Give power your Firefox SearchBar

Many people use Firefox but few know how improve the search bar.

There are may add-ons to search  but only two are really useful:

• Add to Search Bar: adds a function in context menu that enables to include any site in the list of search engines. Right click on search box of site that you want add and then click on “Add to search bar…”. No sweat!
• ContextSearch: permits to search  selected words directly from context menu.

One other trick very useful  for open search directly in new tab is that:

1. write “about:config” in address bar and press enter
2. click ok on the alert page
3. write “browser.search.openintab” in filter box
4. change value from false to true by double click
5. restart Firefox

The last trick that I want advise permits to search in address bar by different search engines. Normally, when you write a word in address bar Firefox uses “I’m feeling lucky” of Google, but it’s possible to use all search engines of the our list and to do it we must put before the word a keyword. This trick works only if the keyword is associated with a search engines.

For add a keyword:

1. Click “manage search engines” in search bar menu
2. Select a search engines and click on change keyword
3. Insert the keyword that you want use. Foe example I use “–g” for Google, “-w” for Wikipedia and “-y” for YouTube

If you want change the default behavior and set the normal Google search, you do this:

1. write “about:config” in address bar and press enter
2. click ok on the alert page
3. write “keyword.URL” in filter box
4. double click on line and insert “http://www.google.com/search?q=”
5. restart Firefox

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Microsoft thinks to WEB 3.0

All know what is WEB 2.0, but Microsoft already thinks to WEB 3.0.

 

Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web culture communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs and tags. Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information, but they want do a high-interaction user-to-website and user-to-user.

 

In the future this high-interaction will be not only user-to-user but also user-to-machine and machine-to-machine: WEB 3.0. Microsoft is studying how use internet technologies for communicate between machine: we'll can buy metro ticket or restaurant by our phone, but also control our house thermostat. All this is only the first step of the innovation that WEB 3.0 wants introduce in our lives.

In WEB 3.0 era, all is interconnect, we'll not open refrigerator to see what buy for lunch, but refrigerator will give us shopping list or send it directly to supermarket.

To support WEB 3.0 our phone and other common used devices will became "intelligent".

 

Maybe someday, while I'll have breakfast, I'll talk about my coffee pot :) .

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Apple admits that OSX needs antivirus

Really bad news for the Apple maniacs that their beloved company is recommending to use antivirus. Yes you read right. At Cupertino are suggesting you to install an antivirus software on your Mac.

Even if in the commercial the subtle Mac was laughing at the poor PC that was ill.

Even if Mac OSX is a UNIX. I am a UNIX hater, I never hid that, and I’d like to know what the people that are theorizing the UNIX safety by design are going to say. I think it would be something fun.

Even if nobody cares to write a virus for a niche of the market. I think that that niche proved to be so dumb that will welcome any malware in his system. If Steve Jobs fooled you once why a good social engineer can’t make your machine working for him?

This is the official announcement. It is Apple.com, so I think that you are taking your credit card and doing an online order of the software suggested.

With the Apple fanatics desperate for that revelation and the users of other operating systems laughing so loud that they can’t read anymore why should I go on with this post?

Thanks to Feliciano for his post.

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Make Firefox 3 look exactly like Safari

Many people dislike Safari and switch to Firefox; I recently decided to try it and I started using it regularly. There are many features that only Firefox offers but there's one thing I particularly dislike of Firefox: the interface. Safari is truly well-designed: the GUI is uncluttered, simple and nice looking. How to make Firefox 3 look like exactly like Safari? These are the steps you have to take:

• Install the "Combine Stop-Reload Buttons" extension (currently at version 0.3); it merges the stop and reload buttons
• Install the "Fission" extension (currently at version 1.0); it provides a Safari-like progress bar, which shows behind the URL
• Install "Quartz PDF Plugin" to give Firefox 3 the ability to view PDFs
• Install the "Inquisitor" extension... it's so cool!
• Open a blank page and type about:config , press enter, click on "I'll be careful, I promise" and edit "browser.tabs.tabMaxWidth" to "200" and "browser.tabs.tabMinWidth" to "150"; this will change the tab width to make it more like Safari.

The result is almost pixel perfect! ...Enjoy!

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Make presentation with LaTeX using Beamer and the Dubino theme

Today I had a look at LaTeX as a tool for doing presentations.

I’m trying to abandon all the clerkish office automation suite. For my documents I’m happily using LaTeX, but sometimes I have to make presentations of my works and  the only program I was able to work with were Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress.

The geek I have inside wanted to do everything with LaTeX, so today I spent a couple of hours “learning” how to use the beamer package (Thanks to Swanz for the suggestion).

The operation you have to do to have it fully functional (Ina Windows environment, if you use other operating systems this is not the post that will tell you what to do in details) are the following:

• Install MikTex and Texnicenter
• Add the beamer package to MikTex (Using the MikTex Browse package tool). On my PC I had to install the following packages: beamer, pdftex-def, pgf, xcolor, ifxetex and translator. I don’t know what the package I mentioned are actually doing, but I can tell you that to make it work I needed to install it.
• Half of the work is done. Now we have to write the actual presentation. I’m not teaching you how to do that, you can Google to it. Sorry for this joke, is since I had this link that I was looking for a reason to use it :-)

Since the standard beamer templates are everything but satisfactory I also hacked what I found to have something enjoyable. To have the wonderful Dubino theme you have to:

• Downlaod it from my skydrive.
• Copy it to this folder C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.6\tex\latex\beamer\themes\theme
• run texhash (In Vista you have to do that in a Run-As-Administrator console)
• Congratulations, you have done it!

P.S.

If you are not understanding what I wanted to do don’t worry.

This post was more a note to remind me what to do than a real tutorial. If you don’t like this post, I’m sorry, but after all this is my blog and I can write what I want, isn’t it?

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