The DIY hackers at Make magazine detail how to deter thieves from targeting your prized cycle by uglifying your bike. The idea: The less desirable your bike looks to a thief, the less likely they are to steal it from among the throngs of other potential victims. Starting with ugly paint and faux rust and ending with a few tacky stickers, the author suggests several tried and true methods for making your bike appear as undesirable as possible. Keep in mind that the article is also quick to point out that this is not theft prevention—a bike lock is still necessary—but considering how easy it is to steal a bike in broad daylight, a lock plus some skilled uglification could make all the difference. U-G-L-Y Your Bike [Make via Hackszine]
Windows only: Freeware application DecaffeinatID is a simple intrusion detection and alert system for your PC that monitors your Windows logs for suspicious behaviour. DecaffeinatID will pop up an alert in your system tray whenever there’s an attempted remote login to your computer, and it detects changes in your firewall log, or your ARP changes. The application is currently in beta and not a foolproof intrusion detection system by any means, but it’s also not a bad tool to run in your system tray next time you connect to the Wi-Fi at your local coffee shop. DecaffeinatID is freeware, Windows only. DecaffeinatID [IronGeek via Hack a Day]
One noticeable change between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 is the yellow address bar background, which turned on in Firefox 2 when you visited encrypted web sites—the ones that start with https://. After much debate among the developers, Firefox 3 dropped that visual cue, but on Windows, with a little userChrome.css tweak, you can have that yellow background back. Here’s how.
All platforms running Firefox with Greasemonkey: Add a little colour to your RSS feeds with the Google Reader Colorful List view script. This Greasemonkey user script turns each feed item a different colour which depends upon the feed name, offering a fun way to visually ID feeds from the same source in a folder’s list view, as shown. Of course, if you read your feeds one source at a time instead of interleaving them, they’ll all appear to be the same uniform colour. The Google Reader Colorful List View is a free download that requires Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.
Windows only: Free, open-source application Types is a lightweight, user-friendly tool for editing default applications, icons, and context menu options for filetypes in Windows. You can already tweak these settings in the File Types tab of the Folder Options menu in Windows Explorer (Tools -> Folder Options), but frankly, the default tool is overly complicated. Types provides a very simple and intuitive interface for making the same tweaks, and you don’t need to dig through the File menu to use it. Types is free, portable, and works in both XP and Vista.
Types [Sourceforge via Inspect My Gadget]If blinking text on a web page is threatening to give you a seizure—or just making your head hurt—you can disable it in Firefox with a simple configuration tweak. No extension or user script required: just type about:config in Firefox’s address bar, press the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button, and then in the Filter field, enter browser.blink_allowed. Change the value for that key from true to false, and you’re good to go, no more blinking, ever again. Thanks, David!
Disable Blinking Text in Firefox [Adamsdvds.co.uk]Productivity blogger Andre Kibbe knows that he gets distracted early and often by hang-ups, inconveniences, and a school of distractions just waiting to take him away from his tasks. He recommends a form of bad day auditing—looking at every step that happened before you got off-track, and fixing it for tomorrow. Waiting for his laptop to boot, for instance, he pledges to check his action lists rather than zone out. The basic idea is to mentally step through the day, looking for the forks in the road that compelled you to do X when you know in hindsight that you should have been doing Y. When was the precise moment what your attention shifted to the path of less resistance? What precisely was the distraction?
What daytime distractions always trip you up at work? What clever time uses have you implemented as a fix? Let’s hear it in the comments. Upgrade an Unproductive Day by Mentally Rehearsing a Better One [Tools for Thought]
Firefox 3′s new Smart Location Bar earns its unofficial title of “AwesomeBar” right out of the box. The location bar suggests web site addresses as you type from your bookmarks and history, and learns as you surf, ranking pages you visit more often higher. Still, there aren’t a whole lot of ways to configure the “AwesomeBar”‘s behaviour in Firefox’s default options dialog—but there are a few new Firefox extensions that can do it for you. Here are four Firefox 3 add-ons that adjust the smart location bar’s behaviour in small but useful ways.
The CyberNet blog points out that any Firefox 3 users unhappy with the way their XP/Vista-specific skins look can adopt their browser using two nifty themes—one for re-creating a Vista look on XP, another for XP on Vista. Both themes are experimental and require a Mozilla account, but, as CyberNet points out, that can be bypassed with a quick BugMeNot search. Firefox 3 Themes: Vista on XP, or XP on Vista [CyberNet]
