The future of browsing, at least with Firefox our favorite browser.

From "ReadWriteWeb" a glimpse into the future of web browsers.  We currently use Firefox with several add ons that give our browser customized power.  One of these is called Ubiquity and another enhances tabbed browsing.  The add ons that we find useful to us seem to be useful to others too.  The future of Firefox seems to incorporate all of them into the browser itself.  We find this article innteresting and perhaps you will too.

The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity - ReadWriteWeb

Thanks to its extensibility, Firefox quickly became the favorite browser for most power users. But while extensions are a great way to make Firefox more functional, Mozilla's designers are also currently thinking about a complete redesign of the way the browser looks and feels, in order to keep up with changing usage patterns. The most radical proposal we have seen so far would do away with the standard browser tabs, and replace them with an interface that looks more like iTunes than Firefox.

Earth Trainer Tomato Growing

This is a great set of instructions for growing tomatoes  hydroponically in plastic storage containers.  The link is here.  Complete instructions including videos are available.  Just continue through the article to the bottom.  I've always had an interest in this and will probably give it a try this spring.  I used a hydroponically watered feed tray to start some Amaryllis seedlings.  They are all doing well.  One of our lilies produced big seed heads and just as an experiment we tried germinating them by using what is known as the "California Method.'  It involves floating the seeds in glass containers until they germinate.  I used some big glass casserole trays and it worked.  I would say we got about a fifty percent germination rate.  The method of growing described in this tomato article might also be a great way to continue growing those seedlings.  I am definitely going to give this a try. 

Nice Orchids For You..

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Nice Orchids For You..

View more presentations from Dinisha .

Plug-in Vehicles for Clean transportation

This this technology is far off in the future?  Watch a video about a family who has driven for 7 years and 70,000 miles with no gas and using only the energy generated from their solar panels.  This could have been implemented almost a decade ago and was not.  Our own house generates excess energy during the day.  We could use it to charge up a plug in vehicle.

Watch this fascinating video right here.

New things in Gmail

Gmail has served us well as a web based email client.  The developers are always coming up with new things to make it even more appealing.  Here are some new features that I really like:

	YouTube previews in mail by Stanley C and Braden K Shows a video preview whenever you receive a YouTube link in an email. You can watch the video right inline!
	Picasa previews in mail by Dan, Stanley, Mark & Umesh Shows photos previews whenever you receive a Picasa link in an email.
	Flickr previews in mail by Dan P Shows photos previews whenever you receive a Flickr link in an email.

...and this one is especially nice.  It is still under development but works well.  The delay needs to be a bit longer or user configurable.  But, this is very nice.  We used to have an undo in our email at work and it saved me many times when I sent something and then had second thoughts about it.

Undo Send by Yuzo F Oops, hit "Send" too soon? Stop messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button.

First Ever Whale Sedation

A right whale was sedated in order to remove entangled fishing gear.  About 90 percent of the gear was removed.  Read more.

Federal Tax Credits for Energy Efficiency

Here is a list of all the new tax credits for energy efficiency.  There are a lot of them.

Solar systems thirty percent off. Buy now.

Solar stuff that Obama will help you buy.

The new tax credits amount to thirty percent off for photovoltaic and solar water heating systems.  If only we had the money.  Well in Florida you also get $4 a watt for photovoltaic systems and $500 for solar water heaters.  So, for photovoltaic systems that is almost another thirty percent off.  Wow.  Wish the tax credit cap had been removed when we installed ours.  We would have saved a LOT.

Mozy Backups

After years of using external hard drives and all sorts of other backup schemes for my computers I took the plunge and decided to give Mozy a try. This site is a good summary of the service. I gave up thinking I could be a reliable support service for my own computers. First I switched to using Google Mail when it first came out. I admit that much of the decision was based on the functionality I saw in their calendar and the way it integrated with email. So, we have used Gmail and Google Calendar for years now and have been extremely happy with it. I won't go into all of the reasons because this post is about Mozy. You can read the excellent review of the service at this site. I'll post more about my use of this service as time goes on. Our two computers, a Mac and a PC, are in the initial backup stage right now. That is a bit time consuming but once the first backup is completed all others are incremental so that they should take only a short time. I was satisfied with the security and privacy protections at Mozy. Thanks Nick Barardi for an excellent overview and review of Mozy.

Energy Panel Discussion

This is an insight into what the future holds for energy management and monitoring.

They sail on pink oil, the strangest sailing club in the world.

Sail World - Powerboat-world: Sail and sailing, cruising, boating news

I found this article to be fascinating from a sailing viewpoint and from a geographical viewpoint.  I might also add that anyone with an interest in water management would find the story about this transient lake in Australia intriguing as well.  Sailors are indeed some of the most interesting people in the world.

My Favorite Firefox Addons

These are the Firefox add on applications that I have installed.  Extensive testing and evaluation have demonstrated that these are most useful for every day web browsing and file manipulation. 

Greem Tax Credits In New Stimulus Bill

How You Can Green Your Home and Cash in on Stimulus Money | Environment | AlterNet

Hampton Falls, N.H. -- Energy-saving systems for the attic, basement, and in between have effectively gone on sale, courtesy of the United States Congress.

The Mothership Media Center

This is the media center in the Mothership, my Iphone in Ipod mode with a Belkin FM transmitter that sends the music to the FM radio. This puts our huge library of music into a very small package with a great graphical search interface. This makes owning the Iphone worthwhile if none of the other amazing functions and applications were available. The music quality is better than the speakers we have in the Mothership. We can listen to hours and hours of our favorite music this way. A real plus is that the power consumption is extremely low.

Google Maps or Mapquest? Vote here.

Reader Poll: Google Maps or MapQuest?

Here at Lifehacker, most of us made the switch to Google Maps in its early days—back before MapQuest had added any of the AJAX map scrolling and zooming that made Google Maps stand out. Still, when it comes to getting directions, I'm always surprised when I hear people use MapQuest as a verb the same way they use Google (i.e., "I'll just MapQuest it."). So we're curious to hear which you're using for your mapping and directions needs:

LED, CFL or Incandescent? Ask Pablo

LED lights | Salon Life

A 10W CFL, available online for $6.90, has an expected median lifetime of 10,000 hours. While this is about 10 times longer than the life expectancy of an incandescent bulb, it is only one-fifth the expected life of the LED. So LEDs have the potential of cutting down on ladder time by a factor of 50 over incandescent bulbs! At about 25 cents apiece, the incandescent has by far the lowest upfront cost, which is why many people still use them. If we normalize the cost of all the bulbs over a 50,000-hour period, the incandescent bulbs cost $12.50, while CFL bulbs cost $34.50, and the LED bulb costs $59.95. But, as you may already know, the upfront cost of a bulb is by far the cheapest part. It's the electricity required to operate the bulb that adds up.

Over a period of 50,000 hours, a 40W incandescent bulb will use 2,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh). At 15 cents per kWh, this will put $300 in the pocket of your local utility, bringing the total cost of the incandescent bulb, over 50,000 hours, up to $312.50. The CFL bulb only uses 500kWh over the same time period, or $75, totaling $109.50. Finally, the LED bulb will use 350kWh for $52.50, with a total cost of $112.45. So, in this example, the LED light does cost a few dollars more but the difference is negligible. Think of the time you will save by not running to the store to buy bulbs and climbing the ladder to change them.

Buy a Prius or a used car?

Prius Envy | Mother Jones

So how are we nonengineers supposed to know when to junk our old car without guilt? By Päster's numbers, building an average midsize car in 2007 emitted 18,000 pounds of CO2—about the same as burning 900 gallons of gas. He won't commit to exact numbers, but he does have a rule of thumb: If your jalopy is moderately efficient (i.e., gets better than 25 mpg) and you don't drive it much, keeping it is better than buying a new car. "But if you have an old car with pretty lousy fuel economy," he says, "then you're better off getting a new car because the emissions from making a new car are really not that big compared to the emissions from using the car."

Gainesville, Florida Passes First Feed-in Tarriff in US

Florida City Passes First Solar Feed-in Tariff in US : Red, Green, and Blue

Place Names

Tranquility Cove and Tranquility Cove (in Clarendon County, SC)

Found these references to Tranquility Cove on the Internet. Interesting that the name is referenced in many places that are part of the internet. It would have been impossible for my grandfather to have imagined this when he stood here before the lake was flooded and named it. The name "Tranquility Cove" appears in many places now including all of the US Geological Survey maps. Every place name has a history. The one that I remember most vividly is "Cape Canaveral." When I was stationed there in the Navy back in the 1960's, Congress tried to change the name of the town as well as the base to "Cape Kennedy." A great furor erupted in the town and the protest resulted in the name remaining the original "Cape Canaveral." How many fascinating place names based on a real story have been wiped clean by some well meaning city council, state government, or congress to honor some contemporary person or event. This is shameful in my opinion because original place names should be protected along with their history and meaning.

Mac Mini as Web Kiosk

I live 500 miles away from my mom and dad. My dad has been a Webtv/MSNTV user now for over a decade. It has served him well giving us communications that we would never had had without it. He knows it well and is quite comfortable using it. Over the last year I have become concerned about the device's limited ability to keep up as web site evolve rapidly to contain more and more features based on Flash and other programming that challenge the device's capabilities. Simply playing a YouTube video from beginning to end has become an impossibility.

Without being overly critical and detailing the limitations of Webtv/MSNTV I want to document the solution I came up with as a backup with the goal of migrating completely to in time. I decided that a Mac Mini was the best solution. It is very small in size, not much larger physically than a thick paperback book yet it has surprising capabilities.

I chose the display first and sense dad's tv was an old Sony CRT it was time to migrate to a more modern unit. Based on a combination of price, capability, and positive reviews on the internet we purchased a 48 inch Sharp Aquos LCD TV that had an HDMI input. The 1020 x 740 progressive display capability essentially gave us a 48 inch computer monitor combined with a beautiful TV display. This particular TV gave us enough signal input options that we could also incorporate the Webtv/MSNTV unit into the mix by simply using one of the RCA inputs. Of course we hooked up his DirecTivo satellite receiver to another of the inputs.

Next we added the Mac Mini to the mix by using a DVI to HDMI cable which we had ordered at the same time we ordered the Mac Mini. It is important to order this so that it is available when you hook up the Mac Mini as they can be a bit hard to find if you live in a rural area. There is quite a bit of debate on the net as to the relative merits of HDMI as opposed to composite input but we decided on the DVI to HDMI as a good compromise.

We ran into a bit of a challenge with the upscaling of the signal from the Mac Mini to the Aquos TV. It is not a show stopper but does require a bit of twiddling with the TV settings. The signal from the Mac is 1024 by 7??? and the TV is a 1080 P display. ???? There are settings on the TV that allow one to matchup the two.

Once the hardware is setup and configured properly you end up with a really nice 48 inch display for internet browsing and email. A bonus is that the Mac Mini also functions as a nice DVD player when properly configured thereby eliminating one unit in the home theatre setup. The system is functional at this point but when migrating a Webtv/MSNTV user to a PC/Mac windowed desktop environment there are a number of tweaks that are necessary to insure a seamless and easy to use system. There is nothing particularly difficult about this tweaking but it did require a lot of research to find everything to make it work with minimal user effort.

I chose to use the Firefox Browser because of its wealth of add ons and plugins that ease the fine tuning for ease of used and the new large display. Webtv uses Hotmail, now Windows Live Mail I think. It was necessary to migrate that into the Firefox Browser too.

Firefox has many options available as far as appearance goes by using various themes. After much trial and error we settled on the xxxxx theme which gives large icons which match up nicely with the display. We also changed the minimum font size to 18 to give good readability from a lounger chair distance from the TV.

Hotmail or Windows Live Mail is the same web based email used by the Webtv/MSNTV so choosing it saves all mail and addresses used on the MSNTV unit. This can be a hard concept for some Webtv users. It is difficult for them to understand that their email can be accessed and managed using any internet capable computer. It might require some effort to explain this so that the Webtv user has confidence that they do not have to return to the old unit to manage their email.

The default on the Mac is to go use the built in Mail client for any mailto links or for sending web page URLS through the file/send/link option in Firefox. After a lot of research we found that installing a small application called Webmailer solved the problem. Get webmailer here. The Firefox preferences might have to be changed to use Webmailer for all email links. Webmailer essentially adds an option pane in Mac OS X so that one can choose various webmail options such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and many others.

The chat function was important for my dad and I and at first this seemed a difficult challenge. There seemed at first glance no easy way to adapt Ichat to use the old MS Instant Messenger that my dad was used to. I tried Meebo, a nice web based chat solution based on Ajax. I like it but my dad did not. Finally we settled on a free solution called Adium that can be dowloaded and installed easily. It is a nice chat solution that has many options and can handle all web chat systems including MS Instant Messenger, Yahoo, AOL, and a multitude of others.

I wanted to be able to manage the setup remotely so I investigated the remote desktop management solutions. The simplist seemed to be to turn on sharing with a password and the installation of the Vine Server to allow VNC access remotely. This works just fine but requires a bit of fiddling with the Cayman router/modem to send port 5900 to the internal IP of the Mac Mini. Once this is setup one can use any VNC client to remotely control the Mac Mini. With a good broadband connection this gives complete control over the unit allowing me to do maintenance and repairs from anywhere.

One of our goals was to add an audio/video chat capability which was impossible on the Webtv/MSNTV unit. We installed a Logitech 9000 Pro webcam on the system. This is simply a USB plugin. The Mac recognized it instantly and it required no configuration. Gotta love the Macs for their capability to recognize hardware with no twiddling or loading of software.

We then installed Skype, a free software package that gives video chat capability. On the Mac it also recognized the Logitech Webcam and we were able to video chat with our my son and his children 500 miles away. This works very well uses technology just as it should be used to bring people together over any geographic distance. The fact that it is all free is a wonderful thing for families.

Once the system hardware and software were setup for ease of use I created a home page on my server to provide a familiar and easy start page that I could edit and manage from my home office location. I added links for the sites that my mom and dad like to visit on a regular basis, the local weather, and the most common search sites such as Google, Wikipedia, and Snopes for checking out those wonderful Internet Myths that circulate by email

There are a lot of training issues in migrating from a Webt/MSNTV to a real computer system that allows multi tasking and windowing. I won't go into those at this time but they are real and require a LOT of patience and training. The benefits are great though and well worth the effort. I am impressed with the result, a nice computer/home theatre setup that is easy to use and powerful enough to handle almost any website.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/apple/use-your-mac-mini-as-a-media-server-part-1/


VNC on the Mac
http://www.dssw.co.uk/blog/2007/05/14/a-vnc-server-is-included-in-mac-os-x-104/
http://www.freemacblog.com/mac-server-series-setting-up-vnc-on-your-mac/

Other nice addons:

http://www.malarkeysoftware.com/projects_PhotoGrabbr.html Photo Grabbr