"Stop already with the Firefox shit will ya!"

I hear you yell at me from the comfort of your home and quite frankly all I have to say in reply is... Try living my life and having something worth writing about at the end of the day... This is the reason I'm doing another shambolic attempt at tech reviewing and informing you all of the latest shit i have plugged into FireFox 3.

First up is a really nice little FireFox media player plugin called Foxytunes. Foxytunes is an addon that enables you to control your media player from inside FireFox. Compatible with WinAmp, iTunes, Yahoo Music Engine, Pandora, foobar2000, Windows Media Player, Xbox Media Center, Musicmatch, Quintessential, J. River, jetAudio, XMPlay, MediaMonkey, Media Player Classic, Sonique, wxMusik, Real Player, XMMS, Noatun, Juk, Amarok, Music Player Daemon, Rhythmbox and many others Foxytunes is a useful little addon if you like to listen to music while you surf the web.

Another small addon I have just installed, and am loving it, is Twittytunes. Twittytunes is a nice little addon made by the same builders responsible for Foxytunes and allows you to post the title of whatever song you are currently listening to onto your Twitter feed.

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*Update* Twittytunes also appears to work with the blogger post editor and allows you to show whatever song you are listening to onto your blog as a signature. Like so...

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Now playing: Happy Mondays - Step On
via FoxyTunes

Ain't that cool and skeezy?

The other day I was raving on...

About the cool and skeezy addons that you can get for FireFox these days thanks to all the wonderful coders out there who see something they like, but think it could be improved, and rewrite it as they would like it to be. It's because of this relentless tinkering that people are able to customize their computer/browser to a level that makes it truly individual without needing to know how it is done.

Take Speeddial for example. This little addon enables you to have all your favorite websites on a tab in FireFox so you don't need to bother with all the hassle of clicking your bookmarks open and remembering where the link is. With a little bit of tweaking (downloading images that you wish to associate with your favorites) you're able to create a really neat looking startpage that suits your needs. Thanks to the easy to use controls, how easy it is to customize and it's use-ability Speeddial is going to be a favorite of mine for a long time. Download it and give it a try, you won't be disappointed. Here's my speeddial page.

Another recent addon to my Firefox is Foxclocks. Which does exactly what it says on the tin. It puts clocks for different timezones on the status bar at the bottom of FireFox. (You can see my Foxclocks on the bottom left of my browser.) Foxclocks is a lot more trick than it initially sounds when you realise that Foxclocks helps you keep an eye on the time, locally and around the world, by putting clocks in your statusbar and comes with other features such a Google Earth location finder built into it.

"That's all well and good Ross, but don't all these addons clutter up the right-click menu?" I hear you ask. And you'd be right to question me on that. But this is where Menu Editor comes into play. Menu Editor is an addon that gives you full control over what is shown on your right-click menu and all your other menus such as the File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Tools and the Help menu. And now you don't have all those unnecessary links kicking about in your menus.

The next thing to make my browsing more engaging is Better Gmail 2. Better Gmail 2 works with the new version of Googlemail, if you're using the classic version you need Better Gmail 1 instead, and vastly improves the functionality of Gmail. Google Ad's are removed and the skin function, there are four at the moment until someone designs more, makes Gmail look light years better.

The final addon I have installed is Customize Google. This is an addon that makes Google's search pages as good as they should be. You want links to other search engines on Google? You got it. You want to make Google stream search results so you have one page of results instead of the usual amount? You've got it. You want the same for images? You've got it. You want to prevent cookies from being sent to Google analytics and anonymize the Google cookie UID? You got it and a lot more.

Enjoy these addons if you choose to grab any of them and remember to recommend them to your friends. If you have any. I don't, I'm too busy playing with FireFox addons.

Mahalo.

So, there you are...

With a nice shiny Ipod and very little music to drop onto it. So what do you do? You give it to your friend and they drop a load of their music onto your Ipod until you can build up a half decent library of your own.

And that's when the problem starts. You've build up your own library of tunes and movies but there are some tunes of your friends that you have discovered are in your taste and want to keep them. Itunes won't allow you to rip from an ipod to your library and you are now faced with downloading the tunes from wherever you downloaded your own songs from (Everyone say Piratebay) and there goes some more of your precious time.

But worry no longer folks because there is a nice little program called Idump that takes care of this problem and enables you to rip from an Ipod to your PC with ease. Grab it now, before apple finds out and shits all over it.

Last night...

I was raving on about how impressed I was with the website drop.io and decided that I should spend an hour or two today getting into the thing and seeing what was what.

But as the saying goes, the best laid plans gang aft agley and after less than a minute I was distracted by another site and felt I should let you all know about it. Cooliris is a neat little plugin that allows you to view the media from a site in a nice 3D environment.

Particularly nice for Google Images, Picasa albums and media rich websites, Cooliris and Coolpreviews speeds up your browsing and works with Firefox, I.E, Safari, Bebo, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube and many, many, more.

Nice little hack...

Here's a nifty little hack for bloggers who want their tags to show in a nice neat tagcloud rather than the in line look.

Coded by, and posted on the blog of, phydeaux3 this code is easy to install and works a treat.

To get the coding for the tags as a cloud click here.