Category: M@’s Picks

Firefox is fast, but you can squeeze a little more speed out of it by not having it draw all those ads that are on almost every web page. I use Adblock Plus to keep them from showing up. It works great, blocking nearly every ad and not messing up the page layout. If you do run into the occasional problem with it, you can easily disable the plugin for the particular page or site. On the other hand, if you get an ad that you shouldn’t it’s easy to let Adblock know about it and have it remove it in the future. Once you’ve got Adblock installed, make sure you set it up for a filter subscription, which it will prompt you to do once you restart Firefox. This will make sure Adblock knows about the latest ads and how to block them.

Tips From the Top Floor is a photography podcast. I started listening to it about a year and a half ago. At the time, I wasn’t sure just how you could describe photography tips and techniques through an audio podcast, but Chris Marquardt, the host, does an excellent job. There’s also an occasional video podcast thrown into this feed, but since I listen to most of my podcasts while commuting, I can’t comment on those.

Windows Mobile has a built in file manager, but it’s slow and doesn’t give you all the features you’re used to in Explorer. Total Commander CE fills this gap. In addition to letting you view hidden and system files and having a search feature, there are also included plugins for FTP and registry. These allow you to move files around via FTP and to edit the registry on you Windows Mobile device. I’d recommend reducing the font and icon size slightly once you install it so you can get a lot more files listed on your screen at one time.

I finally decided on PockeTwit for posting to Twitter from my phone. The app has an Iphone like interface with smooth scrolling menus and a full screen display. The developer is actively adding features to it and is very quick to respond to bug reports and general support questions. There’s just one trick to getting used to it, especially on a smartphone. You need to scroll left and right to get to the menus that have all of the post, reply, time line and settings. Once you get used to that you’re good to go.

Opera Mobile also has some built in keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. Since I couldn’t find these documented anywhere very well here’s what I’ve found through trial and error:

  • 1 – Open URL dialog (also includes history and bookmarks)
  • 2 – Window list
  • 3 – Home page
  • 5 – Toggle images (requires page refresh)
  • 6 – Page up
  • 8 – Next window
  • 9 – Page Down
  • * – Full Screen
  • # – Toggle between desktop and fit to screen display
  • Space – Page down