MakeUseOf Cheat Sheets list shortcuts for common programmes that you use daily. These will make you more productive.
Tag Archive for 'Power User Tips'
searchOnTab
This extension allows users to select where are loaded the results of the search bar:
- In the current page/tab
- In a new tab.
The choice can be done easily from the Firefox search bar drop-down menu, by checking or unchecking the “Open in new tab” option.
The Cloud & Security
Cloud computing makes knowledge work easier. In large organisations, employees are using nothing more than dumb terminals with a browser interface and corporate e-mail is webmail, corporate documents are all on GoogleDocs, and specialized applications have a web interface, it’s easier to allow employees, partners, suppliers, and customers to access the company’s data.
The Cloud & The PI
Security is always a trade-off, and security decisions are often made for non-security reasons. In this case, the decision is usually to sacrifice security for convenience and flexibility. Corporations want their employees to be able to work from anywhere, and they loosen controls to get that. However, in Canada, a Private Investigator must consider how PIPEDA and the courts will look upon any breach at Google. The PI is not a member of some favoured elite. If a data breach happens at Google, the Canadian PI will almost certainly be held liable for using Google Docs.
Data Breech Liability & PIPEDA
The Canadian PI has several practical reasons to be cautious when using services like Google Docs. Continue reading ‘Google Docs & the Private Investigator’
The MailBrowser add-in puts a sidebar to the right of your Gmail screen in Internet Explorer or Firefox, showing information about the sender of an open e-mail or any contact you search for. You can see a list of unread e-mails from the person, e-mail threads and a chart of e-mail activity.
It also lets you search through attachments and shows thumbnails to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. It works on Windows and Mac, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.
Gmail Drive works with IE 5 or better to turn your Gmail storage space into a virtual hard drive where you can keep any sort of file. Just like a local hard drive, you can move a file there by dragging and dropping and open it by double-clicking. When you save a file to Gmail Drive, it shows up as an e-mail with attachment in your inbox. If this could mean it gets sent to your smartphone, then this could be either a nuisance.
GSpace – an add-in for Firefox on Windows, Mac and Linux – adds interfaces for pictures and music. GSpace lets you manipulate files much as Gmail Drive does, but viewer to let you flip through photos, and a music mode that will play your tunes direct from Gmail. As with Gmail Drive, your files show up as attachments to e-mails in your inbox.
Downloading videos from sites like YouTube to your computer is something every Investigator will need to do from time-to-time.
An easy way to do this is with the Firefox Fast Video Download plug-in. While watching the video select the Tools menu, Fast video download, and then select the video you want to save. The videos may have the name of the video or a generic name. The extension may be .flv or .mp4, or there may be one or more of each. Select the format that you want , such as.mp4, and save the file, renaming it if you need to.
To playback the videos VLC Media Player is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The combination of the Fast Video Download plug-in and the VLC Media Player give you a free way to handle this type of material.
Pdf It! is more than PDF
The Pdf It! extension is designed for FireFox running on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. The Pdf It! menu item appears in the Tools menu as well as context menu.
The Pdf It! extension features are as follows:
- Convert current page(Whole Page or Visible Part) to Image(PNG or JPEG)
- Add title to generated image (Firefox 3 only)
- Specify the color/position/font size for title
- Apply up to 16 filters while converting page to Image
ImageVenue
I don’t have much use for the PDF function of this addon (based on an online service) . The PDF function does not provide a full colour rendition of the Web page. It is the ability to create a JPEG of a web page that can be emailed or put up on a site like ImageVenue.
If you use ImageVenue, then you only need to send a link to the image, which must be either JPEG or JPG with a maximum size of 3 meg. For example, an image of our web page is easier to send as a link than as an image file. Of course this is not secure from outside viewing but it is handy for some things.
Most PI companies are small affairs, usually four or five people, but in my experience, they create a lot of data. Video, pictures, reports, supporting material for reports, scanned documents, and it must all reside on a computer somewhere.
Microsoft Windows Home Server software, which sells for about $100, is a a very simple (in form and function anyway) operating system that has built in backup and file sharing capabilities to make life easy without adding the complexity of managing a true server.
In May, Acer began selling its Aspire easyStore Home Server. The street price seems to be less than $500 CD which usually includes a second 1TB drive and Windows Home Server software.
UPDATE:
It seems that it had a tendency to lose data under some conditions, a problem that’s only been fixed recently: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=473
How often have you hear the terms Web 2.0, Web 3.0, or semantic web, and realized you don’t even know what Web 1.0 is? Well, here is the article that explains it all in very few words and some good slide presentations:
Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English
Recently, I did battle the Great MicroSatan.
Two of our workstations have been going for about 4 years without a fresh install of the OS. One machine started to act-up and it corrupted all the MSWord templates it touched. The documents it created were everlasting problems on other machines. The offending machine would hang-up, crash, and generally make everyone’s life miserable. The Great MicroSatan was wreaking havoc upon our little company.
It wasn’t hardware. It wasn’t the drives. Took out the drives and ran checkdisk on them using another machine, everything was OK. Diagnostics found no problems. It was the work of the Great MicroSatan!
Spybot-Search & Destroy found thousands of temporary files, but nothing untoward.
Norton found nothing.
Using CCleaner, I removed all the temporary files.
Using Little Registry Cleaner and then CCleaner I removed all the dross in the registry.
Nothing helps — oh, despair, woe is me — the Great MicroSatan is too powerful!
Then salvation appears in MSWord, Help>Detect and Repair. Great MicroSatan, get thee behind me, you are defeated!
Texter saves you countless keystrokes by replacing abbreviations with commonly used phrases that you define. It runs in the Windows system tray and works with applications you’re typing in. It can also set return-to markers for your cursor and insert clipboard contents into your replacement text, in addition to more advanced keyboard macros.
How did I ever live without this?
Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted.
Efficient online searching dictates that you set time limits for each search. If you don’t, the time allotted will be infinite and the job will expand to fill all the time you have and more.
Defeat Parkinson and His Damn Law
The first step to preventing Parkinson’s Law from taking over your life is to fully understand what you are really looking for. As an Investigator, I will normally look for data on people or companies; each has a name, address, telephone number, and fax number. This is how I search for this data on the Internet and compile the results in the shortest possible time.
The Assembly Line
The purpose of the “Assembly Line” is to be certain that I search using all relevant search terms while keeping good records of the date and URL’s where I find things. The collected material will be well organised for easy report production. Hence the title, Assembly Line Searching. Continue reading ‘Assembly Line Searching’
The Web browser has become one of the Investigator’s or Researcher’s most basic tools. Add-ons make this tool more complete, easier, and faster to use.
ErrorZilla: The standard “server not found” page is useless if you’re looking for a Web site that’s gone AWOL. ErrorZilla adds a series of buttons to the bottom of the standard “Firefox can’t find the server” message, providing instant access to the Wayback machine, Google Cache, Whois lookup, Ping and Trace
A similar add-on, Resurrect Pages, allows you to see dead pages, broken links by searching through five big page cache/mirrors: CoralCDN, Google Cache, Yahoo! Cache, The Internet Archive, and the MSN Cache. Unlike ErrorZilla, this doesn’t offer Whois lookup, Ping and Trace.
All-in-One Sidebar
The Firefox sidebar is one of the browser’s more useful tools, but least used. It allows you to browse your history and view bookmarks and many add-ons use it as well.
This add-on tool lets you quickly switch among all your sidebar panels, which gives you information about your browser use. It will let you see your entire download history in the sidebar or show all of your add-ons with details about each, or give you information on the current page you’re visiting, and more.
If you don’t use the Firefox sidebar, try this add-on and you might. If you do use it regularly, then this one will be a keeper.
Download All-in-One Sidebar