Matt Goldspink DJ Mixes

Just found this really interesting page on digg. It basically tells you how to find password files, social security numbers and hack into people’s remote desktops by searching on google! Some people are right muppets! Anyway the page is at http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.com/2006/02/things_you_dont.html

There’s also more muppets (likely to be the same muppets actually) who put private documents on file sharing networks like Limewire and stuff! Have these people no brains?

Right, I’m semi-awake. I’ve been into uni, handed in my coursework, come back, made my land-lady a cup of coffee, did some washing up before she showed people round, and then I went to bed for 5 hours or pure, bissful napping!
So, anyway. I’m awake now and I’ve finally shifted my blog so it appears on the front page of the site in all it’s sexy colours and themes! (check them out on the right/left depending on which theme you’re currently on. I’m also gonna integrate my photo gallery properly so that everything on the site will become one smooth, slick, sexy, lean, mean, weblogging machine! Roar!!!

I’ve just realised how crap the title of this post is (and the previous part for that matter). Nevermind, I’m not a genius with linguistical skills, I shall leave it as it is. So, hopefully if people attempted any of the stuff in the previous post on browsing, you should have Firefox set up and you’ll be ready to check out some of my favourite sites. Most of these are what’s called Web2.0, a better approach to creating websites that automatically update themselves (don’t have to hit refresh to see if there’s anything new), provide customised screens, and just make the internet that little bit more fun! So without further ado, here we go!!!

• Ok, first up del.icio.us. It’s described a social bookmarking blah blah blah. Basically it allows you store all you favourite websites online and give them tags so that they can be grouped together. Not only that, it will recommend other links and websites to you based on other users tags. Infact you can check out anyone’s bookmarks (for example, mine are here). It’s extremely useful because you no longer have to try and remember the address of that website you wanted to show a mate when you’re not at you computer. Just simply head over to delicious and fish it out! Or as I mention in my next point, make things a little bit easier still…
• If you read lots of blogs, news sites, have a delicious account, have a Gmail, yahoo and/or Pop3/IMAP email account and get a little frustrated navigating to each one, sack it!!!! Instead head over to netvibes.com, get an account and put them all on one page!!! It’s bloody awesome! This place is now favourite/most visited website ever(well it’s my homepage, but i go there all the time)! I know a few other places have them (Google’s personalised homepage for example) but Netvibes is the best I’ve seen for ease of use and clean interface. It’s so easy to add a new RSS/ATOM or whatever feed (if you don’t what they are, find out here, it’ll make browsing the web a lot simpler!). Anyway, trust me, just try going to netvibes, creating an account and just playing around adding stuff to it (they have custom modules for Gmail, Yahoo mail, Weather, Flickr photo’s, To-Do lists (trés handy!), and del.icio.us bookmarks, plus they keep on adding more!)
• Hopefully, all that will have persuaded you to get a netvibes account. If so, here’s few feeds/sites that feature on my netvibes page.
  • First up, Digg.com. This may not interest everyone, but if you’re interested in technology, science and random, funny and amazing stuff, add this feed! Basically, it’s like a newspaper. Anyone can submit a story, and everyone else is an editor who can approve (digg) a story. If a story receives enough digg’s, it makes the front page!
  • Next up, Waxy.org’s links page. This guy puts some very cool/random/funny links up to many treasure troves all over the internet. He also started off Upcoming.org which I’ll talk about in a sec.
  • Upcoming.org (now owned by Yahoo) is a website where people can post events that are happening in their area. At the moment, there’s not many people posting stuff for Manchester, but hopefully as more people catch on you’ll be able to be notified (on your RSS feed on your netvibes home page ) of gigs, meetings, exhibitions or whatever happening in your area (so for me, Manchester, then London and New York (yeah baby!)) You can also put up events on it too!
• So there’s a couple of other feeds I have on netvibes, peoples blogs (also one for comments incase someone posts one, very very rare at the moment:(). Anyway, my next site (which is also on my netvibes account) is Calendarhub.com. An online calendar which can be made public and can also email you alerts. To be honest I haven’t used this much yet, but it’s definately handy to have on my netvibes page since that’s what I look at a lot and it reminds of upcoming stuff (personal things that I’m not gonna put on upcoming.org).

That’s a reasonable list for now I feel. I hope people find them useful (I won’t plug netvibes any more, I promise!). I keep finding random sites which I think I’ll post links to in separate posts (pandora.com and last.fm both music recommending services in two totally different styles). For now I shall leave thee all in peace!

Now I surf the Internet quite a lot (I’m a geek) and I’ve set up my computer so that I can do stuff faster and more efficiently. So since I’m bored I thought I’d share a few things I’ve discovered/use to make my life easier and maybe they’ll make your life on the internet a bit less hassle too!

I’m just gonna cover the web browser in this post, I’ll share a few of my favourite web sites in another post.

So then. The web browser… Firstly, ditch Internet Explorer, it is woefully bad! Instead, go here and get Firefox. Firefox is much easier to use and has so many great, great features that it makes Internet Explorer look like one of the most pointless things ever! Here’s a mini rundown of some it’s key features:

• Two words: tabbed browsing. Such a simple idea, but so so useful!! No longer will you have to have 6 or 7 IE windows open, firefox uses tabs across the top to make it easier to flick between different open web sites.
• It is safer to use than IE (it doesn’t download Active-X scripts which people can use to hack into your computer). So less chance of getting viruses, spyware, etc…
• Firefox is known to be faster to run than IE, so you’ll have fewer moments were your computer hangs.
• Extensions! These are the most useful feature of Firefox. You can now add in extra functionality easily. I’ll discuss these below because there thousands of them available, but there’s a few essential ones I think people should have
• Search engines. In the top right hand corner is a search engine box, where you can select a search engines or site, eg. google, amazon, wikipedia, etc… and search it without first having to go to the website (It’s little things like this that make firefox easier to use)
• Live bookmarks. These are essentially links to RSS or Atom feeds so that you can get the latest news/posts from a blog or whatever in your browser without having to go to the website

There are plenty of other features (lots of stuff for web developers, like javascript console – a godsend!) but I shall let people discover those as they go.

Extensions

Once you have Firefox, you should get some of the extensions for it. There are 3 or 4 main ones that I use (plus a few others for designing web stuff, but I won’t mention them):

1. First up get Adblock and the Adblock Filterset.G extensions (make sure you install Adblock first, then Filterset.G). Adblock can make downloading webpages faster and also makes them less cluttered by (you’ve guessed it) not downloading adverts! The Filterset.G plugin contains a list of known adverts that should be blocked (once you’ve installed it, you may need to update it, I’ll talk thru this in a moment because you have to restart firefox when you install an extension (probably the only downside), so it’s better to install the extensions first, then restart and configure them.)
2. The next extension to get is customizeGoogle. Infact, you should only get this if you use google (which most people do) It basically adds links on the google results to page to perform the same search in other search engines (yahoo, msn, etc). It can also block google ads down the side and you can tell it to exclude certain websites from all your searches (for example, i exclude expertsexchange.com because it is the most frustrating search result i get – it has answers to my programming problems, but I have to pay to access them! Therefore I never ever want to see it in my results page)
3. Next up add greasemonkey. I shall talk about this another time, because there are some really cool things you can do with it (for example, fed up of logging into a page that already has your login details filled in on it? write a 2 line greasemonkey script that skips that page and logs you straight in!)
4. I also recommend getting IE tab. Unfortunately, some websites will only work in IE, namely microsoft update (because it requires active-X controls). This extension allows you to have a tab as an Internet Explorer window. You can also configure it so that everytime you visit certain pages they will always load up in the IE tab.

There’s a few other extensions I use aswell which people may find useful:

• Fasterfox is an excellent plugin for speeding up firefox even more! You can set it so that while you have nothing downloading, the browser will automatically start downloading all the pages that are linked on the current page, so that when you click a link, it will show instaneously (cos you’ve already downloaded it! It will also prevent sneaky code that loads pop-ups which most pop-up stoppers miss.
• FoxyTunes is also a very handy new one I’ve found recently. It allows you to control your music player (windows media player, winamp, etc) from the firefox window and takes up hardly any space!!
• del.icio.us is also a fantastically useful extension if you use del.icio.us (which I’ll talk about in another post).

That’s a fair bit to get through, so I’ll finish up there. Next time I’ll discuss some very useful websites, inparticular netvibes.com and delicious.com (plus a few others) so if you feel like a having a peek at them, go for it, but I’ll write more about them and a few others another time.

Yes ladies and gents, Monkeyboy Matt has added another great feature!!

Some people may have noticed that the title is no longer randomly loaded each time. This, unfortunately has had to be sacrificed. Very sad, however, a new feature has replaced that will add more life and vigour to the blog! The observant among you may have noticed a new side bar section titled . If you click on one of the links there, you will see something fantastic happen, right before your eyes!!! Keep an eye on them too, I’ll be adding more as the days go by!!!