Keefer Madness

Tweaking Firefox with CSS

// April 3rd, 2011 // No Comments » // Computers, Software

I love customizing everything on my computer — making it exactly to my liking. I’ve never really done anything to tweak my browsers though, save adding my favorite extensions (1Password, Firebug & Xmarks). But for a long time, Firefox has had stylesheets. While I’ve never needed content styles to be overwritten with local styles, I love the fact that you can get rid of parts of the chrome/interface when not in use. Check out these two links about tweaking the UI of Firefox. I’m hoping to find more tweaks to apply utilizing userChrome.css.

Automatically Hide the Firefox Bookmarks Bar When Not in Use
Customize Firefox with userChrome.css

40+ Beautiful Wallpapers to Brighten Your Mac Desktop

// April 1st, 2011 // No Comments » // Apple, Computers, Design

Love this list of gorgeous and large resolution desktop images. While the title says Mac Desktop, most of these backgrounds would be perfectly at home in Windows… or Ubuntu for that matter. A few are sized to fit the iMac’s resolution perfectly, and a few are Apple-themed. But overall, these are just some nice wallpapers.

40+ Beautiful Wallpapers to Brighten Your Mac Desktop

Thunderbolt: Apple and Intel's New Interconnect

// February 24th, 2011 // No Comments » // Apple, Computers, Tech

Intel’s LightPeak, or as Apple calls it, Thunderbolt, sounds pretty freaking promising if it is widely adopted on both hardware (Mac and PC) and in peripherals. To me, it’s the most exciting thing about the new MacBook Pros announced this morning.

Thunderbolt: Apple and Intel’s new interconnect

Final Jeopardy! and the Future of Watson

// February 18th, 2011 // No Comments » // Computers, Software, Tech, TV Talk

The geek in me really dug the concept of the first part of this week’s Jeopardy competition — Man versus machine. IBM created Watson to play Jeopardy. The ten minute video below gives a great post-mortem on the project’s public test. Very cool stuff, and IBM did a great job with both the whole Watson system, but also its public face and promotion.

The article below talks about that public face and all the visuals. It’s amazing the nuances that went into it, not to take anything away at all from the actual achievement in the technology and processing behind the scenes.

Joshua Davis Creates the Face of Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy Supercomputer

How to Make Your Caps Lock Key Search the Web, Chrome OS-Style

// February 8th, 2011 // No Comments » // Computers

What’s one of the most worthless, if not most worthless key found on your computer’s keyboard? The caps lock key! I’m a fan of repurposing into anything that’s even a little bit more useful. Chrome OS is of the same opinion, and now Lifehacker has quick tutorials on ways to transform your Caps Lock key in either Windows or OS X into a more useful web search button. Do you have other suggestions solutions for the unneeded caps lock key?

How to Make Your Caps Lock Key Search the Web, Chrome OS-Style

Mozy Raising Online Backup Prices, Eliminating Unlimited Plan

// February 2nd, 2011 // 5 Comments » // Computers, Internet / Web, Software

Mozy’s been our offsite backup of choice — cheap at $5 a month. But this is just lame. I read about this on Lifehacker. It was nice of them to email customers for a heads up.

mozy.com/home/newplans

Plans are as follows:

$5.99/mo – 50 GB (1 computer)
$9.99/mo – 125GB (up to 3 computers)

An additional 20GB of storage is $2.00/mo.

We’ve currently got about 140GB backed up on there, meaning we’re looking at going from $5 a month, to about $12 a month.

Might be a good catalyst to go through iPhoto and get rid of a lot of unneeded/crappy photos. It might also be time to be more selective about what we’re actually backing up offsite. We’ll see how much we can cull. If that doesn’t get us enough, might be time to look for a new offsite backup solution. Thoughts?

The Best of 2010 Featured Desktops

// December 21st, 2010 // No Comments » // Computers, Design

I love changing my desktop backgrounds on a regular basis. The last few years, I’ve been on a kick of having two related images on my dual displays — sometimes just a mirrored image of each other, and other times a continuation from left display to right. Lifehacker has compiled a list of some of their best featured desktops. A lot of these go beyond just having a pretty image as a wallpaper, but instead have active information, data, etc. I’ve always wanted to take a stab at this, and know it’s possible on OS X via things like Geek Tool, but have never taken the time and effort to do so. Out of Lifehacker’s list, I like “The Duality Desktop” the best.

The Best of 2010 Featured Desktops

Flock Web Browser Moves to Chromium Engine

// December 1st, 2010 // No Comments » // Computers

Flock, the web browser that adds social ties built in has completed its transition today from being built on the Mozilla engine (Firefox) over to the Chromium (Chrome) engine. While this transition already had happened on the PC platform, it wasn’t until this morning that Flock OS X was upgraded and released.

The only issue here is getting Firefox plugins that were running in Flock working in the new version — things like 1Password immediately come to mind.

Flock

Delorean Time Machine Hard Drive

// November 29th, 2010 // No Comments » // Computers, Film, Tech

Love this idea, if not the price — it combines a Back to the Future III DeLorean (notice the collection of tubes on the car’s hood, with a 500GB Seagate harddrive. OS X’s built-in back up software is called “Time Machine,” so why not make your backup hard drive an actual time machine? My external backup hard drive is named, “Flux Capacitor” and even has the Flux Capacitor icon. Yes, I’m that much of a dork.

Delorean Time Machine Hard Drive

Ten Great AppleScripts for iTunes 10

// November 10th, 2010 // No Comments » // Apple, Computers

Seeing as today’s the last night I’ll be working at the Apple Store, it’s only fitting that I have a couple of Apple-related posts. I use iTunes daily. Love it. But iTunes isn’t perfect. I’ve come to love a lot of addons made for Apple’s media player and organizer. At first when I saw this list of 10 AppleScripts for iTunes 10, it didn’t look like anything I could use, but the second half of the list is great and usable stuff.

Ten Great AppleScripts for iTunes 10