Here are a few Firefox extensions that I’ve used that I really, really like and feel lost when browsing without them.  I highly recommend all of these add-ons.  (They work in Windows, Linux, and I assume OS X.)

Tree-Style Tabs
This puts all of your tabs on the side of your browser instead of the top.  This has two main benefits:  it’s much easier to see what your tabs are when you have a lot of them open, and it saves vertical space (good for widescreen laptops and monitors).  Lots of options to configure it to suit your needs.

ColorfulTabs
This goes hand-in-hand with Tree Style Tabs.  ColorfulTabs makes your tabs all a different color based on the site.  Much easier to tell things apart than with just a single color.

Cooliris
I cannot explain how awesome this is.  It allows you to view video and photo searches on a scrollable 3D wall.  Very smooth rendering.  Allows searches from Google Images, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc.

Xmarks
If you have more than one machine that you use regularly, you need this.  It syncs bookmarks and passwords with as many machines as you want.

ScribeFire
This allows you to write blog posts by simply clicking the ScribeFire icon.  It brings up a rich text editor that offers most of the features that you’d have on your blog, only you don’t have to actually take the time to load up your blog.  You can set it up to post to multiple blogs.  It supports Wordpress, Blogger, etc.  Has features for promoting and monetizing your blog posts.

Adblock Plus
It blocks ads, and it does it well.

FlashBlock
This keeps Flash videos/animations from loading and replaces them with a play button.  Hit the play button and the video/animation plays.  Helps websites load faster, and also prevents annoying movies from automatically playing.  Has a whitelist that you can add sites to.

Hide Menubar
Just what it says.  It hides the menus like File, Edit, View, etc.  This gives you a little more vertical space on those widescreen monitors.

The Acid3 Test tests how well your browser handles various web standards.  Or something like that.  Anyway, I ran it on the lastest version of Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, and here are the results:

Opera:

Firefox:

Internet Explorer:

(No, I didn’t put the FAIL there.  The test did.)

As you can see, Opera 10 tests perfect, which is rather impressive.  Firefox comes in with the letter grade equivalent of a C-, which is disappoint performance, but acceptable.

Internet Explorer 8 comes in with an unbelievable 21%.  And that’s Microsoft’s latest and greatest.  I thought maybe it was due to security settings, so I added the test to my Trusted sites and set it to the lowest possible security settings.  It didn’t help.  Sad.

Edit:

Here’s the test result for Google’s Chrome browser:

Last week I decided that I wanted to set up my own testing network so I could experiment with various networking things in various operating systems. I figure this is the only way that I’m going to learn some things, and heck, it’s just cool anyway.

So I ordered:

5 x Dell Optiplex 240 – 2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HD
1 x 8 port KVM switch
1 x 24 port Cisco 100 Mb Ethernet Switch
10 x 7″ Ethernet Cable
1 x PS2 Keyboard and Mouse

The grand total for all this, including shipping, was about $700.  Not too bad…that’s about the price of a cheap laptop.

So what I’m going to do is stack these computers in the corner of my UBL (Underground Basement Lair, pronounced “yoo-bull”), plug them into the KVM and the switch, and run a cable from my main computer to the switch so I can manage everything remotely once it’s set up.

Some of the things I want to try include:

• Windows Active Directory Domain
• MS SQL Server
• MS Exchange Server
• Clustering/Load Balancing
• Creating Firewalls and IP rules
• VPNs
• Linux Domains
• Web servers
• OpenVPN
• OpenExchange
• PostgresSQL Server
• Distributed Computing
• Anything else I can think of.

I’ll post a picture when I have everything set up, as I think it will look neat.  It’s been like Christmas every day this week with all the stuff arriving   The only think I’m still waiting for is the computers.  I feel sorry for the UPS guy though…the UPS tracking site says that the package weights 145 lbs.

There are so many things to learn in the world…I sometimes wish that I could stop time and just READ. Here’s a list of all things that fascinate me and I wish I has more time to learn about:

• Physics
• Chemistry
• Math
• Quantum mechanics
• Programming
• Hacking
• Networking
• Animals
• Jungles
• Deserts
• South Asia
• Scandinavia
• South America
• Africa
• Space
• Language
• Cooking
• Hunting
• Fishing
• History
• Mythology
• India
• Political Theory
• Religions
• God
• The universe
• Life
• Love
• Poetry

When I think of the sheer massive amounts of information out there, it is simply overwhelming. I mean, I could pick just one topic that I mentioned and spend the rest of my life learning about that one thing. Take programming for example. You can split that into different languages…like C, C#, C+, C++, Java, Javascript, VB, VBA, VBScript, VB .NET, VB .Net 2005, PHP, PHP4, PHP5, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Perl, SQL, etc etc etc. And that’s JUST A FEW of that languages that exist. Then I could pick just one of those languages and spend a very long time learning and mastering it.

Consider that one little piece of a single topic could take years to learn about, and expand that to cover all the pieces in that topic, and expand that even more to cover all topics…that’s hundreds, if not thousands of years of possible learning…and that’s if there were no new discoveries/developments. I find that exciting and yet depressing at the same time.

I’ve probably been thinking more about this as I think about what I want to do with my life…and the answer that I keep coming up with is EVERYTHING. I want to do everything that I can out of everything that there is. And when I stop to think about what “everything” actually is, it blows me away.

I bought some tomato hornworms (a kind of caterpillar) off of the internet to feed my bearded dragon Gus. Here’s a picture of one of the suckers. They’re flippin’ huge.  (The left side of worm is it’s real head.  The other side is a decoy head.)

Now here are the pictures of Gus eating one of these bad boys:

*burp*

This is an awesome deal that’s going on until May 16th perpetually, so if you’ve been needing a copy of Microsoft Office (or if you’ve been using a pirated version and you wish to go legit), this is the time to get it.  You can get Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate edition for $60.  It’s normally $600.  Heck, even the Student and Home edition is $250.

All you need is a .edu email address (alumni .edu addresses work too) and $60.  Go here to buy it: http://www.theultimatesteal.com/

From http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=622101

“We pulled a bad drive apart at work this afternoon. It had a nasty rattle to it before we opened it, but we didn’t expect this:”

I just found this link to control web cams in a couple of parks in Eugene, OR.  Geek factor = 9.8.  Check it out.