Firefox add-ons

A couple of useful add-ons for Mozilla Firefox.
I've been using mouse gestures in Firefox for a long long time, but I realized a lot of people haven't caught on to this. Fire Gestures is an add-on which works for the latest version of Firefox. There are a few other options: All-in-One Gestures and Mouse Gestures are also good options, but they work for older versions of Firefox. Mouse gestures are the use of the right click and moving the mouse in predefined directions to perform various browser operations such as open tab and close tab. I am addicted to this now, and find it really useful.
ReloadEvery can be used to reload a webpage every few seconds. The time between refreshes can be controlled while turning on the ReloadEvery menu. Right clicking on a webpage shows an option called "ReloadEvery", which also gives options to choose the time between refreshes. Useful for pages which need constant refreshing, but are not provided by the website host.

Awesome Highlighter

This website provides a neat interface to highlight parts of webpages. The way it works is simple. Enter a webpage in the field provided on their homepage. This opens the webpage within their website. You are provided with a yellow highlighter, which can be used to mark parts of pages. Once you are done, the website provides a URL, which can then be shared and saved. Pretty neat utility to share pages with specific highlighted passages.

YouSendIt

YouSendIt is one of the many websites which can be used to send large files. It allows files upto 100MB to be sent across for free. However, the reason I am most impressed with this website is this. This is a stand-alone add-on which can be used for either Windows or Mac. I have used it for Windows and found it very useful. After installation of this add-on, right clicking on a file in Windows explorer also provides an option which reads "Send By YouSendIt". This enables sending of files directly without having to go to their website and selecting the file to upload. I think that is pretty good functionality.

Recycling CFL bulbs

With the increased use of energy efficient bulbs also known as CFL bulbs comes the problem of dispsing them. Since they contain a very small amount of mercury, disposing them with the rest of the trash will end up putting in mercury in the groundwater. The best way of getting rid of used bulbs is to contact the local garbage disposal guys to check if they provide recycling facilities. The other option is to drop them off at local recycling facilities. A good link providing info about recycling CFL bulbs is this. Another good website to provide more information about recycling facilities and locations is Earth911. This website also provides good information about recycling other household items and waste as well.

svchost.exe

I'm not sure how many other people have experienced this problem, but I have had my Windows system freeze for no apparent reason when there aren't too many programs running. A quick look at the processes in Windows Task Manager reveals that a program called svchost.exe hogs around 95-99% of CPU. Killing this task immediately frees up the CPU and my computer starts working fine once again. However, this seems to be a recurring problem, and I wanted a permanent solution to it.
A google search of svchost.exe reveals multiple threads discussing this issue. After reading a few pages, I realized that svchost.exe is a Windows system process, and the most common reason for the system freeze happens to be Windows Automatic Updates. So, it is suggested that instead of using the Auto Update and Install option in Windows System Update, choose "Notify me but do not automatically download or install updates". The way to do this is on Windows XP is: Open an explorer window, keep going up levels to the topmost level. Right click on the My Computer icon and choose Properties. Choose the Automatic Updates tab, and choose the third option. This should prevent the svchost.exe problem.

E-rewards

On the same lines as e-miles is e-rewards. Again, you get paid for answering surveys. But, this website is fairly clever in terms of getting good responses. You get paid with e-rewards currency for answering survey questions. $25 in e-rewards currency can be encashed for a $25 travel certificate or various other items. The catch however is this. The surveys are well designed to prevent people from faking results and opinions. Instead of simple Yes/No questions, there are multiple filters which decide whether you are eligible or not for a survey. Further, some of these filters are not relevant to the current survey, so in some sense you do not know which questions are really the ones deciding you eligibility. In any case, you get paid $0.50 on the average if you are not eligible. If you are found eligible and complete the survey, which can take anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes, you can earn around $5-6 on the average. That, according to me, is pretty decent cash for doing something in your spare time.

Free Software

This website gives free software every day. Each day, the full version of a licensed software will be available for download for free, but these links for download and activation will only be valid for 24 hours starting 12 midnight PST. The software changes each day, and it also has an active community, whose members provide good feedback on the quality and utility of various software. I have personally found some very good utilities here. The catch is that none of these software are eligible for updates and upgrades, so if you end up upgrading to a newer version, you will invariably lose the full functionality of the software. A very good website nevertheless.

E-miles

A program that pays you in frequent flyer miles for time spent answering 2 or 3 survey questions at a time. The frequent flyer miles can be deposited in any airline of your choice. I think this is reasonable compensation for a couple of minutes of time. I have earned over 2000 miles on this to date. The website can be found here.

Visualizer Photo Resize

Visualizer Photo Resize is a free utility to resize jpg files to a lower resolution. I think this is extremely useful since the resolution of digital cameras seems to be increasing everyday. It is quite irritating when someone sends a digital photo, which is 3MB in size with a resolution of 3k by 3k pixels. For view photos on a computer screen, a resolution of 1600 x 1600 is more than sufficient. I find this utility very useful to resize photos in bulk and email to friends and family. This free software can be downloaded here.

Utility for merging and splitting PDF files

I was looking for a free utility to split and merge PDF files and the best option I found was pdfsam. It had quite a few useful options and best of all it is completely free for the basic version. It also has an enhanced version, which is best described by this from the website.
"pdfsam enhanced is “almost” free, you can download the source code, compile and use it or, if you think it’s worth it, you can make a donation."
The enhanced version comes with some advanced features, which most users would not require. Give this software a shot if you are looking to play around with PDF files. The download page can be found here.

Dropbox

Dropbox - A great new way of sharing and organizing files between multiple computers. I wonder how much disk space they would be able to afford for each user when they go public. Right now I'm still waiting for my beta invite, so maybe I will put up another post when I find out more about it. An article on Digg about the same.

Very interesting advertisement

I thought this was brilliant

The Story of Stuff

A friend sent me an extremely interesting video on American Consumerism. It is a 20-minute video, but it is an very nice video, very relevant to today's world. The video can be found at http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Glary Utilities

Glary utilities is a very nice program to keep your Windows machine clean. The program can be downloaded from here. I found it to be particularly useful to track large files and to remove temporary files. It contains a host of other utilities as well, so its well worth trying out.

buxfer.com

I have been using buxfer.com for over a year and a half to track my personal expenses, but the best part of the software is to settle shared expenses. Each person involved in the transaction is a different buxfer user. Each time you make a shared expense for home, say splitting money for lunch, all you do is to enter the amount, how much each person owes and thats it. Every one involved in the transaction gets an email informing them about the expenses. Its basically a sophisticated excel sheet to track common expenses. My roommates and I have found it to be very useful tool. The website has a wide variety of analysis tools and can give you an idea of where to cut down the expenses. Another nice thing is that you do not need to sign up if you have an AOL, Facebook, Openid, google, yahoo or msn username, which makes the sign up process significantly easier. I think its a great tool for personal and shared expenses.

Freerice

A friend of mine introduced me to this website http://freerice.com. The concept of the website is simple. You must find the meaning of a word displayed on the screen and guess from 4 options. Every correct answer donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations Food Program. As you keep playing and answering correctly, the difficulty level of the game increases. Each wrong answer reduces your vocab level by 1, whereas you must answer 3 consecutive words correctly to increase the vocab level of 1. Officially, the highest level is 55, but anything above 40 is pretty impressive. The rice program seems like a really good initiative and a worthwhile thing to do.
However, as with any new initiative come the skeptics. I found quite a few websites questioning if freerice.com is indeed a philanthropic initiative or is it another money making scam? The links below seemed to alleviate my fears and suspicions, so I think this is indeed a genuine program.
Article in BBC
Video on World Food Program website
You can find more info about this at the freerice.com FAQ. So go ahead and click to make a difference.

Ear wax

The topic of this post might not be the most interesting in the world, but here is some information regarding this. Apparently, it appears that using a cotton swab everyday as a matter of practice for general hygiene is not encouraged. I guess I must stop my habit of using a swab each morning. Here is a summary of information I found at www.webmd. com.

Earwax is a naturally produced substance that protects the ear canal. It is a mixture of skin, sweat, hair, and debris (such as shampoo and dirt) held together with a fluid secreted by glands inside the ear canal (ceruminous glands). The ear canals are self-cleaning. Earwax helps filter dust, keeps the ears clean, and protects the ear canal from infection. Normally, earwax is a self-draining liquid that does not cause problems. As the skin of the ear canal sheds, the wax is carried to the outer part of the ear canal and drains from the ear by itself.

Earwax is normally produced only in the outer half of the ear canal and will not become deeply impacted unless it is pushed in. The ear canal may become blocked (impacted) when attempts to clean the ear with cotton swabs, bobby pins, or a finger push wax deeply into the ear canal. Impacted earwax may cause some hearing loss or other problems, such as ringing in the ears (tinnitus), a full feeling in the ears, or vertigo. Poking at the wax with cotton swabs, your fingers, or other objects usually only further compacts the wax against the eardrum.

CCF settlement

A lot of people have been getting postal mails from this group called CCF Settlement. It looked like a sure scam to me, since it seemed like free money for nothing in return. After some extensive googling and cross verifying between various webpages, I came to the conclusion that IT IS NOT A SCAM. The website for this is http://www.ccfsettlement.com. In any case, all they need from you is your address, which they already have in case you received a postal mail and the estimated number of days you spent outside the US between 1996 and 2006. So, you don't have much to lose and possibly atleast $25 to make. They have 3 options, Refund Option 1 for a flat $25, which is for people who have traveled abroad for less than 1 week, and this seems like the best option. Refund Option 2 is where you declare the number of days you traveled, where you could make more, but finally might be less than $25. Refund Option 3 is for corporate travelers, who have official documents to support their claims. In any case, for options 2 and 3, your claims can be audited, while option 1 seems like the safest.
Some links discussing this issue are:
Arizona Tribune
LA Times
Hattiesburg American
The last link has some nice tips to be aware of potential scams riding on this legitimate law suit.

FlickrDown

I found a utility which can be used to download snaps from friends and family from Flickr. Its called FlickDown and can be found here. After you authorize your account and enter the name of another user, it lists all the albums and photos available for download and it saves the images to your disk. A neat utility for all Flickr users.

Bulk Rename Utility

I found this really useful tool for bulk renaming files in Windows. I used this tool for processing some files for my research, but I think it will be really useful for people who want to rename images which have been copied from digital cameras. The GUI is not the greatest that I have seen and it is quite intimidating at first, but it is pretty simple to use, and the best part of it is that it is FREE. I have found it nice to use, not too hard to learn and extremely flexible. It supports a variety of Windows OS. The utility can be found and downloaded here.

Windows /3GB switch

This is information I got from an article written by Serdar Yegulalp at searchwincomputing.com about the /3GB switch in Windows XP.

Recent versions of Windows support a switch option in BOOT.INI called the /3GB switch, which adjusts the way memory is allocated between the user and the operating system. By default, the split is fifty-fifty -- up to two gigabytes for the user and two for the operating system. The /3GB switch option sets those limits at three gigs maximum for the user and one gig for the operating system.

As the name implies, /3GB was originally meant to be used in systems that have 3 GB or more of RAM -- something that is no longer quite as rare as it used to be! However, even if you don't have 3 GB or more of memory, you can still use the /3GB switch successfully if you are running memory-hungry desktop applications. Photoshop, for instance, is infamous for staking out as much RAM as it can. With /3GB enabled, there's that much more memory that the application can use.

To add the /3GB switch as a separate boot option:

1. In My Computer | Properties | Advanced | Startup and Recovery, click Settings.
2. Click the Edit button under System Startup to edit the BOOT.INI file.
3. Find the current boot entry, which typically looks like this:
   
   multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
4. Copy this line and paste it at the end of the BOOT.INI file, and change it along these lines:
   
   multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional 3GB Switch" /fastdetect /3GB

   This lets you choose between a conventional boot entry and the /3GB boot entry. If something goes wrong when you use /3GB, you can always boot back into the original configuration.

5. Save and close BOOT.INI.
6. Click OK to close the Startup and Recovery panel.
7. Click Settings again, and in the "Default operating systems:" dropdown, choose the newly created boot entry with the /3GB switch.
8. Click OK to close everything. Reboot into the new profile.
   

Simple laws that could get you into trouble

Two issues are highlighted in this post, which have different laws in different states, so this is potentially useful for people doing interstate travel.
1. Seat belt law:
This link provides seat belt laws, and this link provides information about seat belt laws for children.
2. Cell phone use while driving:
This link summarizes the various state laws for cell phone use while driving.