Helpful Tools for the Internet

Helpful tools for the Internet

  • Dropbox: Dropbox is a cloud-computing technology that lets you easily share folders full of files between different computers (your own) and different users. ( If you use this --> link <-- then both you and EB PEN will get bonus storage space)
  • Firefox: Firefox is a very powerful web browser with hundreds of great add-ons (like WeatherBug, Pixlr Grabber, Scrapbook Plus and the awesome Cooliris).
  • Thunderbird: Mozilla Thunderbird (put out by the same people as Firefox) is an email/calendar application similar in many ways to Outlook (but free and constantly improved).  If you use GMail for your mail, Thunderbird can retrieve your mail for you and let you browse through it off-line.
KennethHFong's picture

Firefox is very customizable

Submitted by KennethHFong on Sun, 01-30-11 10:18 pm.

Firefox is very customizable to suit your own particular needs and desires. You can move the buttons on the toolbar around by going to View> Toolbars> Customize. You'll see a new pop-up window with some tool buttons not already installed. BUT WAIT, there's more! When you're doing that, even if you don't want to add or remove tool buttons, you can now pick up a button and move it to a different place. You can even add a toolbar to hold your most useful bookmarks. You can even put a folder of bookmarks on a toolbar and access the bookmarks inside using the drop-down menu.

If you change your mind, that same Customize setting will let you restore the default set of tools.

Did you know you can add search engines to Firefox? Look for the little arrowhead just to the left of where you type in your desired search term. That little arrowhead is a drop-down menu. Click on it, and select Manage Search Engines. You can add search engines for some of the sites you use the most. I added Amazon.com, Baseball-Reference.com, IMDb.com, AddAll.com, I even added the Alameda Public Library's catalogue search. (AddAll is a great search portal for new and used books, music, and movies. It crawls all the major and some of the minor bookselling sites and lists books by price including shipping.)

Firefox also permits you to change the look by changing the Theme you are using. You're going to have to look at your screen for long hours, why not change it to a more pleasing appearance? Try it. Tools> Add-Ons> Themes and click Get Themes at the very bottom. There are different nature scenes, color schemes, even themes based on popular television and motion pictures. You can select a few different ones and change 'em up whenever it suits your fancy.

If you need help with this, drop me a note: KennATKennFong.com. Type the "@" sign instead of the word "AT." This is a spam-fighting technique. - kenn