CHRISdotTODD

Many applications we use come with built in spell checkers; with F7 being the most common way to execute the spell checker. With more and more web based apps, I seem to find myself occasionally not having a spell checker or the spell checker is cumbersome. For me, this no longer is a problem. I have been using a free product called Enso Words from Humanized for over 6 months as my spell checker. Here's how simple it is: Highlight what you want to check (ctrl-A to select everything) Hold the Caps Lock key down and start typing "spellcheck". In my case, just an "s" is enough to put spellcheck in the top of the Enso list. Release the Caps Lock key If there are no misspellings, Enso Words will tell you so. If there are, a window will open with your text, and the misspelling will be highlighted. Click and hold on the misspellings to see possible correct spellings. Select the correct spelling or select Learn. Alternatively, you can type the correct spelling. When you

I recently noticed a new problem with Word and Excel opening rather slow -- on a new laptop no less. And when I was connecting through our VPN to the office, I would get an error message, "The printer has not yet responded... Continue to wait?" Turns out there was a problem with my default printer definition in Windows being corrupt. I delete the old definition and created a new definition (Add Printers and Faxes) and the problem has gone away.

I ran across a great article on Royal HeHe2-ness from guest blogger Ian McLean about DRM and why it needs to go. Why Its Time To Kick DRM To The Curb give a good perspective on the options for digital media companies and consumers. Mr. McLean re-enforces the fact that honest folks are impacted, while the less honest have a better product. Further he also points out that in many cases there are free alternatives that are as good or nearly as good as the expensive DRM software packages. Give this article a read.

If you re unfamiliar with the term DRM, it stands for digital rights management. The record (RIAA), movie (MPAA), and software industry has used forms of DRM to prohibit you from sharing your purchased digital goods with others. This continues to be a headache for the honest, while the less honest folks are able to find free "cracked" version of the same materials. Take for example if you purchased music from the likes of Microsoft or Yahoo! You were notified (hopefully) this past year that they will no longer support these services. For reasons that appear to agree with what has been argued all along -- that DRM only impacts honest, paying customers -- Microsoft, Yahoo!, and now Wal-Mart are reversing their business models by discontinuing the DRM practice. Microsoft and Yahoo! have easied up some what on their position, to give you more time to find a work-around, but nevertheless you are left either with losing the music once your current PC dies or the burden of transf

Recently a new vulnerability was found in the core of the web surfing systems... the DNS server. The DNS server, short for Domain Name System, is used to translate a websites URL to a websites ip address, the addressing system of the Internet, so your web browser can find the website you are looking for. In order to manage the load of users, there are many, many DNS servers. In fact DNS is provided by ISPs -- either their own or third party systems that they have paid for -- so when you connect through your ISP, you can find the website you want. When the DNS you connect to cannot find a website, it will contact another DNS server to update its records. Likewise, websites will have DNS servers to tell other DNS servers what ip addresses are required for their website. Here's the problem at hand. It has been figured out how a hacker could tell a DNS server a wrong ip address, when the DNS server is updating its records. It does this through forcing the server to ask for a new update

In Excel, I will use formulas quite frequently for my analysis. At times I want to reference the resulting value of the formula for comparison or to feed another formula. Unfortunately, if you are doing a comparison, Excel will try to compare the formula instead of the formulas results. Well, turns out there is an easy way to correct this. If you want your formula result to be a number, then use the VALUE function. If you want the formula result to be text, use the TEXT function. Here is the syntax for each: VALUE(text) TEXT(value,format_text) -- The format_text value can be any format from the Category box on the Number tab (in the Format Cells dialog box) except General. Here is an example of each: =VALUE(MID(A2,46,FIND("&",A2)-46)) -- this actually finds a number beginning with the 46th character of a string, and continues until it finds the ampersand character. By wrapping the formula with VALUE, I can now compare the number to other numbers in my looku

With the release of Google Chrome just weeks ago, speed tweaking tips are popular topics for Firefox. I found a list at TechRadar to be fairly good. Of the 8 tips offered, I am trying the following: 1 - 3, 6, and 8. Not that some of these are as much about perception as really making any difference. But isn't perception all we really care about? If we perceive it to be faster, it must be faster.

With all the buzz around Microsoft's latest ad campaign, prior videos are re-appearing. Thanks to Digg, I found this video with Christopher Lloyd as Microsoft kicks-off TechEd 2007. I found most of it quite funny. "Oh, Biff..."

As published on the Silicon Alley Insider , here's a video that compares the real speed of an iPhone against the speed you see in the iPhone commercials. In looking at the ad, Apple has clearly cut out much of the connection and load times. Now let's examine the reality of cell phone network speeds. As reported by tests done by Computer World , AT&T's network averaged download speeds of 755Kbit/sec. and average upload speeds of 484Kbit/sec. Computer World also included a 3 second network connection time. With this information, let's calculate the load time for an average 50kb page. Convert our download rate to Kb: 755/8 (8 bits in a byte) = 94.4 Kb/sec Download page time: 50 / 94.4 = 0.53 seconds Total time: connection time of 3 sec + download time of 0.53 seconds = 3.53 sec For us to really get the performance we have come to expect from our computers, it appears the issue right now is the connection times. We can grow our page sizes 6x (and many have) before the

I recently got a new laptop with Windows XP and I'm slowly getting it configured to all my preferences. One thing I noticed is that everytime I rebooted, the Language Bar would reappear in the Taskbar. No matter how many times I removed it, it would rear its ugly head again. With a little research, I found out how to stop this nasty behavior. You need to un-register and re-register a DLL that controls the behavior. Specifically, here's what you do: Go to Start and click Run... Enter"Regsvr32.exe /u msimtf.dll" and click OK Go to Start and click Run... Enter "Regsvr32.exe msimtf.dll" and click OK Next time you reboot, it wont show up.

It's hard to figure whether the Gates/Seinfeld ads ran their course as expected or were they cut short because thy missed the mark expected. Regardless, Microsoft has releases some new, more relevant ads that displays all types of people and their roles as PC users. I'm a PC: Pride I'm a PC: Not Alone I'm a PC: Stereotype The New York Time released an analysis of the Microsoft strategy to combat the Apple TV spots, and they point out that Microsoft isn't the first company to try and take some very bad press and turn it around in their favor. “This is just the beginning, the first phase of the campaign,” said Mich Mathews, senior vice president for marketing at Microsoft. “We’re on a journey to reposition the PC.” Looks as if we may have many more entertaining commercial spots ahead of us.

You may have the need to open and view more than one Outlook Inbox at the same time. Take for example an employee quitting... who's going to monitor his inbox until a replacement is hired? In my office, email support is handled through a shared email account, with designated individuals watching it at various times. Here's how you can add additional inboxes to Outlook, so you do not have to switch back and forth between accounts: Start Outlook Go to Tools | E-mail Accounts... Make sure View or change existing e-mail accounts is marked and click Next Make sure your Microsoft Exchange Server is highlighted and click Change Click More Settings... Click the Advanced tab Click Add Enter the name of the additional inbox you want to add. This is the same name you find in the Outlook Address Book. Click OK -- you may have multiple choices, if the name you gave matches more than one account. If so, select the account you want and click OK , again. Click OK Click Finish Here's a

How often do you use the right-click on your mouse a s a shortcut to tasks that otherwise would take much longer? Sometimes I find I want to open a file in an application that is different than the default application. For that purpose, I right-click the file and hover over Open With Other times though, I may want to send the file in an email, or zip it up, and sometimes, OpenWith is not even listed. For these times, I use SendTo . Microsoft has made it very easy to customize SendTo to meet your needs. The default options include all the drives on your computer, zip, shortcut on the Desktop, an attachment in your default email, or to My Documents. For my own list, I have added all my web browsers (except the default), because when I right-click on an HTML file shortcut (URL), there is no OpenWith option. I also added Dreamweaver, as it does not always show up in the OpenWith dialog for file formats. Notepad has also been a good addition, as often times there are file formats I want to

Windows XP (like all Windows operating systems) uses a technique of storing some content of its system memory (RAM) to the hard drive, therefore using less memory for functions that are used less often. So what Windows is doing is keep functions used most often in RAM and "swapping" out less used functions on to your hard drive. Though great in principle, if/when a function is needed that is stored on the hard drive, the system must reload it in memory before it is used, which makes things work slower. This is particularly true when Windows stores central parts (referred to as the kernel) of Windows itself on the hard drive. If you have 256 MB or more of RAM, a simple Registry change keeping the kernel from being swapped to the hard drive can give you some performance improvements. Here's how you do it: Click Start Click Run... Enter Regedit and click OK (opens the Registry Editor) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ M

This is a little 'techy' for my typical blog posts, but I had a heck of a time finding an answer online. I recently got a new laptop and needed to reconfigure my ASP development environment. I kept running into one problem, where my home page displayed ASP code at the top ( <%@LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> <% var openMenu; ...), instead of executing. Turns out you need to add to the basic ASP configuration to execute ASP code that is in HTML pages. Of course that seems like a no-brainer, but I don't recall having done that in the past. Here's the steps to do this: Go to Administrative Tools in the Control Panel Launch Internet Information Services (IIS) Go to your (default) website and open Properties Go to the Home Directory tab Click the Configuration.. button under the Application Settings section On the Mappings tab, click Add Enter the following information: Executable: c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\asp.dll Extension: .ht

This is a simple Registry setting that will speed up your Windows XP menus. Click Start Click Run... Enter Regedit and click OK Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop \ MenuShowDelay Change the default value of 400 A value of 0 would open a menu even if you just pass the mouse over it, so try a value of 100 or 200.

I just got a new laptop and was reminded of a common annoyance in MS Office products. The menus never fully display immediately -- you either have to click the arrow at the bottom of the menu or wait a few seconds. There is actually a fairly easy way to keep them expanded all the time. Right-click any toolbar Select Customize Check "Always show full menus" That's it.

AT&T has released new information that they will also start degrading customer network throughput for those that use more than what AT&T would consider average. You can read all the terms of service on the AT&T site . Here are some highlights in order of appearance, followed by my commentary: Broadband access is provided in speed tiers of: (1) 200 Kbps to 768 Kbps downstream (not available for AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet service) (2) 769 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps downstream (3) 1.56 Mbps to 3.0 Mbps downstream (4) 3.1 Mbps to 6.0 Mbps downstream; (5) 6.1 Mbps to 10.0 Mbps (available only with AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet service) (collectively “Service Capability Speeds”)... ... AT&T Uverse High Speed Internet throughput speeds may be temporarily reduced when a customer is using other U-verse services in a manner that requires high bandwidth. This could occur more often with higher speed Internet access products. ... While this performance optimization process w

Microsoft has released their 2nd ad, from their infamous ad campaign to combat Apple. At 4 1/2 minutes, it's certainly different than what we're accustom to from a commercial. I don't think there are as many buried messages as the first ad ; the big message here is Microsoft connects people. "Bill, have you had scallop potatoes before?" confirms a feeling many have about Bill: he's different, therefore he has not experienced the typical American family dinner. "Do we have any more ketchup" and "Nobody told me we were eating" are lines that tries to re-enforce that this is an average family and Microsoft (through Bill and Jerry) are trying to better understand ("re-connect with real people") what it's like to be an average family. "Didn't we have this yesterday?" Bill implies that with Microsoft, you don't have to have the same thing every day. Bill reads a technical story; Microsoft knows technology "Jer

Well it has been a week since Google released Chrome, a week since I've tracked my Internet bandwidth usage, and 5 days since Microsoft released its ads to compete against Apple. Let's take a look and see how each are doing. =============== I wrote a little about Google's surprise announcement of their new browser Chrome last week, highlighting some of its features. One feature that intrigued me was the ability to "tear-off" a tab and turn a browser window into a pseudo application on your desktop. I did just that with my email and RSS reader -- I replaced Thunderbird with a direct window into my Gmail account and replaced the RSS reader with Google's RSS reader. I had looked and tried many RSS readers before settling on Thunderbird, but found that over the last six months that I've used it less and less. I like the Google Reader interface much better than Thunderbird and others and Chrome has made it just a little easier to access it. In addition, in th

Over the last 6 to 12 months there has been several battles between ISPs, users, and the government. ISPs want to choose what type of content can run on their network and how fast it should be delivered. One such example is Comcast's blocking of P2P traffic . During their FCC investigation, Comcast changed this practice, though after being ruled that it was actually illegal practice, Comcast is now challenging the ruling . For Comcast to block just P2P traffic, it had to scan all the activity on your connection to identify what part of the traffic was P2P. In the Comcast ruling, the FCC implied that it would be legal to monitor user traffic so that illegal content could be blocked such as child pornography and copyrighted material. While we would all like to see child pornography and other nefarious activity stopped, this would require the ISP to inspect everyone's content, from banking to love letters to new job applications and everything in between. It would be interesting t

Couple funny lines, but I don't get how it applies to buying anything Microsoft. "Bill, your a 10"

Goodreads is a social network for those who like to share what they read and find new books to read. I joined Goodreads and was able to easily add a dozen books that I've recently read, and provide my rating and review for each. The site is very easy to use. It's easy to find books to add that you've read and books that you want to read. Goodreads is also easy to find other readers with similar interest and ratings on books that you've considered reading. With goodreads, you can start your own book club or join an existing one. The groups can even go a little off-topic, such as there is a group for folks to rate and discuss recent movies they watched. You can also find over 4000 authors who participate on Goodreads, as well as some author interviews. If that's not enough, you can also test your book smarts with general book trivia or triva only from books you've read. Now I'm seeing some value out of social networking... MySpace to keep in-touch with my fa

Tip 1: When the phone is locked, double-click the Home button to access your "iPod" volume, play/pause, forward, and backward features Tip 2: When the iPhone is unlocked (you're using it), double-click the Home button to get to your Contact Favorites Tip 3: ( Repeat from a prior post ) When apps are crashing, power your phone off and on or start and stop airplane mode

Live blog from CNet Webware Today at 11 am PST, Google will announce a new browser from the search giant, Chrome. Chrome promises to start off on the right foot with many great features . Sandboxing: kill one tab while the rest of the browser tabs continue running Blacklists: one for phishing and one for malware, both maintained by Google Plug-ins: dedicated processes Faster Javascript: designed for speed and important enough to be built by its own Google team Multiprocessing: separate process for each task Tabs: placed at the top of the window, giving each tab its own URL (Omnibox) box Google has published a comic book to cover all the features. It will be interesting to watch the responses from the current browser incumbents Microsoft ( IE ), Mozilla ( Firefox ), Apple ( Safari ), and Opera Software ( Opera ). For example, Google is signed up to be Firefox's biggest contributor through 2011, with $56 million of $66 million coming from Google in 2006. As they say in the tech in

Effective October 1st, Comcast is putting a cap on its unlimited usage plan -- instead of unlimited bandwidth, you get 250GB per month. It looks as if first-time offenders will only be given a warning, but then any subsequent violations could result in termination of your service. At first glance, that seems like quite a lot of bits; lets check it out. Comcast claims their average usage is 2 - 3 GB per month. From the Comcast Network Management Policy page, here's how you could use the 250 GBs. Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email) Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song) Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie) Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo) What Comcast didn't publish was a realistic look at usage. For example, Comcast left a few items off such as IM, YouTube, podcasts, and 3rd party VoIP calls. With that being said, estimating usage for a family of 4 still only exceeds the Comcast estimate by 10x (20 - 30 GB p/ month). I did not c

I started my research on this blog entry thinking I was going to give you an easy, free solution to make sure you are secure when surfing from an un-secure Internet connection. First let's discuss the problem we're trying to solve. Whenever you connect to the Internet over a network that others have access to, you open yourself up for others to track and intercept your habits and data. This is called a "man-in-the-middle" attack. Take for example a free wireless hotspot. You and anyone else can get on this network ( Is your home wireless network secure? ). With an easy to find program, another user on the network can pose as the host, and all your data will pass right through their computer for easy intercept. Another very common place for this to occur is in hotels. Even though you may have a wired connection, again anyone else on the network can potentially fool your computer into being the host and intercept your data. Of course this is never known to the poor indi

I was provided a used laptop at my new job a few months back, and I was surprised when I did not find a pre-installed CD burning software such as Sonic or Roxio. This led me on a hunt to find something for free; I ended up with CDBurnerXP . I was quite impressed with how easy to use CDBurnerXP is to use -- the screens are very intuitive and helpful. When creating a data disk, you get a Windows Explore like view on the top half of the screen, where you can navigate to the files you want to burn and drag them to the bottom half of the screen. Seems obvious and simple, but not all programs work so well. As I add my files, a bar across the bottom shows how much space I've used; if I exceed the capacity of my disc, the background color changes from green to red. To create an audio disk is very similar, except the bottom half shows my tracks and their details. CDBurnerXP makes it very easy to drag and drop audio tracks to put them in the order you desire. If you want to sample a file, yo

If you enjoy reading, you know that the cost of getting new books can add up quickly. For the commuters who listen to books, purchasing new audio books is nearly prohibitive. If you fall into one of these groups, you might find Project Gutenberg to be a great resource. Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. Imaging going to a never ending bookshelf to pick your next book to read. Project Gutenberg is a volunteer organization working to make every public domain (copyright-free) book available in electronic form. Unfortunately copyright law has changed since Project Gutenberg was started. While a book used to be public domain 28 years after written, the law now says the author must be dead for 50 years. Nevertheless, there is quite a collection of interesting books available -- 25,00

before I find that the My Computer view is much less helpful when interacting with files than the Explorer view. By default, when you click on My Computer or My Documents, and folder and drive shortcuts, the left pane contains links to Make a new folder, Publish this folder..., and other not-so-helpful links. I like the Explorer view which has a tree of all folder, open to the folder that I've selected.. Well, with an easy Registry change, the behavior of My Computer and the like can be changed to open in an Explorer view. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell and set the default value ( Value data ) to "explorer" -- that's it. after

I recently started having a problem where my Excel 2003 and Word 2003 files would not open when clicked, unless Excel and/or Word was already open. If the application wasn't open, it would open the application, but not load the file. I did quite a bit of searching, but couldn't seem to find the right answer. Some sites recommended checking a setting to Ignore other applications -- a setting that wasn't even available in Word. Turns out for both applications, it was the Addins that were causing troubles. To remove the offending Addin, you need to edit the Registry. Here's the process I used. Go to Start > Run... , enter regedit, and click OK . Go to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\ Addins . Right-click on Addins and select Export . This will let you re-import the keys. Delete the individual Addins one at a time, testing each time to find the offending Addin. Once you identify the offending Addin, re-import all Addin keys, and de

Similar to my prior post on Convert Date/Time Format with MS Access , this explains how to take a date in dd/mm/yyyy format and convert it to mm/dd/yyyy , so that MS Access will recognize it. It takes just a few easy steps: Assume you start with your data in CSV format, the first step is to Import the data into Access ( File > Get External Data > Import... ). When importing the date field, import it as text, therefore loading all the data into your database. Create a Query to convert your date data and change from text to date format. From Design View , add all the fields except the field with your date data that you want converted. Insert a new field , and add ( Build... ) the following formula (see explanation and picture below): NEW_DATE: CDate(Mid$([DATE],4,3) & Left$([DATE],3) & Right$([DATE],4)) Run the query to validate that the formula is entered correctly. Once verified, change the Query Type to a Make-Table Query . Give it a name Run the query Confirm the num

I discovered an easy fix to crashing iPhone Apps... turn Airplane Mode on and off or shut your iPhone off and on. By doing this, your iPhone re-establishes itself with the cell phone network. This reminds me of troubles I used to have with my old Sprint phone -- the longer I had it on, the more likely I would have problems with dropped calls. According to Sprint at the time, the cell phone needs to periodically re-establish itself with the cell database. This seems to have worked for me with the iPhone, as my crashes were always occurring when the iPhone was interacting over the network, such as trying to establish my location. Note that I have a first generation iPhone on firware 2.0.1. Let me know if this works for you or not.

If you're like me, over the years I've started to forget some of those old DOS commands. One that we still need to use occasionally is the cd command to navigate to a file in a different folder, because whenever you go to the Command Prompt you begin in the C:\Documents and Settings\[your username] folder. With a minor entry into your Folder Options, you can actually open directly to the folder you want using Windows Explorer. Here's how you do it: 1. Open a Windows Explore window (Windows Key + E) 2. Click on Tools 3. Select Folder Options... 4. Click on the File Types tab 5. Click on [NONE] Folder 6. Click on Advanced 7. Click on New 8. Type " Command Prompt " in the Action box 9. Type " cmd.exe " in the Application used to perform action box 10 . Click OK on each of the dialog boxes until you are back to the Windows Explorer window Now see it in action: 1. Right-click on a folder in the left-pane 2. Click Command Prompt 3. You will see a (DOS)

I found a new tool from Microsoft that will evaluate the security of your PC, and give instructions on how to correct potential vulnerabilities. Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) is an easy-to-use tool designed for the IT professional that helps small- and medium-sized businesses determine their security state in accordance with Microsoft security recommendations and offers specific remediation guidance. You don't need to be an IT professional to use MBSA , as instructions for correcting potential vulnerabilities are easy to follow. MBSA examines the following areas on your Windows computer: Security Updates Windows Administrative Vulnerabilities and System Issues, e.g. is Windows Firewall enabled, is the Guest Account disabled, and if are unnecessary Services turned off Internet Information Services (IIS) Administrative Vulnerabilities and System Issues, e.g. are the sample applications removed and has the IIS Lockdown patch been applied Note, many folks do not realize t

In looking up some locations in Google Maps today, I found that the map images were not displaying. The searches worked, and I did get the list of possible matches on the left side. Thanks to some searching through Google I found the problem. The current Skype add-on (v.2.2.0.87) for Firefox is causing this problem. I'm not sure how they are related, but by disabling the Skype add-on fixed the problem. It appears this Skype Add-on is also causing screen redraw issues for some users of Firefox as well.

I was looking earlier in the week for a simple utility to monitor a folder and update equivalent folders on two other machines, based on content changing. I found SyncBackSE from 2BrightSparks to do the trick. This $30 utility program saved me countless hours in writing my own solution. SyncBackSE comes with a fully functional 30 day trial. SyncBackSE can be used to backup files or to keep folders in sync. Sounds pretty simple, but it can get rather complex. SyncBackSE has two configuration interfaces, easy and expert. Let me run through creating a simple backup Profile. Click Ctrl-N to start a new Profile. Select source and destination directories (folders). These can be on mapped drives or even UNC paths. Accept the default backup (or sync) settings, or adjust as required. For example: If a file appears on the destination, but not on the source, do you want to delete it or copy it back to the source? If a file has changed on the destination, but not on the source, do you want to ov

Update, 10:22 am PST: I am now able to make calls, receive email, and use the network. Update, 10:05 am PST : AT&T customer service confirmed that there is a major outage in Oregon and Washington and they are sending a technician out to fix it. They have no ETA on when it will be back up. This affects only the 2G network -- 3G is up and working. Update, 9:50 am PST : Still no change. No incoming or outgoing calls, nor access to any network functions. It's 9:00 am PST, just south of Portland, OR, and I am unable to dial out or receive calls on my first generation (firmware 2.0.1) iPhone. I confirmed the same experience with 3 of my co-workers. Data services are also down. I'll be looking for that credit on my next bill from AT&T.

I have updated my 2006, Firefox 2 keyboard shortcut tri-fold for Firefox 3. I added about a dozen new keyboard shortcuts from my prior version. Click on each of the gif files to view a full version or just download by right-clicking. Print one image on each side of your paper, and then fold into three.

Here's a few fun easter eggs in Firefox. In the "awesome" address bar, try entering each of these: about:robots about:mozilla And here are a few Firefox plug-ins to make your browsing a bit easier: For those that prefer the Firefox 2 address bar, try the Oldbar plug-in. Save a step of having to arrow or mouse down to the first item in the awesome bar, install the Enter Selects 3 plug-in. Aging Tabs will continually darken the color of tabs the as time passes since you last viewed the particular tab. Instead of reopening a closed tab using History, you can accomplish the same task with a button using Undo Closed Tabs Button plug-in. Firefox Showcase let's you view thumbnails of all your tabs in a single window.

Just a few nights back after work, following a fairly normal routine, I accepted the iTunes request for an update to 7.7. Upon completion and plugging in my iPhone, I was prompted to update the firmware to 2.0.1. Again, I accepted. During the middle of this process, iTunes crashed. Upon clearing the dialog boxes, iTunes restarted (my iPhone was still connected). Only this time, iTunes had nothing in it's library -- no music, no movies, no Podcasts -- nothing. And then looking at my iPhone, it was cycling between the Apple logo and an image of a USB plug and the iTunes logo -- my iPhone had become an iBrick. Wow! In a bit of shock, I tried closing and restarting iTunes, and I tried shutting down and restarting my iPhone. Neither one helped. Here I went from a few casual, routine updates to a lot of unplanned for, and really unnecessary rebuilding. First, i had to figure out how to un-brick my phone. The best I could come up with was some instructions posted on ...my first tech blog