Day: August 15, 2008

i-Blue 747 GPS Logger

As mentioned elsewhere, I have this little obsession with capturing data about my activities as I move through the day. Cheap, large scale storage makes it easier and easier to capture and archive such data, so why not?

Several months ago I added the i-Blue 747 GPS Logger to my collection of gadgets. It pretty much does what the title suggests — it records its GPS position to internal flash memory. Periodically, then, I download the GPS data file as a CSV file. That’s about it. Apparently it has Bluetooth so you could sync it wirelessly to your laptop or smartphone if you wanted to do real time mapping/directions, but I’ve never tried that feature (and don’t plan to).

The main advantages of the i-Blue 747 are that a) its cheap – $65 on Amazon at the moment; b) it acquires GPS signals fairly accurately, even in less-than-ideal conditions; c) it is extremely small; and d) it lasts all day on a full battery charge.

I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with it over the past few months. I definitely got my $65 worth on this particular gadget.

Whitewash – A Nice, Simple WordPress Theme

One of the things about WordPress is that most people don’t seem to think their install is complete until they have a theme with 50 columns, giant buttons, and ads everywhere. I had to laugh a few weeks ago when The Blog Herald ran a series of articles about reducing template clutter — seriously, go visit their site for what passes as on the simple side in the WordPress community (thank goodness for Google Reader).

On the other hand, this is my idea of a simple, no nonsense template that doesn’t make the visitor’s eyes bleed (demo this template here).

C’mon guys — sometimes less really is more.

Firefox New Install – Extensions

This is just a list of addons I need to remember to add to any new Firefox installs on machines I use:

AdBlock Plus – blocks ads

AutoCopy – automatically copies highlighted text in browser to the clipboard

BugMeNot – bypasses registration systems for viewing content

CookieSafe – take control of cookies

DownThemAll – download manager

Fireshot – takes screenshots of web pages

Google Gears – speed up some sites and work offline

GooglePedia – adds Wikipedia results to Google search

Greasemonkey – allows insane level of customization

NoScript – blocks scripts

Picnik – edit images in Picnik

Searchbar Autosizer – autosizes searchbar as you type

Session Manager – save and restore tabs after Firefox crashes

Tab Counter – displays number of open tabs in upper right corner

Tab Mix Plus – best tab options manager, period.

Text Area Backup – this is a GreaseMonkey script that backs up the text in any text area once per second so it is recoverable in the event of a browser crash

Text Area Resizer and Mover – lets the user resize and move text area boxes

TimeTracker – tracks how much time you spend webbrowsing

Webmynd – saves local file of every web page you visit