Flickr’s Photostream

I just don’t like that Flickr doesn’t give you the option of hiding certain kinds of images from your photo stream, even if the image is public. For example, I want to be able to upload a logo for use in a blog post without having it mixed in with my family pictures. Arghh. I’m may end up using another service, like Photobucket, to host logos and other non-photographic image files.

Quality at Google

I found this post from Google particularly interesting because it gives a glimpse of how their Quality organization is tied to planning and product development.

Why I’m sticking with Clipperz

There are two big contenders when it comes to web-based password vaults: Passpack and Clipperz. There are plenty of reviews in the blogosphere talking about these two, so all I am going to mention is why I am sticking with Clipperz. While the user interface of Passpack is very nice and gives you the ability to tag cards, I was really turned off by the fact that it doesn’tallow you to customize the cards with your own fields. If you use the vault for things other than website passwords, then this feature is a must-have.

Mint vs. Quicken Online

I took a quick look at Mint and Quicken Online to see which one would work best to manage my finances. They are both good, but the first thing to take into consideration is the fact that Mint is free while Quicken is not, charging $3 per month. Mint makes their money by making referrals to bank and other financial services offers.

Mint was the first one I tried. Like Quicken, it was pretty easy to use and had a nice dashboard that shows your finances at a glance. Other than its price, the main plus for Mint is that it simply offers more features than Quicken. Budgeting and split transactions, for example, are not currently offered by Quicken Online. I also really like the weekly e-mails they send with a summary of new transactions.

I decided to take a look at Quicken Online after doing my taxes in TurboTax Online, which I thought was awesome. Not surprisingly, then, Quicken Online was very easy to use and got the job done. But, considering that it’s not a free service, the lack of a budgeting capability is a major drawback.

In summary, both tools are good, but for now Mint is clearly the winner. Quicken Online simply does not offer enough benefits to justify a monthly investment.

Weebly and other simple site-creation tools

I keep running into all these free easy-to-use tools to create websites and it’s just tempting to take a look. However, I ran into this and other posts offering cautionary tales about Weebly. The bottom line is that WordPress is so widely adopted that it offers the comfort that in the future you will be able to port your data to something else, if need be. I want to preserve my blog postings for posterity, so the notion of having some small startup go under leaving me with website that I cannot host somewhere else scares me.

Ed Hardy by Christian Audigier

OK, I must admit this perfume smells pretty good.

Inquisitor no more

Had to stop using Inquisitor because it seemed to be slowing down my system.  It seems like it was running some kind of process that kept my CPU running almost at full capacity even though Safari was the only application open.  Sure enough, things calmed down once I removed it.

Blogging sites

I’ve been trying to figure out what the best blogging tool is. After briefly taking a look at just abou every blogging solution out there, I narrowed it down to WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr. Being the biggest out there, it’s not surprising that I am taking a look at WordPress and Blogger. Tumblr came from a couple best-of lists I came across. So here’s my take:

WordPress

Able to easily import and export the blog in XML format. This is important to me for future flexibility. I had played around with Apple’s iWeb and was turned off by the fact that once you start using their tool, you are stuck. WordPress seems to offer the most all around flexibility, which makes it a good choice for a work-related blog that may not be solely focused on video and pictures.

Blogger

It’s easy to use and has beautiful templates. It offers good integration with Google Docs, but I am not looking to stay inside someone’s walled garden.

Tumblr

The most beautiful of all, it seems to be ideally suited for a personal blog. It seems to have more limited functionality but seems like a great choice if all you want is to post pictures and videos.

˜

Another option is the newly minted Google Sites. It seems to work well but the configuration was really messy, mostly because it’s not aimed at personal sites, but business and education. I guess Google wants you to use Blogger instead.

Customize Google

While 90% of the time I am able to easily find what I am looking for just by searching Google, sometimes I do want to try other search engines. The Customize Google extension provides additional links to Google search results that make it really easy to try other options without having to copy and paste the search terms.

ResizeSearchBox doesn’t work anymore

Ran into another problem with the ResizeSearchBox extension in Windows XP: it doesn’t seem to work with the latest version of Firefox. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find an alternative to it in the Mozilla website, other than using the Google toolbar and completely replacing the built-in search bar. The problem with this is that the Google search bar does not allow the use of other search plug-ins, such as Merriam-Webster or Wikipedia.