I’ve mentioned how fantastic the ad block firefox extension is in the past. Properly configured, you need never look at an ad again. I’ve also linked to the location of a great, regularly updated set of filters at pierceive.com. The problem is you have to remember to update periodically, and given the struggle going on between the advertisers who want you to see their ads and the rest of the world who would rather not, you really need to update pretty regularly, which is something of a hassle. Enter the Filterset.G Updater, a firefox extension that will automatically update your filterset every 5 days. Sounds like an anti-virus checker, doesn’t it? It’s still in beta but has been working fine for me since beta 2 (they’re up to beta 3 now). If you’d rather not see ads when you’re browsing, get this up and running. And install the most excellent Flashblock extension while you’re at it, so you can opt out of any non-essential flash content.

Well, actually just across networks, where it’s the most infuriating. If you run servers and you’re sick of having to clean up the bajillions of .DS_Store files macs dump everywhere on your drives, get the mac support person/s to read this brief documentation then get them to make the appropriate changes on the macs attached to the network. It won’t make the problem go away, but it will reduce the volume somewhat. I understand the usefulness of these files but I think Apple is being a bad network citizen by shipping their machines with this setting on by default. It makes sense on an all-mac network, which exists in maybe .01% of the networks in the world. The rest of the world’s networks would appreciate Mac’s keeping their metadata to themselves.

…and it was good. But then it stopped being updated, and there was some small gnashing of teeth. But then the good folks at Genii Software took over and started updating it again, and there was much rejoicing in webgeek land.

Evernote is most closely related to Macintosh tools like Hog Bay Notebook and Aquaminds Notetaker – it’s a note taking/personal organization tool. It distinguishes itself in a couple of ways. Firstly it has an attractive and well designed interface. It also supports a ton of data formats and input methods, allowing you to draw together web pages/snippets of html, handwritten text recorded with a tablet or digital pen, imagery, and data from a spreadsheet all into one collection of materials. It also has native support for Tablet PC’s ink and has handwriting recognition. It has a couple of useful tools for organizing your content – the somewhat standard categories and the timeline ‘tape’ view which lets you see your content as you added it over time. Additionally it has some built in templates for things like todos, shopping lists and other personal organizational tasks. It also features rudimentary outliner support and comes with excellent documentation. This is a really promising and well designed app that’s worth a look for windows users looking for some help organizing their digital (and analog) lives.

I mentioned camstudio recently. Today I found an alternative solution, also free. Wink. It can’t output to video (it only outputs to flash) but it’s more featureful in terms of markup and presentation tools you can use to overlay instructions, text, audio, pictures and so on onto the screen recordings you make. It also runs on Linux as well as windows. Again no mac version unfortunately, though since this runs on linux there is at least some hope that it will ultimately run on a mac. This is another package that we’re evaluating for training and documentation purposes. If you need to do screen recording on your windows or linux machine this is well worth a look.

This is pretty cool actually – check out flashearth.com, which is a flash-based interface into the google and microsoft map data. It generally runs a little smoother than the dhtml-based interface on google’s site, and more importantly it lets you switch dynamically between the datasets. This is a really handy and time saving feature. I hope the developers keep enhancing this, it could easily become my default interface into the map data if they get to feature parity with the google and microsoft sites.

Pretend you’re me for a second. You’ve just come off a job where you pulled together a fantastic (ultimately award winning) large scale website redesign project, css based layout, standards compliant, the works (www.bowdoin.edu). You’re proud of your accomplishment and gratified at the recognition you get. You take a new job and quickly discover that the folks at your new job are clueless about css. They argue against the box model on the grounds that it’s too hard to make it work across browsers (translation – they don’t know how to do it, thus it’s too hard), they lay everything out in uber-complicated tables, and they pull shit like putting a call to the same stylesheet multiple times in a single html file because they use dreamweaver and they want their files to correctly appear in wysisyg even when they’re only working on a section of a page. In short, they’re best practices website design retarded. What would you do?

If you’re me, you’d go to battle with these folks by collecting as much data as you can to refute their position, which is what I’m in the midst of doing. Today I found a really great presentation that was given at Seybold San Fran years ago called why tables for layout is stupid (which is, by the way, 3 years old, hopefully serving to further make my point with the folks still stuck in a table-based layout world). Anyway, if you find yourself in a similar position my bet is you’ll find this useful in your discussion with the powers that be. And if you have other handy resources along these lines, please pass them along in the comments below.

(There’s also a great slide in a another presentation from the same timeframe demonstrating the scale of savings one can achieve by moving to CSS just on a bandwidth basis, which they demonstrate by looking at what happened with a redesign on the ESPN site. Check it out – this more than anything seems my most likely leverage point, I’m going to try to use it in a conversation with the CFO).

For years now one of the first things I’ve done on a new machine or new install of a web browser is to set the preferences such that by default I get a blank page when I first launch the browser. I’ve no interest in the ad-laden default pages the various browsers give you by default, and even Firefox’s default google interface represents network resources that need to load when really I’m wanting to go somewhere else. Yes, I really am that impatient. Anyway, that changed today when I installed the bookmarkshomefirefox extension. Basically it allows you to turn your default browser page into an organized, aesthetically pleasing presentation of your own bookmarks, including your ‘live bookmarks’ (ie RSS feeds). Simple, free and useful. Check it out.