Apologies, I seem to have been constantly too busy on one end or the other of the whole work/life see-saw this week to pay much attention to matters of lifehackery. Fortunately, let's face it, I knick most of this stuff from lifehacker anyway and I still have a bunch of stuff saved up in my highly organised (for me, at least) .txt folder of annotated links, so here we go anyway. It might be a day late, but... ooh, look - something distracting!
Random usefulness
Pageonce promises "Your internet, your way." Apparently, what this means is that they're offering what amounts to an online personal assistant - manage your life from just one page on the interweb. Which does rather lead me to wonder exactly how big a monitor you'd need to have... Still, since it looks (from a quick once-over) like it might, at present, be of most use to American users, that question probably remains academic for now.
An excellent idea if you often use computers other than your own might be to carry PortableApps on a USB memory stick. Not only does plugging in the stick and firing up applications like Firefox or OpenOffice from there - rather than the computer itself - give you a little more security when using an internet cafe, for instance, but it also means no faffing around with someone else's unfamiliar programs - anything to avoid Internet Explorer, quite frankly. [More life on a memory stick stuff at lifehacker].
Or, if it's just not having access to your bookmarks when away from your regular machine that you're worried about, while PortableApps kind of has that problem covered too, perhaps an easier solution might be to install the Foxmarks plug-in for Firefox. Foxmarks not only synchronises and organises your bookmarks across however many machines you install it on, but also creates a webpage that you can access from anywhere. Erm, assuming you can remember the address without already having it bookmarked somewhere, obviously...
TechCrunch had news, the other week, that Facebook might actually become almost useful one day soon, or at least slightly less annoying: tabbed profiles, and searchable Facebook mail are almost ready. Long overdue catching up, both of them, if you ask me; but still, they're certainly a step in the right direction.
Firefox Extension of the Day
CacheIt! - if you've ever clicked on an interesting search result only to find that the page is for some reason unavailable, you'll know instantly how useful this little widget could prove. CacheIt! simply takes you to the archived version of the page, letting you see what Google saw. Problem solved.
Random usefulness
Pageonce promises "Your internet, your way." Apparently, what this means is that they're offering what amounts to an online personal assistant - manage your life from just one page on the interweb. Which does rather lead me to wonder exactly how big a monitor you'd need to have... Still, since it looks (from a quick once-over) like it might, at present, be of most use to American users, that question probably remains academic for now.
An excellent idea if you often use computers other than your own might be to carry PortableApps on a USB memory stick. Not only does plugging in the stick and firing up applications like Firefox or OpenOffice from there - rather than the computer itself - give you a little more security when using an internet cafe, for instance, but it also means no faffing around with someone else's unfamiliar programs - anything to avoid Internet Explorer, quite frankly. [More life on a memory stick stuff at lifehacker].
Or, if it's just not having access to your bookmarks when away from your regular machine that you're worried about, while PortableApps kind of has that problem covered too, perhaps an easier solution might be to install the Foxmarks plug-in for Firefox. Foxmarks not only synchronises and organises your bookmarks across however many machines you install it on, but also creates a webpage that you can access from anywhere. Erm, assuming you can remember the address without already having it bookmarked somewhere, obviously...
TechCrunch had news, the other week, that Facebook might actually become almost useful one day soon, or at least slightly less annoying: tabbed profiles, and searchable Facebook mail are almost ready. Long overdue catching up, both of them, if you ask me; but still, they're certainly a step in the right direction.
Firefox Extension of the Day
CacheIt! - if you've ever clicked on an interesting search result only to find that the page is for some reason unavailable, you'll know instantly how useful this little widget could prove. CacheIt! simply takes you to the archived version of the page, letting you see what Google saw. Problem solved.
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