Paul Henman at henman.ca

I spotted this cartoon on a couple of websites (with no link back to its origin):

It reminded me: isn’t the Ontario ban on drivers using cell phones coming in to effect soon? I checked a few sites and it appears it’s not law until October. Read more »

I haven’t posted very much this month, partly because of an aborted attempt at starting work (which means I’m back looking for a project management gig again) and then I had not one but two hard drives die on me!

One of them was my main boot drive (Windows XP / Fedora Linux dual boot) which was backed up pretty often, so I didn’t lose much data but it’s taking forever to reinstall/configure everything back to how I like it. (Unfortunately you can’t simply restore Windows applications or some programs config settings.)

The other drive was a 500Gb backup drive, containing all of my photos! Read more »

I was just listening to Net@Night episode 90: Leo and Sarah were comparing Firefox plugins and I thought I should share my list. It’s significantly longer than their lists, but then more is better, right?

• Block the nasty people: Adblock Plus, firephorm, NoScript, SSL Blacklist
• Pretty up Firefox: All-in-one Sidebar, ColorfulTabs
• Pretty up websites: Better Flickr, Better Gmail2, Better GReader, Better Lifehacker & Better YouTube – thank you Gina! Also: Google Redesigned
• Manage my bookmarks: Delicious Bookmarks, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
• Manage my music: Foxy Tunes
• Better photo/image viewing: Cooliris, Image Zoom
• Twitter-craziness: Power Twitter, TwitterBar & TwittyTunes
• And the rest: bit.ly preview, CSSViewer, Download Statusbar, Fast Dial, Google Gears, Google Toolbar for Firefox, Java Quick Starter, Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant, Password Exporter, ReloadEvery, URL Fixer & Window Resizer
• I also use these Greasemonkey scripts: Gmail Addons, FFWorkSpace, Flickr Groups Organiser, Flickr Photo Page Enhancer, Flickr Refer Comment, Flickr Buddy Icon Reply & Nested Twitter Replies

Somewhat related, if you want to see which WordPress plugins I use, check out my Plugins Used page.

It’s easy to use the built-in Firefox password manager (remember to set a master password!) but that only works on one machine. When I switch between Windows XP and Fedora (Linux) or our Mac machine, those passwords don’t move with me, so I end up with unsynchronised sets of passwords … and then I change a password from one machine and then can’t login from the others until I remember to update the local records on the others.

So what’s the solution? A cross-platform password manager (i.e. it runs on all the various operating systems I use). The database has to be encrypted; I don’t care if it’s stored on a USB flash drive or “in the cloud” (on a remote server). And of course it should be free, because I’m a cheapskate!

If anyone uses such a tool, please leave a comment with your recommendations … or warnings!

Meanwhile, a Google search returns quite a few options, so I’ll try some and update this post with my findings.

Steps/findings:

• Installed the Password Exporter plugin for Firefox to (oddly enough) export my FF passwords to XML and CSV, ready for (hopefully) importing into the different password manager tools
• (more to come)

I wish I’d know about this site sooner – 24 ways to impress your overly geeky friends between now and Christmas. Looks like I’ve got some catching up to do!

[Spotted @ PeteBevin.com]