Super Quick Firefox Tip: Recover Closed Tab!

This is one simple, super quick tip for today, but there's nothing more satisfying than having such a simple solution for such an annoying problem: when you accidentally close a tab you didn't want closed!

Just as you would hit CTRL-T to create a new tab, just hit CTRL-Shift-T to reload the last closed tab! You can even keep doing this until the history folder doesn't have any more records of your past browsing section!

Scooped! CD/DVD Spindle Cable Organizer

I just had to go and blog about this out of sheer surprise that somebody else came up with the same exact solution as I did for wrangling USB and short power cables and stuff:

CD/DVD Spindle Cable Organizer (via Lifehacker)

Man, I totally woulda had that scoop if I'd written about it as soon as I figured out to do it!

Automatically Publish Future Blogger Articles

I am so happy to have found out about this feature that I had to blog about it immediately... in fact, I found it by searching the exact phrase that I chose as the title to today's article, it only seemed fitting.

A week ago I'd mused about a way to have Blogger automatically post an article on a future date and time that I specify. This would've come in handy last weekend when I was out on vacation, not being able to publish articles I'd already written for the days I'd be out, because I couldn't even get enough internet time to hit "Publish."

Well, turns out there's a beta service that Blogger's testing called Blogger in Draft, which makes it so that when you modify the date of your Blog post by hitting Post Options, when you hit "Publish Post" it will not publish the post until the date and time you had specified.

All you need to do to use this new feature is go to http://draft.blogger.com instead of the usual http://www.blogger.com (I've already changed my bookmark), and the feature will be activated.

I haven't yet tested this feature, but let's just say that if this article, which was written Thursday night, March 27th, actually publishes itself on Saturday, March 29th, at 11 am, then the system works!

Get Clear, Anti-Aliased Font Display with Cleartype

Cleartype shouldn't even be a feature, it should be the default on Windows. It's the app that turns on anti-aliasing (aka smoothing) of the display of fonts on your system. Look at the difference:




Unfortunately this isn't the easiest feature to turn on on Windows. Luckily, Microsoft has a free, browser-based way of activating and tuning Cleartype to make the display of fonts on your monitor as comfortable on your eyes as can be possible. And if the website doesn't work, there's an installation you can download on the same site.

Microsoft Cleartype Tuner

I personally didn't know of the site when I first found out about Cleartype, so I went and used the installable Powertoy. As such, I can't actually vouch for the online version, but I can vouch for the install. Great stuff!

Keep in the Legal Clear With These Public Domain Photo Sites

On my most recent job I was tasked with recreating a 1-second piece of stock footage that would've otherwise cost 10,000 dollars (!) if we'd decided to pay for it. It was a simple motion graphic that involved otherwise still images set in motion.

To recreate the image and not have us in legal trouble, I went about finding similar images online and compositing them in AfterEffects. But many people don't realize that just because you can download an image off of Google, that doesn't mean someone out there doesn't own a copyright to that image, and you could well get into trouble, especially if you use the image without proper credit and for commercial purposes.

Meanwhile, there's an annoying difference between royalty free and public domain. The first means simply that once you have the proper rights to use the photo, you don't have to pay money every time you use it (or for a set amount of time). However, that may still mean that you need to pay for it the first time around. The latter, public domain, means there are no copyrights on the images at all, and you are free to use it once and in perpetuity. As such public domain photos are by definition royalty free, but not necessarily the other way around. So if you really want to make sure you're in the clear downloading photos, make sure they're public domain.

To make it easier on you guys, here are two resources I've found that compiles a good list of public domain photos (and from where I got the photos I needed for my own project):

instant fundas: 25 sites to find royalty free photos for your websites

Wikipedia: Public domain image resources

And good luck with your projects!

Save Windows XP Online Petition

Blog BadXP.com just published an article that iterated the fact that Microsoft is planning on cutting support for Windows XP (not counting security updates) on January 1st, 2009, in order to focus their attention on Vista.

Meanwhile, InfoWorld is running a petition to keep Windows XP support coming. I just signed it myself (click here to do the same), as in the past six years of using Windows XP I've found it to be the most stable and versatile operating system in all my experience as a computer user.

Simple Check if Your Website is Down

Back when I was wrangling with dodgy web hosts, I constantly had to go and check if/when my web servers were down, or back up, or have switched to the proper nameservers. Here are two sites that can help you figure it out, one super simple and that I had found about recently, and another that's far more comprehensive and what got me through the tough times:

Down for Everyone or Just Me - recently featured on Lifehacker, it's about as simple of a server uptime check as you can get: just fill out the question with the URL you're checking, and it answers it for you immediately.

Host Tracker - Host Tracker is the opposite of the former site, in that it gives you concise yet comprehensive information about the status of the URL you are checking up on. It works by having about 25 different servers around the world check your site for a response over a minute or so, and tells you if they got a response and the site is up, or if it's down.

Even better, it shows what ip address your URL is directing to, which is valuable if you're moving your domain to a different host and you want to know how long it's taking for DNS servers around the world to resolve to the proper IP address.