I spend an enormous amount of time browsing the web looking for new ideas to write about, so one of the biggest problems for me is tagging articles for more careful reading later. Also, I’m sure any moment I’m going to reach a page that says “You’ve reached the end of the internet, now go outside”.
The solution to this problem is to have a good mechanism for tagging a page as “to be read”, and then be able to easily retrieve them at a later date. We’ve already written about using del.icio.us for this purpose, but I’ve come across the Read it Later extension for Firefox that has very similar functionality.
To save a page for later, you can simply click the Read Later button…
Or you can right-click a link and choose to “Read this Link Later”, which is much more useful when you are browsing around social sites with loads of links.
To retrieve the articles later, you can click the Reading List button, or you can use the drop-down menu.
Note: I found the menu to be really flaky… sometimes things would show up, other times they wouldn’t. The button always works even if the menu doesn’t.
Once you are done reading, you can click the Mark as Read button, or you can use the drop-down to quickly add a bookmark as well.
Personally I’m going to stick with Readeroo because I can use it across computers, but this might be useful if you don’t use del.icio.us. Also, the buttons are just HUGE, and there’s no option to make them reasonably sized.
Update: Looks like Nate updated with a new version with a lot of fixes for some of these issues. Now you can also move the buttons around, much more useful.
Download the Read it Later Firefox extension from ideashower.com
I love when I find a fun online game to play. When the workday is going completely insane and I want to burn the place down (Milton in Office Space) it is helpful to immerse oneself in fantasy. Treasure Of Cutlass Reef allows just such opportunity. This is a cool game where you’re a pirate ship
WinSCP is by far and away the best SCP/SFTP client for Windows users, but the default settings don’t use keepalive, so you get disconnected far too often. I like to leave the client open while I’m doing work, and this causes a serious problem with my workflow.
My good friend Tim asked me the other day: “How do I take a screenshot of an entire web page… am I supposed to just piece two images together?” Thankfully for Tim he has a geek friend to explain a simple way to accomplish this.
Usually the people listed in your Contacts list are regarded as safe by Outlook’s Junk E-mail Filter. Usually being the key word. I ran into an instance today where an interoffice email sent went into the recipients Junk Folder. To correct this I used the following steps.
If you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon you are probably still a very productive person. If you want to make your time-wasting sessions slightly more efficient, you can use the keyboard to stumble instead of clicking the Stumble! button.
Hidden away in the Windows directory is a separate utility that can be used to perform certain user administration functions not provided in the normal interface. Instead of typing “control userpasswords2” into the run box, you can just add it as an icon in your Control Panel.
This is a quick tip to speed up the start menu in Vista. I wrote a previous article about helping the user interface more snappy. This tip concentrates on the start menu but will have a similar effect. So if you employ both strategies the UI will run more smoothly. This tip requires a registry
If you use Outlook to store all of your contacts, you can also use it to quickly find maps and directions for your contacts by using the quick access Map button.
If you find yourself using the Group Policy Editor all the time, you might have wondered why it doesn’t show up in the Control Panel along with all the other tools. After many hours of registry hacking, I’ve come up with a registry tweak to let you do just that.
This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.
