Fashion Your Firefox Creates Quick, Custom Extension Packs to Fit Your Tastes [Firefox Extensions]
Mozilla is looking to streamline the process of multiple extension installation with a new webapp called Fashion Your Firefox. In a nutshell, Fashion Your Firefox identifies a handful of browsing types, from the "Finder and Seeker" ("I want to make finding information on the Web simpler and more relevant to me.") to the Digital Pack Rat ("I want a hassle-free way to keep track of my favorite sites, bookmarks, blogs and, well, everything!"), then suggests popular extensions for each type of user. Just click through each list of suggestions, cherry pick the extensions you're interested in, and then click Install my Add-Ons.
Fashion My Firefox confirms your choices, then downloads and installs the lot of them in one fell swoop. Granted, you probably have a pretty good handle on what extensions you want and need to install to get things done, but Fashion My Firefox is perfect for someone new to Firefox and the whole idea of extensions. As for you—the add-on junkie—Fashion Your Firefox could still uncover some hidden gems you haven't tried. The webapp is a little limited relative to the giant selection of great extensions available, so we'd love to see Mozilla run with this idea and develop it even further.
ZoneAlarm Pro Free Promotion Is On [Firewall]
As we mentioned yesterday, the normally $40 firewall and antivirus solution ZoneAlarm Pro is available for free today only, so if you're interested in some free quality software, consider this your reminder to grab a copy.
Assume a Five-to-One Ratio for Job Search Replies [Job Search]
Guest writer and career coach Michael Melcher writes about the agonizing uncertainty of sending out multiple phone calls, emails, letters, and the like on a job search and getting absolutely nothing back—not even a carbon-copy "nothing available at the moment" letter. He offers tips for dealing with non-response professionally, like relying less on net-only communication and using FedEx/Priority Mail to bust through firewalls, but his best tip involves re-thinking how busy the rest of the world is:
My rule of thumb is that, as a whole, you should assume a 5:1 ratio in job-search communications: five calls or e-mails going out for each one that will come in.
Pretty valid, based on the job searches I've been privy to. Check out our own tips for restarting a stalled job search, and tell us how you deal with unresponsive hiring types in the comments. Photo by foundphotoslj.
Create a Live-Booting XP CD or DVD [How To]
The creators of the previously mentioned, versatile CD/DVD burning tool CDBurnerXP have posted a guide in their forums to using the program to create a live-booting Windows XP (or 2000/2003) disc. It's a multi-step process that involves a lot of settings to tweak, but at the end you should have a Windows desktop that loads straight from the boot. If you're going to roll your own live-boot XP, you might want to get familiar with trimming it down to the bare essentials for faster loads, or slipstreaming your installation to avoid Windows Update nags that will, frankly, never go away. I haven't given it a thorough test yet, but online forum users seem to give it the thumbs up. Let us know your experience with live-booting XP in the comments.
Springpad Helps You Get Things Done [Task Manager]
Springpad is a web-based life organizer built around a system of virtual notebooks. These notebooks, or springpads as they are referred to, are highly interactive. You can create task lists, add and edit notes, create calendar events, and tag every item for easy searching and list generation. Everything in Springpad can be dragged and moved both within and between the notebooks. Accessing related but scattered data is easy. For example, if you tag items that need to be purchased for your various projects within their special notebooks you can pull all the items tagged as purchases together into a master shopping list. Intelligent use of tags is one of Springpad's strong points, allowing you a higher level of interaction with your data than most traditional task managers. For an overview of Springpad's interface check out this demonstration video from their site:
If you love the idea of highly-linked virtual notebooks and a tag-friendly environment, but aren't so sure about putting your entire life so solidly into the cloud, check out our introduction to Microsoft OneNote and Getting Things Done with OneNote.
30 Cliches You Should Basically Avoid (Going Forward) [Writing]
Using a data analysis tool that monitors new books, research papers, broadcast transcripts and news sources, Oxford University came up with a list of the top 10 most irritating phrases. Headed by "At the end of the day" and capped with "It's not rocket science," it's both an eye-rolling exercise in familiarity and a good lesson in phrases to avoid in your own presentations and writing. The readers of the BBC's online magazine, however, add to the list with their own 20 most hated cliches, and while a few are British peculiarities, the majority make for good additions to add to your personal spelling checker or text replacement tool. What meaningless (or management-friendly) words drive you up the wall? Share your distaste in the comments. Photo by StaR DusT.
Slydial Brings Stealth Messaging to Mobile Apps [Voicemail]
Slydial, the previously mentioned service for skipping right to someone's voicemail when you can't/don't want to actually talk, is pushing out free mobile applications for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and (soon to be released) iPhones that make stealth-messaging simpler. Have you used Slydial for an awkward call, "sick" day, or other purposes, nice or nefarious? Tell us (what you can) in the comments. [via]
Hot Corners Adds Actions to Desktop Corners [Featured Windows Download]
Windows only: Hot Corners, a free utility for Windows desktops, adds the "hot corners" abilities of OS X's Expose system to any Windows desktop. The system tray utility can assign actions like minimizing all windows, locking a system, showing the My Documents folder, and others to any corner of the screen you run your cursor into. There's also a "Mouse Move" feature for those who'd like fewer accidental actions which requires holding the Windows and X keys while dragging the cursor before acting. Hot Corners has shown up a few times in our Desktop Show and Tell sessions, and while it lacks the full-fledged Mac-cloning features of DExposE2, it's pretty handy for being so small. Hot Corners is a free download for Windows systems only.
Get 3D Compositing Effects in Linux Without Compiz [Linux]
If you'd like to use desktop apps or features that require a 3-D compositing manager but lack the hardware power (or patience) to enable Compiz effects, the Tombuntu blog points out that the standard Metacity window manager can fit the bill. As noted, enabling metacity's compositing gives you just a few effects—mostly window previews on Alt+Tab switching, drop shadows, and window movement smoothing—and relies only on the CPU for power, so nearly any graphics card can use apps like the OS X-style Avant Window Navigator. To enable Metacity's built-in composite manager on most any modern GNOME-based Linux distro, open the gconf-editor tool (by launching with Alt+F2 or through a terminal), head to apps->metacity->general, and enable the "compositing_manager" option. Hit the link below for a command line switch you can script or shortcut to turn compositing on and off.
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