Fast!
  • You can also tag your bookmarks to make finding them in the location bar faster.
  • Smart bookmark folders, if you are familiar with iTunes Smart Playlists then this is the same idea, by default the new version has Most Visited as an example.

There are a lot more but that should get you started.  I am looking forward to Thunderbird 3!