Grupenet

Ever get frustrated when a Flickr image isn’t made available at full size? I recently found a great bookmarklet at typewriting.org which allows you to get easy access to the full resolution images stored on Flickr’s servers even if they aren’t made public.

Just drag the following link to your Bookmarks toolbar: Get Flickr Original

Now whenever you see a photo on Flickr which does not have the original full resolution image available to the public, just click on that bookmarklet and you’ll instantly be taken to the full-size image.

I recently stumbled across a great little trick for using the new Google Talk Gadget in a sidebar in Firefox. There’s no need to install any extensions in Firefox as the functionality needed to do this trick is already built in to Firefox.

First things first, add a bookmark in Firefox for the link below. I’d recommend placing the bookmark in the Bookmarks Toolbar for easy access.

• http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client

Next, right-click that bookmark and choose “Properties”. Check the box labeled Load this bookmark in the sidebar and click OK. Now every time you click on the Google Talk bookmark it will open in the sidebar.

You can use this same method with any other bookmark as well, though it only works best for pages that can be viewed at very narrow widths.

Ever notice those little arrow overlays over every shortcut in Windows? Do they bother you as much they they bother me? Glad we’re on the same track. Thankfully I recently discovered a great little application which will get rid of those little arrows. The program I’m talking about is called FxVisor.

After you’ve downloaded and installed FxVisor, launch it and you will immediately be given the choice of removing any arrow overlay from shortcuts or replacing the overlay with a different style which isn’t as much of an eye sore.

If you have removed the arrow overlay, FxVisor will also allow you to re-enable the default overlay. All in all, FxVisor is a great little application which will be of much help to any users who use desktop shortcuts to launch their applications, though I still recommend using differents methods for application launching.

Update
Apparently this will only work on Windows Vista. For those of you using Windows XP, the TweakXP Tweaking Utility will allow you to remove the arrow overlays, supposedly.

Ever visit a site which automatically resizes your browser window? This may be a big no-no in web design, but some people still do it regardless of what may be good and right in webdev rulebook. There’s an easy way to stop sites from doing this, assuming you’re using Firefox (which you should be).

In Firefox, go to “Options” under the “Tools” menu. Find your way to the “Content” section in the Options. Next to the “Enable Javascript” option you will see an Advanced button. Click on that and in the dialog that pops up uncheck the Move or resize existing windows option.

Once you save all your changes, Firefox will not be bothered by those nasty window resize scripts. There is also a more involved method of configuring the same option by using about:config, but I won’t get into that since the above method is much easier to do and follow.

In an effort to get my butt off the chair a bit more this summer, I’ve decided to limit my time surfing the web a bit more. There are a lot of great applications that can count how many minutes you are on your computer, but they do not count the time you’ve spent just surfing the web.

After doing a bit of searching around, I found an extension for Firefox called TimeTracker. It’s a simple addon which counts how long the Firefox window is in focus. So every time you go on to do something else in another application, it will stop counting. This really helps you get an idea of how much time you waste every day just surfing the web.

Give it a try and see how much time you’re consuming browsing the web. How much of your day is spent surfing?

Update (07/04/2007):
I just found out you can also add a filter list to TimeTracker in the options so it will pause the timer on certain sites, e.g., grupenet.com is on my filter list.