Antony’s blog

I prefer to have a close button on the edge of each tab, and when I close a tab for focus to go to the previously selected tab, so these two are invaluable:

• tab x
• flst (turn off the tabflipping feature immediately though)

(I wonder if these actually have any code in them, or they just change some preferences somewhere)

Next, here are two extensions which help me to solve two web annoyances - pages with crazy annoying flash, and sites that are designed only for IE and don’t work right in firefox.

• flashblock
• ie tab

And depending on how much web development I happen to be doing, this one comes in handy:

• web developer

Both flashblock and web developer have useful buttons you can put on your toolbar. The button for flashblock lets you add the current site to your flash-allowed site list, and the button for web developer allows you to quickly show/hide the developer toolbar.

To get the buttons, you go to View->Toolbars->Customize and just drag them onto the navigation bar.

Finally, here’s another nice one to have:

• bugmenot

This one automates lookup to bugmenot.com for anonymous username/passwords for registration required sites like nytimes & friends, and autofills form fields.

There are times that I’m using remote desktop to connect to a machine running vmware, and I need to user of the virtual machines running inside vmware. The display refresh is often slow in this case, and the mouse emulation seems to get a little confused as well. It would be cool if vmware itself provided a vnc / remote desktop server you could connect to, instead of having to mess around with turning on remote access within the virtual machine itself (which, if your virtual machine’s networking is set to NAT or a host-only private network, is complicated or impossible to make work).

Now here’s an awesome idea: AWD bicycles (two wheel drive, in other words). When mountain biking up steep grades with a normal bike, you have to lean forward to avoid doing a wheelie, but balance your weight carefully between the forward and rear to keep traction to the rear wheel. There have been many times I’ve ended up either walking my bike up really steep sections, or tried to keep riding but ended up losing traction and totally biffing it. I can imagine an AWD bike would make these steep grades much easier.

(via bramcohen)

Thanks to Mike for pointing this out to me.

I read an article in the Mercury News about the Wonderful World of Rats event held this past weekend. Unfortunately we were busy but it would have been fun to drag Amy over there. (I had mice for pets as a kid so I have a special place in my heart for pet rodents)