Xerosphere

It is for me!  I have finally made the leap -- on a test basis anyway.  I sat down and took a long, hard look at what my laptop needs are, and felt pretty good that they could be met with the open source tools.  In the midst of hemming and hawing over whether or not to commit some time to installing & getting used to a new operating system, the deal breaker happened:  Ironically, it was in the form of receiving an .xslx file which made my vintage copy of MS Office choke.  I read an article confirming that the latest version of OpenOffice can work with the new-fashi

Friend, collaborator and currency visionary Art Brock has posted a new prezi outlining his take on the economic shifts currently taking place, and the shifts that need to take place for our economies to support humankind, rather than the other way around.

I implore you to drop what you are doing and step through this presentation.

I think I'm pretty typical in that I use a desktop computer in my home office, then grab the laptop on the way out the door. I do have good tools for syncing files and folders between the two, but a glaring problem has always been my browser. I've manually set up my bookmarks toolbar on both machines, and they wind up being just different enough from one another that it is a distraction. I've given up on keeping bookmarks like I used to. Delicious is cool, but not really the right tool for keeping a nice, tidy, hierarchical library of bookmarks.

I don't know what I would do without the awesome Web Developer extension for Firefox.

Suddenly my shortcut key for "Display Element Information" stopped working.  This is pretty much the thing I use the most.  Long story longer, the conflict is AdBlock Plus (another amazing extension).

In about:config I see an entry to alter the shortcut key for the function in Web Developer, but I do not see an entry to alter the shortcut key for AdBlock Plus.  Boo!

The web is becoming more atomic. That is to say, the little fragments of information that make up the web are more and more being made to stand on their own.

Every day, content that goes up on the web is less connected to (and thusly less contextualized by) its source. RSS feeds, aggregators, Yahoo Pipes and other mashup technologies immediately pluck news stories, blog entries and other bits of this and that from their www-based nests, wrap them up and deliver them however they like (really, however *you* like if you are game to figure out how to use the pipes).

I recently entered the world of high-end mousing. I have to say, I'm impressed, and wonder how I ever got along without it.

The Razer Pro|Click V1.6 feels good in the hand, is smooth and accurate, the buttons have great action, the software driver has a "sensitivity adjust on the fly" feature that is wonderful, and the thing is just plain cool looking too.

I had to migrate a multi-site installation of Drupal from one server to another, and devised a way to copy all the relevant MySQL databases from the old server to the new server with a single bash command. It is secure as it is piped through SSH. Hope someone finds this useful.

The DOM Inspector is a built-in Firefox extension that "can be used to inspect and edit the live DOM of any web document or XUL application." I had never found the DOM Inspector useful by itself, but some components of the (very useful) Web Developer extension rely on it.