The Smart Productivity weblog posts a simple Firefox shortcut: You can quickly copy any group of bookmarks to your clipboard—from a bookmark folder to every single bookmark you’ve made—by right-clicking your folder of choice and selecting Copy. Want to copy every bookmark to you clipboard for a quick backup? Do the same thing on the Organize Bookmarks entry. When you paste your bookmarks, each URL is organized by folder name.
CNET reports that Windows 7 will ship mid-year 2009, just in time to find its place under the tree on pre-configured machines by the 2009 holiday season. After taking a look at our continuing Windows 7 coverage, will you be first in line for Windows 7? [via Gizmodo]
The Pacecar bookmarklet makes reading web pages with distracting graphics or a lot of crammed text easier by highlighting the section you’re reading and dimming out the rest. Once you’ve saved the bookmarklet, you can visit any page, click to activate the bookmarklet, and get a mask attached to your mouse pointer to deprecate any visual information you want to avoid on the web page — helping you focus on the textual or graphical facts. It works best if you have a key command, mouse scroll wheel or other way of scanning down the page as you read. A simple contextual menu pops up if you right-click, allowing you to limit the width or expand the depth of the highlighted area. Double-clicking turns the tool on and off. Auto-scroll and auto-zoom on text would make the tool an even better accessibility aid. Check out this screencast of Pacecar in action.
Free online storage and sharing site Drop.io was already a pretty streamlined service—upload a file, copy the “drop” address, then share it with anyone you wanted to have access to your files of up to 100MB. Since opening up an API, though, the service has spawned an even more streamlined service, uSend.io. Click to choose a file, enter emails separated by commas, and your recipients get a link to your file (also with a 100MB limit). No ads on the download page, no wait times, just shared files. For another intriguing remix of Drop.io’s service, check out Collab.io, which sets up a conference call phone number and meeting time with a document collaboration space. uSend.io [via Ars Technica]
If you’ve got a nice camera and all the attachments and accessories to go with it, you’ll definitely want a camera bag to protect it. But you don’t have to pay a professional-grade markup or make it obvious you’ve got expensive gear in there. The Wired How-To Wiki details turning a military surplus bag, some rolled-up foam and stiff cardboard into a compartmentalised, sturdy, and non-branded camera bag. It’s not waterproof, and won’t necessarily fit all the lenses you could want, but it’s made for carrying and could easily be upgraded by those with an eye for it. Make a Stealth Camera Bag [Wired How-To Wiki]
