everyday

Unbeknownst to most, your when you provide your user name and password to the Google Notifier for either Gmail or the Google Calendar you are transmitting those credentials in plain text. In order to secure your credentials, you need to configure the Google Notifier to transmit your credentials via secure http (https). To do, follow the directions in this article on macosxhints.com. I have discussed security in regards to Gmail before (see: “Secure your Gmail“), but that wasn’t necessarily in regards to the notifier.

While this may not seem all that important to you, just take a moment to consider how much of your personally identifiable information is transmitted through email. Without securing your credentials, you are inviting anyone to sniff your packets and pull any information that they want.

As far as I know, this little tip only works on the wonder-filled Mac OSX operating system.

With the advent of tabbed browsing (thanks to Firefox!) I have learned that I really do not like new windows popping up, no matter what the reason. When I click on a link in Gmail, I do not want a whole new browser window opening, I just want the linked item to appear. I think it is a control issue, I do not want the person making the web page to decide for me how content will appear. That being said, here is a tip on how to get Firefox to behave like I want it to!

1. Open Firefox
2. Click on “Tools”
3. Click on “Options”

This will bring up the various options for Firefox. The main categories of options in Firefox are:

• General
• Privacy
• Content
• Tabs
• Downloads
• Advanced

As you can probably guess, we will be choosing “Tabs”. Once opened, the “Tabs” options can be seen. Find the checkbox that is labelled: “Force links that open new windows to open in:” and select the radio button that is labelled: “a new tab”. That’s it! Now whenever a webpage attempts to open a new browser window, it will be forced to open it as a new tab in the current window.

Another tip for eliminating annoying windows is to use Microsoft’s Tweak UI to disable any program from setting itself as the current focus of the desktop (warning: downloading Microsoft’s programs may require you to validate your current Windows installation). When set properly, the program trying to focus itself will simply flash it’s placeholder in the taskbar alerting you that it requires some attention. I for one find it extremely annoying to have a window pop up and grab the OS’es focus right when I am in middle of some task that I really do not want to be interrupted from. Tweak UI is part of Microsoft’s “Power Toys” for Windows XP. These are small collection of programs that make Windows a little more useful.