Healthy. Wealthy. Wise.

If you're like most of my friends then you're probably an internet retard (sorry, friends) - this depsite the fact that the web has been around for over a decade now. I'm going to help you make your internet life better. Ready?

Download Firefox and become instantly cooler...

Don't um and ah. Just do it. Here's the link. If you're someone who needs a reason...I spend more time online than you and know what I'm talking about.

Install it and then we can get busy making your online experience full of sunbeams and happiness.

Custom Extensions

This is why you're going to love Firefox (or FF...if there's some geek in IT you need to impress); the ability to to make your browser do cool things for you.

There are currently...well, a lot of extensions for Firefox, but I've selected a few of the one's that I think you'll find most useful, so let's get cracking.

Xmarks - this synchronises your bookmarks and passwords across multiple computers. If you've got a work computer and a home computer and want your browser setup to be the same on both - get this installed. It also does a bunch of other stuff that I don't really care about...but just having this functionality is enough to make your life instantly better.

FaceMod - ever yearned for the ability to make known your negative feelings about something someone posted on Facebook? Now you can, by installing this extension. When you do, you'll see a new icon appear in your list of options and you'll be free to punish nonsense status updates from your friends:

Three things you need to know about this:

1. Only people who also have the extension installed will be able to see that you dislike something. It doesn't somehow magically alter Facebook's original interface - it's just some clever programming. It also means that if none of your friends have it - your displays of displeasure will be nothing more than a personal joke echoing through the emptiness of cyberspace. If you're my friend on FB though - I promise to dislike at least 83% of what you say.
   
   
2. This extension is classed as experimental - meaning it's technically a prototype and hasn't been fully tested. It has already been downloaded 150,000 times though, so make up your own mind.
3. It will add some more ads the right side interface of FB. Not really an issue, but just a heads up.

Morning Coffee - this one's great. If you check a number of sites daily / regularly and find yourself going through the same routine of opening new tabs and then finding your saved bookmarks - install this add-on.

It sits as an icon next to the address bar and once you have set it up, it automatically loads all the sites that you want to open into separate tabs.

But the best part is that you can customise different days of the week. If your browsing habits are different on Thursdays and weekends, for example - just add a different set of sites in the configuration panel. Then when you hit the coffee cup icon on that day, the correct set of sites will open up for you. Knock out!

Ad Blocker - no explanation needed really. Stops ads appearing on websites. In general, I have no issue with ads - people need to make a living...but certain sites load so many ads that they become slow to the point of unusable. Installing this speeds up performance.

Tab Mix Plus - gives you a metric ton of control over how your tabs behave. Highlights include:

- Undoing closed tabs
- Recovering tabs if your browser crashes
- Duplicating tabs
- Highlighting unread tabs (this is worth the install alone)

Very useful, if like me, you browse with mutliple tabs open (current count: 14)

Honourable Mentions

Download Status Bar - manages your downloads without the download window getting in the way of your browsing. Handy little add on to keep things flowing.

Greasemonkey - this is only if you're feeling a little more adventurous and I almost left it out as installing this might might damage your non-geek cred.

Greasemonkey is an extension that lets you load other scripts that control the way your browser works. For example - want a script that completely changes the Gmail interface; or lets you do multiple friend accepts in Facebook; or changes the way information is presented in Amazon?

You can install this extension and then head over to userscripts.org where they have thousands of scripts that change anything and everything to do with your browsing experience.

So that's it. Next time I'll show you how to put in search short-cuts into the the browser - which, for example, makes looking things up in Wikipedia a snap. And it's not the way you'd probably think to do it either.

Happy browsing.

Haven't installed Firefox yet? Stop being a bed-wetter and download it now.

I've been testing a handy new iPhone app recently called Pastie - which lets you store templates for texts and emails that saves you typing them out in full.

Once you've created the text that you want to use on a regular basis - the app then gives you two other options:

1. Assign that text to either email, text or just the phone's clipboard (for use somewhere else)
2. Assign the text to a specific contact.

When you open the app and select the text you'd like to use (say SMS) then then Pastie will automatically copy your text to the clipboard, open the Messages app and the right contact if you've assigned one...and...this is the only annoying feature...then requires you to actually paste the text into the text entry field before sending it.

I'm using the Lite version, which is free but only stores 3 templates.

The paid version costs US$1.99 and is made by manic wave productions

A new add-on for Firefox and IE8 allows users to find a common meeting time with their Google Calenders. No more back and forth as you try and figure out when everyone you need to attend a meeting has a free time slot. Great if you're a Google Calendar ninja.

You can download the plugin here

P.S. If you're not using FireFox already, you should be. Download Firefox here.

We've been using Drop Box in our office now for a couple of weeks and I'm impressed! Drop box basically allows you to synchronise files across computers so that you don't have to worry about carrying around USB drives or emailing files to yourself.

I use it two ways:

1. As a shared drive. I can create a new folder for a project and give staff who are assigned to that project access to the folder. We can all then work on a single version of a document from a single location - just as you would with a shared drive.
   
   Where it beats a shared drive is that Drop Box has version control, so any file that gets modified also gets backed up so you can retrieve older versions of your work if you need to. This does create a defacto offsite back up of your files, which comes in very useful if you happen to have a laptop stolen or a catastrophic hard-drive failure (I'll talk about back up strategies in another post).
   
   It also allows public sharing of folders with anyone - so in cases where you might need to send large files to a client you can simply add them to a public folder in your Drop Box account and send them the link to download it (a covenient alternative to something like You Send It) or share a project folder with them, in the same way that you would with a team member. This makes project collaboration very easy - although we use Basecamp to manage our projects.
2. The second way is to access files that I need to work on from home. Just by adding files to folders in my Drop Box account, I can login from home and pick up right where I left off. No more carrying around a USB drive or emailing files to myself. Handy.

Integration with your computer is seemless. Drop Box acts just like any other folder on your computer so it intergates beautifully with your existing workflows

Drop Box folder on OSX

OSX Menu item for Drop Box

When you sign-up you get 2GB of free space and there are options to upgrade to 50GB for US$99 per year or 100GB at US$199 per year.

If you refer a friend and they sign up, the good folks over at Drop Box will give you an extra 250MB per person that signs on as well as an extra 250MB for the signee - which is then capped at 3GB (meaning you can get a total of 5GB for free).

You can watch a video tour of Drop Box and if you like what you see - then sign up using this link (and we'll both get some free space out it.) It's available for both PC and Mac.