Gina at Lifehacker posted a really nice rundown of what goes into making a Firefox extension: The meat of a Firefox extension is simply Javascript – the not-very-mysterious stuff of bookmarklets and regular old web pages – and a markup language called XUL (pronounced “zool.”) To build your own, you’ll need some Javascript know-how, comfort […]
FireGPG is an awesome little plugin that adds GPG support to Firefox. You need the GPG package installed on your machine to start, and after activating the plugin, you’ll have a new right-click menu that will let you sign, encrypt, decrypt and verify any selected text. You can use this to add strong crypto functionaliy […]
It’s still Alpha, but raop_play is an Airport Express client player that will allow you to send audio files, including http streams, to your Airport Express. Better yet, there’s an ALSA driver included with the package, which will make your Airport Express look just like a second audio output device. Once that’s set up, you […]
There’s a huge discussion happening both on Lifehacker and Get Rich Slowly regarding the pros and cons of paying off a mortgage early. Contrary to my own assumptions, the numbers (assuming current interest rates around 6%) seem to strongly encourage investing your money instead of paying toward your mortgage’s principal. On the one hand, you […]
Christian Flickinger wanted to be able to sync status updates between his Twitter and Facebook accounts, so that when his status is updated on Twitter, his Facebook status is automatically updated at the same time. Unfortunately, Facebook didn’t have an API for setting status, so Christian decided to hack his own using PHP and cURL. […]
When two machines running Skype need to communicate directly, but are both behind a NAT firewall, there’s a clever trick that’s employed to start a communication channel. It works like this: First, both machines open a connection to a non-firewalled server. The server takes note of the source port (which may have been altered by […]
Bean looks like a pretty spiffy open source word processor for Mac OS X – Bean is lean, fast, and uncluttered. If you get depressed at the thought of firing up MS Word or OpenOffice, try Bean. If you use Text Edit but have to jump through hoops just to get a word count or […]
