I've listed my fave extensions before, but on re-reading it recently I realised that it does change a fair bit from year to year.

The Old Reliables:

• Adblock Plus & Adblock Filterset.G Updater
• Download Statusbar – puts progress indicators for downloads in the status bar.
• Firebug – debug javascript
• PDF Download – download PDF files instead of trying to open them.

I can't imagine ever not needing those four. Google basically included 2 & 3 in chrome, even tho the focus is on a stripped down browser. Absolutely essential.

The Fallen

• faviconize Tab -  just don't find myself using it that often anymore. Prism has seen my most regular windows move to their own processes
• All-in-One Gestures – mouse gestures are cool, but once I became more laptop centric I found them very hard to do on a touchpad
• SmartBookmarks – I don't care about bookmarks anymore. I save some important work stuff at work, but I hardly ever use bookmarks at home, except for on the toolbar.
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – see above.
• Piclens – Now called CoolIris I think. Still very cool but I never used it enough.
• All-in-One Sidebar – I used to do things in the sidebar but I can't for the life of me remember what they were anymore
• Web Developer – viewing CSS can be handy, but its one toolbar too many

The Newbs

• Downthemall – download manager which can't be beaten. Indispensible
• FoxTab – A cool graphic tab manager like safari is always bragging about. rarely used, I doubt i'll still have it come this time next year
• GoogleGears – More of a plugin really but it comes up as an extension
• Fission – turns the Location bar into a progress bar
• Growl/GNTP – extension to add growl (for windows) support to firefox
• LocationBar2 – linkifies sections of URLs in your location bar
• Personal Menu – hides the top menus (file view etc) and puts them in a button on the side of the location bar. with a custom menu
• Prism – The best thing since sliced bread. Turn oft used websites (hint – GMAIL) into separate web apps!
• Source Viewer Tab – view the source in a tab next to the window, chrome style
• Ubiquity – command line web stuff – my most common uses are defining, googling or wiki-ing words, or mapping things.

RocketDock
http://www.rocketdock.com

A windows version of the dock application based on the Mac dock. Except its better because its on windows of course. =)

If you’ve ever seen the Mac dock you’ll know what to expect. You can add icons to the dock, and also folders of icons using the Stacks Docklet (a separate download, here). In fact there are all kinds of addons available on the site, although most are fairly simple stuff, usually just adding a shutdown button or some other trivial function.

Rocketdock also shows your minimized tasks, and I can happily report it works very well with previously blogged app miniMize.

Apple recently won a legal battle to patent the dock, so it may not be around forever, as they’ll no doubt try and keep it exclusive to macs. hopefully by that stage the geniuses behind XGL or Bumptop will have created some ingenious new way to interact with our PCs.

TaskSwitch XP
(http://www.ntwind.com/software/taskswitchxp/download.html)

Even with miniMize and RocketDock, you’ll still need to alt-tab occasionally (sometimes its just more instinctive). TaskSwitchXP replaces the default alt-tab menu with a much better one, which allows sticky mode (the menu stays on the screen until you pick something with the mouse) and is super-customisable.

1. Open up regedit and go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

Create a new String Value called MinWidth and set the value to -255.

2. Right click on the taskbar, and click properties, tick ‘Group Similar taskbar buttons’ and click OK

3. Install Visual Task Tips from http://www.visualtasktips.com/ and log off/on again.

Here’s a Screenshot of your resulting Windows XP Super Taskbar in action:

The Windows 7 bar also allows programs to show up little submenus with actions. This feature has been much talked about as a brilliant new addition to the taskbar in Windows 7, but it is already possible in XP. Not many apps seem to support it, but it can be done, as demonstrated by the lovely J River Media Jukebox:

One Missing Feature

The first screenshot above is showing two instances of chrome, rather than two tabs in chrome. This is one advantage windows 7 has over this. Until someone writes an XP util that duplicates this functionality (which, lets face it, will likely never happen) then we’re stuck with only showing window instances.

One Unfortunate Side Effect

Windows minimized in Photoshop CS3 (and probably other versions) seem to inherit the width from the MinWidth value, so you may come across this problem:

 
I can’t find a way around it except to access these windows via the window menu, if anyone comes across a fix let me know.

As you can see I’ve applied a hack which removes the text from each item on the taskbar, similar to the Windows 7 super bar (or whatever its called). It’s a registry hack. The thing I love about registry hacks is that they’re overhead free. I didn’t have to install any extra program to make this work. Here’s what you do:

1. Go into Regedit and find the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

2. Create a new String value, name it MinWidth and set it to -255

3. Restart (or log off and log on again)

Simple!

Although we’ve installed nothing, we could now install VisualTaskTips (http://www.visualtasktips.com), which would give us a windows 7 style preview of any item we hover over in the taskbar.

Coincidentally, I’ve been experimenting with using Taskbar Shuffle to colour code my taskbar icons during particularly long sessions.

I know it sounds daft, but I have this theory that when we look for an icon for a program, we identify by colour first. Thus, if we need firefox, our eye is drawn to the orange / red hues at the end of the taskbar, and we find it faster. It also looks way better:

Transferring lots of files, however, is a different story. by the time your on the 5th or so file, you'll be getting fairly tired of right clicking on tray icons.

I put the following command in my autohotkey script, using WIN + SHIFT + B as the shortcut key.

%windir%\system32\fsquirt.exe -receive

Now if I want to transfer ten photos, I hit WIN+SHIFT+B ten times, ten dialogs spring up, and I can fire away all my photos from the phone end.

PS: fsquirt? Who thinks up the names for these things?

Sometimes you need to split a large mp3 file into parts. Sometimes. But you never remember the last program you used, and you end up downloading 5 things that don't do what you need them to.

This splits large mp3s into auto named files at a length of your choosing. That's it. No frills, its this easy.

step 1
drag mp3 to window

step 2
choose length of segments (I chose 10 minutes each)

step 2a. (optional)
have it stick all the files in the same folder, or pick a folder

step 3
click 'Split Files'

It'll even do multiple files in one go, to their respective folders. Go Mp3Split!

Rory

Well, the good news is iRex got back to me. The bad news is that they want €275 to fix the iliad.

I’m torn. On the one hand, I’d love to have my ebook back, and getting it repaired will mean a screen upgrade to a sharper, faster display.

On the other, it cost me €400 on ebay, and I can’t really justify spending another €275 on it when I could pick up a Sony PRS-505 for €249

In any case, I’ll be posting the remainder of my scribblings here in the months to come, but I think I’ll also be turning this into a general blog about e-book readers.

-Rory

I used to use this app all the time a few years back, and I thought I no longer needed it until yesterday.

Picture the scene: You have a pile of windows open, working on lots of stuff, some saved, some not. Suddenly, your PC locks up. nothing will respond. The mouse barely moves. Windows will not redraw. CTRL + ALT + DEL seems to offer help, but once you click on 'Task Manager' the whole process just repeats, and we lock up again.  So what do you do? Sit there and hope for the best? Restart?

Well if you've already installed ProcessTamer, this might not happen at all in the first place. Process Tamer simply watches for system processes (programs) which are hogging too much of the CPU and reduces their priority.

In the early days of Firefox memory leaks, I found this hugely useful. Ever since firefox 3, I haven't had a need for it. But yesterday, I downloaded a piece of software to interface with my Sony Ericsson phone which completely crapped out and hung my system. Only through patient clicking and waiting did I manage to kill the process, and even then it took over 10 minutes to do.

Process Tamer is a tiny piece of software, with a tiny memory footprint, which you may never have to use in your entire computing life. However, if you ever do need it, you'll be very thankful for it.

PS: Just an additional tip here, on the same subject. I've seen a lot of people complain that their system is running slow because something called 'System Idle Process' is at 99%. People wrongly assume that these are background windows tasks hogging all the resources. In fact, System Idle Process is a process who's only job is to keep the CPU running when nothing else needs it. I don't know the exact technical reasons, but the CPU needs to be kept working constantly, if not intensely. If you ever see System Idle Process running at close to 99%,
it means that your system resources are almost 100% available, and nothing else is using them.

Update:

Looks like I already posted about ProcessTamer back when I started this blog! Whoops…

Far Cry 2 is starting to piss me off, because I can't go anywhere on the map without being attacked about 6 times by the guys at checkpoints.

A (very) simple mod would fix this problem. Either the checkpoint spawn points could be removed, or more ideally the guys manning them could be replaced with those faction type guys from Pala. This would be ideal. You'd pass through the majority of checkpoints unharmed, or you might go through too fast and run over a guy, incurring the wrath of the other soldiers.

Unfortunately, Ubisoft didn't see fit to release a Dunia SDK, and therefore no mods can be created. There is a map editor, so its possible someone could edit the game files and remove all the spawn points, but this wouldnt be distributable since it would a) be huge, and b) consititute a pirated copy of the game.