Scrabble-esque Game

If you're bored over Thanksgiving, there's a Scrabble-esque game to keep you busy.
See:
http://wordsquared.com/
Mozilla (the company that runs Firefox) runs the website, I think.

On User Notifications in Browsers

One of the designers of Firefox did an interesting post on just how well-designed software should interact with the user.  It's interesting to see how things that I really don't give much thought to in Firefox or Internet Explorer have quite a bit of thought put into them.  It helps explain why Clippy was not the success that Microsoft wanted him (it?) to be.  The discussion of their prototype for a new tab page is neat.  It's pretty neat to see how far Internet browsers have come in the last few years.

Useful Plugins for Firefox

I discovered a few plugins for Firefox, two of which are from Mozilla Labs. A disclaimer: These are all non-final versions, and therefore might be buggy. However, I have not had any real difficulty with any of them.
Ubiquity allows you to use the keyboard to quickly Google something, select text and email it to someone, or insert a map into an email and email it to someone, and more. But hitting -, you call Ubiquity, which then will do your bidding.
Second, a program called Auto Dial, which, based on your web history, builds a custom web page that opens each time you open a new tab, so that when you open a new tab, it will
Finally, a program called Ctrl-Tab allows you to switch between tabs easily, all the while seeing what tab you will be switching too.

Useful Firefox Plugin

I was looking at an entry in Yahoo! employee Jeremy Zawodny's blog and decided to try a plugin he uses -- Aardvark. What's useful about it is that you can use it to kill off ads in web pages on an individual basis. If you want to print from a website, you just activate Aardvark by a right click, mouse over the item that you want to remove, and then press r (for remove) It disappears. There are other hotkeys which you can use -- press h (for help) when Aardvark is activated. The homepage for the actual program is here.