Tab Mix Plus for Firefox 3 July 17, 2008

I’ve been seriously mourning the loss of Tab Mix Plus for FF3.

Having to right click, open in new tab to get a link or bookmark to open in a new tab was driving me crazy.

Every time FF3 told me it had found an update for one of my add-ons, I could hardly bear the excitement, thinking could it be, just maybe, Tab Mix Plus?….but disappointment abounded.

But, no more!

I did a manual check today, just out of curiosity and lo and behold, there’s a development build of the add-on on the Tab Mix Plus website. O glory be!

Get Excel to read your data back to you July 16, 2008

It’s always such a nightmare entering loads of figures into an excel spreadsheet and then having to try and check the figures are right, isn’t it?

Did you know Excel can READ the data (numbers and words) back to you so you can manually check the original data? Nor did I until I read the latest tip from tech-recipes.

Here’s what they say to do:

1. Open Excel 2007 and go to the Quick Access Toolbar at the top of the window.
2. Click the downward point arrow to the right of the toolbar and select More Commands.
3. From the dropdown menu, select Commands Not in the Ribbon.
4. Scroll down the list and find Speak Cells, Speak Cells — Stop Speaking Cells, Speak Cells by Columns, Speak Cells by Rows, and Speak Cells on Enter. Add each of these by selecting them one-by-one and clicking the Add button. Click OK after all 5 commands have been added.
5. Now go to your spreadsheet and select the cells you want Excel to read by performing a simple click and drag. Once the data is selected, go to the Quick Access toolbar and select either Speak Cells by Columns or Speak Cells by Rows. When you are ready for Excel to begin reading off the data contained in the selected cells, select Speak Cells and Excel will begin reading out the data to you.
6. If you need Excel to stop reading, simply select Speak Cells – Stop Speaking Cells.

Admittedly having all those items on your quick access toolbar is a bit clunky, but you can always remove them, I suppose?

Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog July 16, 2008

Catch Act I here.

Act II being released tonight at 12am EST.

Sing along now….

Remove the URL from printed web pages July 11, 2008

I’ve been wanting to know how to do this for ages. And now the How-to Geek has told me how. Who knew it could be so simple?

I use Firefox, but he also deals with IE7. What a guy!

Check out his post here.

Now if he could only tell me how to open a bookmark in a new tab in Firefox 3 without having to right click, open in new tab…. or get that new tab to open on the page of my choice rather than a blank one…. Boy, do I miss TabMix Plus

Favthumbs shows you thumbnails of your delicious bookmarks July 11, 2008

And that’s all Favthumb does. But who needs anything more?

Just sign in with your delicious username and you’ll see a thumbnail grid of all your bookmarked items. Items without thumbnails are either blank or say ‘image coming soon’, which kind of spoils the view, but hey.

Hit the ‘Carousel’ button (top left) and you get a cover flow view (see above).

Apparently, if you put your password in you can see public bookmarks too, but I didn’t go there.

[via Lifehacker]

‘Search commands’ for Office 2007 July 10, 2008

I have been using the Microsoft Office Labs ’search commands’ for a while now and it’s a pretty useful tool when you just don’t know how the heck to do something in Word, Excel or PowerPoint 2007.

You can download an additional tab for your ‘ribbon’ that gives you a search box to type in your query and it magically tells you how to do what you need to do. Just click on the result you want and it does what you need it to do.

Problem is, it doesn’t tell you HOW it did it, so you don’t get to learn anything. Can’t have everything, I suppose.

Simply go to the Office Labs search command page and download the .msi file, run it and next time you open Word, Excel or PowerPoint the last tab on your ribbon will be the ‘Search commands’ tab.

Search command from Microsoft Office Labs

How to… change a ‘tag’ name in Google Reader July 8, 2008

I thought I was going crazy. There seemed to be no obvious way to change a tag’s name in Google Reader.

And I was not wrong. You need to follow 6 steps, according to Googlified’s post on how exactly to do just this.

To reiterate the 6 steps:

1. Go to your Google Reader Settings page and click the ‘Subscriptions’ tab at the top
2. Find the input box called: “Filter by name, tag, or URL”, top right, and enter the tag name you want to change
3. Click “Select: All {number} subscriptions” (left side of the page)
4. Under any one of the feeds in the “Change folders” drop down box, find “New folder…”, and enter the new name for your tag
5. Go to the “More actions…” drop down box and choose the tag you just created under “Add tag…”
6. Go to “More actions…” again and click the old tag that you don’t want, under “Remove tag…” to remove the tag

Settings page

There’s even a handy video in Googlified’s post showing you how to do it.

Matters are not helped by the fact that Google calls the same thing a tag and a folder. A rose by any other name….

If anyone has a quicker method, just let me know.

‘Redesigned’ theme now for Google Calendar July 4, 2008

If you like the Gmail redesigned theme from Globex as much as me, you’re going to love that there’s now one for your Google Calendar (GCal).

Head over to userstyles.org and get your Google calendar redesigned. You’ll need either the Stylish or Greasemonkey extensions for Firefox first (if you haven’t already).

Beautiful. Sigh.

[Lifehacker]

Free online temperature converter July 2, 2008

It’s pretty hot today. 31 degrees celsius. My mum didn’t get how hot that was ’til I told her it was about 88 degrees fahrenheit (she’s in England, I’m in Canada).

I used this free, simple, online tool to work it out

Change your keyboard language July 1, 2008

Now, I found this out quite by accident.

I was changing my batteries on my cordless keyboard and I must have pressed some random keys because when it started working again my ‘@’ button was giving me speech marks and Shift+3 produced a ‘£’ instead of the ‘#’ symbol. I was most confused.

I guessed it was the keyboard language that had somehow switched to UK, rather than US English, as I had both set up. So how did I change it back?

Press the left Alt key and Shift.