March 10, 2005
Dude, I'm Getting a Dell... Actually, Two Dell LCDs
03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (5) ~ PC - Customizing
When I first purchased a PC back in the 90s, I had to have a big screen — one capable of running 1600×1200 resolution. Why such high resolution? Because the screen is your primary interface to the computer (you look at it all the time), so the more resolution you can run, the more windows you can have visible at once and the longer you can make your windows to avoid/reduce scrolling. At the time, I got a great deal from Viewsonic on a 21” CRT. I think it ended up costing me something like $1200.
My current monitor is a Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2040u (21” CRT). I picked it up around about five years ago, and it’s run like a champ since. However, it is very large and heavy as hell… so heavy I hate moving it. It probably a power hog too since 21” CRTs typically draw something like 140 watts of power. I think I paid something like $1100 for the monitor, which was also a great deal at the time.
CRTs are still the bomb for high-end graphics production, since they can more truly reproduce colors. The Sony GDM-C520K Artisan is the monitor of choice for this kind of work. However, for most general computing applications, LCD panels are the way to go. They are now relatively cheap and even fast enough to run games on.
It wasn’t too long ago that you’d have to pay almost two grand for a decent 1600×1200 LCD panel. With the huge demand for panels, economies of scale have kicked in and you can pick up a great 20” LCD for under $700… actually, I paid just a little over $500 for a Dell 2001FP.
Actually, that’s not quite correct. I actually paid a little over $500 each for two 2001FPs. Two? Yes two. Since my graphics card supports dual monitors (one through DVI and one analog), I’m going for a dual-monitor set up. Two monitors is almost a must for applications like Photoshop where you have a gillion of these little tool palettes (which control things like layers and color histograms) in addition to the main image window. With two monitors you can place all of the palettes on the second monitor leaving the primary monitor just for the image you are editing. It’s also nice to be able to place your music client, IM client and other applications in the second monitor leaving the primary just for web browsing.
Going with two 1600×1200 monitors will give me 3200×1200 pixels of screen real estate. I had thought about getting Dell’s new 2405FPW 24” LCD, but at $1200, it’s about the same price as two 20” panels, while only running 1920×1200. And if you think that I’m nuts to care about getting the maximum resolution possible, check out Dell’s multi-monitor page. Clearly, there’s a lot of people/businesses who what big screens.
If you’re interested in buying a Dell monitor (or any Dell product for that matter), be sure to check sites like Techbargains’ Dell coupon page to make sure you’re getting the best deal. I saved $125 on my monitors by using a coupon I found on their site.
The 2001FP doesn’t support portrait mode (rotating the monitor 90 degrees for 1200×1600 viewing), but you can buy portrait-enabling software from folks like Portrait Displays.
Dude, I’m gonna be stoked when my panels arrive.
February 02, 2005
Firefox — Roll Your Own QuickLaunches and QuickSearches
03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) ~ Firefox & PC - Customizing
Man, just when you think you have everything figured out with Firefox, you learn about something new. In fact, sometimes you feel like you’re the last one to learn about it. What “new” features of Firefox am I talking about? That’d be QuickLaunches and QuickSearches (I sort of made those CamelCase words up).
Creating a QuickLaunch
For sites you visit a lot, it’s great to have an easy-to-remember letter or short word that when typed into the address bar tells Firefox to launch a particular site. For example, I have Firefox set up to launch the front page of Yahoo! by simply typing “yhoo” into the address bar and hitting return (actually, I type “cntrl+L” to set the focus on the address bar, and then type “yhoo” and return — no mousing required).
To set the keyword for a site, browse to that site and bookmark it. Then right-click on the bookmark and select Properties from the context menu. This reveals the Properties menu. Type in the keyword you would like associated with that site into the Keyword field, then click the OK button. Easy!
Creating a QuickSearch
But wait, there’s more. QuickSearches allow you to not only tell Firefox to launch a site based on a keyword, but also automatically search on a query. For example, let’s say that I want to search on the term “whatever” in Yahoo!. I have Firefox set up so that all I need to do is type “y whatever” into the address bar and hit return to load this page.
To set up a QuickSearch, you must bookmark the results page for a search engine, substitute in “%s” in place of the query and add your keyword. If this doesn’t make sense, go here to see how the QuickSearch bookmarks for several common search engines are formatted (and don’t forget the keyword).
I have several dozen QuickLanches and QuickSearches set up in Firefox. This saves me a lot of time mousing around and has just about eliminated my use of the search box (located in the upper right corner).
Tip
Don’t just randomly place your keyworded bookmarks into your bookmarks list. If you do, you’ll lose track of them making it almost impossible to look up a forgotten keyword. To solve this problem with Firefox’s weak bookmark managing system, I created a folder called “Keywords,” and created all of my QuickSearches and QuickLaunches within this folder (even if I end up duplicating bookmarks found somewhere else in my bookmarks list). In addition, I add “(=Keyword)” to the end of the Name field in the bookmark’s Properties menu (e.g., the Yahoo! bookmark name field reads “Yahoo! - Search (=y)”). If I forget a keyword, I can open the Keywords folder to see a complete list of my keywords.
January 18, 2005
Windows XP Tuning
12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2) ~ PC - Customizing
When you install a fresh version of Window XP, I like to change some of the default settings back to the "classic" settings.
- Win2k Style Login - From the Control Panel:
Goto User Accounts then Chage the way users log on or off and uncheck Use Welcome - Win2k Style Search - Regedit to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState
Right click and add a new String Value with properties
Value Name: Use Search Asst
Value Data: no - Removing Extraneous Startup Programs - Lots of programs like to jam
stuff in the startup folder. Hate it. I pretty much remove everything
from this folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\your_user_name\Start Menu\Programs\Startup - Turn Microsoft's ClearType on (especially for LCD displays). This is an ActiveX control, so you have to do it from IE.
January 10, 2005
Firefox Customization
05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (7) ~ Firefox & PC - Customizing
Firefox is a great browser and a great example of how well open-source development can work. Straight out of the box, it's very usable, and is probably fine for most casual users. Lucky for power users, or users that just like tinkering, the design of Firefox facilitates a wide range of customization options. Add on programs (extensions), custom settings files, themes and even custom binaries for specific CPUs all exist or can be created to modify Firefox specific tastes and needs. Here's some notes on how I've used these items to customize my Firefox install.
CPU-Specific Builds of Firefox
I've just started using (as of 2005_01_26) MOOX's custom build of Firefox. These builds are designed to exploit features of particular processors and/or instruction sets. So far the build I've been using seems very stable. It's a bit faster than the normal Firefox build, but definitely not a huge increase (e.g., a 2x speed increase). Make sure to read this page which guides you through which build is appropriate for your particular CPU (most newer processors use the M3 build). Downloads can be found here.
Oh, here's a couple of quick tips to make your Firefox use more productive.
1) cntrl+Tab scrolls between Firefox's Tabs (cntrl+shift+tab goes the other way)
2) Click on any bookmark, and enter a keyword. Now, Firefox will open this bookmark when you enter this keyword into the address field.
3) You setup Firefox to find an item on the simply by typing your query while focused on the page. To set this up, go to 'Tools/Options,' 'Advanced' and 'Accessibility', tick 'Begin finding when you begin typing'.
4) Cntrl+e locks focus on the search box in the upper right corner.
5) Once focus is on the search box, cntrl+arrowup/down scrolls through your search engines.
Essential Extensions
- IEView - Adds "View page in Internet Explorer" links to the content and link context menu. This rocks. Since I don't have Flash installed in Firefox (which is nice for blocking evil UI elements and ads), IEView lets me quickly load the page in IE in all of its Flash glory (or gory). Also good for pages that don't load well in Firefox.
- Context Search - Changes the "Web Search for" context item into a menu containing your search plugins.
- Compact Menu - Allows you to free up some vertical space my cramming all of the menu controls (i.e., File, View, etc.) under a fish icon.. why the fish, I don't know. Here's a picture of it in action.
- Linkification - Makes textual URLs links.
- Diggler - Adds a button to the toolbar and a link in the context menu that with tools to easily dig through the directories of the URL you are currently browsing.
- Tabbrowser Extensions - Greatly increases control over your tabs. An essential extension.
- SpellBound - A feature-rich spell checker for Firefox. Use it in TypePad (just be sure to click on the field you want to check before initiating it). Add-on dictionaires for international language support can be found here.
- Scrapbook - Facilitates capture of full or partial web pages and creation of plain-text or HTML notes. You can change the directory that Scrapbook stores its entries in under
Tools/Settings/Advance. - ColorZilla - Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily. And there's more...
- A9 Toolbar - Has an A9 search box, saves your history and bookmarks online. Really used to receive the A9 discount at Amazon (which is a little over 1%).
- Sage - A lightweight RSS and ATOM feed aggregator
- Mapit -- Select addresses from a web page and open a map of it using the context menu.
- Feedview -- Allows the browser to render RSS feeds. Similar to the functionality found in Apple's Safari browser.
- All-in-One Gestures -- This extension allows you to execute common commands using mouse gestures, rocker navigation, scroll wheel navigation and page scrolling.
Optional Extensions
Quick Note -
QuickNote is a note taking-like extension.
ConQuery - translate page -- http://www.cusser.net/extensions/translatepage/
Dictionary Search
Context Highlight
FoxyTunes
Image Zoom
OpenBook
Sage
Bloglines Toolkit
Mozilla Archive Format
Scrollbar Anywhere
SessionSaver - If Firefox crashes, SessionSaver will reload your open tabs at the time of the crash. In addition, you can save your open tabs in SessionSaver kind of like a group bookmark. Also lists recently closed tabs.
Firefox Search Plug-ins
- Yahoo!
- Yahoo! Shopping
- Amazon
- Wikipedia
Themes
Rein
I'm currently using the
default Firefox theme. If you are interested in changing the look of
your Firefox install, look here for a new theme.
Speed Enhancement Settings
Look at: http://windowssecrets.com/041202/
User.js
// This one makes a huge difference. Last value in milliseconds (default is 250)
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
// Stop reusing active windows:
user_pref("advanced.system.supportDDEExec", false);
// disable target="_blank" (open in same window):
user_pref("browser.block.target_new_window", true);
// Change to normal Google search:
user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=");
// Put an end to <blink> tags!
user_pref("browser.blink_allowed", false);
// Enable pipelining:
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 100);
// Turn off Automatic Image Resizing:
user_pref("browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing", false);
// turn on timer-based reflow management
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
// sets the allowed time between reflows in microseconds
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 100);
// set the number of reflows to do before waiting for the rest of the page to arrive
user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 200);
UserChrome.css
UserChrome.css
//
UserChrome.css
(found in C:\Documents and Settings\user_name\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\default\wfkd6mnh.slt\chrome)
/*
* Edit this file and copy it as userChrome.css into your
* profile-directory/chrome/
*/
/*
* This file can be used to customize the look of Mozilla's user interface
* You should consider using !important on rules which you want to
* override default settings.
*/
/*
* Do not remove the @namespace line -- it's required for correct functioning
*/
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"); /* set default namespace to XUL */
/* Kill icons on normal bookmarks */
/*================================================
* Main Window Edits
*================================================*/
window {
font-size: 9pt !important;
font-family: Verdana !important;
}
#sidebar {
font-size: 9pt !important;
font-family: Verdana !important;
}
/*============================================
* Tab Edits
*============================================*/
/* change the font style on the tabs */
.tab-text {
font-size: 9pt !important;
font-family: Verdana !important;
}
/* make inactive tabs hardly visible :) */
tab:not([selected="true"]) {
-moz-opacity: 0.5 !important;
}
/*
.tabbrowser-strip tab:not([selected="true"]) .tab-text {
font-size: 14pt !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
}
*/
/* hide the text of the inactive tabs */
/*
.tabbrowser-strip tab:not([selected="true"]) .tab-text {
display: none !important;
}
*/
/* never show "Open in New Window" when right clicking */
#context-openlink {
display: none !important;
}
/* Don't Display Icons in Bookmarks menu and add Blue to folders */
menu.bookmark-item > .menu-iconic-left {
display: none;
}
menuitem.bookmark-item > .menu-iconic-left {
display: none;
}
menu.bookmark-item {
color: navy !important;
font-weight: 900 !important;
}
/* Change Active Tab Color */
tab {background-color: white !important; color:black !important}
tab[selected="false"] {color: black; background-color: white !important;}
tab[selected="true"] {color: blue; background-color: yellow !important;}