Cool ‘net toys
February 24th, 2008 -- Posted in Ramblings, Tech stuff | 11 Comments »This post was inspired by Dawn who commented that I had great plugins. I love my widgets, plugins, addons, and extensions…
I spent yesterday afternoon wiping the old laptop and reinstalling the OS. In December we gave my old Inspiron 600m to the girls. It’s battery life was pathetic, but they didn’t care. It was theirs and they didn’t have to use the old PC for games, they could sit in the den with us and enjoy the relaxation room. Before long a couple of lights were blinking red. It still worked, but I couldn’t figure out why the thing was blinking. I determined it had to do with the battery and they should just be certain to plug in for each use. Late January it stopped working altogether. I just knew the motherboard was toast. Big ‘bit received a Bratz doll for her birthday and wanted to use the Be-bratz deal that came with it. Guess what, not compatible with Vista. All computers that were Internet capable would not allow the Be-bratz to install. I was inspired to attempt Inspiron 600 repair. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least try a reinstall. After gathering the disks I set off to wipe it clean. This is a scary thing to do. Even though the laptop was unusable it would be more useless if I deleted the OS and couldn’t get it reinstalled. The decision was made to take the plunge and it worked. The OS was reinstalled and things seem to be working smoothly. After the reinstall I had to download AVG for virus protection, Firefox for web browsing, and the necessary add-ons for Firefox.
What is Firefox? You must know. It is what IE7 wants to be and modeled itself after. I love it. You can customize the look and add all sorts of great tools. My favorite part is the button bar. All of my favorite sites are a button click away. No dropping down the bookmark tab and searching for the right site. Just click, and go as fast as your connection will allow. How much? FREE! Where do you get it? Mozilla.com is the place. Here’s what happened. Netscape and IE were in competition. IE became the top browser and was packaged with all new PCs. Netscape sold out to AOL and the guys of Netscape started to create and open-source system. Mozilla Firefox was born. A community of users and developers help to make it the best browser available. Yes, that is jmho, but I think I’m right. If you are familiar with Netscape you will recognize similarities, but it is so much better.
I mention FF because I went to download one of my favorite add-ons for the girls. The Firefox filter made us feel much better about them browsing the WWW. Instead of finding the Foxy-filter I found a new add-on called Glubble. From their site:
Glubbles are bubbles of web content you trust for your child to see online. Discover a wide selection of Glubbles we’ve prepared for you, then modify them to suit your personal family values to build the web you want.
It includes Disney, Nick, and all the usual kid sites along with MANY more. You can add any site you want to their available sites. If they try to go to a site that is not included in Glubbles it will block it. They can send a request to have it allowed. I installed the add-on to my computer so that I can see where they are going on the net and allow/deny requests for other sites. There is a family messaging feature in Glubbles. The girls like to leave comments to each other on “the wall.” The Google searches are modified to block content that may be inappropriate. I have been struggling with the Google search within the Glubble kids window, but haven’t found this to be a problem because I do not allow the girls to search the net for whatever they want. If they have a research assignment we sit down and search together. Glubble is still in development, but I believe it is a great tool for those who have children on the ‘net. You do have to be a Firefox user, but it works with any OS.
Other tools…
I love my Foxytunes. It allows you to control your music player (for me iTunes) from within the Firefox window. There are also search features incorporated, but I do not use these often. Foxytunes will also include your current music into a blog post or email. Just a button click. Example:
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Relaxing to the sounds of: Steely Dan - Josie
via FoxyTunes
If you do a good bit of research you might find Zotero helpful. One-note is an office product that allows cut/paste for notetaking while you browse and it saves the URL for documentation. I like One-note and I use it to stay organized at school, but I do not like it for note-taking while web-browsing. Zotero works within the browser and allows you to add screen shots for later reference. I can not describe it and do the program justice, but they have a great video tutorial here.
Those are my favorite Firefox extensions and it took up a good bit of posting space so I will keep my Wordpress favs short.
First, the new versions of Wordpress allow widget use which makes life so much easier. Less dealings with code and tags. My favorite WP plugin is one that no one sees. Advanced Admin Menus turns your admin page into drop down menus instead of buttons. Yes, I’m lazy. I don’t want to click button after button to get where I need to go. It’s something like clicking 1 for English, 1 for current customer, 1 for billing, 2 for repair, 3 for fed up with automated systems… I also like comment-luv which links to a commenters last blog post. Bad Behavior and Spam Karma do a great job keeping spam off the blog, but I would love to have an anti-troll plugin. Bannage is OK, but really a troll is called a troll for a reason.
Lastly, I found two new programs that have made You Tube use in PPT easier. TubeDownload and Free FLV converter. I think the FLV converter will do the same as the download but I’m still playing with both of these.
That’s it for now…thanks for stopping by.
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Relaxing to the sounds of: Aerosmith - I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing
via FoxyTunes
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