Personas for Firefox

If you're looking for a fun add-on to make some aesthetic customizations to Firefox, you should check out Personas for Firefox. The add-on doesn't really add anything functional to your 'fox installation, but it does add the ability to swap in some pretty nice looking themes.

I didn't think this add-on would be that interesting, but I have to admit that I find Firefox way more pleasant to look at with the themes made available by Personas. You can also swap between themes quickly and easily from a new icon that the add-on places in your status bar.

Thanks to Chris L. for telling me about this!

A Quick Music Recommendation

I rarely venture out of my main focus of this blog (technology), but I feel that I should pass along a nice gift that I got recently. MacDerm told me about a band called The Smithereens and that they will be playing a free concert at the U. this week. In preparation for the concert, I decided to download some Smithereens music and do a little background reading on them.

Suffice to say I really like them - I won't attempt to analyze their musical style; I leave that to those better qualified to do so. I will just say that they are a very melodic rock band. If you want to get a quick sample, download "Behind the Walls of Sleep" from Amazon and check them out.

One of the most impressive things that I read about the band is that they influenced Kurt Cobain during his writing of Nevermind, an album I consider to be among the greatest ever. You would never guess it at face value - the Smithereens sound nothing like Nirvana to me.

Anyway, thanks to MacDerm for this. I am really looking forward to the concert.

Foxmarks

So, I was reading Lifehacker today and I came across a post for Foxmarks, an add-on for Firefox that allows you to synchronize your bookmarks across multiple computers running Firefox. This is pretty interesting (and many people have asked me if it's possible to do this), but I think that it may be too little too late given del.icio.us' recent boom in popularity and its integration with Firefox being about as tight as the built-in bookmarks functionality.

Although, I could see this being a viable option for those who don't really have any aspirations of sharing and tagging bookmarks. And, like delicious, it relies on a third party server to manage the synchronization. So, you would be no more vulnerable to data unavailability if you used Foxmarks.

So, I am posting this for two reasons:

1) for the benefit of anyone who may find this tool useful

2) because I like where this technology is going. There are certain vital applications that I wish would follow suit here, address book syncing in Thunderbird being the foremost.

I haven't personally tried this tool out, so I'm in no position to speak to its quality/reliability. Please let me know what you think of it if you decide to check it out.

I'm back (I think)

My apologies to those who follow my blog for not having posted anything in nearly a month. I knew that I couldn't keep up the overly-ambitious pace that I started with, but I didn't anticipate December being this busy! Anyway, sorry for going AWOL on you!