A while ago, I noticed a quite popular extension for Google Chrome called “Disconnect”. I do use Chrome on occasion, but mostly Firefox, and I was disappointed that Disconnect wasn’t available for it. What Disconnect does is automatically prevent popular websites (such as Facebook and Google) from “tracking” you. This sort of thing is done by a LOT of websites that install “tracking code”. Often they’ll be using Google Analytics or something else that most people would consider “harmless”, but the whole point is that places you visit are matched to your IP address (ie your unique identity on the web, which in the US will also pinpoint your geographical location) and sent to websites which record and use that information. I intensely dislike that idea. If I’m on widgets.com, I don’t want Google to know that I was there at 7:15am on Wednesday 1st June 2011. If I’m on bollocks.com, I don’t want Facebook to be “told” that IP address such-and-such has visited that site.
So I was understandably thrilled when I heard about Disconnect. Even more thrilled when I discovered recently that it has become available for Firefox (finally!)
And overjoyed beyond belief when I discovered through the feedback comments for Disconnect that there is another addon out there called Ghostery which does even more than Disconnect to protect your privacy online. Their website succinctly sums up what it does: Ghostery sees the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity. After showing you who’s tracking you, Ghostery also gives you a chance to learn more about each company it identifies. How they describe themselves, a link to their privacy policies, and a sampling of pages where we’ve found them are just a click away. Ghostery allows you to block scripts from companies that you don’t trust, delete local shared objects, and even block images and iframes. Ghostery puts your web privacy back in your hands.
I recommend you install one of these addons as soon as possible. Google, Facebook, Yahoo and ad networks don’t need to know about you. Especially without your permission. They’re both completely free. My vote is for Ghostery, mainly because it has more capabilities.
For some reason I had installed two captcha systems on the site and then never actually tested it. I received a report that comments were unable to be added and this was indeed true. I have corrected the problem and comments should now work again, assuming you enter the captcha code correctly. I will also try to minimize any half-baked site tweaking in the future. Sorry about that!
I will seriously buy ALL the Monster energy drinks from the local Frys and take a week off work when this thing comes out.
Amusing how my blog has regressed to be a game countdown. I promise I’ll have something sensible and useful posted on here soon. I’m sure it’ll be the first time for both.
Last post of the year. Following on from my “The Dhry Way or the Highway” Android essentials post, today I’ve decided to make some recommendations about Firefox addons that improve my productivity at work and play. Avid followers of my blog will recall that at one stage I hated Firefox but gradually warmed to it as the dealbreakers started to crumble. Now that most websites actually WORK in FF, I probably couldn’t live without it and this is mainly due to the extension of its capabilities via small addons. This is not to say that I probably couldn’t get similar stuff working with IE and Chrome but I’m just so used to FF these days. If only it loaded as fast as Chrome..
Anyway, on to the addon recommendations. Note that some of the addons below are for older versions of Firefox and you may need to reconfigure your FF to disable addon compatibility checking in order for them to work. Relax, doing this is harmless.
Classic Compact: Coupled with Classic Compact Options, this is my skin/layout of choice. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s wasted screen real estate – too much padding in tables, menus and buttons too large. I’m not blind and ninety years old yet! This skin allows me to fit a very large amount of bookmarks, buttons and other items at the top of the screen in a relatively small space so that there’s more room on the screen for the actual website.
Echofon: Makes it very easy to post to Twitter from your browser without having to login to the site – considering that the browser is the one program I can guarantee will be open 100% of the time while I’m at my machine, this is quite handy for me. Manifests as a small icon in the browser status bar; click it and voilà, a popup window allowing you to read and post to Twitter for multiple accounts. LINK REMOVED: Echofon for Firefox doesn’t exist anymore.
Greasemonkey: Definitely can’t live without this. It’s a framework that allows you to write code which kicks in whenever you visit a page or range of pages. I use it in its most basic form to replace fonts and change CSS padding etc on pages that I regularly visit in order to optimize my browsing experience, but it’s possible to completely change the functionality of sites. There are heaps of user scripts on, wait for it, userscripts.org. Greasefire checks userscripts.org automatically for each site you visit and shows a list of scripts that are enabled for that site and may be of interest.
Firebug: A very good plugin for web developers. Firebug breaks down websites into a lot of technical data, popping a window at the bottom of the screen which allows you to, for example, hover over screen elements and determine the files that they are pulling their CSS from. As well as this you can load a site and find out in realtime which elements are taking the longest to pull from the webserver etc. Helps immensely with my Greasemonkey script development when reverse-engineering sites in order to twiddle them.
DownThemAll: A pretty cool download manager plugin. If you regularly download files from websites, this plugin is invaluable. Works in multithreaded mode too, which allows you to download files faster. I‘ve never managed to figure out why downloading a file from start to finish takes x seconds, while downloading it with eg ten threads takes (x ÷ 10) seconds. Maybe one day I’ll discover the reason.
Tab Mix Plus: Adds functionality to the browser tabs in FF – multiple rows, change tab background and text color, little close-buttons on each tab, min and max tab width, and plenty more.
Shorten URL: I use this many times each day. Very good for sending links to friends or posting them on Twitter. Visit a web page, click this button and it instantly makes a long URL into a short one using one of dozens of selectable URL shortener websites such as bit.ly.
Text Link: In order to click text and have your browser take you to a site, the text has to be a hyperlink. Like the word hyperlink that I just wrote in the previous sentence.. However, unless you hyperlink them manually, text URLs don’t do squat when you click on them. Like this: www.yahoo.com. If you had Text Link installed, you’d be able to doubleclick on that Yahoo URL and have it work exactly like a live hyperlink.
Toodledo: Toodledo.com is probably the web’s most popular reminder system. This plugin allows you to easily add new tasks for yourself on toodledo.com without having to load the main site. Also enables a nice sidebar in FF showing your current tasks.
Mouse Gestures Redox: Once you get used to using this addon you won’t be able to do without it. Essentially it allows you to trigger browser actions by holding down the right mouse button and “drawing” a shape on the screen. For example, drawing an L shape with the right button held down will close the current page, and drawing a line from right to left will make the browser go “back” a page. After you get used to it it saves quite a bit of time and clickery.
Add Bookmark Here²: Allows you to bookmark a web page directly into a location in Firefox – for example, a folder in the bookmarks toolbar or menu. (Normally adding a bookmark makes you perform an additional step in telling FF where the bookmark should be positioned.)
No Color: I use this often. Click it once and it removes all color and background images from a website so all you see are the tables and black and white text. Handy for websites with godawful color schemes; makes the text much easier to read. Click again and color is restored.
OpenDownload: THIS addon was one of the main reasons I started using Firefox after bitching about it for years. It fills a giant gap in functionality by allowing you to “open” a file from a website, similar to how IE does it (Chrome still cannot do this – freaking useless!) Without this addon, Firefox will force you to save a file to your hard drive, whereupon you then need to minimize FF, browse to that folder and manually doubleclick on that file to open it. Pfft.
Textarea++: Ever tried to add a comment or fill in a form on a website, where the text area you’re given is barely the size of a matchbox? This neat plugin allows you to resize any text entry box directly within the webpage giving you a little more textual breathing room. Also adds scrollbars to text areas.
Retro Find: God how I love this plugin. When you press Ctrl-F to find text on a website, Firefox opens this awful, immovable find area at the bottom of your screen. I’ve hated that thing so much, you wouldn’t believe. Retro Find turns the find option into a floating dialog box (similar to what you get with every single other program on earth, eg Microsoft Word, Notepad etc) that you can drag anywhere you like. Yays.
SyncPlaces: A big failing with FF is the inability to export a range of bookmarks so you can use them on another machine. For example, I have a crapload of work-oriented bookmarks on my office laptop, but how to transfer them to my home machine? You can’t, unless you use this addon. Allows to export all, or just some bookmarks, including to an FTP server – and then retrieve and inject them easily into another FF instance elsewhere. However, I’ve found that later versions of SyncPlaces are broken – the last version that worked for me is 4.07 and I recommend you use this too until they fix the damn thing.
ViewSourceWith: FF’s default source viewer sucks. This plugin allows you to use any third-party source viewer you like. My preference is Notepad++.
Edit 20180213: Please visit this site for some webextensions that work with the new Firefox Quantum, which can hopefully replace the older extensions you used to use. –Dhry
The update checker for Notepad++ still doesn’t work.. but why is is pissing me off so much this morning? Click for bigger pic. And no, my firewall isn’t canning the request. And yes, I have internet access.
Lately, a couple of friends have gotten themselves Android phones and have asked me for a couple of tips on which apps to start off with. I’m coming up on about one full year of fiddling around with Android now, and have been through and tossed dozens and dozens of apps (as usual). I’ve got a list of my votes for cream of the crop below, but first, a layout tip. Set your homescreens up in a useful, ergonomic fashion. Some flavors of Android give you a default set of widgets on several homescreens and I can’t help but think that plenty of people just “get used to” the layout they’re given and decide it’s not worth the trouble of tinkering. Trust me, it is. Widgets are extremely useful and a very powerful part of the Android system, and with a little arrangement you can actually cut out several fingertaps because you’ll have arranged your desktop in such a way that your info is instantly available when you look at your phone. You’ll only need to do this once, maybe twice until you’re comfortable. I haven’t changed my desktop layout in maybe three months now. It just works really well for me. Time, date, weather and quick call icons plus some essential apps on the main page, calendar info to the right and Twitter, Barnacle, my to-do list and a couple of news apps on the left. Even my wife’s layout is more complex than that, but like I said, mine works for me.
Now, on to the apps!
Jorte: Strange name, but it’s an awesome free calendar application. It can synchronize with a Google calendar or an exchange/corporate one, and even syncs with Google Tasks. The real power of the app comes in its almost frighteningly huge number of widgets. There are daily, weekly, monthly and task view widgets available in every size from 1×1 through 4×4 allowing you complete freedom to design one of your homescreens with the productivity view that suits you best. Install Jorte, hook it into your calendar and decide which one (or two) of its widgets you like the best. I use the 4×3 month-view and a 4×2 task view (yes, I have 4×5 icons available on my homescreen, more on that in a sec). If you don’t use the widget(s), the app itself is still a fantastic replacement calendar tool.
LauncherPro: Android gives you a standard “home” application – the system that controls the number of desktops you have, number of icons on the desktop etc. LauncherPro is a “home screen replacement” which extends the capabilities of your homescreen environment, giving you the ability to have more icons on each screen, a great scrollable “dock” at the bottom, more homescreens (up to seven, if that floats your boat) and everyone raves about how smooth it is visually. It’s free, but you can pay for additional features.
World Forecast Clock: This is a nice widget app that shows you the time, date and weather for a particular city. Being Australian, I have two of these widgets – one showing the current time/date in Brisbane AUST and the other showing details for my current city of residence in Arizona USA.
K9 Mail: This is a “killer app” for Android. Nobody should be without it. It’s an email application, with a huge amount of features. Forget about using the built-in apps, this one runs rings around them. Can save email/attachments on your card etc. And it’s completely free.
AndExplorer: Once you get well and truly stuck into Android you’ll want to start nosing around your directories on your SD card. This is a nice, small and free file browser. I like it because there’s a nice big button at the top that you can click to jump straight to the root dir of your SD card. And because it’s free.
BeyondPod: If you like reading news on your device, immerse yourself in the world of RSS with BeyondPod. Can sync with Google Reader and update feeds on a schedule. I set mine to update all feeds once every 8 hours, ie 3 times a day. Then the phone is jam packed with fresh news from Engadget, Gizmodo etc for me to read when I’m eating lunch or when I’m (cough) waiting in traffic (cough). Free, but you can pay for additional functionality.
NoteEverything: This is a fantastic app for writing notes – text notes, picture notes, and checklists. I use it as an electronic shopping list. It’s comprehensive, straightforward and just one of those apps that you can’t do without.
Facebook: Blah blah blah, not much to be said about this one, eh? Unfortunately it doesn’t support multiple accounts. Oh, what’s that? You use your real name on there and why would ever want to do anything else? Shame on you. *8-) Android’s FB app isn’t as good as the iPhone one, apparently because only one dude was in charge of writing it and Google “poached” him (pissing off the Zuck in the process) but development has started on it again so it should catch up in terms of features soon.
Multicon: I would have recommended More Icons Widget at one stage, but this one’s free and does just as much. It’s an absolutely essential addition to your homescreen. Basically it takes the form of a widget, but within the widget you can create smaller “icons”, effectively allowing you to have a huge amount of icons on your desktop instead of being constrained to 4×4 (or indeed 4×5 with LauncherPro). Icons can be shortcuts too, so I’m using this to have a sort of “dialer bar” with icons allowing me to quickly text, email and call my wife. YMMV, of course. You can create as many of these icon-containing widgets as you like.
Timeriffic: This is another awesome idea. Basically this app controls settings on your phone based on time of day. Like their description says, you can have the program “unmute audio @ 7am; turn off vibrate and audio at 10pm for sweet dreams.” I have this set up to decrease my phone volume at 9am (work) so I don’t annoy my coworkers, increase it again at 6pm, drop the brightness to lowest at 11pm and mute the phone, and reset stuff (including unmute) at 6:44am before my alarm goes off at 6:45am. All completely automatic. For more functionality (but not free), check out apps like Settings Profiles (hey, they have a lite version now, I never knew!) and the big daddy app of this genre, the ever-popular Locale. Ten bucks for the latter is a little steep though.
Android OS Monitor: No self-respecting geek should be without this (or a similar) app. It’s a task monitor like you get on Windows. Provides an animated tray icon showing you how much CPU power is being used, run the app from the windowshade area and you can see a list of all apps, their cpu %usage and more. Has other stuff like network interface info, established TCP/IP connections and some other tech data. Free.
Meebo: I’m not a big IM’er (I use it for work but not really anytime outside of that) but if you are, check out Meebo. The app can either hook you into Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Google Talk etc, or else it can link you to your account on the meebo.com website. On their site, create an account and then add in all your other IM accounts, and you can then log into multiple IM systems from one central “middleman” concept. Handy, unless you’re paranoid and think that Johnny Meebo might steal your shizzle. In which case, please sell your Android phone since Johnny Google is far worse..
FBReader: There are two great ebook readers on Android. The most popular is Aldiko which has a fantastic interface and some awesome features, pretty much rivalling the iPhone’s flagship ebook reader app Stanza. But I prefer FBReader. It just loads faster and takes me straight into a book if I’m in the middle of one, rather than jumping to the bookshelf mode and forcing me to reopen the book I’m reading. Both are free; ebooks are typically not (unless you get stuff from Project Gutenberg). A hint –> get the awesome but sluggish Calibre prog for Windows if you’re considering hardcore ebook reading. By which I mean “you intend to read a lot of ebooks in the future”.
Gentle Alarm: My favourite alarm clock app. Set an alarm (like your favourite MP3 – I myself have Visa Röster’s Human Race Subtune 4 as my wake-up alarm of choice) to play a minimum volume, and a duration that should pass before the gradually-increasing volume hits maximum. After the trial, the app can fire your alarm on every day except Wednesday to convince you to buy it. Pfft. I just use my iPod alarm on Wednesdays. *8-) This prog also has a unique “pre-alarm” feature, where it does a tiny beep about 30 mins before the main alarm fires, to kind of gently “nudge you up” from delta to alpha sleep in preparation for wakey wakey time.
Universal Androot: Android OS’s typically come “locked down” by the provider/manufacturer. Meaning that there are certain system-level things that you are not permitted from doing. You need to hack the system and gain “superuser” rights before a new world of functionality opens up for you. Most people don’t need this. If you’re a nerd who just got Android, you need it. Unless you’re a Mac nerd, in which case you’re not a nerd at all and you don’t need it. But I digress. The method of gaining superuser permission on Android is commonly known as “rooting your phone”, a term which may make some Aussies chuckle. *8-) Once rooted you can run programs like Barnacle (a program which shares your phone’s internet via adhoc wifi) and Titanium Backup, which backs up your entire phone to the SD card but for some arcane reason needs root access to do it.
Handcent SMS or ChompSMS: Both of these free apps replace the default text messaging app, and both of them have immense amounts of customizability. They’re really neck-and-neck in terms of which one you’d want to use, but my preference leans toward Handcent – purely because Chomp forces you to use the “bubble conversation” visual style made famous on the iPhone, and I prefer text that isn’t encapsulated in gay crystalline speech bubbles. YMMV.
Supacount: Just a simple countdown app, but you can have multiple timers running simultaneously if you so choose.
And now for the last-but-not-leasts:
Yelp is great for finding local food reviews and “checking in” to restaurants during a visit. Touiteur is the best Twitter client on Android, and has a great widget too (although TweetCaster is really close behind). Better Cut allows you to create shortcuts on your desktop but select your own names for them rather than being stuck with the default app name. Dolphin HD is probably the most popular browser replacement on Android. CacheMate is for rooted phones only and allows you to clean out caches and junk to restore free space periodically. Quick Settings is a great control panel program for fiddling just about every setting on Android. Got To Do is a task/to-do app, which allows you to sync with the hugely popular Toodledo website (you don’t have a free Toodledo account> – GO GET ONE NOW!) and gives you a task list widget to help keep you organized. WidgetLocker allows you to put widgets on your lock screen so, for example, you can see your calendar or to-do list while your phone is still locked (== awesome). Voice Recorder allows you to record your voice – duh! SpringPad is a free note-taking app that syncs your info with the website – have a look at the website and create a free account to see everything it can do before you decide if you’d like the app.
And finally, if you have the cash, you might like to invest in the mighty Tasker. At $6.30, it’s not cheap, but it does everything. Don’t believe me? Check out the tour of the app’s capabilities on its website. After viewing the tour, I guarantee you’ll be pleased you invested in an Android phone.
Boy, it’s been a while. Thank god for Twitter – at least it allowed me to jot down some quick day-to-day notes instead of forcing me to settle down and write a huge, long-winded paragraph about something mundane (like I ever do that). However, I’ve decided to bust WLW out after months of absence due to the following news: I bought an iPod Touch 4G!
This may surprise some and outright flabbergast others, but if you fall into either of these two categories you never really “listened” to anything I’ve said over the years. I’m not anti-Apple, anti-iPod or anything like that. I’ve always liked all sorts of technologies and greatly enjoy playing the good points off the bad for each particular program, platform, device, whatever. What pissed me off most about iPhones after the “flocking” started was, put simply, uneducated decisionmaking. I asked iPhone owners who I actually respected technically what the deal is with them months and months ago, and this is what led to my disillusionment post back in July last year. Since that post, Android arrived and fulfilled pretty much everything I needed in a smartphone. But as predicted, now that everyone else has caught up to (and in several cases, far exceeded) where the iPhone was – at least in terms of the touchscreen display and app store/market concept – Apple has been forced to get off their arses and furiously gallop with the rest of the OS and device manufacturers. Single-tasking isn’t good enough. 320×480 displays were around back in 2002. Cameras on PDAs were around at approximately the same time.
I bought my wife an iPod Touch several months ago. I knew that most of the stuff it did would be stuff she liked, and most of the stuff it couldn’t do wasn’t stuff she would care about. In fact, she now has a DroidX and absolutely loves it – and the old iPod has been filled with toddler games. My kid now enjoys stuff like Angry Birds, Luxor etc when we need to keep him occupied. Fast forward a bit to when the iPhone 4G was released in June of this year. Finally, they’ve updated the resolution on the system – they forged to the front of the pack with a 960×640 display which impressed even me. Still, here in the US, AT&T is classified as one of the worst carriers in the country, and having an exclusive deal with Apple for the iPhone has been a dealbreaker for many, even above the shortcomings of the device itself. Then, on Sept 1st, Steve Jobs announced that the improvements to the hardware and OS in the iPhone 4G would be brought to the iPod Touch product range. And that’s when I decided to buy one.
Make no mistake, I would never choose an iPhone in its current incarnation for a smartphone – I’m still extremely happy with my Droid – but the Touch is a different story. For a screen that still remained more or less the same physical size as the previous Touch, 960×640 is an astronomically high resolution. The single-tasking concept is still there, but with the faster processor this actually works in its favour. Now, with a phone that I run my life off of, I WANT background apps running at all times to give me reminders, tell me the weather, show me my battery usage etc. All that is mandatory. But with a “fiddle device” like the Touch, I prefer that other stuff not be running. Because I plan to just fiddle with it – play games and the like. I won’t be using it for reminders, I won’t be using it for any sort of office productivity – my Droid does all that far, far better. I don’t even think I care much for Apple’s push notification stuff, and I sure as hell will be jailbreaking it as soon as the exploit is available for IOS v4.1 (any day now, apparently) because at a very base level I resent something that I own being sectioned off from me doing whatever I like with it or to it. And yes, jailbreaking is explicitly exempted from the provisions of the DMCA. According to Wikipedia, anyway.
For those who have been under a rock for the last few months, here’s some brief specs on the iPod Touch 4G: 8/32/64Gb models available. Front-facing AND rear-facing camera – about time. Built-in microphone – about time. Slimmer – in fact, at 7mm thick, I would say it’s actually a little TOO slim – very prone to slipping and sliding around in your hand – I’d have appreciated a grippier back, but I’ll get a case for it soon. And that high-resolution display; they say that the pixels are so small that you can’t even see them anymore, and after a lot of squinting I’d have to agree. The visuals are sensational. Came bundled with headphones, but they all do these days. HD video recording – 720p – isn’t anywhere near as good as my Kodak ZI8 but see, that’s why I actually own a Kodak ZI8. The camera allows you to tap on the screen to focus in that particular area and gamma up or down as necessary – a nice touch, if you’ll pardon the pun. Photo quality is blah, but then one can’t really expect too much from a pinhole camera in a device thinner than a typical pocket notepad or ballpoint pen.
So now I want to talk about the lie that is Apple’s “multitasking”. With the new OS versions, you can double-press on the button at the front to bring up a pop-up dock of the most recently used applications. This allows you to switch to one app from another, without having to go back to the homescreen first. The net effect, my friends, still remains the same. Apple are doing this in a very similar way to Palm OS’s “multitasking” in that almost all apps will simply freeze their current state – usually “remembering” the screen you were on in that app – and then go away and not continue to run when you start a new app. This has a very few exceptions, such as Pandora being able to continue to play music in the background, but it’s not multitasking. In fact, all it does is clutter things up – imagine I use twenty apps, then double-press the home button. All I see are the last twenty apps I used. I can slide left and right to select any of them, but what’s the point? I could hop back to the homescreen and select another app just as quick, sometimes even quicker. I don’t care, because as mentioned the Touch is just something to futz with in my spare time. But I still maintain that nobody in their right mind should ever consider their primary PDA/phone to be a device to that is patently incapable of doing something while something else is running – triggering a backup, showing you a to-do reminder, etc. Android is still streets ahead in practicality. Apple just temporarily leapfrogged Android devices with the screen resolution. I promise, it’ll be a temporary lead – like all tech innovations these days.
Since Android has allowed developers to access such a vast amount of system internal workings, I think devs have started to get a sort of “unix” complex about programming. A HUGE percentage of apps now on Android concentrate on multitasking, background services and allowing you explicit control over the guts of the thing – battery usage on a per-app, per-time-period basis with graphs and pie charts and the like, the phenomenal Tasker program which allows automated control to an extent that blows my mind, and more widgets and readouts than you’ll ever need in your life. But when you go looking for games on Android, you get what? Connect 4, Solitaire, brick breaker and a couple of other things that a first year compsci student could program blindfolded AND drunk. Admittedly, there’s maybe ten or less actual quality games out at time of writing. But development is slow, and the very feature that makes Android so cool – MULTITASKING – works against the concept of something which has typically needed exclusive usage of all your device’s resources. Bonsai Blast on my Droid, for example, is jerky as hell. And yet there are hundreds of very high quality games on the Apple platforms – PLUS the OS by default gives you everything it has for the foreground app. You know, what Android really needs is a “system exclusive” mode that forces every single third-party background app to freeze while the foreground app runs so that you can get 100% juice on-demand. I hereby copyright that idea *8-) It’s obviously still early days with Android app development now, but I’ve started to get a little tired of waiting for the creative breadth of apps that Apple has to make their way across. Where’s Luxor? Where’s SIDPlayer? Now I don’t have to wait (shrug). And maybe I’d have had to wait a long time..
A while ago, I noticed a quite popular extension for Google Chrome called “Disconnect”. I do use Chrome on occasion, but mostly Firefox, and I was disappointed that Disconnect wasn’t available for it. What Disconnect does is automatically prevent popular websites (such as Facebook and Google) from “tracking” you. This sort of thing is done by a LOT of websites that install “tracking code”. Often they’ll be using Google Analytics or something else that most people would consider “harmless”, but the whole point is that places you visit are matched to your IP address (ie your unique identity on the web, which in the US will also pinpoint your geographical location) and sent to websites which record and use that information. I intensely dislike that idea. If I’m on widgets.com, I don’t want Google to know that I was there at 7:15am on Wednesday 1st June 2011. If I’m on bollocks.com, I don’t want Facebook to be “told” that IP address such-and-such has visited that site.
I recommend you install one of these addons as soon as possible. Google, Facebook, Yahoo and ad networks don’t need to know about you. Especially without your permission. They’re both completely free. My vote is for Ghostery, mainly because it has more capabilities.
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