Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

We knew that there was a new method coming that would let you sync Mozilla Sunbird and Lightning with Google Calendar, but we weren’t sure what form it was going to come in. It was thought that this would be a built-in feature but it looks like they took an alternative route by delivering the synchronization capabilities in the form of an extension called Provider for Google Calendar.

This way of synchronization is much easier than using the GCALDaemon which we explained a few months back. In fact, you can have this up and running in just a few minutes…

1. Download and install Sunbird (the stand-alone calendar application) or Lightning (the Thunderbird add-on) if you haven’t already done so. You will, however, need to be running a pre-release version of the calendar software (version 0.4 or higher). You can find the latest nightly of Sunbird here and the latest nightly of Lightning here (the extension is located in the linux-xpi, mac-xpi, and windows-xpi folders).
2. Download the Provider for Google Calendar extension by left-clicking on the Install Now link, then right-clicking on the Accept and Install link, and choose the “Save as” option.
3. Now open up Sunbird or Thunderbird, go to the Tools Menu, and select the Add-ons option. Then press the Install button and browse for where you saved the extension that you just downloaded. Restart the application to complete the installation.
   
4. Now pull up your Google Calendar, go to the Settings page, and then click on the Calendars tab.
   
5. Click on one of the calendars that you want to remotely access:
   
6. Copy the private XML address to the clipboard by right-clicking on it and choosing the Copy Link Location option.
   
7. Now go back to Sunbird or Lightning and create a new Calendar. You should be prompted with a dialog box asking whether the calendar is on your computer or on the network, choose the On the Network option. Then on the next screen choose the Google Calendar option and paste in the URL you copied from step 6.
   
8. You’ll be prompted to enter in your username and password for your Google Calendar account:
   
9. Now give your calendar a name and press the Next button. Then press Finish. Your calendar will now periodically synchronize itself with the Google servers.

As you can see that is pretty easy to setup, but it does have its drawbacks which you should be aware of:

• Recurring events can only be viewed, and not created or modified. I’m sure this will be a deal breaker for many people.
• The newest version (released April 30, 2007) of the extension does support alarms, but it has to use a workaround to do so.
• You cannot add attendees to your calendar.

Hopefully those remaining bugs will eventually get fixed because that will make this extension a lot more useful. In the meantime though, it is giving me an easy way to add release dates to our CyberNet calendar located in the sidebar!

Alternately you can also try using the newest version of Calgoo which also has several improvements. It does require Java in order to run which is something I’m not too fond of, but it does do a pretty good job of synchronizing the recurring events and reminders.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

I’m not sure about you, but I have a collection of bookmarks that is almost unmanageable. Some of the bookmarks I probably haven’t touched for years, and I thought it was time for a little spring winter cleaning!

So I started browsing around looking for a utility that would assist me in the daunting chore. Sure there are Firefox extensions out there that can check for duplicate bookmarks and look for dead links, but all of my bookmarks aren’t in Firefox alone. I needed something a little more universal.

That’s when I stumbled across a free Windows-only program called AM-DeadLink. It’s a nifty little tool that can check your Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera bookmarks for both dead links and duplicate entries. This would really be a killer application if it didn’t require any installation, but I’ll take what I can get.

–Dead Links–

If you’re a bookmarking fanatic you probably have some pretty ancient sites saved that don’t even exist anymore. Just startup AM-DeadLink, select your browser, and click the green button with the checkmark in it. The app will begin scanning all of your bookmarks 10 at a time (number of concurrent connections is adjustable in the settings), and it will alert you of its findings:

Click to Enlarge

The nice thing is that it will ignore local bookmarks and bookmarklets which would likely return an error. You’ll also notice that it points out when a bookmark is redirected to another site. Unfortunately there is no option to automatically update the address of all the redirected bookmarks, but that might be a nice feature for the developer to add in the future.

If you find a broken bookmark that you want to delete you don’t have to worry about opening the browser to remove it. Just select the bookmark from the list (Ctrl+Click to select multiple bookmarks), and then click on the Recycling Bin button located at the end of the toolbar.

–Duplicate Bookmarks–

There is an option located on the toolbar that will filter out all of the displayed bookmarks except for those that have duplicates. This is great for finding those sites you’ve bookmarked one too many times:

Click to Enlarge

–And More–

AM-DeadLink has a few other features as well, such as the ability to download favicons for all of the websites in your bookmarks. If you find that the browser doesn’t have a lot of favicons for your bookmarks this is a fast and easy way to do it yourself.

And since your bookmarks are so important it only makes sense that the app lets you back them all up. In just a few clicks they will be saved to your computer in a compressed ZIP file.

–Overview–

In the end AM-DeadLink managed to hunt down 23 dead links and 6 duplicates in my hundreds of bookmarks. It might not be a huge amount, but I thought that I did a good enough job managing my bookmarks that it would have a hard time finding anything wrong with them. Guess everyone should clean “house” once in awhile!

Download AM-DeadLink (Windows only, requires installation)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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So far, Chrome is the only browser of the big four — Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer being the other three — to escape the Pwn2Own hacking competition unscathed the past two years. (Sorry Opera aficionados, looks like there’s not enough of you to merit a place in the contest… yet.) Evidently, its past success has Google confident enough to pony up a cool $20,000 and a CR-48 laptop to anyone able to find a bug in its code and execute a clean sandbox escape on day one of Pwn2Own 2011. Should that prove too daunting a task, contest organizer TippingPoint will match El Goog’s $10,000 prize (still $20,000 total) for anyone who can exploit Chrome and exit the sandbox through non-Google code on days two and three of the event. For those interested in competing, Pwn2Own takes place March 9th through 11th in Vancouver at the CanSecWest conference. The gauntlet has been thrown — your move, hackers.

Google’s paying $20,000 to hack Chrome — any takers? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 20:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink ComputerWorld  |  TippingPoint  | Email this | Comments

Ever been freaked out by an online ad that seemed to know you that little bit too well? It’s the result of good old advertisers tracking your net-navigating habits and delivering targeted commercials to your eyeballs, but it can be prevented. Both Google and Mozilla have stepped up (or perhaps been pushed by the FTC) to try and tackle this issue of pernicious tracking cookies, but they’ve gone about it in different ways. The Chrome solution is a Keep My Opt-Outs browser extension that remembers the sites you don’t want personalized information from, while Firefox will start beaming out a Do Not Track HTTP header that should be respected by advertisers and result in you receiving generic, repetitive ads. The important commonality between the two is that they don’t rely on you preparing a cookie file with all your anti-advertiser bile contained within it (which was the FTC’s original, somewhat impractical idea). Google intends to open-source its extension and bring it to other browsers as well, though obviously it’s taking care of Chrome first, which can benefit from the add-on right now.

Chrome and Firefox adding new opt-out features to prevent third-party advertisers from tracking you originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink New York Times  |  Google Public Policy Blog, First Person Cookie  | Email this | Comments

This article was written on August 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

Mozilla is currently taking new steps to improve upon their 50% user retention rate for Firefox. That number means that only half of the people who try Firefox actually continue to use it on a regular basis. So what’s Mozilla going to do to make that number even better? Here’s their plan:

1. Force the Firefox icon to easier to find location
2. Alter the default browser settings path for better user choice
3. Major outbound brand marketing program driving brand recognition and differentiation
4. Change Firefox icon label to closer resemble action of getting to web
   
5. Improve download page and first run pages
6. Launch support.mozilla.com
7. Make common plug-ins work out of the box
8. Make add-ons and personas more accessible
9. Stickier start page
   
10. Make the web feel more human
11. Improve messaging through communication channels

Mozilla recently started a community effort to create more support documentation, and we’ve been contacted by Mozilla to see if Chris from our very own Learn Firefox could contribute some of his work to the project. We’re still trying to work out some of the terms regarding that, but Learn Firefox has everything beginners and advanced users need to know about getting started with the browser. And if you’re looking for a theme there is no better place than Learn Firefox to browse over 200 of them!

There’s no doubt that Mozilla is making some progress as they climb up to 20% of the browser market share, and hopefully by implementing some of these tactics it will increase their retention rate. In the first week of September Mozilla should also be hitting a big milestone: 400 million downloads of Firefox. They are currently close to 390 million downloads, and I’ve estimated the 400 million mark using the current download rate.

Source: Ars Technica

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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