Timely Tidbit: Do All Guinness Records Make it Into the Book?

Yesterday I blogged about Mozilla's attempt to make Firefox 3 the Guinness World Record holder for Most Downloaded Software in 24 hours, and how I'd pledged to support the cause.

Meanwhile, I also asked whether or not every record Guinness accepts gets put into the book. I took a cursory search online but couldn't find an answer.

Well, coincidentally, the Freakonomics blog just recently posted a Q and A with Guinness editor Craig Glenday, which adds a definitive answer to part of my question:

My principle job is to create the world’s best-selling book, and I’m not going to achieve that if I fill the book with boring achievements. As a company, we might still recognize the odd dull accomplishment, but there’s no guarantee I’ll ever print it in the book. Records have to be relevant to as many people as possible. We had a claim for the Longest Wall of Sausages, a traditional creation in, I think, a small village in deepest Hungary. As well as failing to make the grade on so many levels (what’s to stop you entering a Wall of Cheese and a Wall of Bananas, etc. — see previous point) it’s just too specific to one village. And too weird.

I still want to know exactly how they make the editorial decision over which records make it into the book, and which don't. He offers a partial response here:

The main annual records book provides up to 90 percent of our turnover, but we do have other ways of exploiting our database. We have an over-supply of content, as the number of approved claims, plus the number of classic records that our readers demand to see every year exceed the space we have in a single book. But we have ways of ensuring the records are published one way or another.

Interesting! And remember to sign up for the Firefox 3 record attempt!

Help Make Firefox 3 the Most Downloaded Software in 24 Hours!

I absolutely cannot wait until Firefox 3 is released. My excitement for it surpasses even my anticipation for Windows XP Service Pack 3 (which really wasn't all that big of a deal), mainly because of its dramatic memory and speed improvements. If only I wasn't such a pansy about making sure all my necessary extensions and tweaks carry over while retaining all the good stuff about the new release, I'd be rocking FF3 right now.

Anyway, Mozilla is hoping you're excited about Firefox 3 as well, and are aiming to get on the Guinness record books with your help, by being the most downloaded piece of software in 24 hours (do the books Guinness releases yearly have EVERY record they've presided over on it? That seems like a LOT).

If you click on the image above, it should take you to a page where you can pledge your support and sign up for email alerts for when the actual download day is announced. Actually, this is my only real gripe about this project, is that they're organizing this gigantic movement on a date "TBA" (it's supposed to be sometime in June). Can't they just lock freaking release date now and just cram to make sure they make it? Hell, overshoot and say July 1st and just sit tight. It's hard to mark your calendars when there's no definite date.

Anyway, regardless, I'll be there, if I don't finally break down and install a beta myself.

Thoosje Quick XP Optimizer Makes Windows Snappier

Freewaregenius recently featured Thoosje Quick XP Optimizer, which claims to speed up various aspects of Windows XP, including reducing shutdown and startup times, speeding up your internet access, and hard drive access times. As someone who's already gone through pretty great pains to optimize their OS (most especially speeding up shutdown and bootup), this seemed too good to be true, but since it offered one-click restore settings, I figured I'd give it a shot.


As you can see, you have choice to optimize specific options, while leaving other ones alone. When you're ready to go, just hit Optimize, after which it will ask for a restart (immediately or at your discretion).

So how did it work? Well, as I surmised, the shutdown and bootup times were virtually the same, since I'd already optimized those options before. Hard disk access was also virtually the same (I tested by copying a 1.4 gigabyte video file from one partition to another, and back also, and timing it).

What it DID do was seemingly increase the responsiveness of displaying folders in Windows Explorer, as well as showing right-click and Start menu options. I've heard of registry entries that can do this, and I'm assuming this is what this program does. Since those small delays in loading times can add up a lot to a person's computer experience, I'm glad to add these tweaks.

One concern I've got is that I'm not sure whether or not Thoosje's restore function restores registry entries and settings back to factory defaults, or to what I'd had it at when I tweaked it. This can be a concern if/when Thoosje's changes cause problems. But since things are running smoothly so far, it's not a big deal now.

Overall, I'm gonna go and uninstall this application, after I went and set those optimizations. There really isn't much of a point to keep a program like this installed, and in fact I'm disappointed that this required installation to begin with. I'd love to hear what you guys have experienced using this program, especially if you haven't gone and uber-tweaked your system to begin with.

Who's got GDirections for Thunderbird Working for Them?

I'd already featured Jeffrey Palm's awesome GDirections addon for Firefox, which lets you highlight an address in your browser and check it out in Google Maps. Recently I'd been wanting the same feature for Thunderbird, so I can easily map out addresses that've been sent to me.

The official GDirections website claims that the latest version of GDirections (1.1.2) is compatible with both Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2. I even successfully installed the addon for Thunderbird (don't forget to check out our recent article on how to remove the installation delay for Thunderbird extensions). However, even after configuring the Thunderbird extension exactly the same as my Firefox extension, highlighting an address in an email showed no GDirections context menu.

Has anyone else gotten GDirections to work for Thunderbird?

Thunderbird Time: Remove the Install Delay for Extensions!

A few weeks ago I featured how to get rid of the 3 second delay when installing Firefox extensions/addons. This time around, we'll feature how to do the same when installing your Thunderbird addons.

The basic thing to first figure out is where Thunderbird's about:config console is located. You can access it by clicking on Tools>Options>Advanced. From there you click on config editor:


Now to remove the install delay. The option to modify is actually the exact same one for Firefox, which is security.dialog_enable_delay. In Thunderbird this option is set at 4000, which is four seconds. I changed mine to 100, which is 1/10 of a second, which unless you're a human mosquito or hummingbird, should be basically instantaneous:



And that's it! Stay tuned for other tweaks to Thunderbird using its own config editor, which can speed up your Thunderbird experience!

p.s. - this marks my 150th post to GreasyPC! I can't believe when I started posting that I'd make it this far, especially with my rule of making at least one post per day! Thanks to everyone for sticking around this long.

Remove Laptop Battery to Increase Longevity

(stock image of my laptop... not my actual one)

I believe I've alluded to the fact that while I remain fully dedicated to my desktop, four years ago I also bought myself a used, cheap laptop on ebay. It was pretty low end when I bought it back then, and is ridiculously so now. But you know what? It still works for minor web browsing, word processing, and its battery still holds a charge. I bring it along whenever I go on long trips, like when I go back to my hometown.

I still use it every night to read comic books. I keep it by my bed like you would your favorite novel.

Most recently I've started to notice that the battery's capacity has gone considerably down since I started using it in 2004. I think it holds at most just an hour's worth of charge now (when it used to be almost 3). It's normal for these batteries to lose reliability after this much use, but it's still worth trying to keep it going for as long as possible.

This tip on, appropriately, One Tip A Day, suggests removing the battery when you're not using it. Commenters have observed that this doesn't nearly do as much saving as you'd think, but it certainly wouldn't hurt for people like me that keep their laptops plugged in 99% of the time. It is, after all, that 1% that matters the most.

Here's hoping I can make my laptop last at least another year or two. I already love how it runs just as fast if not faster than my sister's laptop, which hardly holds a charge anymore and takes many more minutes to start up, but was bought new after I bought my used one.

Fix it! Is Your Window Opening in the Wrong Size or Wrong Part of the Screen?

Just another quick solution here, like the one where I told you what to do with a window that's gotten itself stuck off-screen. These are the kinds of Windows problems that many of us just don't take the time to figure out, leaving us frustrated whenever it happens, but never actually remembering what we did the last time the problem popped up. Hopefully this time you'll remember it.

So the problem we're talking about, is when, for some reason, whenever you open a program, like Firefox or Notepad or whatever, the size and location of the application window is something unacceptable. It's either too big, too small, or it's half hanging out of the screen. You change the size and location to something you like and go about your business, but the next time you open the application again it's back to where it was before. Even worse, sometimes your changes actually stick, and it's the inconsistency you feel that's really frustrating. At least that's how I used to feel.

To make sure that your window spawn size and position really stick around next time you open the program follow these steps:

1. Open the program. It'll look like the way you don't want it to look.
2. Resize the window and relocate it to your satisfaction.
3. Here's the important part: CLOSE the program immediately. Don't start working on it, and most importantly, do NOT maximize it. Closing it immediately without maximizing it tells windows that this is how you really want this window to spawn in the future. Maximizing the window cancels out the changes you'd made.
4. Open the program again. Voila, it spawns the way you want to!

I know this is probably one of those "duh" moments for a lot of you, but for those of us that impulsively maximize our windows, this just compounds the problem. But now you know how to wrangle those wayward windows!