So I have been using this quote that supposedly came from Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, since I received it in an email back in the early 1990’s:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”

To me, it just says something about the paths that democracies take throughout history, and that it is tough to learn from the past.

Once again, this quote is making the viral email circle, and this time I decided to do some research on the quote. I came to find out that it is attributed to Tytler but it’s unverified. The website The Truth About Tytler by Loren Collins seems to be the most exhaustive analysis of the quote or quotes.

Now for my bleg: does anyone know who or whom made the above quote or quotes, and in what context?

In The Yale Book of Quotations, for which I tried to trace all famous quotations to their accurate origins, the earliest version I found for this passage was in the New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1959 (the same occurrence cited by the Loren Collins website), and the earliest attribution to Alexander Fraser Tytler I found was in Martin Dies, The Martin Dies Story (1963).

However, doing some fresh research now, I find the following earlier evidence:

Two centuries ago, a somewhat obscure Scotsman named Tytler made this profound observation: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”
Daily Oklahoman, December 9, 1951

REPLACE [drive1:][path1]filename [drive2:][path2] [/A] [/P] [/R] [/W]
REPLACE [drive1:][path1]filename [drive2:][path2] [/P] [/R] [/S] [/W] [/U]

  [drive1:][path1]filename Specifies the source file or files.
  [drive2:][path2]         Specifies the directory where files are to be
                           replaced.
  /A                       Adds new files to destination directory. Cannot
                           use with /S or /U switches.
  /P                       Prompts for confirmation before replacing a file or
                           adding a source file.
  /R                       Replaces read-only files as well as unprotected
                           files.
  /S                       Replaces files in all subdirectories of the
                           destination directory. Cannot use with the /A
                           switch.
  /W                       Waits for you to insert a disk before beginning.
  /U                       Replaces (updates) only files that are older than
                           source files. Cannot use with the /A

As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king's firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict. The electorate--the demos--believes that its task is to choose the best man, but in truth its task is much simpler: to annoint a man.

If you've spent any time stumbling around the net, you've run across a site using an irritating animated favicon—a moving icon that shows up in the address bar, the site's tab, and even the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. (Here's one at the DHL site.) While there's no way by default to disable animated icons in Firefox other than completely disabling all favicons, there are a couple of possible ways to block a particularly distracting web page icon.

Blocking for a Single Site

If there's a single site that is giving you trouble, you can use the Adblock Plus Firefox extension to block the offending favicon. Just open up Blockable items, find the favicon in the list and choose "Block this item" to get rid of it.

Replace Favicons with Favicon Picker

Instead of blocking the icon, you can choose to replace it with the Favicon Picker extension, although this method requires you to bookmark the site before you can replace the icon. Just open up the properties for the bookmark, and you can either pick an image file to use as the icon, or use the default icon with the Blank button.

Once you've changed the icon, you can delete the bookmark and the change should stick as long as you have the extension installed.

Blocking (Almost) All Animated Favicons

Since almost all of the animated favicons have the filename "favicon.gif", we can use a Stylish user script or dig into Firefox's userChrome.css tweak to hide any image with that file name from appearing as the bookmark or tab icon.

If you are using the Stylish Firefox extension, create a new blank style, and paste in the following code, which will replace animated icons on the bookmarks bar with the default icon and leave the favicon blank on the tab bar.

.bookmark-item[image*="favicon.gif"] .menu-iconic-icon,
.bookmark-item[image*="favicon.gif"] .toolbarbutton-icon
.bookmark-item[image*="favicon.gif"]:not([container]) .menu-iconic-icon,
.bookmark-item[image*="favicon.gif"]:not([container]) .toolbarbutton-icon {
  width: 0 !important; padding-left: 16px !important;
  background: transparent url(chrome://global/skin/icons/folder-item.png)  no-repeat !important;
}
#page-proxy-favicon[src$="favicon.gif"], tab[image$="favicon.gif"] .tab-icon{
  width: 0 !important; padding-left: 16px !important;
}

You should be able to immediately see the favicons disappear by clicking the Preview button. If you are satisfied, click Save and they should be gone.

(Here are some more functional Stylish user scripts that can improve your browsing experience.)

If you don't want to install the Stylish extension, you can still use this tweak by creating a userChrome.css file in your Firefox profile directory, and paste in the same code from above (make sure Firefox is not running).

Note that this style doesn't seem to disable the icons if you are using the Awesome bar to search for a bookmark, or in the bookmarks manager. Got any other tips for killing animated icons? Post 'em up in the comments.

Eternal September

Intended For Windows Vista Windows XP Windows 2003 Windows 2000 Windows Me Windows 98 Windows 95

• Open Explorer, and go to your Start Menu folder.
• Find the shortcut for Explorer, right click on it, and select Properties.
• Click on the Shortcut tab, and change the Target so it reads: c:\windows\EXPLORER.EXE /n, /e, d:\myfolder (where c:\windows is your Windows directory, and d:\myfolder is the directory in which you want Explorer to start.)

• Tip: To have Explorer start with My Computer, so no branches are initially expanded, use the following command line options: /n, /e, /select, c:\

  Note: this won't work if you try to start Explorer by right-clicking on the Start Menu (here's why). Just put a shortcut to EXPLORER.EXE in the top level of your Start Menu folder for easy access.

Intended For Windows XP Windows 2003 Windows 2000 Windows Me Windows 98

• Right-click on an item in the folder you want to sort, and select Sort by Name.

Here's the hard way, which allows you to sort all the folders in your Start Menu at once:

• Open the Registry Editor, and expand the branches to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrder.
• Delete the MenuOrder key, and close the Registry Editor.

Here's how to sort the entire Start Menu automatically every time you turn on your computer:

Use the Tab Key to Rename Multiple Files in Vista [Windows Vista Tip]

Tweak the "AwesomeBar"'s Suggestion Algorithm [Firefox 3]

Disable All Notification Balloons in Windows Vista

To hide an MP3 file into a JPEG image, copy the MP3 file and a picture into a folder. Open the command prompt window (Start –> Run –> cmd) and switch to this folder. Now run the following command:

copy /b my_picture.jpg + my_song.mp3 my_new_picture.jpg

Remember to replace my_picture and my_song with relevant file names. Next, upload the my_new_picture.jpg file to Flickr. The MP3 song picture will look just like any other regular photograph that you share on Flickr.

When you want to download that MP3 file from Flickr, open the relevant photo page, go to “All Sizes” and download the original sized image (example). Change the file extension to MP3 and enjoy the music using Winamp*.

Become the Memorial Day Grill Master [Grilling]

Memorial Day marks the start of the serious grilling season, and there's no better weekend to try your hand at outdoor cooking, or bolster your established grill master game. Luckily, honing your outdoor culinary skills is a lot more simple than it seems, given the right tools, a little preparation, and a few tips on technique. Take a look at some pointers on getting the right gear, turning out great meals, and even preparing for uncooperative weather, after the jump. Photo by Another Pint Please....

Get the right tools

• Lump charcoal or briquettes?: This is one of those endless, both-sides-are-right-and-wrong debates (kind of like Mac vs. PC), but there is some fairly common ground. As The Virtual Weber Bullet puts it:

  The general consensus is that lump tends to burn hotter than briquettes, but not as long or as consistently. Some lack of consistency is to be expected, given that the content and piece size varies within an individual bag and between bags.

  Personally, I recommend briquettes for anyone just starting out with their grill, as lump can be finicky in lighting. Of course, you can save yourself a lot of effort and frustration by investing in a chimney starter, which you can also use for flash-cooking. Photo by Joshua Thompson via WikiMedia.
• Choosing a gas grill: Ignore the BTUs and heat for the most part—unless you really need to cook a whole bird or roast this weekend, most grills have got your steaks and burgers covered. Consumer Reports' blog recommends bringing a magnet with you to gauge the quality of steel used to contain the heat. If the magnet sticks, it's likely a cheaper grade that will rust more easily. Feel free to give a test model a few shoves and shakes, as an unstable grill is a recipe for serious problems.
• Multi-use utensils: The three-tool grilling sets you see at big-box stores have all you'll need for basic grill work, with long-handled versions of a spatula, tongs, and a carving-type poker. A long-handle brush would be your next purchase, and then a grilling basket and skewers when you start branching out. Make sure your tools feel heavy and firm in your hands, as clumsy handling creates the kind of BBQ stories you don't want repeated. Photo by rick.

For more grilling gear, our gadget-crazed brother site Gizmodo runs down 10 awesome grills you can buy for the ultimate Memorial Day barbecue.

Getting ready

• Clean that grill: If there's black crust on the grill bars, you need to get it off to ensure no-stick cooking and easy food flipping. If you're feeling strong, wad up some aluminum foil and go to town on that stuff. For seriously stuck grime, you could also try popping the grill in the oven to bake off the stubborn bits.
• Make your own sauce: Most of the pre-bottled sauces you see on grocery shelves are over-sweetened, and none match the taste of homemade. Making your own isn't that difficult, either. Use one of BBQ Recipe Secret's three sauce bases as a starting point, and build your own flavor ideas into them. It'll give you something to talk about while you're waiting for the ribs to finish. Photo by Jason McArthur.

Hone your technique

• Use a cheat sheet: Experience is the best indicator for knowing the precise moment to yank your food off the rack, but Real Simple offers a super-helpful cheat sheet you can print and bring to this culinary test (original post). Here's a sample that covers the basics of red meat and sausages:
• BBQ chicken: As my fellow editor Adam can attest, eHow's technique for grilling whole or partial chicken results in some juicy bird. The basics: Oil the grill, cook the chicken uncovered slightly off the heat center, and, for Pete's sake, don't put your sauce on until the last few minutes.
• Perfect burgers: Our commenters don't necessarily agree on cooking great burgers, but they do have some common wisdom to share. Use meat that's as close to room temperature as possible for even cooking. Don't press them on the grill, unless you like your meat dry. And the best "secret" to great burgers is buying good meat, preferably ground by a butcher while you watch.
• Seriously salt your steak: Got filet mignon dreams for the weekend, but only a Quarter-Pounder budget? Buy a cheap cut of "choice" meat, then salt, salt, salt the heck out of that thing—for only one hour before grilling, and then pat it dry. By doing so, your salt is breaking in your meat and loosening some of its protein strands, making it hold flavor better and cut like the steakhouse commercials of your dreams (original post).
• Let it rest: You'll be eager to slice open your tender steak or succulent chicken, but you'll lose a lot of juicy flavor if you do so. As the food techies at Cook's Illustrated point out, cutting into your food right off the grill releases a significant amount of juice, which would be re-absorbed for better succulence if you let it sit a few minutes.

Recover from a rain-out

All that planning, cleaning, and purchasing, and Mother Nature calls an audible on your perfect grill day? You're not finished yet. As the New York Times' food guru and cookbook author Mark Bittman points out, your oven broiler can sub in for your grill with a little prep-work, with results almost as satisfying. Brown your meat in the pan, roast or braise it slowly, then use the broiler to give it that grill-like finish. Check out his oven-based pork ribs or brisket recipes if you need convincing.

Document your success

When you've put all this effort into creating a great fire-cooked feast, you'll want more than just compliments to remember it by. Break out your digital camera (or pass it off to a trusted friend) and try the following tips to take some great grilling shots. (Photo by ctaloi):

• Tell a story: A BBQ-friendly shooter named Nika notes that a lot of grilled food might look good to the human eye, but smoky crusts and perfect charring can look like unappealing dark nothingness without good framing. Try to capture moments of "drama," such as when the meat's being pulled, or focus on the tools used to make the meal to get shots you'll remember.
• Get in close: At the same time, Flickr user Another Pint Please..., also known as Mike and who shot the steak picture you saw at the top of this post, recommends being brave and getting up-close and personal with your heat source—while being safe with your lens, of course. You'll have time to take wider-angle shots when the cooking's done, but those sudden flare-ups and perfect glistening angles only happen once.

Got some great resources for first-timers or experienced grill gurus? Planning on trying a new technique this weekend? Let's hear about great food, and solid tips, in the comments.

Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, will be cooking outside this weekend, whether it snows in Buffalo or not (kidding?). His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, appears every Friday on Lifehacker.

Standard Windows Hotkeys

The History of Coffee

The history and development of the beverage that we know as coffee is varied and interesting, involving chance occurrences, political intrigue, and the pursuit of wealth and power.

According to one story, the effect of coffee beans on behavior was noticed by a sheep herder from Caffa Ethopia named Kaldi as he tended his sheep. He noticed that the sheep became hyperactive after eating the red "cherries" from a certain plant when they changed pastures. He tried a few himself, and was soon as overactive as his herd. The story relates that a monk happened by and scolded him for "partaking of the devil's fruit." However the monks soon discovered that this fruit from the shiny green plant could help them stay awake for their prayers.

Another legend gives us the name for coffee or "mocha." An Arabian was banished to the desert with his followers to die of starvation. In desperation, Omar had his friends boil and eat the fruit from an unknown plant. Not only did the broth save the exiles, but their survival was taken as a religious sign by the residents of the nearest town, Mocha. The plant and its beverage were named Mocha to honor this event.

Originally the coffee plant grew naturally in Ethopia, but once transplanted in Arabia was monopolized by them. One early use for coffee would have little appeal today. The Galla tribe from Ethiopia used coffee, but not as a drink. They would wrap the beans in animal fat as their only source of nutrition while on raiding parties. The Turks were the first country to adopt it as a drink, often adding spices such as clove, cinnamon, cardamom and anise to the brew.

Coffee was introduced much later to countries beyond Arabia whose inhabitants believed it to be a delicacy and guarded its secret as if they were top secret military plans. Transportation of the plant out of the Moslem nations was forbidden by the government. The actual spread of coffee was started illegally. One Arab named Baba Budan smuggled beans to some mountains near Mysore, India, and started a farm there. Early in this century, the descendants of those original plants were found still growing fruitfully in the region.

Coffee was believed by some Christians to be the devil's drink. Pope Vincent III heard this and decided to taste it before he banished it. He enjoyed it so much he baptized it, saying "coffee is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it."

Coffee today is grown and enjoyed worldwide, and is one of the few crops that small farmers in third-world countries can profitably export.

Coffee Timeline:

And I do dream--of colorful popsicles in shapes of starbursts and rockets. Check out these super-cute popsicle molds:

• Tovolo shooting stars
• Tovolo rockets
• Cuisipro sailboats

The best part of making your own popsicles? You can make any flavor you want! When the sun does finally come out in Seattle, I think I'll try this recipe, recently featured on YumSugar (visit their site for step-by-step photos!):

Vietnamese-Style Coffee on a Stick

Ingredients:
1/4 cup sweetened condensed milk
1-3/4 cups water
1/4 cup freshly ground espresso

Directions:
1. Brew the coffee to a strong robust flavor, approximately 10 minutes if using a French press.
2. Pour the sweetened condensed milk into a separate bowl.
3. Slowly pour the hot coffee into the bowl with the sweetened condense milk. Stir.
4. Chill coffee and sweetened condensed milk mixture in the refrigerator until cool.
5. Strain the coffee, if needed.
6. Fill popsicle mold and place in freezer.
7. Once frozen, pop out of the mold and enjoy.

Makes 4 popsicles, depending on size of mold.

--KitchenMaus

That morning coffee is just the thing to get the brain in gear and the body moving. But it turns out that just the aroma of coffee also gets some of our genes up and at ‘em. That’s according to research in the June 25th issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The authors report that a sniff of coffee turns on several genes in the brain in ways that help diminish the impact of sleep deprivation. In rats, at least. 

Rats that were stressed by lack of sleep were exposed to the smell of coffee. Seventeen different genes got activated in their brains.  And thirteen of them produced proteins known to protect nerve cells from the damaging effects of stress. While there have been numerous studies analyzing the health impact of the ingredients ingested when drinking coffee, the researchers say that this is the first study to examine the effects of coffee’s aroma. So maybe you don’t have to shell out that four dollars for the latte—just walk by the counter…[old TV ad: “smell the honest coffee smell, ahhh, smell it!”]

—Steve Mirsky explains, with reporting by Harvey Black

That morning coffee is just the thing to get the brain in gear and the body moving. But it turns out that just the aroma of coffee also gets some of our genes up and at ‘em. That’s according to research in the June 25th issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The authors report that a sniff of coffee turns on several genes in the brain in ways that help diminish the impact of sleep deprivation. In rats, at least. 

Rats that were stressed by lack of sleep were exposed to the smell of coffee. Seventeen different genes got activated in their brains.  And thirteen of them produced proteins known to protect nerve cells from the damaging effects of stress. While there have been numerous studies analyzing the health impact of the ingredients ingested when drinking coffee, the researchers say that this is the first study to examine the effects of coffee’s aroma. So maybe you don’t have to shell out that four dollars for the latte—just walk by the counter…[old TV ad: “smell the honest coffee smell, ahhh, smell it!”]

—Steve Mirsky explains, with reporting by Harvey Black

Sleep loss produces false memories

But caffeine helps to boost accurate recall

Kerri Smith

Sleepless nights can increase your chances of forming false memories, according to researchers in Germany and Switzerland. But, as for so many aspects of life, it seems that coffee can save the day.

A good night's sleep can help to prevent false memories from forming.Punchstock

Although neuroscientists know that memories can be strengthened while we are asleep, it's been unclear whether false memories form as we slumber or whether they are only consolidated when we are asked to recall the information the following morning.

To find out, Susanne Diekelmann in Jan Born's lab at the University of Lübeck, Germany, and her colleagues asked volunteers to learn lists of words, each list relating to a particular topic. For example, they might learn the words 'white', 'dark', 'cat' and 'night' — all of which can be linked to the word 'black' — but black itself would not be part of the list.

The researchers then tested their subjects' memories after a night's sleep or a night spent awake. They showed them the list of words again, having added a few extra words, and asked them to recall whether the words had been in the original list. The sleep-deprived group gave more false responses than the group allowed to sleep. "A lot of subjects said, 'yes, these false words were presented before', and they were absolutely sure about it," says Diekelmann. "Sometimes they were even more convinced than on the real words."

Diekelmann suggests that it isn’t sleep deprivation itself that causes the formation of false memories, but the act of retrieving them from storage. When the team kept one group of people awake for one night, let them catch up on their sleep the next night, and then tested them, the volunteers recalled the same number of false memories as those who hadn't been sleep-deprived at all. In the past "it has been difficult to separate fatigue effects from consolidation," says Brian McCabe, a memory and learning researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK. But this study seems to confirm that false memories are indeed consolidated at the moment of retrieval.

Diekelmann's team reported their results at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, on 13 July.

Coffee time

The scientists took the work one step further. If false memories were being generated at retrieval, they wondered, would a dose of caffeine reduce the effect of sleep deprivation? They took two more groups of volunteers, deprived them of sleep, and then gave them either caffeine or a placebo in the morning, one hour before their memories were tested.

The group given caffeine had 10% fewer false memories than those who did not receive any, an effect McCabe describes as "quite striking". The team suggests that this effect might occur because caffeine is known to affect the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain that is impaired by sleep deprivation — and an area, says Diekelmann, that has previously been shown to help discriminate between things that have actually happened and things people have only thought about.

Diekelmann points out that understanding the false-memory process could be crucial to situations in which accurate recall is needed, such as when witnesses give statements in legal trials. McCabe agrees, but cautions that the work doesn't reveal whether the quality of sleep matters, or whether types of error other than false memories — for example, remembering a word correctly but in the wrong list — are any more likely.

Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions

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When Howard D. Schultz in 1985 founded the company that would become the wildly successful Starbucks chain, no financial adviser had to tell him that coffee was America’s leading beverage and caffeine its most widely used drug. The millions of customers who flock to Starbucks to order a double espresso, latte or coffee grande attest daily to his assessment of American passions.

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Enlarge This Image

Jez Burrows

Coffee and Tea	Caffeine
Decaffeinated coffee or tea, 8 oz.	2 mgs
Black tea, brewed, 8 oz.	47
Green tea, brewed, 8 oz.	30 to 50
Plain coffee, brewed, 8 oz.	95
Starbucks Coffee Grande, 16 oz.	330
Soft drinks and energy drinks
Coca-Cola Classic, 12 oz.	35
Diet Coke, 12 oz.	47
Mountain Dew, 12 oz.	54
Red Bull, 8.3 oz.	76
Monster Energy, 16 oz.	160
SoBe No Fear, 16 oz.	174
Foods and other products
Hershey’s chocolate milk, 8 oz.	5
Hershey’s milk chocolate, 1.5 oz.	10
Dannon coffee yogurt, 6 oz.	30
NoDoz Maximum Strength, 1 tablet	200

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Times Topics: Caffeine

Times Topics: Coffee

Web Link

Caffeine: The Good, the Bad and the Maybe (Center for Science in the Public Interest)

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• Get Health News From The New York Times »

Although the company might have overestimated consumer willingness to spend up to $4 for a cup of coffee — it recently announced that it would close hundreds of underperforming stores — scores of imitators that now sell coffee, tea and other products laced with caffeine reflect a society determined to run hard on as little sleep as possible.

But as with any product used to excess, consumers often wonder about the health consequences. And researchers readily oblige. Hardly a month goes by without a report that hails coffee, tea or caffeine as healthful or damns them as potential killers.

Can all these often contradictory reports be right? Yes. Coffee and tea, after all, are complex mixtures of chemicals, several of which may independently affect health.

Caffeine Myths

Through the years, the public has been buffeted by much misguided information about caffeine and its most common source, coffee. In March the Center for Science in the Public Interest published a comprehensive appraisal of scientific reports in its Nutrition Action Healthletter. Its findings and those of other research reports follow.

Hydration. It was long thought that caffeinated beverages were diuretics, but studies reviewed last year found that people who consumed drinks with up to 550 milligrams of caffeine produced no more urine than when drinking fluids free of caffeine. Above 575 milligrams, the drug was a diuretic.

So even a Starbucks grande, with 330 milligrams of caffeine, will not send you to a bathroom any sooner than if you drank 16 ounces of pure water. Drinks containing usual doses of caffeine are hydrating and, like water, contribute to the body’s daily water needs.

Heart disease. Heart patients, especially those with high blood pressure, are often told to avoid caffeine, a known stimulant. But an analysis of 10 studies of more than 400,000 people found no increase in heart disease among daily coffee drinkers, whether their coffee came with caffeine or not.

“Contrary to common belief,” concluded cardiologists at the University of California, San Francisco, there is “little evidence that coffee and/or caffeine in typical dosages increases the risk” of heart attack, sudden death or abnormal heart rhythms.

In fact, among 27,000 women followed for 15 years in the Iowa Women’s Health Study, those who drank one to three cups a day reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease by 24 percent, although this benefit diminished as the quantity of coffee rose.

Hypertension. Caffeine induces a small, temporary rise in blood pressure. But in a study of 155,000 nurses, women who drank coffee with or without caffeine for a decade were no more likely to develop hypertension than noncoffee drinkers. However, a higher risk of hypertension was found from drinking colas. A Johns Hopkins study that followed more than 1,000 men for 33 years found that coffee drinking played little overall role in the development of hypertension.

Cancer. Panic swept this coffee-dependent nation in 1981 when a Harvard study tied the drink to a higher risk of pancreatic cancer. Coffee consumption temporarily plummeted, and the researchers later concluded that perhaps smoking, not coffee, was the culprit.

In an international review of 66 studies last year, scientists found coffee drinking had little if any effect on the risk of developing pancreatic or kidney cancer. In fact, another review suggested that compared with people who do not drink coffee, those who do have half the risk of developing liver cancer.

And a study of 59,000 women in Sweden found no connection between coffee, tea or caffeine consumption and breast cancer.

Bone loss. Though some observational studies have linked caffeinated beverages to bone loss and fractures, human physiological studies have found only a slight reduction in calcium absorption and no effect on calcium excretion, suggesting the observations may reflect a diminished intake of milk-based beverages among coffee and tea drinkers.

Dr. Robert Heaney of Creighton University says that caffeine’s negative effect on calcium can be offset by as little as one or two tablespoons of milk. He advised that coffee and tea drinkers who consume the currently recommended amount of calcium need not worry about caffeine’s effect on their bones.

Weight loss. Here’s a bummer. Although caffeine speeds up metabolism, with 100 milligrams burning an extra 75 to 100 calories a day, no long-term benefit to weight control has been demonstrated. In fact, in a study of more than 58,000 health professionals followed for 12 years, both men and women who increased their caffeine consumption gained more weight than those who didn’t.

Health Benefits

Probably the most important effects of caffeine are its ability to enhance mood and mental and physical performance. At consumption levels up to 200 milligrams (the amount in about 16 ounces of ordinary brewed coffee), consumers report an improved sense of well-being, happiness, energy, alertness and sociability, Roland Griffiths of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine reported, although higher amounts sometimes cause anxiety and stomach upset.

Millions of sleep-deprived Americans depend on caffeine to help them make it through their day and drive safely. The drug improves alertness and reaction time. In the sleep-deprived, it improves memory and the ability to perform complex tasks.

For the active, caffeine enhances endurance in aerobic activities and performance in anaerobic ones, perhaps because it blunts the perception of pain and aids the ability to burn fat for fuel instead of its carbohydrates.

Recent disease-related findings can only add to coffee’s popularity. A review of 13 studies found that people who drank caffeinated coffee, but not decaf, had a 30 percent lower risk of Parkinson’s disease.

Another review found that compared with noncoffee drinkers, people who drank four to six cups of coffee a day, with or without caffeine, had a 28 percent lower risk of Type 2 diabetes. This benefit probably comes from coffee’s antioxidants and chlorogenic acid.

Top 15 Quotes By Famous Atheists - listverse.com:
1. Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov

2. I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. — Andrew Carnegie

3. All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway

4. Lighthouses are more helpful then churches. — Benjamin Franklin

5. Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche

6. The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. — George Bernard Shaw

7. Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. — Kurt Vonnegut

8. I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. — Frank Lloyd Wright

9. Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. — Denis Diderot

10. A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. — Samuel Clemens

11. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. — Sigmund Freud

12. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. — Edward Gibbon

13. The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. — Ferdinand Magellan

14. Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. — Woody Allen

15. It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous. — Gloria Steinem

And they call us arrogant

November 14, 2007

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff
The best three paragraphs I’ve read this year are from this book:

This purpose entails three and only three governmental functions. In Ayn Rand’s statement, these are: the police to protect men from criminals – the armed services to protect men from foreign invaders – the law courts to settle disputes among men according to objective laws. Any additional function would have to involve the government initiating force against innocent citizens. Such a government acts not as man’s protector, but as a criminal.

Government is inherently negative. The power of force is the power of destruction, not of creation, and it must be used accordingly, i.e. , only to destroy destruction. For a society to inject this power into any creative realm, spiritual or material, is a lethal contradiction: it is the attempt to use death as a means of sustaining life.

The above means, first of all, that the state must not intervene in the intellectual and moral life of its citizens. It has not standards to uphold and no benefits to confer in regard to education, literature, art, science, sex (if adult and voluntary), or philosophy. Its function is to protect freedom not truth or virtue.

Leonard translates Ayn’s philosophy into layman’s terms. I like how he brings much of her philosophy into the post Soviet world and uses the demise of international socialism/communism as an example of Ayn’s philosophy. At the root, our economic and social problems come from too much central management, not too little. Many people see a social or economic problem and think the government should solve it. This book illustrates the folly of this thinking. The forced government solution will either make the problem worse or create a larger “blowback” from somewhere else.

******

A few of my favorite authors: Thoreau, Emerson, Twain, Orwell, Huxley, Rand, and Hill.

Atlas Libertas

So close were they that Rand stood next to Greenspan when he took his 1974 oath of office at the White House in the presence of President Gerald Ford. And, he writes, "Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982 and I'm grateful for the influence she had on my life."

South Africans should be grateful too.

Two of her stories—The Grass Is Singing and This Was The Old Chief's Country—combined the sad indistinctness of a melancholy memoir with the very exact realization that a huge injustice had been done to the "native" inhabitants of the land to which she had been transplanted. For much of her life, the battle against apartheid and colonialism was the determining thing in Lessing's life. She joined the Communist Party and married a German Communist exile (who was much later killed as the envoy of East Germany to Idi Amin's hateful regime in Uganda), and if you ever want to read how it actually felt, and I mean truly felt, to believe in a Communist future with all your heart, her novels from that period will make it piercingly real for you.

Later on, and in a way that is now so familiar that we take it for granted, she gave up this animating faith. But not without writing about it in such a way as to make you catch your breath. There is a short fiction called "The Day Stalin Died" that would deserve reprinting in any anthology of the prose of the 20^th century. I have only twice had the experience of reading a story that was so good, and that seemed so much to know what I might be thinking myself, that I was almost afraid to read on. The first time was with Katherine Mansfield, and the second was when holding Lessing's tale "The Temptation of Jack Orkney" (which is incidentally also about a crisis of faith)

International Association of Time Travelers: Members' Forum Subforum: Europe – Twentieth Century – Second World War
Page 263

11/15/2104
At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl's cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?

At 18:33:10, SilverFox316 wrote:
Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you've never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I've got nothing better to do?

11/16/2104
At 10:15:44, JudgeDoom wrote:
Good news! I just left a French battlefield in October 1916, where I shot dead a young Bavarian Army messenger named Adolf Hitler! Not bad for my first time, no? Sic semper tyrannis!

At 10:22:53, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1916 France I come, having at the last possible second prevented Hitler's early demise at the hands of JudgeDoom and, incredibly, restrained myself from shooting JudgeDoom and sparing us all years of correcting his misguided antics. READ BULLETIN 1147, PEOPLE!

At 15:41:18, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Point of order: issues related to Hitler's service in the Bavarian Army ought to go in the World War I forum.

11/21/2104
At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote:
Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler's admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape artist! Brought back a few of his paintings as well, any buyers?

At 02:29:17, SilverFox316 wrote:
All right; that's it. Having just returned from 1907 Vienna where I secured the expulsion of Hitler from the Academy by means of an elaborate prank involving the Prefect, a goat, and a substantial quantity of olive oil, I now turn my attention to our newer brethren, who, despite rules to the contrary, seem to have no intention of reading Bulletin 1147 (nor its Addendum, Alternate Means of Subverting the Hitlerian Destiny, and here I'm looking at you, SneakyPete). Permit me to sum it up and save you the trouble: no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel. Get the picture?

At 02:29:49, SilverFox316 wrote:
PS to SneakyPete: your Hitler paintings aren't worth anything, schmuck, since you probably brought them directly here from 1907, which means the paint's still fresh. Freaking n00b.

At 07:55:03, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Amen, SilverFox316. Although, point of order, issues relating to early 1900s Vienna should really go in that forum, not here. This has been a recurring problem on this forum.

11/26/2104
At 18:26:18, Jason440953 wrote:
SilverFox316, you seem to know a lot about the rules; what are your thoughts on traveling to, say, Braunau, Austria, in 1875 and killing Alois Hitler before he has a chance to father Adolf? Mind you, I'm asking out of curiosity alone, since I already went and did it.

At 18:42:55, SilverFox316 wrote:
Jason440953, see Bylaw 7, which states that all IATT rulings regarding historical persons apply to ancestors as well. I post this for the benefit of others, as I already made this clear to young Jason in person as I was dragging him back from 1875 by his hair. Got that? No ancestors. (Though if anyone were to go back to, say, Moline, Illinois, in, say, 2080 or so, and intercede to prevent Jason440953's conception, I could be persuaded to look the other way.)

At 21:19:17, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Point of order: discussions of nineteenth–century Austria and twenty–first–century Illinois should be confined to their respective forums.

12/01/2104
At 15:56:41, AsianAvenger wrote:
FreedomFighter69, JudgeDoom, SneakyPete, Jason440953, you're nothing but a pack of racists. Let the light of righteousness shine upon your squalid little viper's nest!

At 16:40:17, BigTom44 wrote:
Well, here we frickin' go.

At 16:58:42, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Racist? For killing Hitler? WTF?

At 17:12:52, SaucyAussie wrote:
AsianAvenger, you're not rehashing that whole Nagasaki issue again, are you? We just got everyone calmed down from last time.

At 17:22:37, LadyJustice wrote:
I'm with SaucyAussie. AsianAvenger, you're making even less sense than usual. What gives?

At 18:56:09, AsianAvenger wrote:
What gives is everyone's repeated insistence on a course of action which, even if successful, would only save a few million Europeans. It would be no more trouble to travel to Fuyuanshui, China, in 1814 and kill Hong Xiuquan, thus preventing the Taiping Rebellion of the mid–nineteenth century and saving fifty million lives in the process. But, hey, what are fifty million yellow devils more or less, right, guys? We've got Poles and Frenchmen to worry about.

At 19:01:38, LadyJustice wrote:
Well, what's stopping you from killing him, AsianAvenger?

At 19:11:43, AsianAvenger wrote:
Only to have SilverFox316 undo my work? What's the point?

At 19:59:23, SilverFox316 wrote:
Actually, it seems like a pretty good idea to me, AsianAvenger. No complications that I can see.

At 20:07:25, Big Chill wrote:
Go for it, man.

At 20:11:31, AsianAvenger wrote:
Very well. I shall return in mere moments, the savior of millions!

At 20:14:17, LadyJustice wrote:
Just checked the timeline; congrats on your success, AsianAvenger!

12/02/2104
At 10:52:53, LadyJustice wrote:
AsianAvenger?

At 11:41:40, SilverFox316 wrote:
AsianAvenger, we need your report, buddy.

At 17:15:32, SilverFox316 wrote:
Okay, apparently AsianAvenger was descended from Hong Xiuquan. Any volunteers to go back and stop him from negating his own existence?

12/10/2104
At 09:14:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Anyone?

At 09:47:13, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Point of order: this discussion belongs in the Qing Dynasty forum. We're adults; can we keep sight of what's important around here?

Desmond Warzel ekes out a subsistence living teaching English in the wilds of Northwestern Pennsylvania. "Wikihistory" is his first published story.

Differences of opinion are normal and healthy in adult relationships and learning to compromise is a skill required in many areas of life. You might want to print out this page and pin it to your notice board to remind you both whenever a disagreement arises.

Before trying this exercise it's worth having a look at the Guidelines for exercises.

1. Stick to the issue in hand - don't bring up previous misdemeanors or other things you've been meaning to say.

2. Don't argue over trivia - for example, arguing whether it was Monday or Tuesday that you forgot the milk. The issue is you forgot, not which day it was.

3. Start sentences with "I" - for example, "I felt annoyed when you..." rather than "You annoyed me when..." And "I would like to go out more often," not "We should go out more often."

4. Don't use absolutes - never say "never", "always", "should" or "shouldn't". They're irritating and often inaccurate. For example, "You never wash up" will almost certainly get a response of "What about when...?"

5. Let your opinions stand on their own merits - don't be tempted to bring in other people's opinions.

6. Try to stay sitting down, relax your muscles and don't forget to breathe - it's much easier to stay calm if you're not pacing around the room.

7. Don't start throwing abuse around - calling your partner lazy, fat or paranoid isn't going to convince them to see your point of view.

8. Be aware of your feelings and tell your partner these as well - saying "I'm scared you don't love me anymore" is likely to get a better response than "You don't act like you love me."

9. Try not to block the conversation - don't interrupt, launch into a monologue or expect them to be a mind-reader.

10. Agree to a code word for time out - if one or both of you feels you're getting overheated it's best to take some time away from each other to calm down before going back to the disagreement.

Remember, who wins the argument is irrelevant if your relationship loses something. Always try to confront the issue - not each other.

Form letters don't work. Autographs do.

Surly cashiers fail. Smiles from real people succeed.

Humans like humans. They hate organizations.

Engadget shares this photo of an xBox 360 signed by the entire xBox team (and Bill Gates). Way better than an impersonal letter apologizing for mishandling a computer that was sent in for repair, no? (They had cleaned off a customer's machine covered with sentimental graffiti).

Do you know what most people want? They want you to care.

Top 10 Reasons Why Your Customer Service Fails

Danth's Law

A guy I didn’t like

I can see what they’re saying

In December 2006, while developing a leadership program for Airbus, I met an executive whose youngest son was born without hearing. Through this man and www.WebSourd.org, a French-language Web site that he founded to offer online sign-language translation services, I became familiar with the silent culture of deaf people. As I immersed myself in their visual, intensely expressive language, I realized that through their “handicap,” deaf people had developed certain communication skills more thoroughly than most hearing people, which made them uncommonly effective at getting their point across. Thus a radical experiment was born: to work with deaf people as communication consultants for our corporate clients. The idea was not to teach our clients sign language — although some of our deaf trainers remain convinced that such training would resolve many problems — but to help them adopt communication skills from the deaf world that would make them better colleagues and managers.

When they interact with one another, deaf people act in ways that let them communicate more rapidly and accurately than hearing people. Some of these behaviors are simple and obvious, but it’s remarkable how often hearing people do the opposite. To improve your “hearing,” consider some of these lessons from our experiences and training sessions.

1. Look people in the eye. In my initial meetings with deaf people, I used an interpreter. That in itself was a strange situation: looking at one person while listening to another. During one conversation I was struck by something a young woman had “said,” so I started to write it down in my notebook. Suddenly the atmosphere changed. I looked up and saw the woman frowning angrily at me. I asked her, through the interpreter, what was wrong. “You are being very rude,” she replied. “Why?” I asked, totally lost. “Because you cut the conversation,” she responded, explaining that when I stopped looking her in the eye, I also stopped our communication. “I apologize,” I said. “But what you just said was interesting, and I didn’t want to forget it.” Her answer was quick and sharp: “No, Bruno. You don’t write to remember. You don’t remember because you write!” I was incredulous. “What are you saying? That because you didn’t take any notes during this meeting, you will be able to remember everything?” Calmly, she answered, “That’s correct. Since I don’t write, I’m more present in the interaction and I can concentrate more. And the more I do it, the better I remember.” Ten days later, when I met this young woman again, she was able to recall not just everything we covered in the original meeting, but also the color of my shirt, tie, and even how many chairs were in the room. From that day on, I stopped taking notes during meetings and interviews. And indeed, since then, my memory has improved.

2. Don’t interrupt. Deaf people follow a very strict protocol: Only one person signs at a time. If another person tries to interrupt, the others in the group shake their right hands to signify to the “interrupter” that he or she must wait until the “speaker” is finished. This approach to communication, which at first feels slow, is in fact extremely efficient because there is much less misunderstanding to explain or recover from. Consensus and agreement are arrived at more quickly than during a typical raucous overlapping conversation. By communicating sequentially, a deaf person ensures that he or she first understands the other speaker before trying to be understood. Try this the next time you’re in a business discussion, ideally one in which there’s some tension — let the other person finish what he or she has to say, then silently count to three before responding. You will find that, in the long term, slower is faster.

3. Say what you mean, as simply as possible. Deaf people are direct. This is why people with hearing sometimes perceive sign language as blunt to the point of rudeness. It’s not. It’s just explicit. The deaf tend not to hide behind soft language, struggling to find the most diplomatic wording and hoping that the listener will be able to discern what they “really” mean. And indeed, deaf people reveal not only their thoughts, but also their feelings, both positive and negative, more clearly than hearing people do, as they express them with their whole bodies. Similarly, the deaf are often far better than hearing people at finding the most economical way to convey their message. For example, I wanted to tell one of our deaf trainers about my last trip to India. I didn’t know the sign for India, so I was forced to improvise. I tried drawing maps with my finger, and then tried to come up with gestures for cultural symbols. Suddenly, I saw a light in his eyes. With a big smile, he took his index finger and placed it between his eyebrows — his sign for the familiar Bindi adornment — asking me to confirm. So simple! I later learned that the sign for Belgium, my native country, is to wipe imaginary beer froth from the lips with the right thumb.

4. When you don’t understand something, ask. Because sign language is a constantly evolving language — and because its evolution isn’t slowed down by the need to develop a written counterpart — new signs emerge all the time. Consequently, even if they use the same national sign language, two deaf people from different parts of the same country will use words unique to their region. Aware of this, deaf people feel completely at ease saying “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand.” Those of us with hearing aren’t nearly as willing to admit confusion or lack of comprehension. We often sit silently in meetings while our colleagues use acronyms or technical jargon we don’t grasp because we think asking for clarification is a sign of weakness. Ironically, we’d rather leave a meeting clueless than risk being perceived as stupid. Many meetings conclude with some version of “So, do we all agree?” which discourages anyone from saying no or asking questions. A better approach, which encourages people to speak up, is to ask each person, individually, whether he or she would like clarification about anything that has been discussed.

5. Stay focused. We all know how difficult it is to concentrate on only one thing when the phone is ringing, e-mail alerts are pouring in, and a colleague has just stopped by. The deaf cut themselves off from any distractions, they don’t multitask, and they focus their attention entirely on the conversation. In a recent meeting with some deaf people, I presented a new workflow chart. I gave them each a document outlining the program, planning to elaborate on it as they read the material. One of them stopped me and asked if they should first read, then discuss or first discuss, then read. Doing both at the same time was impossible to them — and of course, despite what we try to do, it is also impossible for us.

These are just a few of the many communications behaviors we can learn from deaf people. But overall, the most inspiring thing about communication with deaf people — and the behavior most worth emulating — is their incredibly strong desire to exchange information efficiently and without adornment. This desire is so strong, in fact, that it often highlights how feeble, misguided, and wishy-washy our own attempts at dialogue are by comparison. It turns out that the people who are truly handicapped in communication are not necessarily those with a physical disability.

Author Profile:

[Snarky Bad Attitude Phrase] + [Core Noun Phrase] + [Unique Word]

Although these are not my actual phrases, let's map them for example:

• Snarky Bad Attitude Phrase = StupidQuestion
  
• Unique Word = Booyah

My answer would be: StupidQuestion SportsTeam Booyah

Here you go, the registry file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\SearchExtensions]
"InternetExtensionName"="Don't Search, Just Take Me There"
"InternetExtensionAction"="http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=%w"

You can also just simply download the reghack file from this zip that also contains a removal hack file:

[www.howtogeek.com]

Google's Design Guidelines

/* remove text from bookmark toolbar but show it on mouseover */
#bookmarks-ptf toolbarbutton:not([container="true"]) label {
display: none !important;
}
#bookmarks-ptf toolbarbutton:not([container="true"]):hover label {
display: block !important;
}

That basically does exactly what the extension smart bookmarks bar does.

Ctrl+page up: Previous tab (tab left of current), circular
Ctrl+page down: Next tab

A bit easier to remember than Ctrl-tab and Shift-ctrl-tab (”Next document/Previous document”), IMO.

"Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once."

I really wish people would stop perpetuating this myth. Firefox caps out at 8 pipelined requests, which is the max allowed by the HTTP spec. By default, it does 4 pipelined requests.

Furthermore, if you could do 30 pipelined requests we'd have sites with a high population of FF users being brought to their knees pretty quickly. Some sites will even block your IP if you try to pull a stunt like that.

Turn off chrome tooltips

All versions: I have an irritating Firefox problem on my Mac. When I try to drag a bookmark into one of my bookmark toolbar folders, the tool tip gets in the way and prevents the drop from working. Argh! Like you, I already know what all the buttons on my browser chrome do, so the tool tips aren't necessary. To turn them off, set the browser.chrome.toolbar_tips key value to false. Bonus is, it solved my Mac's bookmark drag and drop problem.

• Key: browser.chrome.toolbar_tips
• Modified Value: false

Fetch only what you click

Fx .6 and up: Firefox has this wacky little feature that downloads pages from links it thinks you may click on pages you view, like the top result on a page of Google results. This means you use up bandwidth and CPU cycles and store history for web pages you may not have ever viewed. Creepy, eh? To stop that madness, set the network.prefetch-next key to false.

• Key: network.prefetch-next
• Modified Value: false

Change Update Interval of Live Bookmarks in Firefox

Start rendering pages faster
Creating an nglayout.initialpaint.delay integer preference lets you control how long Firefox waits before starting to render a page. If this value isn't set, Firefox defaults to 250 milliseconds, or 0.25 of a second. Some people report that setting it to 0 -- i.e., forcing Firefox to begin rendering immediately -- causes almost all pages to show up faster. Values as high as 50 are also pretty snappy.

Reduce the number of reflows
When Firefox is actively loading a page, it periodically reformats or "reflows" the page as it loads, based on what data has been received. Create a content.notify.interval integer preference to control the minimum number of microseconds (millionths of a second) that elapse between reflows. If it's not explicitly set, it defaults to 120000 (0.12 of a second).

Too many reflows may make the browser feel sluggish, so you can increase the interval between reflows by raising this to 500000 (500,000, or 1/2 second) or even to 1000000 (1 million, or 1 second). If you set this value, be sure to also create a Boolean value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to true.

A page "reflowing" while loading in Firefox.

Control Firefox's 'unresponsive' time
When rendering a page, Firefox periodically runs a little faster internally to speed up the rendering process (a method Mozilla calls "tokenizing"), but at the expense of being unresponsive to user input for that length of time. If you want to set the maximum length of time any one of these unresponsive periods can be, create an integer preference called content.max.tokenizing.time.

Set this to a multiple of content.notify.interval's value, or even the same value (but higher is probably better). If you set this to something lower than content.notify.interval, the browser may respond more often to user input while pages are being rendered, but the page itself will render that much more slowly.

If you set a value for content.max.tokenizing.time, you also need to create two more Boolean values -- content.notify.ontimer and content.interrupt.parsing -- and set them both to true.

Control Firefox's 'highly responsive' time
If Firefox is rendering a page and the user performs some kind of command, like scrolling through a still-loading page, Firefox will remain more responsive to user input for a period of time. To control how long this interval is, create an integer preference called content.switch.threshold.

Hacking Firefox The secrets of about:config Before you begin Speed up page display Have tabbed browsing your way Make the user interface behave Hack network connections Stop memory hogging

If you haven't already created the Boolean values content.notify.ontimer and content.interrupt.parsing and set them both to true in conjunction with content.max.tokenizing.time, you'll need to do so to make content.switch.threshold work properly.

If you are more inclined to wait for a page to finish loading before attempting to do anything with it (like scroll through it), you can set content.max.tokenizing.time to a higher value and content.switch.threshold to a lower value to allow Firefox to finish rendering a page faster at the expense of processing user commands. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who likes to scroll through a page and start reading it before it's done loading, you can set content.max.tokenizing.time to a lower value and content.switch.threshold to a higher one, to give you back that much more responsiveness at the cost of page-rendering speed.

Squeeze more tabs into the tab bar
The integer preference browser.tabs.tabMinWidth controls how narrow, in pixels, tabs can be shrunk down before scroll arrows appear on the left and right edges of the tab bar.

The default is 100, but you can set this to something smaller so you can fit more tabs in the bar at once. Note, however, that you might find the shortened titles harder to read.

Maximize connections to multiple servers
The integer preference network.http.max-connections controls how many simultaneous network connections Firefox will make at any one time to any number of Web servers. One typical way this pays off is if you have Firefox set to load multiple home pages in different tabs at once, or if you access pages that aggregate contents from several different servers (for instance, multiple advertising systems).

By default, this is set to 24, which should work well for most network connections, but you can raise it to 32 and see if that has any effect. (I've seen people raise this as high as 64, but anything above 32 doesn't seem to provide much discernible payoff.)

Maximize connections to the same server
The integer preference network.http.max-connections-per-server controls how many separate connections Firefox makes to the same server, which allows multiple elements in a page to be downloaded in parallel. Normally, this is set to 8, but some people choose to set it as high as 16.

Note, however, that some Web servers will block you if you try to establish more than 8 inbound connections, typically as a bandwidth-protection or antileeching measure -- this is the kind of behavior also exhibited by download managers that try to use as many "slots" as possible to speed things up, and many server admins hate that sort of thing. Also, if you're on a connection that's not fast to begin with (e.g., slow ISDN or dial-up), changing this setting will have no discernible effect, and may in fact slow things down.

Bump up persistent connections per server
Firefox keeps persistent connections to a server "alive" to improve performance: Instead of simply sending the results of one request and then closing, they're held open so that multiple requests can pass back and forth. This means a little less network traffic overall, since a connection to a given server has to be set up only once, instead of once for each separate piece of content; it also means successive connections to the same server go through faster.

The integer preference network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server controls the number of persistent connections allowed per server. By default, this is set to 2, although some servers will honor a higher number of persistent connections (for instance, if there's a lot of content from their site that loads in parallel, like images or the contents of frames). You probably only want to go as high as 8 with this; more than that may cause a server to temporarily blacklist your IP address depending on how it's configured. (If you're going through a proxy defined by Firefox, use network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy instead of this setting.)

Hacking Firefox The secrets of about:config Before you begin Speed up page display Have tabbed browsing your way Make the user interface behave Hack network connections Stop memory hogging

Most people set this to 0 (in seconds), with the default being 10. Note that this does not override connection limits imposed by remote hosts, so its usefulness is limited by the whim of the server you're connecting to.

Stop memory hogging

The default way the Windows version of Firefox consumes memory can be alarming if you don't know what's really going on. People routinely report a memory "footprint" of 75MB to 100MB or more with only a few windows or tabs open, and they assume a memory leak is to blame. While earlier versions of Firefox did have memory leak bugs, they're not the reason for this kind of memory consumption in Firefox 2.x.

Here's what's happening: Firefox caches recently used objects -- Web pages, images -- in memory so that they can be re-rendered on-screen quickly, which drives up memory usage. The following tweaks can make Firefox stake out memory less aggressively. (Note, however, that lightening the memory load might make your pages load a bit more slowly than you're used to.)

Reduce graphics caching
When the Boolean preference browser.cache.memory.enable is enabled (the default), Firefox keeps copies of all graphical elements from the current browsing session in memory for faster rendering. You can set this to false to free up more memory, but pages in your history will reload less quickly when you revisit them.

Another option: Set the value to true and create a new integer preference called browser.cache.memory.capacity. Then specify, in kilobytes, how much memory to set aside for graphics caching. That way you get some of the speed benefits that graphics caching provides without taking a huge memory hit. If you use -1 as the memory value, Firefox will size the memory cache based on how much physical RAM is present.

Reduce Web page caching
Firefox caches several recently visited Web pages in memory so they don't have to be regenerated when you press Back or Forward. The integer setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers determines how many individual Web pages to store in the back/forward cache; each page takes about 4MB (or 4,000KB) of RAM.

By default, however, this value is set to -1, which determines how many pages to cache from the amount of available physical memory; the maximum number of pages stored when you use -1 is 8. Set this value to 0 to disable page caching entirely. That will save some memory, but will also cause Back and Forward navigation to slow down a bit.

Note that this caching is not the same as browser.cache.memory.enable: That setting is for rendering elements on pages like graphics and buttons, and the contents of https-encoded pages, while this setting is for caching the text content of Web pages that have already been rendered or "tokenized."

Hacking Firefox The secrets of about:config Before you begin Speed up page display Have tabbed browsing your way Make the user interface behave Hack network connections Stop memory hogging

Swap out to disk memory when minimized (Windows only)
A little-known feature in Firefox allows the Windows memory manager to swap out some of Firefox's physical memory space to disk when Firefox is minimized but not closed. This allows other programs to use the physical memory that Firefox was previously monopolizing.

Firefox's minimized memory usage with (top) and without (bottom) config.trim_on_minimize. (Click for larger view.)

That said, if you run Firefox side by side with other memory-hungry applications, it might help keep them from competing with each other. To enable this feature, create a new Boolean preference called config.trim_on_minimize and set its value to true.

 user.js

/*:::::::::::::: Inactive & Hovered Tabs Opacity ::::::::::::::*/

#content tab:not([selected="true"])
{-moz-opacity: 0.5 !important;}

#content tab:not([selected="true"]):hover
{-moz-opacity: 0.75 !important;}

/*::::::::::::::Invisible Menubar::::::::::::

How to use it: Move all your Navigation Toolbar items (back/forward buttons, address bar, search bar etc. from the navigation toolbar to the Menu Bar, either on the right side or left side of the Menu Items. Now past this code in userChrome.css and restart your browser. You will no longer see the menu items. Now hover at the right/left edge of the menu bar (whichever side the menu items were on) and the menu items will appear. You can now hide the navigation bar and save vertical space
::::::::::::::*/

#menubar-items {
padding-left: 5px !important;
}

#menubar-items > #main-menubar {
margin-left: -9000px !important;
}

#menubar-items:hover > #main-menubar {
margin-left: 0 !important;
}

#menubar-items:hover {background-image: none !important; padding-left:0 !important;}

By default, if you enter a search term in the address field and press Enter, a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search is performed, and you're taken to the first result of that search directly. If you prefer to see the standard search result list instead, use about:config to change the value of the preference keyword.URL to http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=.

Of course, you could also change to a completely different search engine by changing the string to something else. The default search string is: "http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=".

To specify in which folder the cache is stored, use about:config to add the String preference browser.cache.disk.parent_directory, and set the value to C:\Path To Cache.

Replace Path To Cache with the actual path to your cache folder.

Best of: Greasemonkey Scripts

Tags: Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Firefox-Add-ons, GMail, Google, Google-Adsense, Google-Reader, Wikipedia, YouTube

Posted on April 9, 2007 by Kyle Eslick

Bookmarklets for the Web 2.0 Jedi Master

Bookmarklets, in case you're not familiar with them, are bookmarks that perform a specific action. I can't live without these because they speed up my day, especially when you use them with browser keywords. Here's a list of some new ones that I have started to use in the last few months. Just drag these to your bookmarks/favorites bar and you're good to go. For more fun with bookmarklets, be sure to also check out Blummy.

Pocket Tweets Pop - pops up the Pocket Tweets interface for interacting with Twitter. (More pop-ups here)

Twit This - send a web page directly into Twitter (requires you first enter your info on the TwitThis site)

Map This - pops up a window, enter an address and you will take you to the map

Gmail-to-Gcal - takes any selected text in Gmail and converts it into an event

Mobilize Me - great for mobile phones, takes any web page you're viewing and strips away the formatting by running it through the Google mobile transcoder

Share on Facebook - takes a web page and sticks it into Facebook as a shared item

Pasword Saver - for sites that won't remember your login info, click this link then enter your username/password and your browser will never forget it

Take Screenshot - automatically create a screen grab of any public web page you're visiting

Search and Highlight - scans a page for any term you enter then highlights the results

New Doc - creates a new word processing Google Document

Movie Times - enter your zip code and get a list of all the movies playing in your hood

Amazon This - pops up a little window, enter a term and it will run your search through on Amazon

Convert Me - takes any YouTube video and converts it into another downloadable format using Zamzar

Edit in Picnik - pushes a web page's images into Picnik where you can edit and save it

¹: For this shortcut to work on Linux, use about:config to set the preference browser.backspace_action to 0.

²: This shortcut only works in the Location Bar.

³: This function is not available in Firefox 2.

Keyboard shortcuts save you time by letting you explore Remember The Milk quickly.

Combination Shortcuts

Locations Shortcuts

Note: You may need to click on the map first before map keyboard shortcuts will work.

When you signup for Remember The Milk, you are assigned a unique email address. Emails sent to this special address are automatically converted into tasks and appear in your Inbox. (You will find this address in your 'welcome' email and in the 'Settings' section.)

How to format your email

The subject should be the task name.

The body can include any of the following (or can be empty):

Priority: 1 or P: 1

Due: Monday at 9am or D: Monday at 9am

Repeat: Every Week or R: Every Week

Estimate: 2 hours or E: 2 hours

Tags: report coffee or S: report coffee

Location: Home or O: Home

URL: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ or U: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/

By default, your task will appear in your Inbox. If you want the task to appear in a different list, you can do so with the following:

List: Work or L: Work

Optionally, if you're unable to specify the subject of your email, you can use the following to specify the task name:

Task: Weekly work meeting or T: Weekly work meeting

Notes can be included at the bottom of the email, but need to be separated with '---'.

If your email automatically contains a signature or disclaimer that you'd like to prevent being converted into a note, you can include '-end-' on a line by itself, and everything after this line will be ignored.

Example email

Subject: Weekly work meeting
To: [Your Remember The Milk email address]

Priority: 1
Due: Monday at 9am
Repeat: Every Week
Estimate: 2 hours
Tags: report coffee
---
This is a heading for the first note.

This is the first note's content.
---
This is a heading for the second note.

This is the second note's content.

Pump Your Productivity with "Mini Me" Bookmarklets

I have bookmarked
http://mail.google.com/mail/?&search=query&q=label:%s&view...
with the keyword gl (gmail label).
Then I can go to a certain gmail label by typing
gl label

Another suggestion is to make a keyword for each label without using %s.

I like the last idea from Joel above, I have a similar one for getting around BBC websites: "http://bbc.co.uk/%s" - so 'bbc radio1' takes you straight to Radio 1's site, 'bbc weather' to the weather site, etc etc.

Another useful one is "http://imdb.com/find?q=%s" mapped to 'imdb' - to search for 'the godfather' on imdb type in 'imdb the godfather' etc. All in all I have about 130 keywords and about 40 of those mapped to keyword 'queries' like the above (using the %s feature).

Auto Hide Sidebar

By srazzano

Last updated Nov 02 2007

7 installs this week, 424 total.

Hides the Sidebar until the mouse contacts the left edge of the screen where it's hidden. Need to establish the width of your present Sidebar by using DOM Inspector. In the DOM location bar enter chrome://browser/content/browser.xul and click on inspect. Ignore the Session Manager by closing it (if it pops up). Click on window(plus sign) > stack(plus sign) > hbox(plus sign) > vbox and in the right panel select Object - DOM Node, there you will find the width of the sidebar. Subtract 1 from that number and enter that value as a negative number in place of the -215 in userChrome.css for #sidebar-box { margin-left: Removes vertical separator, search: label, search input box, closebutton, title text, scrollbar (scrollable with mousewheel) and adds 3D border. Also removes the Bookmarks or History item from the View > Sidebar > Menu popup, for which ever view is active. Tip: For access to widen the Sidebar, grab it from the 5px area just below the bottom toolbar (at the top left corner of the screen while in Fullscreen mode). See after screenshot.
**Updated to restore right click context menu.** Tested with FF 2.0.0.4 - 8. I will respond to feedback!

To move the sidebar from the left to the right you do add this line:

#browser {-moz-box-direction: reverse;}

To increase the width of the sidebar you would add this one:

#sidebar {max-width: none !important; }

A restart of Firefox applies the new settings.

Google Sidebars

Firefox and Opera have a little-known feature: the sidebar. You can open any page in a persistent sidebar that sits in the left of your window. Because the sidebar is usually very small, not every web page is usable when added to the sidebar.

If the links from this page don't automatically create a sidebar, you'll have to bookmark them and select "Show in panel" (for Opera) or go to the Bookmark Manager, and enable "Load this bookmark in the sidebar" in the bookmark's properties.

1. Google Notebook - a simplified version of Google Notebook that lets you access your notes and easily add new notes. It's a good idea to use it if you don't want to install the extension.

2. Google Talk - the Flash gadget for Google Talk is a good replacement for the desktop client if you don't use more advanced features like voice chat or file sharing.

3. Google Search - this page was designed for Internet Explorer and it's useful if you want to see the list of search results in the sidebar.

4. Google Docs & Spreadsheets - the list of your files sorted by the last modified date.

5. As most of these pages were actually created for Google gadgets, you may be wondering if it's possible to add any gadget to the sidebar. Some of the gadgets can be added by bookmarking this address:

http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=[Gadget Source]

where [Gadget Source] is the URL of the gadget's source code, which can be found if you click on the little arrow from each gadget box and select "About this gadget".

Example: http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=
http://www.counttonine.com/google-sudoku.xml (a Sudoku game).

Now that you have a lot of sidebars, you'll want a way to organize them. Opera lets you easily switch between panels and for Firefox there's an extension called All-in-One Sidebar that adds this functionality.

You can use this URL to point directly on the first widget of the page..

http://www.google.com/ig#c_1

Why the name OnePipe?
After processing the desired keyword, OnePipe calls upon the URL parameterization capabilities of Yahoo! Pipes to generate the feed. Look closely at the full URL processed by Grazr: there are really only a couple of parameters:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=dCunRCfP2xGZfglMOUVYtA
&_render=rss
&query=Headline Animator
&feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2

1. a URL pointing to the Pipe I created (direct link: OnePipe : The CleverClogs Generic Feed Filter)
2. the "_render=rss" suffix to force the output to RSS
3. a query parameter
   
4. the URL of the feed that is being filtered.

What this means is that you could substitute any feed, alter the query and parse those with one and the same Pipe—hence the name OnePipe. If you're curious what OnePipe does behind the scenes, then please feel free to take a peek, then clone and tweak it. Here's the link that takes you directly to the source of OnePipe : The CleverClogs Generic Feed Filter.

Installing OnePipe
Drag this hyperlink OnePipe to your bookmarks toolbar. This will cause a button named OnePipe to become available on your toolbar. Open its properties if you want to see the underlying Javascript code. The current version is from 2007-03-13, 3:49 PM - GMT +1.

Grabbing your feed
OnePipe feeds are just feeds as any other. With the bookmarklet I offer an easy way to view feeds created with OnePipe. Of course you can use any other tool too: to subscribe to your newly created feed in your feed reader, grab the entire URL off the Grazr address bar. Select the URL, copy it to the clipboard and paste it into the dialog box that your feed reader provides for new subscriptions. Let me know if you have any issues with this.

Where to take your feed
Apart from subscribing to a OnePipe feed in your feed reader, you could also consider the following possibilites. Start out by creating a filtered channel of highly relevant posts about a certain topic, about a person, or about an event.

• Receive a system tray alert or a sticky desktop message when a new feed item matches your filter, or display your channel as a running ticker on your system. To enable this, subscribe to your OnePipe feed in Touchstone.
• Have all Twitter posts from your "With Friends" page that mention @yourname, forwarded as SMS messages to your cell phone using Rasasa or ZapTXT. Just sign in to your account with any of these services, fill in the URL of your OnePipe feed and set your preferences.
• Receive the items in your OnePipe feed as instant-messaging notifications through your preferred IM system: for Skype there's Anothr and, since fairly recent times, ZapTXT. For the other main IM systems, consider Rasasa (all systems) and Feed Crier (AIM and Jabber).
• Forward the items in your OnePipe feed to your email inbox, for example using FeedBlitz, R|Mail or Zookoda.
• Use your OnePipe feed as a building block to create a topic radar. To merge your OnePipe feed with other feeds, consider using newsmastering services such as mySyndicaat, Feed Digest and Feed Blendr.
• There are literally hundreds of RSS Tool Vendors—yes I track them myself. Excellent resources where RSS tools are discussed in depth are John Tropea's Library clips, who's not just thorough and smart, but always points to other relevant tools in the same category, and 3Spot's incredibly comprehensive RSS Tools page.

Feed Auto-Discovery
As you may have noticed, OnePipe is capable of detecting all of the feeds offered on any web page you visit. You may know that the mechanism of recognizing feeds is usually referred to as feed auto-discovery. Most blog publishing services offer this capability automatically and you should be able to use the bookmarklet with most blogs and sites offering RSS feeds. The bookmarklet component of OnePipe is mostly an adaptation of the OPML Auto-Discovery bookmarklet that I published a couple of months ago.

The concept behind OnePipe
For me the exciting part about OnePipe is not so much the bookmarklet itself, but the generic feed filtering mechanism that I built for it using Yahoo! Pipes. Feed manipulation is an essential part of newsmastering, the techniques used to build feeds matching a particular topic, person or event. As far as I know OnePipe is the first solution to offer on-the-fly feed filtering based on URL parameterization. With other feed filtering services the source feed and sometimes the search query get obfuscated, hindering direct finetuning of the settings.

Room for improvement
These are some ideas I have to make OnePipe better:

• offer tag, category, author and title search capabilities  (already in progress in Pipes)
• integrate with John Forsythe's Feed Preview add-on for Firefox
• general debugging and fine-tuning

I'm very curious for your feedback on OnePipe. Moreover, if you've been able to successfully use OnePipe for a particular purpose, then please share your experience. David Tebbutt provided me with lots of useful input in this project. Thanks!

First Reactions:
Mike Kowalchik understands this is a proof of concept and there maybe some wrinkles to iron out. Indeed, Mike. It seems Pipes only searches through excerpts of feed items, and not the full feed.

Mike Gotta calls OnePipe innovative on his blog and suggests you give it a try. Thanks Mike!

James Corbett (through IM) points out that OnePipe could be especially useful to filter the noise from one's Twitter Friends' stream. He requested a Yahoo! Pipe that lets you create a feed that lists items that do not match certain keywords. Ok, James, here's the AllButPipe bookmarklet, and the link to the Pipe that fuels it: AllButPipe : The CleverClogs "Exclude This" Feed Filter

Danish podcaster Karin Høgh (through IM) asks for instructions to add the bookmarklet to IE7. Yikes. Sometimes I forget I'm not in a Firefox-only world. What's worse: the bookmarklet isn't going to work in IE7 because its underlying Javascript code is tiny bit too long: 2880 characters instead of the allowed 250—more or less. Thanks Karin!

Phil Hollows of FeedBlitz (through IM) helpfully suggests to turn OnePipe into a server-hosted script. The advantage is that that might make it accessible for IE7 users, and it would give me version control. On the other hand, this is definitely beyond my scripting capabilities and the TypePad server would be accessed each time the script is called. I think I'll leave that until I've had proper training in Javascript coding.

View Source in Sidebar

Bookmark Keyword

Opens the bookmark with the specified keyword. Replace the string KEYWORD with your bookmark's keyword.

Option 1: Bookmarks and Descriptions
http://del.icio.us/html/username/?extended=body&tags=no&rssbutton=no

Option 2: Bookmarks Only
http://del.icio.us/html/username/?tags=no&rssbutton=no

Option 3: Bookmarks and Tags
http://del.icio.us/html/username/?&rssbutton=no

Option 4: Increase the Bookmark Count to 100
http://del.icio.us/html/username/?&rssbutton=no&count=100

Firefox 3 Beta only: If you've taken the plunge into testing the brand new Firefox 3 beta but your favorite extensions are disabled, that's because developers haven't updated them and may not be providing secure updates yet. If you're an impatient risk-taker who needs your extensions back NOW, here's a cheat that may get them to work. Big Honking Warning: Only do this if you're willing to deal with possible bleeding edge extension bugs and security risks!

• Type about:config into Firefox's address bar and click the "I'll be careful, I promise!" button.
• Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.
• Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.
• Restart Firefox.

his article describes how to prevent websites from disabling certain new window features by changing the related Firefox or Mozilla Suite preference setting.

Web pages can disable a number of features in new windows opened via JavaScript. The new window or "popup" may not be resizable and other features such toolbars may be missing, as discussed here. Advanced users can prevent these features from being disabled by editing configuration via the user.js file or in about:config. For example, you can set the dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable preference to "true" to prevent popup window resizing from being disabled, so that you can resize popup windows that may open too small. Other "dom.disable_window_open_feature.*" preferences are listed below:

(From the About:config entries article, under DOM.*)

Five Quick Searches That Turn Firefox's Address Bar into a Network Command Line [Firefox]

Tweak Google Reader iPhone Edition in Your Firefox Sidebar

Adjust the Smart Location Bar's Number of Suggestions

1. Enter about:config into the address bar and hit Enter.
2. Press the "I''ll be carefull. I promise!" button. (Because you will be.)
3. Enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults in the Filter field to reach this preference.
4. Set it to your desired number of suggestions. Three shown here.

One of the most useful but also very annoying feature in Firefox 3 is their new location bar. It’s useful because you can bookmark and tag websites from the address bar itself. It’s annoying because it pulls down site suggestions from your bookmarks.

If you like to stop Firefox 3 from displaying bookmarks in the address bar alongside search history, here are the possible options:

Option A: Disable autocomplete drop-down entirely

Use this if you don’t want Firefox to display any kind of suggestions in the Address Bar be they from your browsing history or from saved bookmarks.

Open the about:config page and set the value of browser.urlbar.maxRichResults as –1. Restart Firefox and your Firefox 3 address bar will behave just like that of Firefox 2.

Option B: See web addresses that you have typed

In this option, the drop-drop remains enabled but it will only suggest website addresses / URLs that you have previously typed in the location bar.

Open about:config and set the value of browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped to False. Now none of the entries from your browser history or bookmarks will appear in the ‘awesome’ address bar.

Option C: Remove Bookmarks Completely from Address Bar

This is probably the option you are looking for. Firefox 3 uses the Frecency score to determine sites that should appear in the drop-down. We can set frecency value for bookmarks to zero and thus they won’t appear in the location bar.

Open the about:config page, and set value of places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus and places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus to zero.

Setting places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus to 0 will prevent bookmarks from appearing that you have never visited while places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus will prevent display of bookmarks that you have visited since the last time you cleared private data in Firefox.

Restart Firefox. Anything that has a frecency value of zero doesn not show up in autocomplete results and thus your bookmarks won’t turn in the suggestions anymore.

One noticeable change between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 is the yellow address bar background, which turned on in Firefox 2 when you visited encrypted web sites—the ones that start with https://. After much debate among the developers, Firefox 3 dropped that visual cue, but on Windows, with a little userChrome.css tweak, you can have that yellow background back. Here's how.

If you've got the Stylish extension installed, you can simply add a new style that contains:

Here's how to configure Firefox 3 to use Gmail as your default mailto: application handler.

Ready to set up Gmail? Roll up those sleeves.

1. Open Gmail in Firefox.
2. In the tab where Gmail is loaded, copy and paste the following snippet of JavaScript into your address bar:
   javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail")
   
   If you are a Google Apps user, use this code instead, but replace example.com with your domain name:
   javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/a/example.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail")
3. Firefox 3 will ask permission to add Gmail as default mailto handler. Click the Add Application button, as shown.
   

Update, 6/18/08: Thanks to a great tip from a reader Andrew, the instructions above have been shortened considerably. Thanks, Andrew!

Now, if you click a mailto: link—try the tips link on Lifehacker's sidebar—Firefox 3 will ask which application you want to use. Choose Gmail, and select "Remember my choice for mailto links" to set the preference permanently.

**Updated 5/21** If this trick doesn't work for you, go into about:config and make sure that network.protocol-handler.external.mailto is set to its default value true.

***Updated 5/21*** To remove the Gmail handler, in Firefox's Tools menu, choose Options. (Mac users, go to the Preferences dialog.) In the Applications tab, search for mailto. From the drop-down of mailto handlers, choose Applications Details, as shown. Here you can select a webapp handler and Remove it using the button.

F

When a user enters a search term in the Firefox location bar (address bar, awesome bar) it is determined if the entered term is an actual web address or a search term. If it is a search term a search using the default search engine is performed. If it is a web address the web address is loaded directly.

Firefox assumes that all phrases that make use of a period are web addresses and will try to load them. This can be quite frustrating if a user wanted to look up a file name in a search engine. You can test that yourself by entering svchost.exe in the address bar. Firefox will try to load the website svchost.exe even though the .exe domain extension is not existent.

There is no Firefox setting or add-on that can restrict the extensions to the known domain extensions but there is another way to directly saerch for terms with periods in Firefox using the location bar.

All that is needed is to place a “?” before the search term. While a search for svchost.exe would result in a page not found error in Firefox a search for ?svchost.exe would perform the search in the default search engine and deliver the desired result.

I've often wanted a way to get Firefox to save the current set of tabs without actually bookmarking them -- the way it does when you install an extension and need to restart. But I'd never found a way to do that through the menus.

But then I realized that I could use the same trick that I use for landscape printing:

1. Edit user.js in your Firefox profile directory, and add this line:

   user_pref("browser.tabs.warnOnClose", false);
   

   This will ensure that normally, it doesn't give you the confirmation box, only when you ask for it.
2. In your running Firefox, go to about:config and search for tabs
3. Look for the browser.tabs.warnOnClose line and doubleclick it (change it to true)

Now you'll get the confirmation dialog when you quit this session.

To bookmark any label, folder or message type in Gmail:

• Copy and paste https://mail.google.com/mail/?search=query&view=tl&start=0&fs=1&q=label: in a new browser window.
• Append the name of the desired label to the address in the address bar.
  • If you have a label called "todo", for example, add "todo" so that the end of the address reads "&q=label:todo".
  • To access a folder, add the folder name; for "Drafts", add "Drafts" so that the end of the address reads "&q=label:Drafts".
  • For a message type, add the message type:
    • "unread" for unread mail
    • "read" for read mail.
• Press Enter.
• Bookmark the page that comes up.

Send text messages to: