Tech Stuff 4 You

The folks over at Lifehacker.com have created an ‘ultimate’ extension which incorporates the best Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail.

Definitely a must-have for Gmail users like me.

Install the extension from Lifehacker.

Gizmodo reporting that the Sidekick ID is now official from T-Mobile. Looks pretty sweet!

T-Mobile Sidekick iD Makes A Statement Personalization and Affordable Style Drive T-Mobile Sidekick iD BELLEVUE, Wash. - April 13, 2007 - T-Mobile USA, Inc. today announces the new T-Mobile(r) Sidekick(r) iD, offering the latest in personalization on a communication device at an accessible price of $99.1 Designed to include the spontaneous communication features synonymous with the iconic brand, the T-Mobile Sidekick iD also offers spur-of-the-moment personalization with easily removable and replaceable exterior panels.

The customizable exterior of the T-Mobile Sidekick iD provides quick modification of the outside of the device with fashionable colors to match anyone's style, mood or that evening's outfit. Inside the device, customers will feast on the famous buffet of communications capabilities that make it simple to stay directly connected with family and friends, or stay on top of their favorite social networks and other Web sites.2

The T-Mobile Sidekick iD is designed for virtually anytime, anywhere communication through voice calling and a robust variety of options for messaging-based communication. The signature swivel screen is designed to be a large, color window into one's own personal life. The screen moves to reveal the full QWERTY keyboard providing the luxury of staying connected through the always-on access to e-mail, instant messaging (AIM(r), Yahoo!(r) and Windows Live Messenger), and text messaging.

"The T-Mobile Sidekick has always been about freedom of expression and communicating with style," said Greg Andrews, director, marketing, T-Mobile USA. "With the T-Mobile Sidekick iD, we're expanding on the theme of individuality by increasing the personalization aspect and providing pricing that is accessible to a wide range of consumers."

The T-Mobile Sidekick iD will have T-Mobile's myFavesSM available out of the box. The unique myFaves experience provides additional customization as the home screen contains images of the five people that matter most or are called the most often. The myFaves interface also enables access to a straightforward communications menu for effortless calling, texting, multimedia messaging and e-mail. Customers can choose from a range of myFaves plans to get unlimited calling to those five designated people - to any number in the U.S., even land lines (excluding toll-free and 900 numbers) - that make up their personal network.3

Key features of T-Mobile Sidekick iD include the easily personalized hardware to express individuality and style as well as the following:
* T-Mobile Sidekick's signature swivel screen with a large landscape color display (2.4-inch screen with 65K colors and 240X160 pixels) for improved viewing of Web pages and contacts
* A full HMTL Web browser with enhancements for faster downloading and optimized viewing2
* Beneath the screen, a full QWERTY keyboard ideal for speedy instant messaging and other text-based communication
* Dedicated support for three major instant messaging clients (AIM, Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger) with the ability to hold up to 10 IM conversations at one time to stay constantly connected to a social circle
* Support for personal e-mail with a dedicated "t-mail" account or use of an already existing personal e-mail account
* Inclusion of myFaves for additional personalization and the benefit of unlimited calling to any number on any network, including landlines, to stay connected to the five people who matter most
* A convenient trackball for one-handed navigation and an improved gaming experience
* A speedy ARM9 processor to handle the massively multitasking communicators
* Replaceable battery with up to 5.3 hours of talk time and 6 days of standby
* Dimensions: 5.12 x 2.48 x 0.87 inches; 6.2 ounces with standard battery
* Accessories available in black, yellow, blue, white, purple and glow-in-the-dark

The T-Mobile Sidekick iD will be available for $99.99 (with a qualifying two-year contract and mail-in rebate) at T-Mobile retail locations and online at www.t-mobile.com beginning April 25. For more information on T-Mobile Sidekick, please visit www.sidekick.com.

Computerworld lists the top 10 Firefox extensions to avoid, based on whether they have any side effects, are memory hogs, or affect your browsing experience negatively. Check them out and comment on if you agree or not.

Fasterfox: This Web accelerator has a "pre-fetching" mechanism that makes you a very bad Web citizen. Here's how it works: You land on a page and start reading it. While your system is idle, Fasterfox silently starts following links and downloading the destination pages. The idea is that if you then decide to click on one of these links, the page is already cached on your local machine and will pop up very quickly.

NoScript : This extension is hugely popular and works as advertised, giving you control over which JavaScript, Java and other executable content on a page can run, depending on that content's source domain. You whitelist the sites you consider safe and blacklist the sites you don't.

Adblock and Adblock Plus : Obviously, we have some bias when it comes to ad-blocking extensions, as Computerworld is an ad-supported site. We also understand that these are very popular extensions. But if everyone blocked ads, how would sites such as ours continue to offer content free of charge?

PDF Download: Here's another extension that works as advertised and is very popular, but it seems like overkill for most users and can cause headaches for others. PDF Download lets you control how Firefox handles PDF files when you click on them -- you can display a pop-up box that lets you choose whether to download, open
or view the file as HTML. You can also set it to take one of these actions by default, skipping the pop-up.

VideoDownloader: Homegrown video is hot right now, and why not? Sites like YouTube and Google Video make it easy to put content online for Web denizens to enjoy. The VideoDownloader extension promises a way to download video from these sites and many more for your offline viewing pleasure. Sounds great, right?
The problem is that the extension has to connect to a Web site in order to work, and more often than not, you'll find that instead of a download window, what you get is "Service Temporarily Unavailable." When it does finally work, the download is
infuriatingly slow.

Greasemonkey: Hey, wait just a minute. Wasn't this on our list of best extensions? Well, yes it was. Greasemonkey is a really nifty extension to use, as long as you know what you're doing with it. It can potentially get you in trouble because it allows JavaScripts written by other people to run in Firefox. If one of those scripts is malicious, your system could be at risk. ScribeFire (formerly Performancing): This falls into the category of extensions that seem pointless. What we have here is a browser-based tool for writing blog posts. But don't most blogs already have a browser-based editor that works just fine?

TrackMeNot: This is another of those extensions for the overly paranoid. The developers apparently became concerned with search engine profiling -- the process in which search engines track your queries and build a demographic profile of you based on those queries -- after a list of three months' worth of search queries from 657,000 AOL members was released on the Web. A small section of a log file of searches performed by TrackMeNot. We don't mean to downplay privacy concerns, but the technique used in TrackMeNot is questionable. The extension runs in the
background while you surf, and sends random search queries to AOL, Yahoo, Google
and MSN search engines. What a waste of system resources for both you and the
search engines you rely on!

Tabbrowser Preferences: This extension lets you tweak Firefox's tab settings in various minor ways. For instance, you can add a New Tab button to your tab bar, or control whether the Close Tab icon appears on each tab or at the end of the tab bar. It works fine.

Tabbrowser Extensions: This extension is a real heavyweight but seems quite popular in certain Firefox circles -- it almost seems to be a rite of passage for Firefox nerds. It gives you lots of control over how tabbed browsing works and even supports plug-ins to add even more functionality. However, it is buggy and conflicts with many other extensions. In fact, even its developers suggest that you not install it!

Bonus: Watch out for the Numbered Links 0.9 imposter: There's nothing wrong with the Numbered Links 0.9 extension per se. By showing numbers next to links, buttons and other interactive elements on Web pages, it lets you navigate without using a mouse. If you chose to install Numbered Links 0.9 previously, there's no reason not to go on using it if you find it helpful (though you might be interested in Conkeror by the same developer).
However, if you see this extension in your add-ons list and don't recall installing it, then tread carefully. There's a version that has been modified into the FormSpy Trojan, which installs itself as a Firefox extension and keeps the title "Numbered Links 0.9." FormSpy can potentially capture information entered into HTML forms and send them on to a malicious Web site. For more information, see McAfee's FormSpy profile.

O’Reilly Media has opened the O’Reilly School of Technology at http://www.oreillyschool.com/. You can take a bunch of information technology and related courses and even get credits from The University of Illinois at $400 a pop.

Top 5 Most Popular Courses
Introduction to HTML and CSS
Linux/Unix 1: The Unix File System
Learn Object-Oriented Programming using Java
Learn XML Programming
Learn Perl for CGI Programming

I don’t know about you, but I am not comfortable saving all my passwords on some online site. According to Clipperz, you don’t even need to trust them with your information, because they encrypt everything before storing it on their databases. I don’t know about this.

From Clipperz.com:

Clipperz benefits

• Free and completely anonymous.


• Access any time from any computer.


• No software to download and nothing to install.


• Avoid keeping secrets on your PC or on paper.

Why you don’t need to trust Clipperz

• Clipperz let you submit confidential information into your browser, but your secrets are locally encrypted by the browser itself before being uploaded to Clipperz.


• The key for the encryption process is a passphrase known only to you! Clipperz will not be able to recover a lost passphrase because we don’t know it. Actually we don’t even know the username you have chosen!


• Clipperz simply hosts your sensitive data in encrypted form and could never actually access the data in its plain form.


• Your browser is a powerful “number crunching” tool, capable of executing cryptographic algorithms thanks to our Clipperz Crypto Library, a JavaScript collection of cryptographic primitives.


• Clipperz does not use homemade cryptographic algorithms but implements standard strong encryption schemes. You can review the source code anytime you like, but you need to know nothing about cryptography to be an happy user!
  

What do you think? Is it safer to save it online rather than saving it on your laptop with a password manager like Roboform?

Extremetech has a nice article on how to speed up Windows Vista by getting rid of stuff you don’t need and some other nifty tips. Check it out.

Performance is probably the most coveted intangible when it comes to PCs, and tweaking, to the performance hungry, is considered more of a necessity than an option. Gearheads go to great lengths to get quicker system response times, faster-running games, and shorter PC bootup and shutdown times.

One way is to overclock the heck out of the poor components (and then, for bragging rights, to log on to a message board and claim a stable CPU frequency of about 300MHz faster than what's actually possible). Another way is to tweak out the operating system itself.

PCWorld lists its version of the 50 best tech products of all time. What do you think?

Great step by step tutorial on how to install XP on a machine that came with Windows Vista pre-installed. I will definitely be doing this on the laptop I just bought with pre-installed Vista.

In a monumental decision today, EMI announced that they will sell DRM free music on iTunes. Gizmodo has a nice write-up on what this means as far as the RIAA’s fight against piracy and all that c*ap.

So… holy crap. EMI is releasing their music on iTunes without DRM. This is great news! And not only that, but they're offering it at twice the quality of the DRM'd equivalent. This is a huge step forward for the online music marketplace.

So how does this affect our movement against the RIAA? On the one hand, EMI is still a member of the RIAA and the RIAA is still suing college students and invalids. On the other hand, this is a huge test of the DRM-free music market, and it's one of the most important times to buy music in years.

Read more after the jump. DRM-free iTunes, the RIAA Boycott, and You