TechBlog

I’m sure you’ve all seen it before; someone finds a video of a cute puppy sleeping on its back and emails it to everyone in their address book. Fine and dandy, but so often people download the video and attach it to their email to send to you. What’s really happening is this: they download the video from a server somewhere, attach it to an email message, the attachment is uploaded to their mail server then transferred to yours, and then you download it from your mail server to watch it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply give the person a link to the site with the video so they can watch it directly? Yes, yes it does make more sense.

When you send a large attachment, you’re not only sending redundant data over the internet as described above, you’re unnecessarily clogging the recipients’ email boxes (and your own)! Not only that, can you imagine being forced to download the massive video over dial-up or some other slow internet uplink? The image on the right is a perfect example; while Dax will get the video in minutes or even seconds, mom and grandma might have to wait hours for the message to arrive in their inbox. Not only that, if they don’t have a webmail service to delete the message before their mail client starts downloading it, they’ll have to wait for your message to completely download before they can get ANY other email! Poor grandma - she’ll never use email again. And Dax probably doesn’t even like puppies.

Don’t put your grandmother through this - find the video online (e.g. YouTube, search on Google) and send her the link rather than the video itself. FYI, the same idea applies to audio files and large photos.

For some time now I have been using the Ubiquity add-on for Firefox. If you are a Mac user, you might be using Quicksilver, which allows you to use the keyboard to launch applications, find files, and so much more. Ubiquity is very similar to this. It allows you to use the keyboard to launch the add-on within the browser, and perform tasks. Now Firefox users are probably used to typing in words into their URL bar, such as my example, ‘wireless’. And Firefox looks into my history and pulls up anything related to wireless, allowing me to use my keyboard or mouse to highlight the item and get to where I want to go. Ubiquity is similar to this but it allows me to throw commands at it and perform tasks. Examples include the following:

Email (message) (to contact) - Typing this allows you to fire off an email message to your recipient. Simply typing in ‘email’ brings up options that allow you to perform all sorts of tasks related to ‘email’.

Weather Zip code or Weather City brings up the current temperature for that city.

Wikipedia - Even typing in wi immediately brings up a suggestion list for Wikipedia (search), simply typing ‘w’ brings up all related commands for ‘w’ such as weather, Wikipedia, etc. Typing in a keyword, Wikipedia wireless brings up all related content with photos and text for wireless. Pretty powerful, and all within your current browsing window.

If you are researching material on a page, you can highlight any text, use the keyboard shortcut to open ubiquity, hit delete to remove previous commands, and ubiquity does the rest, suggesting items related to your highlighted text.

Simply tinkering with throwing commands in the Ubiquity window is pretty cool as well. Typing in ‘a’ brings up all of the commands under the ‘a’ listing such as Amazon search, Ask search, Add to calendar, Answers search, etc. Below is a full listing to help get you started. As you can see Ubiquity is a really powerful add-on and I look forward to its future development.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/

A
ask-search (search term)
amazon-search (search term)
answers-search (search term)
add-to-calendar (event)
tab (tab name)

B
back 1
bold
bookmark
bugzilla (search term)
tab (tab name)

C
convert (text) (to conversion-options)
close-tab (tab name)
calculate (expression)
count-tabs (filter)
close-window

D
digg this page
delete
define (word)
desaturate-image
detect-email-provider

E
email (message) (to contact)
edit-page
ebay-search (search term)
exit-firefox
edge-detect-image

F
flickr (search term)
forward 1
flip-page
fullscreen
define (word)

G
google (search term)
gcalculate (expression)
get-email-address (name)

H
home
help (command name)
highlight

I
imdb (search term)
italic
image-search (search term)
invert-image
Performs a imdb search

J
twitter (status) as j
translate (text to translate) to japanese (from language)
translate (text to translate) (to language) from japanese
wikipedia (search) in japanese
twitter j (as twitter username)

K
back 1
flickr (search term)
bookmark
sparkline (data)
wikipedia (search) (in language)

L
last-email-from gmail
link-to-wikipedia (text)
bold
yelp (restaurant) (near text)
help (command name)

M
map (address)
map-these (selection)
msn-search (search term)
home
zoom (percentage)

N
undo
print
define (word)
tinyurl (url to shorten)
convert (text) (to conversion-options)

O
home
zoom (percentage)
bold
undo
redo

P
print
map (address)
yelp (restaurant) (near text)
help (command name)
edit-page

R
redo
refresh
report-bug
rotate-image
restart-firefox
The redo command

S
save
search (query) (with search engine)
sparkline (data)
skin-list
syntax-highlight (code)

T
tab (tab name)
tag (text)
twitter (status) (as twitter username)
tinyurl (url to shorten)
translate (text to translate) (to language) (from language)

U
undo
undelete
underline
tinyurl (url to shorten)
youtube (search term)

V
view-source
save
convert (text) (to conversion-options)
invert-image
remove-annotations

W
weather Milwaukee, United States (in temperature units)
wikipedia (search) (in language)
word-count (text)
forward 1
twitter (status) (as twitter username)

X
exit-firefox
restart-firefox
syntax-highlight (code)

Y
yelp (restaurant) (near text)
youtube (search term)
yahoo-search (search term)
tinyurl (url to shorten)
ebay-search (search term)

Z
zoom (percentage)
bugzilla (search term)
amazon-search (search term)

Here’s a good tip I wish people would use more: get rid of your screensaver. Why? There are numerous reasons.
1) You probably don’t need a screensaver anymore. They were developed a while back to prevent an image from being burned into the glass on CRT (the giant tube) monitors. That sort of effect doesn’t happen with LCD screens anymore.
2) Installing and running your fancy aquarium screensaver takes up system resources - some of which you won’t get back until you reboot the computer. Cycling through dozens (or hundreds) of photos for a slideshow screensaver not only makes your computer read from your hard drive more frequently, it has to save all this data in RAM while the screensaver is active.
3) Displaying something on your monitor while you aren’t even in front of it is virtually useless. Who needs to look at it?

Here’s what you should do instead and why:
Replace your screensaver with a power-saving feature available in ALL operating systems - turn off the display. This will save some hours on screen life, significantly reduces the wattage burned while you’re not using the computer, and will stretch your battery life even further. I set my screensaver to “none”, tell the computer to turn off the display after 3 minutes of activity, and to sleep after an hour of idle time. Three minutes is a good amount of time - if I haven’t touched the mouse or keyboard for 180 seconds, I’m probably not going to for another few minutes. All it takes to get the computer to come back alive is to touch a key or wiggle the mouse and it’s right there. While it might take a half second longer to bring the monitor back on in some cases, I’m willing to make the sacrifice. Many computers don’t have a function to lock the computer when the display goes off; rather, that happens when the screensaver comes on. Not to worry, most operating systems have a “blank” screensaver. So if you’re worried about security, set the blank screensaver to come on at the same time your display blanks or thereafter. Doing so allows you to require a password to wake it back up.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been in meetings and when the person’s display turns off they quickly turn it back on by moving the mouse - just to let it sit there and do the same thing again, again, and again. It’s no wonder they complain about short battery life. I say, let your computer snooze whenever you’re not using it. You won’t be upset.