As it turned out, the solution was already on my computer and right under my nose: Google’s Picasa. As long as Picasa is running (duh) and not minimized, I can go crazy with the Print Screen key and all screen captures will be instantly saved to My Pictures/Picasa/Screen Captures in My Documents as .bmp files for editing at my leisure. And trust me, I am a man of leisure.

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How To Do Rapid Fire Screen Captures

Yeah yeah, we’ve all seen this image before. However, it was only today that I asked myself “Is this real or ‘shopped?”. Sure, I could go to an urban legends site, type in a few keywords and hope I can come upon the right answer. Why go through all the guesswork when TinEye can get you there much quicker? Better yet, if you use Firefox, the handy-dandy Tineye extension makes it happen in only a couple of clicks.

Now, just scroll down through the results until you find the desired article.

Hmm. So that was a real photo after all

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Is that photo for real?

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Backgrounds For The Rest Of Us

Menu bar and tools bar are blacked out

Clicking inside the bar gets a visible drop-down menu to appear

But no worries, IE Tab in Firefox still works just fine

Update 1/29: Upgraded to RC1 yesterday (forcefully, I might add, as I thought I had removed the beta and reverted back to IE7, which didn’t fix the problem.) The same results as above when I launched the browser, but it seems to have disappeared when I fired it up today:

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Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 doesn’t like me

So, who am I to buck the trend? I’ll buck it by listing just my essential extensions – just the ones that, without them, would make my Firefox experience much less enjoyable and productive:

Tab Mix Plus
This extension has yet to be officially released for v3, but test builds can be found here. If there is one extension that has functions which should be built into Firefox, it would be this one. Had there been no way to get this extension to work with v3, I would not have upgraded from v2. The most important options for me are automatically opening new tabs from events such as bookmarks/history, typed URLS, groups of bookmarks and the search bar.

Delicious Bookmarks
Yeah, I know – the Firefox bookmarking system has evolved into a database-driven, tag-enabled wonder. And, yes, tag searching the local bookmarks is a great improvement. I use it everyday. However, I’ve yet to break my remote bookmarking habit. I prefer to keep my most-used links local and use Delicious to tag, bookmark and forget the rest. This extension makes doing that a simple three click operation. The addition of the Delicious sidebar is almost the same having these bookmarks local.

Download Statusbar

Eliminates the Downloads window by placing recent downloads in a neat toolbar just above the status bar.

Forecastbar Enhanced
Get your current and forecast weather at a glance. Includes many options, such as location on the browser (I placed mine on the menu bar to take up all that unused real estate), customizable tooltips and -my favorite- animated radar.

Tooltip - showing Heat Index, Sunrise and Sunset

I can also get to tropical weather in two clicks. Very handy for someone living on the Gulf Coast like me.

Gmail Manager
See your Gmail unread count at a glance and login with a single click (new tab of course.) Also see snipets of the latest ten email in a tooltip. If you’re like me and have more than one Gmail account, you can quickly switch to another.

Google Reader Watcher
Google Reader is probably where I waste the most time online. I take that back – it’s where I waste the most time online. This extension lets me see, at a glance, how many unread feed items I have waiting and logs me in with a single click (new tab of course.)

GUtil
Gives you a customizable drop-down list of all your Google apps and products.

IE Tab
If Firefox doesn’t render a page correctly, just click the icon on the status bar to switch the page on the current tab to the IE engine.

That’s it. Without these, Firefox just wouldn’t be the same for me. The rest of my extensions are icing on the cake.

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My Essential Firefox Extensions

So, does this mean that I have to read through 120 sites x the number of articles posted to each site? Not at all. Just scroll through the headlines of each. Reader can be set up to display either full posts or just the title of each.

Expanded Titles

If set to expanded view and the article is ridiculously long, just use the “next item” button at the bottom of the page.

Next and Previous Buttons

See something that you want to save and come back to later? Just click the “star” located at the top and bottom of each item.

Star Items Button

Over time, you may find that you have accumulated many feeds covering the same general topic, but the problem is that they are spread out all over your feed list. Simple solution: just create a folder and move those feeds to that one folder. Now you can click that folder to display all the feeds in it or expand the folder to read feeds individually.

Folders

And I would like to finish with another important factor: Bandwidth. A large majority of feeds only output the text and images of the article itself, which means you won’t have wait for normal page elements to load such as colors, background images and other formatting elements, along with various scripts (flash, java, etc.)

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RSS – Let it do the work for you

I didn’t know that t-storms could prowl. I’ll need to be careful walking around the corners of buildings when I go outside.

And I’m glad that Accuweather is wrong now and then. I doubt the high for the day was a degree or two over 90°

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A Thunderstorm on the prowl?

“Windows Vista is the most secure operating system we’ve ever released,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer. “In the first 180 days we’ve had far fewer high-severity vulnerabilities than XP. We’ve had 12 in Vista. We had 25 in XP.”

Huh? Why not just state that vulnerabilities have been cut in half? He almost sounds like he proud of the fact that Vista has had 12 severe vulnerabilities in six months.

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Quote of the Day

“We do not want to ship crap on time. We want to ship good software when it is ready to be shipped.” –Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe.

(on why Mozilla refuses to set a fixed date on the release of Firefox v3)

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Quote of the day

The same goes for questionable eBay email:
spoof@ebay.com

For “phishy” email sent in the name of other companies, sites, financial institutions, etc. (along with the above), I will normally forward to:
reportphishing@antiphishing.org or phishing-report@us-cert.gov

Does any of this do any good? Hell, I don’t know, but it sure feels good doing it.

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PayPal Phishing