Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 23, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Could you imagine going through a day of using your computer without being able to copy and paste stuff? I know, it sounds crazy! Being able to copy and paste saves me unbelievable amounts of time every day, and I have a huge appreciation for the copy/paste keyboard shortcuts.

With the help of some Firefox extensions we’re going to demonstrate how something as simple as copying and pasting can be taken to a new level! I’m sure you’ll find at least one or two extensions that can make you more productive. Here are our top 10 Firefox extensions for copying and pasting:

1. CoLT (Homepage)
   Do you find yourself copying and pasting hyperlinks into forums or sites that require specially formatted links? This extension will take care of that problem by copying the selected link into any format that you designate, and if it doesn’t include what you need out-of-the-box you can always add your own.
   
2. Paste and Go (Homepage)
   Imagine for a minute that you have copied some text or a URL from within your browser. What do you plan on doing with it now? Maybe you’ll paste the URL into the Address Bar to open it up, or maybe you’ll paste the text into the search box to pull up the search results? Paste and Go simplifies the process of doing either task with a simple context menu entry or buttons that you can add to the toolbar. With it you’ll be able to paste a URL and go to it, or paste some text and perform a search all with a single click!
   
3. PasteIP (Homepage)
   How often do you go hunting around for your current IP address? Let Firefox do the work for you with this simple extension. Whenever you decide that you want to insert your IP address just right-click in the text field and select the “Paste IP Address” option.
   
4. Copy All URL’s (Homepage)
   With this extension you’re able to copy all of your open tabs to the clipboard, and then paste them into a new window. It also has some more advanced options that make sharing your open tabs with other people a little more convenient. Take a look at the options to see the different ways that you can format the output.
   
5. Table2Clipboard (Homepage)
   If you’ve ever tried to copy and paste a table from the browser into Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc you may have noticed that things do not copy over as well as they should. This extension aims to ease the tedious burden of reformatting an HTML table to look right in a desktop application such as Excel. Just highlight the cells that you want to copy, and in the context menu there is a new “Copy table elements” option that will take care of the formatting for you. Then go ahead and paste them into the application just as you normally would.
   
6. Extended Copy Menu (Homepage)
   You’re probably familiar with copying content from Firefox and pasting it into a word processor. All of the formatting and everything is typically carried over, but with this extension you’ll be able to specify whether you want the text copied as “plain text.” Not only that but you’ll also be able to grab the underlying HTML using the “Copy as HTML” option in the context menu:
   
7. Lorem2Clipboard (Homepage)
   You can never get enough Lorem Ipsum text, can you? This extension will let you quickly copy a few paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum text to the clipboard so that you can use it in any way you desire. All you have to do is click the button located in the Status Bar to have it automatically copied to the clipboard:
   
8. Auto Copy (Homepage)
   This is an extremely simple extension that serves a valuable purpose for a lot of people. The Auto Copy extension, as the name implies, will take any text that you highlight and copy it to the clipboard automatically. No right clicks and no keyboard shortcuts… it’s automatic baby!
9. Copy Links (Homepage)
   I’m sure it’s happened to you before where you’ve wanted to copy several different hyperlinks that appear in a body of text. With Copy Links you can actually do that. Just select a body of text and hit up the respective option in the context menu.
   
10. Copy/Paste Form (Homepage)
    Note: This is an experimental add-on and will require that you login before being able to install it.

    Have you ever gotten burned out of filling in the same form one after another? Copy/Paste Form will let you copy every field from a given form, and paste it directly into another form! Or even better… save the form and paste the content back in later on. It supports text fields, passwords, selections, checkboxes, and radio buttons.
    

Now I know that not every one of those extensions will apply to you, but hopefully there are a few that sound like they could be helpful. Copying and pasting content has always been about being more productive, and many of these extensions assist in that area. Let us know in the comments how you make the most of copying and pasting.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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It’s not a brand new concept or anything, but rather than forcing mobile users to scan QR codes in order to access more information about a given product or advertisement, Wizup is able to recognize far more esoteric items. Created as a part of the Windows Phone 7 developer challenge, this piece of software is able to listen to radio stations (at least in France), understand images from magazines and even recognize TV channels. Simply snap a picture or let it listen in (much like Shazam for song titles), and it then delivers all sorts of germane content to the mobile’s screen. It’s a dream come true for marketers, but better still, it makes digging for more information a whole lot easier on the end user. Head on past the break for a demonstration video — if you’ve been denying it thus far, good luck as you continue to resist the Augmented Reality Revolution.

Continue reading Wizup emerges from Windows Phone 7 developer challenge: think Shazam, but for ads

Wizup emerges from Windows Phone 7 developer challenge: think Shazam, but for ads originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Sep 2010 11:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on January 16, 2008 by CyberNet.

The New York Times managed to get some time with Steve Jobs yesterday after his keynote, and there were some interesting remarks in the interview from Jobs. Apparently his mother never taught him that if he didn’t have anything nice to say, not to say anything at all.

First up was the Amazon Kindle (review). This is portable reading device designed by Amazon that is able to download digital books without ever needing to be connected to a computer. Amazon can’t even keep the device in stock, but Jobs said that:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

Then he went on to talk about the Google Android (review) mobile operating system which is expected to be released later this year. Interestingly enough Apple has worked with Google to provide specialized services on the iPhone, such as mapping and YouTube videos, but that didn’t hold Jobs back from expressing his true feelings:

Having created a phone its a lot harder than it looks. We’ll see how good their software is and we’ll see how consumers like it and how quickly it is adopted. I actually think Google has achieved their goal without Android, and I now think Android hurts them more than it helps them. It’s just going to divide them and people who want to be their partners.

The thing is that Google isn’t actually creating phones, instead they are developing the software to run on the phones. It’s likely that there will be dozens of different devices running Android when it is released, and that will help speed up the adoption rate. Particularly if they are more affordable than the iPhone.

I can’t wait to see what the future holds for both Kindle and Android, and to see just how accurate Jobs’ predictions are.

New York Times [via Gizmodo]
Thanks to “Google” for the tip!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on March 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

There are all kinds of Firefox tips and tricks available on the Web, and when I come across some of the cool ones (many in forums) I jot them down real quick. That way I don’t have to post about just one of the tricks, and instead I can show you a whole compilation of them. Previously I put together lengthy Firefox 2 tweak guide, and none of the tips that I am about to mention below are in that guide.

For starters, I want to mention that a lot of the tweaks below use custom CSS scripts that need to be integrated with Firefox. You can follow these directions on installing those scripts, or you can also use the Stylish extension which makes it a lot easier. When using the extension you just have to open the extension options and select “Write” to create a new script that you want to use:

Now let’s move on to the tips…

—Removing Menu Items—

Sometimes the menu items (File, Edit, etc…) just seem to get in the way and you never seem to use them. I’m sure many people, for instance, never use the Help menu. Or, if you have an extension managing your bookmarks, you might never use the Bookmarks menu. It is really simple to hide certain menu items using the Stylish extension mentioned above. Just create a new script and insert the following code:

#file-menu, #edit-menu, #view-menu, #bookmarks-menu, #go-menu, #tools-menu, #helpMenu{
display: none !important;}

That code will actually remove all of the menu items, so you should take out the items in that list that you still want to display.

—Change the Search Box size—

For some people the Search Box in the upper-right corner of Firefox is just a little too big. Shrinking it down is very simple to do with Stylish:

#search-container, #searchbar {
max-width: 50px !important;
width: 50px !important; }

The “50px” in both lines represents the width (in pixels) that you want the Search Box to be. I would probably use around 200px because 50px is pretty small.

—Block Blinking Text—

It is a sad day when you come across a site that still uses blinking text to try and get the reader’s attention. I still see them from time to time, but with a simple about:config trick we can prevent it from happening. If you’re not familiar with the about:config screen please see this quick tutorial I put together. 

All you have to do is open the about:config screen, find the option browser.blink_allowed and double-click on it so that the value will change to false.

—Make JavaScript HyperLinks Noticeable—

I like to be conscious about the links that I am clicking on for a site, and I’m a even more careful when I see a JavaScript link on a site that I’m not familiar with. For that reason you should think about making the JavaScript links more noticeable, and an easy way to do that is altering the cursor when you hover over them. In this example the cursor will change to a crosshair whenever you hover over a hyperlink that actually contains JavaScript:

a[href^="javascript:"]{ cursor: crosshair; }

The result when hovering over a JavaScript hyperlink would look like this:

There are a ton of different cursors that you can use in place of “crosshair”, and a good listing of them can be found here.

—Find As You Type Tricks—

Find As You Type is one of my favorite features in Firefox. This feature will start searching a page for text as you type it, which makes finding something specific on a page a lot easier.

I like having the Find As You Type automatically begin as soon as I start typing so on every Firefox installation I always go in and change the setting to enable this:

Some of you may not like having it work like that, so there is a way that you can use the “Find As You Type” without setting that option. If you want to initiate a Find As You Type just press the forward slash key (“/”) on the keyboard and begin typing your query. You should see a box popup on the bottom of the browser window that displays the characters that are currently being searched for:

That Quick Find will search all of the text on the page, but what if you’re looking for a link? No problem, instead of typing a forward slash press the apostrophe (‘) key and that will initiate a Quick Find that will only search links. When would this be useful? Sometimes I use it if I have a hard time finding a download link on a site, in which case I’ll do the Quick Find (just searching links) for the word “download.”

—Overview—

Those are the tweaks that I have accumulated over the past few weeks, so I hope that you enjoyed them. One of the things that makes Firefox so great is the customizability that it includes. The deeper you dig, the more tricks you’ll find. Even with everything that I have found up to now, I still feel like I have barely scratched the surface.

In time I’m sure I’ll find more, but if you have any of your own tweaks that you use, make sure you let us know in the comments below!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on October 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

Have you ever wanted to morph multiple images together? You know, take a picture of your friend and have it morph into a monkey or something? I accidentally came across a free application today called Sqirlz Morph that will do just that.

A screenshot of the program can be seen above, but don’t let the stripped-down toolbars deceive you. This program has a powerful array of options that will help you morph images with ease. With that being said it took me 5 or 10 minutes before I fully understood how the program worked, and so I thought I would give some pointers:

1. You can use as many photos as you want in the morphing process, but the more images you use the more work you’re going to cause yourself. So you may want to be selective.
2. After you have your images open you’ll need to add a few morphing points to start with. This is done with the green plus sign on the side toolbar. When you add a morphing point on one image it will be added to all of them.
3. What you need to do now is switch over to the other photos that you’ve opened, and move the points around so that the key features match up between all of the images. You can move the points around by clicking the black arrow in the side toolbar, and then clicking on a morphing point. In the example above you can see that I made sure the eyes, mouth, and edges of the face matched up.
4. Go to Image -> Animation Order if you want to change the image morphing order.
5. I chose to output my morphed images in a GIF format so that I could easily post the result in this article, but you can also save it as an AVI. When saving the image it asked for a frame rate, and 15 frames per second is pretty standard. I, however, chose just 3 frames per second so that you could clearly see the morphing process:

Adding the morphing points to the photos are a critical part of how Sqirlz Morph works. The result will not look right if you don’t take the time to properly align the points on the photos. That’s why in Step 1 I told you to be selective in how many photos you choose to use.

I have to admit that this is a pretty cool program, and I haven’t seen any other freeware that does the same sort of thing. You may not see a purpose for it right now, but at some point you may realize that this is just what you’re looking for. Bookmark it even if you don’t plan on using it right now.

Post links below to any images you decide to morph together. Can’t wait to see what some of you come up with.

Sqirlz Morph Homepage

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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