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Google Maps is apparently a new service from Google. I hadn’t seen it before today.

Got this from digg.com:

This web page describes a spoof that every browser but IE allows. As near as I can tell it has to do with the fact that IDNs (International Domain Names) can have country- or language-specific characters in them, yet the display like English characters. So you will see a URL that appears to be, for instance, http://www.paypal.com but it’s actually http://www.p&amp#1072ypal.com — the “&amp#1072” is an accented “a”.

You can circumvent this problem in Firefox but the fix doesn’t persist across browser restarts. Opera’ssupposedly got a fix for it now.

From Elias Fontinis comes TaskArrange which allows you to order the icons that appear in your taskbar as you want them. He’s also got Deskpins which lets you pin any window to your desktop and keep it on top of all others. Both are free.

(digg.com)

I’m not usually big on minimizing apps to the system tray … I’ve already got far too many icons down there. But this one does a couple of things that I find to be really handy: it keeps Firefox resident, even if I’m not running it at the time (and if I’m not running Firefox now, you can bet I will be within the next 10 minutes). It also allows me to start Thunderbird, have it minimize to the tray and announce when I’ve got new mail. Both of these are good things for me.

To make this all work, go here and don’t forget to click on the Installation link at the top of the page to get all the details on what you need to do. Not a lot of work but a tiny bit more than usual.

(digg.com)

Have you ever wondered how someone else can send email that looks like it came from you? This how-to guide describes it in excruciating detail. Not for the faint of heart, it’s a bare metal guide on how to do it. It’s not elaborate nor does it explain what the various commands do but it shows you how simple it is to send email, making it look like it’s coming from someone else.

Why am I passing this on? Because you should know how easy it is.

Another item courtesy of digg.com:

Copy your DVD into DivX5 format – Guide for 16:9 anamorphic movies

Yeah, free! SimpleOCR is free and a pretty decent OCR application.

Odd, don’t know how I missed this. 3SP has made their SSHTerm Pro free for 25 users or less. They’ve also released an OpenSource SSL tunneler called SSL-Explorer which is a free (i.e. GPL) VPN replacement package providing a more VPN-like environment than what can be had with SSH tunnels to Remote Desktop and/or VNC.

Lots of people have been talking about the Firefox speed tweak that was in The Inquirer recently. Here’s a link to the article.

Update, Feb 2, 2005
Never can tell when links and/or text will disappear so here’s a rundown on how to accomplish the speed-up:

Type “about:config” into the address bar, then alter the following entries: change “network.http.pipelining” to “true”, “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true” and lastly “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to 30, meaning it will be able to make 30 requests at once.

Update, Feb 7. 2005
Another tip surfaced from what appears to be the original article and that’s to create a new integer from the about:config display (right-click anywhere and select New -> Integer), name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set it to 0.

xMirror v0.1.1 available from Meatme adds 3 extensions mirrors to the Firefox extension dialog.

User Agent Switcher gives the user the ability to change the User Agent string (the string that identifies your browser to the web server at the other end of the pipe) between the default of Firefox, IE, Opera and Netscape. You can edit the existing User Agent strings as well as add and delete strings. The page listed also shows you what your User Agent string is.