Make Firefox into a Powerful Command Line

I thought I’d share a computer trick I use dozens of times a day, which unlike most of my Mac-specific trick, is available for anyone who uses Mozilla’s Firefox Browser (or a derivative, like Camino).
The trick relies mostly on a combination of Firefox’s ability to make search shortcuts for the location bar, and google’s many nifty bits. With it your can utterly do away with the search bar in your browser and search from multiple search engines right from the location bar. But I’ve since expanded the trick to do much more, such as have an instant shorthand for any popular site, and get instant travel directions.

Email Suggestions

Thanks for visiting. I thought I’d share, and hopefully inspire others to employ, some of the email conventions that I find useful. These are conventions for sent mail. In future I may share some of my Mac Mail.app organization tips.

Quicksilver Discovery: Mouse Dragged Object Triggers!

The thing I love about Quicksilver is that it never stops amazing you with the things it can do. So many times I’m using Quicksilver and I wonder, “wouldn’t it be cool if Quicksilver could do x?” and find that it’s way ahead of me and it can. It was in this way that I discovered the drag and drop abilities well featured in TAB screencast here, which has transformed the way I move files around, especially when attaching things to emails. (QS to it, and drag it into the mail, what could be easier?).

Today’s blog concerns such a discovery. While horribly mistyping the word google (don’t ask me how) I stumbled across a proxy object I had never seen before:

At first I thought to myself, what good is this? But than I realized a wealth of possibilities in trigger creation. Imagine, anything that you frequently do to, well, anything that you can drag, you can make into a trigger that requires you to simply drag it to some corner of your screen! To find out how to do this, read on.

Quicksilver Adulation 1: iTunes is Telepathic

I am not alone in saying that a Mac without Quicksilver is hardly a Mac at all. It is a program that is difficult to describe because it does so much. At heart it is an application launcher, but it can manipulate so much more.

I once waxed on to a colleague who asked what Quicksilver has done for me:

It has made iTunes telepathic. It has replaced my dock when my hands are on the mouse or keyboard. It records my every thought and moves it to the right container. And everyday I learn about something else it can do.

The fellow immediately demanded that I qualify my comments, something neither of us had the time for. Hence, this blog.

Prologue

I figured before my first official post I should let you know about myself and my standpoint on the geeky things I plan to share.

I’m a Mac Geek. I believe that computers should (and are) able to actually make our lives easier and I strive to make my Mac that way. I’m a grad student and therefore poor poor poor, so I heavily favor free software. As a rule, excepting the vitally necessary, I don’t buy software. I don’t steal it either. Rather I evaluate the best freeware/opensource options and use them.

Once upon a time, I had a dream of setting my computer up to do absolutely anything I could imagine. I went through several programs a day and kept an external harddrive filled with “just in case” apps that I made sure were the best of the best and always up to date.

The hobby had become a dangerous obsession, what’s worse, it had made my computer kruffty, so it all had to go. My new philosophy is when I find a task that I want my Mac to do, I solve it with the triage below. I refrain from solving problems I may someday have.
1) When encountering a task you want the computer to do, see if it’s built into Mac OS X.

I had a number of freeware programs doing things that Tiger could do fine. For example I used OSXVNC when my Mac could run a VNC server all by itself. There are a lot of features and tools built-in to the OS itself, I’ve have yet to stop learning about them.

2) If Tiger doesn’t already do it see if an existing tool (i.e. Quicksilver) does.

As you will see in my next post, there are a million programs that will control iTunes for you. It just so happens that QS is one of them, and I use QS for other things anyway. I figure it’s better to have one tool than nine, so I try to keep as many solutions “in the family” of apps that I’ve gathered, so that everyone plays nice and I don’t squander system resources.

3) If 1 and 2 fail, seek out a freeware tool solution.

Favoring those that are streamlined, functional and strike you as a good member of “the family.”

In this way I strive to keep my hacks productive. The quest for gadgets can quickly become a profound distraction. This way, I try to make my computer a great place to work, not a never ending fix-it-up project.