Helpful Software and Firefox Setup
Wednesday, March 09, 2005

I recently read an interesting SH/SC topic over at Something Awful concerning helpful programs and neat windows hacks, etc... . Incidentally, I now have some lovely and customizable programs on my desktop that I am now going to share.

1. Rainlender - A program providing a fully functional, skin-able calendar on your desktop
2. Rainmeter - Made by "Rain" again, this program monitors your system and displays outputs on your desktop. E.g. HDD space, memory, cpu temperature, weather, net stats
3. CCleaner - "Crap Cleaner", cleans up mru lists, temp files and lots of unused leftovers from other programs. Lots of people were reporting deletion upwards of 4Gb, personally it only deleted 250mb on my system, mainly firefox temp files.

Additionally, something I have had for a long time and gradually added to:
I have some very cool quick search firefox bookmarks I made myself, i.e. I type "what giraffe" and it will load the page corresponding to Giraffes on www.answers.com. Similarly, "define giraffe" gives the google definition, "google giraffe" searches google, img - images, wiki - wikipedia, play - play.com product search, amg - allmusic guide, word - dictionary lookup, thes - thesaurus lookup. There are lots more but these are the ones I use most. Combine these features with my extensions: Gmail Email notifier, Adblock and extensive filter list of all major ad providers, BlogThis right click extension, Download Sort that automatically puts filetypes in specified folders without the annoying browse dialogue appearing all the time, Add Bookmark Here lets me quickly and easily organise favourites and finally Greasemonkey that lets me edit any site however I choose using javascript – i.e. allmusic.com no longer has annoying javascript links and aintitcool.com doesn't have a shitty design. Oh I also have live RSS feed bookmarks from the BBC and other news sources.

Labels: Technical

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