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One of the most important aspects of my online life is to be able to find what I need in a moment’s notice. The search field found in the upper right hand corner (by default) in Firefox is one of my favorite features. The wonderful thing about it is that you can expand your search options by adding other search engines.
Here is a list of my favorite Firefox search engines, in no particular order. Some come with Firefox while others I needed to download:
There are tons of other search engines available on the Firefox add-ons website and the Mycroft Project website.
What are your favorite Firefox search engines? Point us in the right direction in the comments.
Update! Suggestions by readers:
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If you are running a small office of a couple dozen employees and you have Windows 2003 R2, you can easily centralize your contacts for your entire office along with give everyone the ability to see the company’s corporate calendar without having to install Exchange in your environment.
With Windows 2003 R2, you also have a copy of Sharepoint services. Sharepoint allows you to create workspaces for your different working groups. It is generally designed to work for either relatively large companies or working groups that are widely distributed. But, if you are neither, you have this technology at your disposal and you might as well put it to good use.
By creating a central contacts and calendar in the Sharepoint services, your users can connect to then using Outlook. This way, is is really easy for them to find contact information for anyone in the company or see what is happening on the corporate calendar right from a tool they already use.
You may even want to expand things a bit more and share your own calendar using Sharepoint so that people can see when you are busy or not and allow them to better select meeting times. Or, instead of just putting in company contacts in Sharepoint, you can also put in vendors and clients so that this information is readily available for everyone in the company to use.
One other nice aspect about doing things this way is that it is also useful for the road warrior. Outlook caches a copy of all the contacts and calendar information locally on your hard drive so that when you are on the road with your laptop, all of the contacts and calendars are still available, even though you may not be able to connect with your Sharepoint server.
Now, if you do not have access to a Sharepoint server, you do have some other options, most free or open source. Here are just a few:
What are you using for online collaboration? Let us know what works and what doesn’t work in the comments.
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While DVDs are relatively small, if you have a large library like I do, it can quickly consume a lot of space. So, I decided to put my entire DVD collection on my home network and get rid of the DVDs altogether. This was a relatively simple process even though it was fairly time consuming. But, in the end, I ended up with a complete set of all my movies which I could watch on demand (read, “I can change disks without getting off the couch!”) that fit nicely on a small home NAS.
I used two pieces of software to put my DVDs on my computer and shrink them down to a size that is useable:
In order to make things truly “on-demand”, you will want a few pieces of hardware. Technically, these are not needed as you could easily store all of your movies on your hard drive and watch them on your computer but it is way better to be able to sit on your couch and watch your movies with nothing more than a remote.
Here is what I have set up:
I’m assuming that most of the readers are relatively technical so I’m not going to go into extreme details as to how to do every little step of the process. If there is enough interest, I might create some step by step tutorials at a later date. For now, here are the basic steps:
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As my wife and I are in the process of packing, we have discovered that there are tons of documents that we have which are in binders. Binders are great if they are on the shelf or if their contents are being accessed on a regular basis but when you are moving and space is a key factor, they sure become a pain.
We decided to use Chicago screws to save some space. They are flat and allow you to get rid of the extra space that is taken up by partially empty binders, covers, etc. We figure that we have reduced the amount of space that our documents use by about 60%.
Sorry that this isn’t really a techie post but this was such a cool idea, I needed to share it.
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There are a number of Debian based Linux distributions out there. My personal favorite is Ubuntu. I will typically use the desktop or server version for most of my Linux needs.
Each time I build a new system, there are a number of steps that I typically follow which I seem to forget and need to research again. So, both to document my actions and for your benefit, here are the first few things that I do for any new installation.
This guide assumes that you have just completed the base installation and have access to a command/terminal prompt. You will also need to have the root password but are logged in as a typical user.
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Except for the very first line, remove all of the # in front of each line the begins with # deb and save the file.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
In this file, find the line that says iface eth0 inet dhcp. Comment out this line (put a # in front of it) and then add after it on the next lines:
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.100
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.0.0
broadcast 192.168.0.255
gateway 192.168.0.1
Make sure that the network information you enter here is accurate for your network. Once you have saved this file, then restart the network:
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
Next, update your host file to reflect your new static IP address:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
Find the line starting with 127.0.1.1 (usually the second line) and change 127.0.1.1 to the IP address you desire. From the example above, it would be 192.168.0.100. Save the file when you are done.
sudo apt-get install ssh openssh-server
These are some other things that I have found to be useful from time to time. They are not necessarily a part of my default setup but they do come in handy
ifconfig | grep Bcast
sudo passwd root
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As many of you have noted, I have been absent from the blog for some time now. The reason for this is that I find myself recently looking for work. I really do not want to get into all of the details why I am looking for work but all of the reasons are positive!
I also wanted to add a little something for those who have come from links on my resume, either paper, digital or online version. This is just to emphasize that Tim Fehlman is my pseudonym that I am writing under and you can rest assured that I did not just link to some random blog!
If any of you live in the Edmonton, Alberta area and know of someone who is looking for a good Director of Information Technology, please feel free to send me an e-mail at tfehlman@dailycupoftech.com.
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