Frank Broughton Times

I recently found this tool that will potentially help speed up your internet browsing. It is called namebench. It hunts down the fastest DNS servers available for your computer to use.

• See this Lifehacker article on the program.
• How to change your nameservers once you determine the fastest ones.

I still feel Firefox is the best tool to use to browse the Internet these days. Though I would share my current list of addons and such:

Get Firefox – The following are the essential addons I use with Firefox for a clean, safer viewing of the Internet:

Firefox Addons:

• Adblock Plus – Annoyed by adverts? Troubled by tracking? Bothered by banners? Install Adblock Plus now to regain control of the internet and change the way that you view the web.
• DownThemAll! – The first and only download manager/accelerator built inside Firefox!
• Easy DragToGo – Allows you to open links in new tabs, serach texts, save images and do more with drag and drop gestures easier.
• Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus – Fight the text ads! Element Hiding Helper is a companion extension for Adblock Plus meant to make creating element hiding rules easier.
• FEBE – FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) allows you to quickly and easily backup your Firefox extensions. In fact, it goes beyond just backing up — It will actually rebuild your extensions individually into installable .xpi files. Now you can easily synchronize your office and home browsers.
• Google Redesigned – A complete redesign of popular Google services, Google Redesigned loads and manages several CSS stylesheets that change the appearance of popular tools.
• KeeFox – KeeFox adds free, secure and easy to use password management features to Firefox which save you time and keep your private data more secure. Think of KeeFox as a bridge or connection between Firefox and KeePass Password Safe, the most popular open source (and free) password manager.
• Read It Later – Save pages to read later with just one click. When you have time, access your reading list from any computer or phone, even without an internet connection!
• Stylish – Restyle the web with Stylish, a user styles manager. Stylish lets you easily install themes and skins for Google, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut, and many, many other sites. You can even customize Firefox and other programs themselves.
• Tab Mix Plus – Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager.
• Xmarks Sync – Xmarks is the #1 bookmarking add-on. Keep your bookmarks, passwords and open tabs backed up and synchronized across computers and browsers.
• Greasemonkey – Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

Greasemonkey Scripts:

• Drudge Style – Updates the lack of style on the Drudge Report (DrudgeReport.com) so it looks cleaner.
• FFixer – Enhancements for Facebook: bigger profile pictures and photos, easier viewing of albums, links to download videos, showing people’s age and sign, google calendar integration, keyboard shortcuts & more. Compatible with new Facebook and fully customizable!
• Profanity Filter – Filters Out Swear Words As You Browse the Internet,
• Yousable TubeFix – Removes ads and unwanted sections (configurable), allows downloading and resizing videos, changes the default video quality, expands the description and the video size, can prevent autoplay and autobuffering, etc.

I found a site that will run tests on various Internet ports to see if your ISP is slowing down your connection speeds. This is called traffic shaping. For example they may slow down your speed if you are watching a flash video (ie YouTube) or slow down your downloads.

Glasnost tests enable you to check whether traffic from your applications is being rate-limited (i.e., throttled) or blocked. There are several tests listed: Glasnost: Test if your ISP is shaping your traffic

I love using Picasa for organizing, fixing up, cropping, and storing online my photos. One tool Picasa currently lacks is a way to stitch multiple photos together to create a panoramic photo. A quick Google search brought me the tool I was looking for: Microsoft’s ICE “Image Composite Editor.” It is quick and easy to use. ICE even uses multiple processor cores if you have a newer computer. Get Microsoft ICE here.

Here is a recent creation I made using this tool. This is from my trip to Peru:

Click on the image for a larger view.

Many times I mistype something while completing a form, it maybe a user name or address or whatever.  I do not want to have to scroll past it again and again as Firefox suggests it in the suggestion drop down box as I use the same phrase in another similar form.

It is simple to delete an entry from the autocomplete dropdown.  Type into any form field until the dropdown box appears.  Next use the cursor keys to move to the entry to be deleted and press ‘SHIFT’ plus ‘DELETE’ and the entry is gone. (For those using IE just hit the  ‘DELETE’ key)

Simple tip, but if you are like me you like having a clean system, free of errors {grin}.

If you are like me (old school DOS 5.0 days) you love to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible. With Windows 7 it is possible to use one for creating a new folder from the keyboard with a shortcut key combination. To create a new folder all you need to do is press Ctrl+Shift+N with the targeted explorer window open. The folder will appear and be ready to be named to something besides new file. This is a small but useful tip – if you prefer the mouse you can still use it to click on the New Folder Window. This was a time saver for me recently as I was setting up a complete newly formatted hard drive reorganizing all my documents, music, videos and thousands of preaching MP3 sermons.

I recently received a nice gift from a friend, a 1TB hard drive. Yes, I have a nice friend. I bought an external enclosure case for this drive from www.newegg.com and installed the drive in the enclosure. Next, I attempted to use the drive on my XP Professional based computer. After plugging in the USB adapter my system did recognize the drive, but I was not able to view it in “My Computer.” No drive letter was assigned to it. So off to the handy Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management tool. The drive was in the list of drives but labeled “GPT Protective Partition.” There was no way available to format this drive with the Disk Management tool.

Doing some research my understanding is that this drive was formatted in a Mac or 64bit system. Thus the GPT Protective Partition. I did find a solution and I share it here:

How to change a GPT Protective Partition to one usable in Windows XP:

We will be using Windows XP diskpart tool to clean this drive which will remove all data and partition structures from the disk. Then XP’s Administrative Tools to initialize and format this GPT disk to a XP usable MBR disk.

1. Go to XP’s Command line (click on “Start Menu,” then “Run,” type in “cmd” in textbox, and hit “OK”)

Type in “diskpart” in command line.
Type in “list disk” in command line to show all disks in this machine.
Use “select” to set the focus to the specified partition, for example “select disk 7″ (as mine was listed).
Use “clean” command to remove GPT disk from the current in-focus disk by zeroing the sectors of the drive.

2. Go to “Disk Management” in “Administrative Tools.”  You will see the disk is “unallocated” now. Right click on disk info, choose “Initialize Disk.”

3. Right click on disk info again and choose “Format Disk.” You can assign any unused drive letter during this step. The disk will proceed to format, depending on the disk size this will take some time. Do not turn off your computer till this step is completed.

4. When finished the drive will now be list in “My Computer” and be usable on your XP sysytem.

Warning: This procedure erase all data on the selected disk!