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Whatever they did behind the scenes managed to break the ad blocking capabilities in both the Better Gmail and Customize Google Firefox add-ons. A minor annoyance -- but still... More info at: http://lifehacker.com/software/sneak-preview/gmail-speeds-up-improves-contacts-316673.php

Just to verify without taking the 30 seconds to actually google an answer, but if Windows Update turns it back on, the standard turn off methods still work, correct? (assuming it doesn't get 'updated' back to on again later).

FYI, these are the instructions I've followed in the past to turn this off (home user, not a sysadmin):
http://lifehacker.com/software/optimization/turn-off-indexing-and-speed-up-windows-xp-031440.php

You can get a pseudo folder look from the scripts developed at Greasemonkey and lifehacker. I use "BetterGmail" and it supports skins, encryption, folders, colored labels, more shortcut keys, and tons of other enhancements...

http://lifehacker.com/software/gmail/lifehacker-code-better-gmail-firefox-extension-251923.php

Backup Google Apps Documents

Treos are way too thick. Compare their thickness to a Motoral Q or Samsung Blackjack. People don't like thick phones. The iPhone does MORE and is thinner. (And before you think of replying with a snarky "But the iPhone isn't a smartphone cause you can't install 3rd party apps, take a look at this: http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/install -third+party-applications-on-your-iphone-295985.ph p )

Palm is simply lagging in both hardware AND software. Where's that new OS btw?

You know.....

There's lies.....
http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/install -third+party-applications-on-your-iphone-295985.ph p

And then there's lies...
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/08/07/iphone-nes-fast-usa ble-totally-rewritten/

Same here, but there is a nifty SystemRescueCd that can do all of that as well - while also being free as in beer (and probably free in other ways as well) Nice write-up on it with screen shots at lifehacker.com

The Firefox extension forces GMail to always run over SSL. It's great!

i came across this on lifehacher.com but i have not have a chance to try it out. I don't think this is going to fix your linux problem..but it might be useful for all the other mac/win people out there

There's a "Darken" bookmarklet that you could use to darken a particular page. They also have a Greasemonkey script if you have certain pages you want to have auto-darkened.

One thing that really bothered me on OS X was its complete and total lack of an uninstall feature. This was especially annoying, as I'd hoped that the "drag to trash" was really a fancy GUI for some sort of real package manager.

I mean, sure, if your app is entirely self-contained, you can just drag it from Applications to Trash and be done with it -- at least that's no worse than Linux, where per-user preferences are left alone, but nobody really cares, since it's only a few K of disk space and doesn't affect anything else.

But what do you do about the random app that installs kernel extensions, browser extensions, and generally insinuates itself among all your stuff? You know, the cool stuff like Insomnia, the SMS-to-HID driver, or the force-any-window-to-fullscreen extension? Or even multi-desktops, or something as simple as a VPN?

Often, the uninstall instructions for these are at least as complicated and unnecessary as anything you hear people complaining about for installing software on Linux.

Oh wait, I forgot -- there's a proud Mac tradition of making you pay $20, $50, or $100 for random bits of third-party software to implement stuff that should have been in the OS to begin with. In the past, it was things like dynamic RAM allocation and swap space, and now, it's an uninstaller.

(You could complain that Windows is the same way, needing third-party stuff like anti-virus, but most of what you need on Windows is either bundled with the OS or available for free, often open source. And you don't really need anti-virus. On the Mac, it's always this truly basic functionality that I guess isn't needed by people who want it to "just work".)

In any case, mod me offtopic if you will, but maybe this proves that Apple was right not to include an uninstaller. Maybe most people just don't need to uninstall anything, ever, so it's too much work to include yet another feature that may confuse grandma, even if it makes us geeks grind our teeth at the mere thought...

What good points? It has a resource intensive "shiny" interface. It has levels of DRM heretofore unseen in an operating system. It is claimed that it is secure, yet still has gaping security holes. It is claimed that it is safe, yet has to be made un-safe for users to be able to do anything with it. It is expensive, clunky, space consuming, privacy invading, insecure, unsafe, and is more interested in protecting the interests of major Hollywood distributors than its users.

Care to highlight why I'd want to use Vista?

try this.

some of the comments are interesting, too.

If you use firefox you could use the better gmail extension it has an option to force https http://lifehacker.com/software/gmail/lifehacker-co de-better-gmail-firefox-extension-251923.php

Sounds like Google is your friend.

(Posting AC to preserve mod points)

Project idea:
(1) domain resolver modification/hack that returns a "not found" result for domains that aren't real sites (maybe check a list of IP addresses used for domain parking / auctioning / squatting / spamming?) In short, if you mistype "ssh myserver.org", the result will be what you expect (host not found) rather than something misleading (connection refused, login incorrect, unknown server key, etc.)
(2) browser hack that detects and blocks pages of this type, possibly trying to correct typos

Actually, it looks like #2 has already been done... cool =)

Lifehacker recently had an article on a piece of software called the PC Decrapifier. I haven't tried it, but it seems relevant to this thread.

Funny that you mention it. If you're a student stuck on a Windows machine (like I am, half of the time):

1. Register for Ruckus.com
2. Download their (piece of complete shit) proprietary "Ruckus Player."
3. Search and download whatever music you want using the service.
4. Strip the DRM from your songs with FairUse4WM
5. Convert them to .mp3 format and put them on your iPod with iTunes.
6. Don't worry about things like this affecting you.

Drop-down menus have been around so long because they work!

So should the "insert row" function be in the "insert" menu or the "table" menu?

Menus, in my opinion, never worked because inevitably the interface will be changed and a new function will be added. When the new function is added, a choice must be made on which menu it should appear and if a new menu is necessary. Eventually you end up with too many functions that were tacked on and a huge tree of functions burried in menus. That's what happened to office and now I can hardly find anything because the menus contain too many items are are unorganized.

I mean, even take practical restaurant menus: you sit at a table, the waiter hands you a menu and now you sit there staring at the thing for 5 to 10 minutes. Who in their right minds thought that this menu would ever be efficient unless the user studied and memorized the stupid thing. It's like reading a book except in the restuarant, at least you have the flavors and crapiness/goodness of the food to help remind you of what was good and what wasn't. In working with software there's no such experience. Click the button, it didn't do what I want, ctrl+z and the option never even had a shot at my long term memory unless it did something that undo wouldn't fix.

Now I haven't use the ribbon myself, but as I understand, Microsoft hired some big time usability experts and spent an awful lot of time trying to make the new Office 2007 interface usable. Note that usability encompasses many attributes of an interface, and learning curve and consistency (the topics that agrivate people the most) are just a few of the many things that need to be accounted for. The problem Microsoft has, and almost any software, hardware, gadget thingy today has is improving the interface without sacrificing consistency. The issue is, some time in the past, someone made a mistake in designing the interface, but because it was there in the previous version, if you take it away or change it in the next version, people immediately complain even though it is obviously a bad way to do it. Is the user correct? Absolutely, they learned how to do something and now that knowledge is lost and they have to relearn it. Is the vendor or designer correct? Absolutely, the method of doing that operation was stupid and required too much training or effort by the user to perform. But give it up, it was wrong to start, and it's going to take some pain to fix.

Now you say "give me my old interface." But I say to you, "tough luck, learn it over again." Chances are, at least with this version, Microsoft put a whole lot of effort into fixing it and getting it right. Had they left in the old interface, that would accomplish nothing. People would laugh at the ribbon and continue using the "old way" for the sake of avoiding learning something new when they could take the time to learn the new way, find out it is actually much more efficient than the old way, and embrace the change because it is actually helping them.

Why do I say this without even having tried the interface? I'm no MS shill, but I admit that their Office suite is unfortunately the standard among office suites because there is no competitor with a good enough feature set. I've tried open office, but often I run into some feature that was available in microsoft (even an older version) but still isn't in open office. Additionally, I've looked at this screenshot tour of Office 2007's keyboard shortcuts. The basic idea is now every function in Office 2007 can be accessed via keyboard. Furthermore, the interface even labels each function with a key or combination of keys to press in order to execute that function without the mouse. I would think Slashdot of all places would actually love this change; it's like the power of VI (in the sense that

Maybe this is what you're looking for
http://lifehacker.com/software/google-calendar/gee k-to-live--sync-google-calendar-and-gmail-contacts -to-your-desktop-251279.php
which users Lightning, but is not the same and uses something called GCalDaemon to even allow you working with it in an offline mode.

Everyone knows that ipods have a life span of anywhere between 6 months and 2 years before either being dropped, over used, or just used (anyone remember the battery issue?)

Great site; one of the first I check out (along with NY Times). Good tips for everyday life to help increase productivity and whatnot.

Check it out: http://www.lifehacker.com/

I think the story you were searching for can be found here:

http://lifehacker.com/software/dual-monitor/dual-m onitors-increase-productivity-168488.php

this is a good one too, but it's written by microsoft...so i have to believe it's riddled with lies
  http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx? id=433

hi,

yes, two monitors can make you more productive. there has already been an article on slashdot
about this:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/1 0/09/137232

and there are also:

http://www.netlobo.com/dual_monitor_productivity.h tml
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000012.h tml
http://lifehacker.com/software/dual-monitor/dual-m onitors-increase-productivity-168488.php

My answer to better ergonomics has been to avoid the mouse as much as possible.

Using keynav in Linux and mouser in Windows, I almost never have to touch the mouse anymore for most routine mouse clicking applications (like web browsers).

Of course, I've had to rely on applications' built-in keyboard shortcuts too. Keyboard shortcuts are faster, and repetitive commands take less effort.

And by using the keyboard almost exclusively, I can focus on maintaining good typing posture, such as by putting the keyboard on my lap while sitting up straight, since ergonomics about your whole body posture, not just your wrists.

http://www.installpad.com/
http://blog.genotrance.com/applications/appsnap/

More at:

http://lifehacker.com/software/downloads/geek-to-l ive--automatically-download-and-install-your-favor ite-software-211373.php

Maybe like me they all use Firefox and the damn fecking apostrophe triggers the Quick Find, often as not.
It's enough to drive a man to apostrophe... "O wee Foxy, thy bugs do gnaw and gnash."

Fixes?:
http://lifehacker.com/software/firefox/quick-firef ox-tip-singlekey-search-tool-236156.php
http://ffextensionguru.wordpress.com/2007/01/10/fx -tweak-quick-find-bar/

(Gotta read the comments (last comment on both pages @ 25-Feb-07 12:30 -600) since the blog authors aren't a help.)

It takes me 3 minutes to figure out if something will take me less than 2 minutes to do, so I get a deadlock. The only real solution is writing post-its on a whiteboard.

As with most things, people like to nitpick the fine details as a way of criticizing the whole.

As a fairly new GTD user, I've discovered that much of GTD is meant to be used as guidelines or strategies, not divine commands from on high. The important principles of GTD are:

1) Collect all of the unfinished tasks and projects in your life ("open loops" in GTD parlance).
2) Go through that collection and decide what needs to be done with each open loop:
      * Can it be done right now, in 2 minutes or less? If so, do it.
      * If not, can you delegate it to someone else? If so, do so.
      * If not, what's the "Next Action" (more GTD jargon) that needs to be done, either to finish it or to move it to the next step?
3) Keep track of your Next Actions in a trusted system -- notebook, PDA, text files, whatever -- so you know what needs to be done when you have time to do it.
4) Once you know what all needs to be done, you are capable of making informed decisions as to what you should be doing at any given moment. (To me, this is the most significant point of GTD.)

If you can make those principles work, the details are negotiable. If it takes you more than two minutes to figure out what needs to be done and your incoming traffic and workload permits it, set the threshold to 5 minutes. The GTD book itself usually describes seveal methods of approaching a step.

This is what drives websites like Lifehacker and 43 Folders; people are sharing things that work for them or pointing out new things that can be used to implement GTD or otherwise improve personal productivity.

(Yes, I know that parent was probably just trying to be funny. But I still wanted to throw my two cents out for people who haven't tried GTD, or tried and haven't been able to make it work.)

Jay (=

The Windows Sidebar is modeled after Apples Dashboard, which allows customized applets to be displayed and used. A useful cautionary note mentions that the Sidebar gadgets dont save data or configurations when closed. You must start all over again.

Actually, this "warning" of losing preferences when closing gadgets also applies Apple's Dashboard: any widget removed from the Dashboard loses its preferences. The act of moving a gadget (widget) from the Gallery (Shelf) into the Sidebar (Dashboard) is what instantiaties a new gadget (widget). Persistence of configuration data is only acheived by keeping the gadget (or widget) alive. Both platforms save configuration data between logouts/shutdowns -- but for instantiated widgets (gadgets) only. Close them, and their done.

And now, some shameless self-promotion for you Vista early adopters, courtesy of lifehacker:

Turn any web widget into a Vista Gadget
The Amnesty Generator for Windows is designed to let you convert any embeddable web site widget (including Google Gadgets) into a Vista Sidebar Gadget with very little work.

Compared to Vista's Gadget library's relatively meager 275 gadgets, Google Gadgets for your web page, for example, currently sports over 3000 widgets - meaning that if you're a fan of Vista Gadgets and you want to expand your palette, the Amnesty Generator looks like a good way to do that. If this sounds at all familiar, OS X Dashboard-lovers may remember that Amnesty Generator is also available for Dashboard. Right now the generator still has a few kinks (particularly in the looks department), but in all it seems to work fairly well.

Amnesty Generator for Vista

The Windows Sidebar is modeled after Apples Dashboard, which allows customized applets to be displayed and used. A useful cautionary note mentions that the Sidebar gadgets dont save data or configurations when closed. You must start all over again.

Actually, this "warning" of losing preferences when closing gadgets also applies Apple's Dashboard: any widget removed from the Dashboard loses its preferences. The act of moving a gadget (widget) from the Gallery (Shelf) into the Sidebar (Dashboard) is what instantiaties a new gadget (widget). Persistence of configuration data is only acheived by keeping the gadget (or widget) alive. Both platforms save configuration data between logouts/shutdowns -- but for instantiated widgets (gadgets) only. Close them, and their done.

And now, some shameless self-promotion for you Vista early adopters, courtesy of lifehacker:

Turn any web widget into a Vista Gadget
The Amnesty Generator for Windows is designed to let you convert any embeddable web site widget (including Google Gadgets) into a Vista Sidebar Gadget with very little work.

Compared to Vista's Gadget library's relatively meager 275 gadgets, Google Gadgets for your web page, for example, currently sports over 3000 widgets - meaning that if you're a fan of Vista Gadgets and you want to expand your palette, the Amnesty Generator looks like a good way to do that. If this sounds at all familiar, OS X Dashboard-lovers may remember that Amnesty Generator is also available for Dashboard. Right now the generator still has a few kinks (particularly in the looks department), but in all it seems to work fairly well.

Amnesty Generator for Vista

You could get something somewhat similar with a DVR. Tell them what you want, and it'll record it. Then skip the commercials. It won't be quite as convenient, but it's something you can do today.

Alternatively, I use RSS with bit torrent to automatically download all my shows (sans commercials). I got so disgusted with advertisements I canceled my cable and set up the torrents. http://lifehacker.com/software/bittorrent/hack-att ack-automatically-download-your-favorite-tv-shows- 171992.php

It's actually possible via an (experimental?) extension to edit subject lines on received emails.

Check out the Header Tools Extension.
Discussed here:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/thunderbird/dow nload-of-the-day--edit-subject-lines-in-thunderbir d-180373.php

Link here:
http://www.supportware.net/mozilla/#ext15

This tool has worked for me, though it's beta... I would LOVE to see this one refined and put out for mainstream use. The ability to stay organized by tweaking subject lines is invaluable!


The new Tags in 2.0 are also a godsend. To make Thunderbird feel a bit more like gMail, download the "Buttons!" extension and give yourself a big handy "Archive!" button in the main toolbar. Once you use it, you'll never ever go back to dragging things to folders.

I know this is hard for you to accept, but there's nothing wrong with these Dells. That's just how Windows performs.

Mac OS X contains Front Row, which is Media Centre minus the TV stuff. Admittedly, that's a feature less, but at least Front Row isn't such a crappy piece of shit like Media Centre (I own a license to the NT Media Center Edition of Windows - I don't use it anymore, I've replaced it with Ubuntu running MythTV). Additionally, there's tons of stuff in Mac OS X that's not in Windows.

And no, every copy of Mac OS X is not an upgrade. Yes, you do have to own a Mac to be able to run it, but after buying it, you own to licenses to Mac OS X. Legally, you can use your old copy on another Mac with an even older version of OS X. That's not an upgrade, that's an additional license.

Something doesn't have to be "a specification or an implementation" to be ripped off. Ripping off implementation is a copyright violation. I'm not accusing MS of violating Apple's copyright (except when they steal Apple's icons, which they have).

I also find it rather hard to take anyone seriously who implies Vista is the first version of Windows with overlapping Windows. You *do* remember we're comparing Vista and MacOS _X_, right ?

Well, since you now admit that Microsoft copied stuff from Apple before Vista, the discussion is moot. That makes it obvious that Windows is a knockoff of Apple's system. I mean, your argument is that Vista is not a Mac OS knockoff because the most recent version of Windows copied nothing from the most recent version of Mac OS X? Even if it were true - which it is not - it's an absurd argument.

Either way, I don't get the Smalltalk reference. Smalltalk is a programming language. The Alto had no overlapping windows.

And no, I'm not going to give you a detailed list of every feature in Vista which Microsoft took from Apple. I don't have the time. Google it yourself, read this, watch this, or read this:

"[When I worked at Microsoft,] I was given a badge that allowed me entry to all but a few of the Microsoft buildings. One of the things that caught my eye was a large grid on the wall of a hallway in the building that housed the engineers that worked on Windows Media Player--building 50, on the 2nd or 3rd floor.
"The grid was labeled across the top with A, B, C, etc., and down the left with 1,2,3, like a game of Battleship. The grid was made of 8.5×11-inch pages, landscape orientation, showing color screenshots from Apple's iTunes software. Each sheet was a different screen of the application: each tab of a preference panel, each info window, everything."

Moving on...

Flip3D and Expose, two utterly different task switching methodologies

Yeah, because one of them shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects, while the other one... shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects.

"take up the whole fucking screen with this window" stems partly from being stuck in the Windows singletasking frame of mind

It's not a "frame of mind." Single-tasking is what humans are optimized for. There's a reason IQ goes down when you try to do more than one thing at a time.

I have a Mac as my primary computer (using itto write this) and I generally love it, but sometimes I'd rather fill the screen so that there's nothing else on it but the task at hand, just like I regularly remove all distractions from my physical desktop.

Fortunately I found Stoplight. The very fact of its existence AND the fact that there's not an equivalent product for Windows ought to tell you something.

I posted the following on the article's comments section:

I'm curious what you (the author) think of this link:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
I was always of the mind that TYs are the best, with no competition. The article above also cites Pioneer, Hitachi Maxell, and Mitsubishi Chemicals in their top 5 archival quality media. I got the link from Lifehacker and was surprised to see anything but TYs as da bomb.
Lifehacker link:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/dvds/choose-the -best-blank-dvds-220373.php

Anyone here care to comment on the digitalFAQ.com article? I'm curious if anyone even halfway qualified agrees with them. Should I only stick with TYs or can I trust these other brands that they claim are as good?

It's not 100% exactly what you're looking for (I don't think, I didn't actually read the article) but it's pretty close. Ultimate DIY Gamer's Cabinet.

you might benefit from using greasemonkey on firefox with this script:

http://lifehacker.com/software/myspace/myspace-cus tom-style-remover-greasemonkey-script-201920.php

It removes custom css, making all myspace tags initially cleaned up of the eye gouging colors, leaving you only with the brain melting text.

It also took me a while to figure out how to remove the close button from each tab. The tab scrolling "feature" was also a point of great annoyance that took up more of my time to find a fix.

In short I'm just not jumping for joy over FF. This new flaw happens to come to light the day after I search Google for a way to manually add userids and passwords to the FF DB (any ideas?). This was to address the problem of FF not picking up some text fields as userid and password fields. One solution I found was RoboForm, though I'm not sure I want to pay for what I think should be a fairly easy thing to do inside FF. FF is getting better but personally I'd rather be using Mozilla 1.7.x.

...with Linux on consoles? Is it just for the fun of getting it to run?

People have gotten Linux installed on a DS and VNC client as well. There are even some utility apps like email and web browsers (not the official opera kind) floating around.

However, because of the DS's limited ram many things are just limited in what you can do.

here is a screen shot of the DS VNC in action.

For the rest of my response, I'll follow your lead and truncate your post to soundbites.

...I've never seen it happen in Opera...

If you'd read my post, I said "mostly due to plugins" -- which you conveniently left out, and which affects Opera, Konqueror, and IE just as badly as Firefox. I've never had Firefox lock up hard past 1.0 that wasn't obviously related to a plugin (esp. Macromedia Flash or Adobe Acrobat) crashing the browser while loading/unloading a page. That's about as strong a promise as you can make when your product loads 3rd party native code.

...the problem is probably due to an extension...

There's a vast realm of difference between a plugin (executable native code) crashing the browser vs. an extension (XUL plus Javascript). The former crashing the browser is inevitable. The latter crashing the browser is sloppy, although some leaks are inevitable. (More on that in a bit.)

You said, "My gut says..."

Yup. I'm a programmer, have been since I was a wee one, been using C and C++ for 10 years, played with Object-Oriented Pascal back in the day, coded serious Java and Perl, written the occasional assembly, walked uphill in the snow both ways, etc. My gut is a finely crafted, state-of-the-art early warning system for catching bugs -- especially memory leaks, NULL pointer dereferences, double free() bugs, buffer overflows, yadda, after using C for that long. Like all heuristical systems it's far from perfect, with false positives and negatives both, but as an early warning system it works wonders. I haven't read the Firefox source code from top to bottom, although I'm fairly certain no lone human could, and I haven't even given it a serious skimming, so I don't have anything more than an educated guess to fly by. But I've seen some surprising interactions between "simple" GDI calls and Windows video card drivers, including previous ones where Firefox crashes under one driver version but runs fine after a driver upgrade (or even a downgrade). (This might or might not stem from the fact that, for speed, Firefox stores bitmaps in video texture RAM on Windows, and asks the X server to do the same on Linux.) I also know from past experience that HTML pages with <embed> and <object> tags crash all browsers far more often than HTML pages without, regardless of the browser in use (and not by virtue of the HTML itself, if you catch my drift). Video drivers and plugins are two likely suspects, and they're the first place I'd point gdb if I came across the RAM/CPU bug on my own machine.

...no one on the Mozilla Foundation team has investigated the CPU hogging bug...

Now, my memory may be faulty, but my entire post was based on reading someone's investigation into the RAM/CPU bug a few years back. Unfortunately, I didn't bookmark it and some creative googling hasn't turned it up. However, I did read Bugzilla in-depth to double check that I wasn't missing anything. (More on that in a bit.)

Your googling, OTOH, showed me two things: (1) a sizable number of people misinterpret the in-RAM cache and Back/Forward cache as memory leaks, not features; and (2) several extensions do/did cause Javascript memory leaks, but are being rooted out one by one (via debug builds and the Leak Monitor extension).

Just to make sure I wasn't missing anything, I did a fairly thorough sniff through Bugzilla. I searched all products for "leak", then personally read all 27 INVALID bugs and all 5 WONTFIX bugs. I didn't see one that wasn't legitimately so.

(Please note that Bugzilla forbids d

If this were possible (i.e., support all Win XP apps with such improvements in the infrastructure) with a small engineering effort, why would MS not have already done so?

There's lots of things that other companies have done and do that Microsoft doesn't. This doesn't imply those tasks are impossible.

And the ability to isolate software is regularly practiced in computer science and real IT. Chroot jails are an example of this. It's not even that difficult, and now there is software that brings this same basic technology to general consumers.

Just because Microsoft doesn't do something because of business reasons (or whyever they decide not to implement such a thing) doesn't mean that it's impossible. To do what the grandparent suggested would only take Wine + similar chroot technology. This is all basic stuff.

Just try using Pledge. I actually did this with scratches on my glasses (the lenses are plastic) and it works pretty well. Note: you'll probably have to do it again in the future, as I'm not sure how long it will last on the CD.

In lifehacjker.com you can find a cleaning solution that works: Non-acetone nail polish remover. Also, someone mentions that Mr Clean Magic Eraser also works.

Start a side business.

I believe Lifehacker had an article showing you how to set up a MediaWiki on a Windows machine.
I tried this, and it worked quite well.

snarfed found a bunch of greasemonkey scripts but he missed the important ones, which are at persistent.info. In particular, he'd probably be interested in:

http://persistent.info/archives/2006/03/21/gmail-m acros

and

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/gmail/hack-atta ck-become-a-gmail-master-161399.php

This post deals with my version of the macros script:

http://gr.ayre.st/~grayrest/greasemonkey/gmail/gma il-macros.user.js

* Filtering has a great UI, but it's horribly weak.
Agreed.

* There's no way to bounce an email. This should be pretty trivial to add.
dontcare

* If no email is selected, the Y key should archive the email under the cursor. This should be common sense.
This isn't part of the macros script, but it wouldn't be that hard to add. I don't usually archive one mail at a time, so this doesn't really bother me.

* You can't automatically create a filter based on an email. Why not?
Agreed. Even better, I'd appreciate mailing list support so that I could get rid of most of my tags.

* You can search, but you can't select messages based on headers, subject, or body text. Worse, if you have more messages than fit on the screen, you can't select any messages that aren't on the screen. If you ever get flooded with email, or with spam that escapes the spam filters, god help you.

Again, search is your friend. If you have my version of the macros script, 'mat' on the results repeatedly.

* Thank god there are keyboard shortcuts...but there aren't nearly enough! I don't mind using the mouse for one-time stuff, but if i have to use it often during my normal email routine, that's a deal breaker. Keyboard shortcuts for go to label, go to sent mail/drafts, and select all/none/unread would be necessary if I was ever to go back to Gmail.

go to label: g+label
go to sent: g+sent
go to drafts: g+drafts
select: m + (a all, n none, u unread, s starred, t unstarred)
apply label: l+label

* Marking messages as read is impossible with the keyboard

'r'

additionally, mark as unread

'v'

* Selecting a message doesn't automatically move the cursor to the next message. This is just plain silly.
Again, not there, but simple to add to the script. I don't usually mark one message at a time...

* The Y key is horribly inconsistent. If you're in the Inbox, it archives. If you're in a label, it removes the label. If you're in spam or trash, it moves to the Inbox! This is a bad case of modal input.

'e' always removes from inbox.

* Gmail might be smart about (not) displaying quoted text, but it can't handle composing with quoted text to save its life.

Agreed but I don't find it difficult to manually remove quoted text.

[Quote]:
Exactly how is it that this fancy jacket or undershirt is going to help me? I'm hot, but not so much that I can't make it through\nthe 20 minutes in there. When I come out, I am handed a 20oz bottle of water and expected to finish it on the spot while having my pulse and respiration checked before even considering going back in.

This jacket would supposedly protect me from flashover -- several thousand degrees where anything that can combust, will.

BULLSHIT.

Even if the jacket worked, my face mask would melt to my face while the straps on my airpack along with the protective clothing I'm wearing would literally disintegrate.
[End Quote]

While I agree that this is bullshit, what they are actually referring to is as a precaution against steam burns as well as a way to keep core temperature down during smells and bells calls. Unfortunately once you enter a heated environment the tubing will melt, ruin your bunker gear (can you say expensive) and the water that leaks out will boil you alive like this potato. Btw what state is 339? New Jersey 161 here.

Quick Google search has found at least two :

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php#/
Reviewed at
http://www.download.com/Foxit-PDF-Reader/3640-2079 _4-10470005.html?v=1/

Downside : won't work in a Tab in Firefox. Then again, Acrobat doesn't always like to play properly with Firefox also.

http://www.lifehacker.com/software//download-of-th e-day-foxit-pdf-reader-109741.php/

Also :

http://www.visagesoft.com/products/pdfreader/

Next step : Doing something like this that is integrated with the browser. It's just a shame that MS would rather produce a new 'standard' than do it with IE.

See - who said Mac users can't be helpful to PC users sometimes.

(10+2)*5

Work for 10 minutes. Break for 2. Do something else for 10. Repeat, killing items on your list. Supposedly you can do quite a bit of "next actions" in an hour this way. DON'T SKIP BREAKS!

You can do what you want in firefox. It takes a little work, but it is fairly simple. Go here to see how.