The Ultimate Keyboard & Mouse from Microsoft

Microsoft presented to the international media today its new Microsoft Entertainment Wireless Desktop 8000.  This keyboard and mouse combo features Blue Tooth Wireless, built-in touch pad along with special buttons for Windows Vista (Media Center PC and other Vista gadgets).  This package will be released in February (shortly after Vista is to be released) with a retail price of $250!!!

The article appears on Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog on the Seattle Post Intelligencer and includes a detailed picture of the keyboard and mouse.  Someone has already comments on his site that at this price Microsoft should throw in a free copy of Windows Vista!

Firefox 1.5.0.7/2.0 Release Schedule Updates

All looks good for Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 to be released on Thursday, September 14th. Also the next milestone for Firefox 2.0 will be Release Candidate 1 scheduled for next Tuesday the 19th. I welcome comments, good, bad or whatever about these builds since I won’t be installing them. At this time I am running the most recent nightly (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b2) Gecko/20060913 BonEcho/2.0b2 ID:2006091303) for Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0a1.

Also, on September 19th, Firefox 2.0 RC1 should, be released.

For more info about these releases see Firefox 2 RC1 And Firefox 1.5.0.7 Release Dates at CyberNet.

Download Statusbar

Thanks to Ryan at CyberNet Tech News for this extension tip! Download Statusbar adds a customizable download status bar just above the main status bar. Now, if you are using the PDF Download extension along with FoxIt, this is a must. The example below shows two PDF documents downloaded (via the PDF Download Extension) in order to be viewed in FoxIt.

Click For Larger Image

Now when I am done viewing the documents, I don’t need them to still be sitting on my hard drive. This is where the Download Statusbar extension is a real time saver, all I have to do is right-click on the file(s) and select ‘Delete From System’. If I use Firefox’s Download Manager I would need to open the manager, select the file, right-click and then select ‘Open Containing Folder’ which would open Windows Explorer and then I could delete the file(s).

The extension work is Firefox 1.5 as well as 2.0 (all builds). I was able to run this with no problems on the most recently nightly on Bon Echo Beta 2.

Funny & Unusal Firefox Extensions

Firefox has around 1800 extensions just on Mozilla Add-ons and countless others from developers who did not want to be listed on Mozilla Add-ons. Today on CyberNet News, a look at some of the funnier Firefox extensions. Now, I have to admit while some of these are quite creative and humors a couple (such as the Random Theme Switcher) if in the hands of the wrong people could provide some really interesting results in an office environment.

See the article: The Funniest Firefox Extensions for full description and download link (Note: some of these are older and may not work with Firefox 1.5.0.X and/or 2.0):

• Ad Bar
• Ant-Paranoia
• Autobrowse
• Firesomething
• Goodbye, Cruel World
• Hammer Time
• Mood Tap
• Office Poltergeist
• Random Theme Switcher
• Remove Links