Category: Geek Stuff

Many companies use some sort of web filter system to keep employees from visiting “time wasting” sites like Facebook, MySpace, eBay, and more. Such filters can be the bane of existence for many employees, and they are hard to get around. You might have heard of “proxy servers”, which act as a kind of “middleman”: your work computer connects to the proxy server, which then connects to the site you actually want to visit; the proxy then sends the content back to your work computer. Such a setup also allows you to access geographically-restricted content; a British computer user, for example, can connect to a proxy server in the US to access Hulu.com to watch US-only content.

The trouble with proxy servers is that most web filters block them too. But chances are those filters haven’t blocked your own home computer, and setting up your very own proxy server is actually pretty easy. This post over at Lifehacker.com shows you how to do it in a handful of easy steps. Once you have everything up and running, you should be able to connect to your home computer from work and access any site you want!

A REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT WARNING: Bypassing web filters is a fireable offense at many companies. In fact, the more locked-down your work Internet experience is, the more likely your could be fired for trying to bypass their Internet security measures. Although the IT guys won’t be able to see which sites you visit, they will be able to see multiple connections to your home computer via port 80, so they’ll be able to tell that you’re using a proxy. In this crappy economy, you might not want to lose your job just so you can browse Facebook at the office. You’ve been warned!

Facebook is the most popular social network out there. Unfortunately the chat client included on the site kind of sucks… or at least it did, until yesterday. That’s when Facebook enabled support for XMPP, an Open Source instant messaging protocol. So if you use a multi-protocol chat client like Pidgin, Adium, iChat, or Digsby you can now have Facebook chats within your instant messaging client (or, if you use Digsby, you can use the far more stable XMPP instead of Digsby’s hacked-together interpretation of Facebook’s own protocol).

How do you get in on the love? Just download and install Pidgin or Digsby (or, if you’re a Mac retard, use a Mac compatible XMPP client). Then go to this page on Facebook’s site, which has full instructions, complete with screen caps.

If you’re already rocking an XMPP client, all you need to do is add an XMPP account, and then enter the following details:

Username: [your Facebook user name]
Domain: chat.facebook.com
Jabber ID: [Facebook user name]@chat.facebook.com
Password: [your Facebook password]
Server: chat.facebook.com
Port: 5222
Use SSL/TLS: no
Allow Plaintext Authentication: no

A quick word: your “Facebook user name” is the name that appears in the URL of your Facebook profile, not the email address you use to log in. If you’re unsure what your user name might be, just click here and then click on “Other” under “Connect your Client” and Facebook will helpfully tell you what it is.

I first wrote an article on this site about Firefox extensions on July 2nd, 2007. I wrote an updated article about them on August 30th, 2008.

A lot of time has passed since then, and so I thought I’d revisit my favorite extensions again:

AdBlock Plus – AdBlock Plus is still the premiere ad blocking solution for Firefox. Although some sites have figured out ways around it (and other sites have learned to detect it, and block content to visitors using it), it’s still an absolute requirement for any Firefox install I use.

Coral IE Tab – I’ve long been a fan of the IE Tab extension, which lets you use the Internet Explorer rendering engine within Firefox. But the current version of IE Tab caused newer versions of Firefox to crash on my system, so I found Coral IE Tab, which is an offshoot that not only does everything IE Tab does, but adds a few key features (like allowing AdBlock Plus to work on IE Tabs in Firefox, or swapping cookies between Firefox and IE, so you don’t have to log in to a site again after switching engines… Nice!).

Extended Copy Menu – Copy Plain Text was one of my favorite extensions; as the name suggests, it allows you to copy plain text from web pages, so you can paste unformatted data into programs like Microsoft Word. Sadly, Copy Plain Text isn’t updated often enough to keep up with new builds of Firefox, so you have to tweak it every time a new version of the browser comes out. Or you could just use Extended Copy Menu instead, which not only lets you copy plain text, but also the HTML code underlying a web page.

Continue reading “Firefox Extensions Revisited Revisted”

When I look through the logs of this website, I can’t help but notice that many of you are still using Internet Explorer 6, which was released on August 27, 2001 – almost eight and half years ago! For the love of God… why are you still using IE6? In 2010?

The governments of France, Germany and Austria have advised their citizens to use something else. Google, Adobe and other companies have advised their customers to use something else. And now, Microsoft itself is asking IE 6 users to upgrade to IE 8. You can read for yourself on a Microsoft blog here:

We recommend users of IE6 on Windows XP upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and/or enable DEP. Users of other platforms are at reduced risk.  We also recommend users of Windows XP upgrade to newer versions of Windows.

Perhaps you work for a company that refuses to upgrade from IE 6. If that’s the case, print out this article from noted Windows expert Ed Bott and give it to your boss. Bott suggests that if your IT staff can’t replace IE 6, it’s time to replace your IT staff. It may sound harsh, but it’s true: IE 6 – with its “Swiss Cheese security” – has got to go.

Here’s a new Windows 7 tip that’s been flying around the Internet:

If you want to have a single folder where you can access almost any setting you’d ever need, just create a new folder wherever you’d like and give it the following name:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

This will create a folder which contains quick links to every Control Panel option, Windows 7’s “Action Center”, the “Backup and Restore” applet, Autorun settings, desktop gadgets, “Devices and Printers” and more.

I have to kind of laugh at the name, though. It’s not really “God Mode”, especially since you could simply type the name of any of these applets into the search box on the Start Menu. But still, if you’re a tweaker who likes having everything at his or her fingertips, then maybe “God Mode” is for you!

I’ve spent a lot of time on this site bashing Time Warner Cable’s Navigator DVR software, and with good reason. It sucks.

But in the interest of fairness, let me share this tip with you I picked up the other day:

To quickly move to a future date in the Program Guide, simply press the right arrow key and then (quickly) press a number button for the day you want to skip ahead to. For example, if you want to skip ahead 6 days in the guide, just press the right arrow key and then press 6.

It’s kind of neat, and saves keypresses over using the “Day” button once you go over two days.

Microsoft Outlook makes it easy to filter for unread email messages and posts. In fact, the default view in Outlook 2007 is unread messages. However, Outlook makes it a bit more difficult to filter only read messages. There’s no built-in way to have Outlook display only read messages in a folder.

My favorite feature of Outlook 2007 is the built-in RSS reader. I use it to subscribe to at least three dozen different feeds. However, because some posts in some feeds interest me more than others, each feed’s folder oftentimes is a jumble of read and unread posts. De-cluttering the folder by deleting or moving the read posts would certainly make my life easier, but there’s no easy way to do it.

Or is there?

To have Outlook display only read posts in a folder, do the following:

1) If you don’t already have the “Advanced” toolbar displayed, do so by clicking on View > Toolbars > Advanced.

2) Click the “filter” drop-down box and choose “Define Views”:

3) In the window that opens, click “New” and then type a short name for your new filter (I recommend “Read messages”). Leave the “Type of View” at “Table” and then click the “All Mail and Post folders” (unless you only want to use this view on a single folder). Click “OK”.

4) In the next window, click the “Filter” button, then click the “More choices” tab. Check the “only items that are” button and choose “read” from the drop-down box. Click “OK” several times to accept the settings.

5) Click the filter drop-down box and choose “Read Messages” (or whatever name you chose in step 3) to filter only read messages.

If you don’t want to have the Advanced toolbar appearing all the time, go to View > Toolbars and uncheck the Advanced toolbar, then right-click the main toolbar and choose “Customize”. Click on View in the left column and scroll until you see “Current View” and drag it to your main toolbar: presto! You have only the “Current View” applet and none of the other bits of the Advanced toolbar!

One of the niftiest features of Windows 7 is federated search, which allows you to search websites within Windows itself. Just by downloading and installing a “search connector”, you can add Google, Flickr, Twitter and other sites to your computer, so when you type in the search box in Windows Explorer, you can not only search your local computer, you can search websites, too!

It’s kind of hard to tell from the above picture, but this person has added popular site deviantART to his Windows search, and has searched for “Windows wallpaper”.

To add additional search engines to your Windows 7 install, just go to this page and download any of the connectors you’d like. And thanks to the OpenSearch protocol, you can even add your own if you’re good with XML! Read more about it at the linked site.