Five Acres with a View

TheOpenCD has a variety of Open Source programs that will run under Windows, including OpenOffice.org and Mozilla.

OOo Off the Wall: Setting Up Page Styles in OOo Writer discusses how to set up pages styles in Open Office. Until I read this article, I didn’t know Open Office had page styles.

I just uploaded to Firefox 9.1. Although most of my configuration came along for the ride, I had to reinstall my extensions. I had been using SwitchProxy and Web Developer. In the process of loading these, I discovered TextZoom, which automatically zooms the text when a new page loads.

Someday, I will probably really want to use this article on how OpenOffice handles lists. With MS Word, I could never figure out whether I had just failed to understand how numbered lists were supposed to work, or that they didn’t, in fact, work.

Despite having long thought web mail a necessary evil, I am beginning to enjoy using Gmail, the recently introduced web mail application from Google. Although I am not interested in it for my “personal” email, I have been routing most of my email discussions lists there. It is nice to know that I can search for information that I once read via email, rather than having to use the limited search facilities provided by yahoogroups, for example.

I’ve also been interested in the way that Gmail filters Spam. If something spam-like ends up in the Inbox, I can mark it and click on a “Report spam” button. (Did Google get a special dispensation from Hormel? Or has Hormel decided to stop fighting this battle?) When I check the spam folder, I find not only those things that I have marked, but an accurate filtering of spam items I never saw in my inbox, including mail that discusses spam. Drive-by spammers are not unusual on some of the art discussion lists which I frequent, and one spam will frequently lead to five posts condemning it, which seems rather pointless.

Firefox Help: Keyboard Shortcuts gives a keyboard shortcut cross reference between Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera.

When browsing with Firefox, I use Privoxy as a proxy to avoid annoying popups and other intrusive advertising. However, there are some sites where privoxy interferes with the correct operation of the site, and it was a pain to have to drill down through Firefox’s menus to turn off the proxy.

SwitchProxy is an extension for Mozilla and Firefox that puts an additional toolbar on the browser so that one can switch between proxies or have no proxies at all. It also allows one to use a proxy that works as an anonymizer while browsing.

A story in NewsForge writes about Linux in action: A public library’s success story in Howard Country, Maryland. I enjoyed this article not least because my grandmother was at one time a Howard County librarian. I still remember helping her by shelving books, which seemed to me a great opportunity to find new authors.

This week, I upgrade my Linux box to Fedora Core 2 Test Release 2. This is a beta release, and the attitude in the documentaton at the website is definitely one of “don’t try this at home, kids.”
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On my Linux desktop, I use a program called J-Pilot to keep my Palm information up to date. For some reason, I didn’t think there was anyone currently maintaining this program, but just saw that there was a new point release.