SHALLOW HACKER ㋡

Have you ever wondered what that little checkbox "Save to file" does when you go to print something? Well, guess what? It saves your print job to a file instead of actually printing it - uncanny huh? ;) When you save such a file, it's a PRN file. Well, that was kinda supposed to be funny, but the serious part of this post is that there's a utility out there that will let you print those otherwise useless little files. It's called PrintFile and you can get it here: http://www.lerup.com/printfile/ Make a note of this, cos one day you'll be like - heh, I can't access the printer, but I know, I can save it to a file and print it off later (on another computer) with that cool little utility PrintFile. And by the way PrintFile is free. How about that :) EDIT: also check out EscapeE by RedTitan NOTE: these apps won't always print your document perfectly! but if you're printer is messed up it could be a life saver.

I've been using Toodledo for a good while now and it's a great to-do list manager. It's free, and manages to offer lots of useful features for organising your tasks while still remaining very simple to use. Also there are 3 different mobile interfaces you can use on your mobile phone or PDA, and there are integration options with sites like Google Calendar, Twitter etc, so you can send yourself notifications and synchronise your tasks etc. All in all, a really cool to-do list manager :) so check it out at Toodledo.com

I do like Viigo quite a lot. It's a free news reader for Pocket PC. You can choose from a huge list of predefined channels or add your own if you know the feed URL. You can also add news search feeds, let it find feeds from a specified web page, and other methods of getting feeds. (Hungry? ;) I've already ramped up a fairly long wishlist however of features that I'd like to see in the next version. Here they are. 1. Be able to set a maximum number of news items per channel. At the moment only a max for all channels is possible. This means channels like BBC news that have loads of news items end up pushing items off of other channels. 2. I'd prefer if the application didn't crash when I rotate my screen from portrait to landscape or vice versa. It doesn't always happen, but often enough! 3. Then I'd like to see some kind of mechanism that ensured your changes and updates are permanently saved immediately they're made. Thus ensuring you don't lose all ...

NoScript is a great extension. It blocks JavaScript from running on websites unless you explicitly allow it to run. Of course it ’ s packed with features like the ability to whitelist websites and to allow sites to run scripts temporarily . It also blocks certain types of dangerous script attacks even if you ’ ve decided to trust a website. Considering I ’ ve heard tell that this year will be a bigg i e for attacks via websites, cross-site scripting and suchlike, this is a browser extension that no Firefox user can afford to be without. I am however a great lover of things that do things for me J And I ’ d love to see integration of a predefined blacklist, or a choice to enable/disable such a list (or lists). This way I ’ d be warned in advance of a site that was a known offender, and wouldn ’ t fall prey to the desire to simply temporarily allow the site to run scripts so I could “ get my content ” if you see what I mean. What I mean is, NoScript blocks script...

I just updated by Firefox plugins, of which I have a healthy number (or rather an unhealthy number), and I could help but (yet again) notice that the extension Download Statusbar is pretty BIG. It ’ s about ~650kB. That ’ s more than half a meg. Surely this little baby could be reduced in size? I refer to it so lovingly because it really is a fab extension. Just simply showing you the status of the download as a progress bar in Firefox ’ s status bar. It shows speed and size, and lets you open the download with a double-click. Nice job. Could it be made smaller ?