monday online productivity?

My current laptop is an old DELL PIII which just enough to manage my home media, mails and work on my projects and documents.
Due to its prehistoric specs, I need to constantly be aware of any processing and capacity waste, and this is how I started using Firefox more often. I took the oportunity to try FF3 Beta 4 and I have to amit it looks quite slick. It is blazing fast and most of all, does not seem to suffer from the memory leaks FF2 was painful with. I LOVE IE7 but it just sucks up all my memory and does not let it loose even if I close most tabs, this sucks and I need to fully close and open IE.
I have the feeling that on IE7, some feature/script on GoogleMail causes a serious memory leak, but I did not look into that.
FF is nothing without some Add-ins though, my favorites being NoScript and TabMixPlus (TMP).
The first, allows me to individually allow which server is allowed to run scripts on specific pages - which is NONE by default.
The second, permits me to configure Tab closing and opening behavior - new tabs originated from a main page are opened next to it's "mother tab", and not annoingly added to the end of the list.
Plus, with the AJAX web console on XBMC is only usable with FF (not IE).

I recently tried Live Writer to write some posts but for a reason that surpasses my comprehension, that supposedly little software is an elephant in disguise walking right into the little porcelain shop this laptop is. I will stick with the online Dashboard with IE (FF sucks here). It looks like Word2007 also supports Blogger posts and as W2007 opens 10x faster than Writer, I will give it a try... another day - connecting to blogger was fast but the formatting sucks...

Another good news, CopyHandler, the file operation queue freeware I use, version 1.30 has just been released with support for Vista and x64 systems. I just love this tool on my XPx32.

Another one I found laying around my NAS is PureText, the Clipboard format stripper - it allows to copy text from anywhere and paste it with all formatting stripped, just as if copying text from a web page, paste into Notepad, copy this one now and paste into Word - the notepad step is just bypassed. (not the first time I rant about this one)

Yesterday, my cellphone fell from the couch on the floor and I could not use it anymore, no key inputs were allowed. I figured out what was the issue after fiddling around for around 2 hours (or more). A while ago Joe told me something about troubleshooting, one needs to start looking at the first layer and then if nothing is found, move to the next one in the direction of the core of the problem.
I ended up flashing my device new, clearing it up from the software I had on it etc... which proved to be a totally unnecessary exercise and waste of my precious beauty sleep time. If only I had started with layer 2 (layer 1 being me, the user), the device's physical state. Instead, I jumped to layer 3 or 4 ending up searching online how to correct the startup bootloader lock.
At 3 in the morning, I then noticed that the Camera button was stuck, a problem solved with a low-tech solution by releasing it with the tip of a knife.
Explanation: with the button constantly pressed, I could not use the normal keys, so I restarted it. On boot, keeping the Camera button pressed forces the device to show the bootloader.

Lesson learned, mainly with the lack of sleep today.

A couple of my latest little projects are design related, I took on doing some layouts in Illustrator. My work queue has:
- a Perspective Central Munich Map, with a representation of all the places I'd recommend my guests to check out if I can't take them on a little tour
- a Simplified Central Munich Map, once printed out, I don't need to make the same drawings over and over...
- a layout of my simple but effective & lowcost home media setup as an Illustrator show-off demostration

Alright, I got more cats to skin. Peace the f*** out.

n.-