How to dramatically reduce your firefox memory

CyberNet Technology News is offering a simple tweak for reducing your memory usage in Firefox.

An excellent article on how you can decrease your firefox usage to under 10 MB (from more than 150 MB it usually consumes).

Check it out, this one is really handy.

http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2006/03/26/this-may-help-your-firefox-memory-leak/

Never leave the scene of an RSS feed without taking action

Well..in short, I have been using RSS feeds (I was an avid Newzcrawler fan but I needed something that worked right inside of outlook). I did not see much sense in having two different applications, one for my email and the other for RSS feeds.

So after much experimentation and trying the top 5 RSS aggregators (not including some web based aggregators), I came to the decision that I would shell out some cash for Newsgator Inbox (which I think is definitely one of the best RSS aggregators out there). You can download a trial version here.

I think RSS aggregators and RSS in general as a technology is going to go big in the next few years. Imagine the innumerable applications RSS could be used in.

For those who are un-initiated - here is a quick recap of what RSS is.

One of these days, I intend to post a detailed review of my experience with RSS aggregators and a comparision of some of the best ones I've laid my hands on.

Now, coming back to the title of this post. I've realized after months of using feed aggregators that too much information could be indeed, well, too much..

So I've a simple rule of thumb (well 2 rules of thumbs, one for each) -

1. Always keep an eye out on how many feeds you subscribe to. It's easy to get overwhelmed when you are subscribing to 20 or 30 or 40 or even more number of different feeds. Triage through your feeds, removing and adding feeds frequently. Personally I tend to limit myself to about 20 different feeds ( a couple feeds for news, a couple for buisiness and so on). If I find I'm not using a feed that often, I will just delete it.

2. Once you get to your feeds, each post you come accross should be dealt with right away. Either read it completely and then decide if it's worth keeping, and if it is, decide if it's one of the best reads on that topic or not, flag it if it is and keep it aside. If you don't find the title and the first few lines of the post anything interesting, do yourself a favor, just delete it. You might think you will get to it some day, but every day you will have tens or hundreds of posts coming into your aggregator and you will not have time to go back to posts from days ago.

Oh, and by the way, once you have settled on your feed subscriptions, make a back up of it (export it as an OPML file and keep it somewhere).

Plan Plus for Outlook 4.0 - I bought it

After trying my hands on numerous planning software and GTDs, I've finally settled for Franklin Covey's Plan Plus for Outlook 4.0. I think this is a really neat application especially if you spend a lot of time on Outlook.

Some of the really cool features of this software:

• Prioritized Daily Task List: helps you rank and organize your daily tasks to keep you focused and ensure the most important things get done first
• PlanPlus Home View: places the four most frequently used tools in one convenient view—calendar, e-mail, notes, and task list
• Master Task List: tracks your biggest projects and tasks that have yet to be assigned to a specific day
• Weekly Planning Tool: guides you through a quick four-step process that helps you set aside time for your most important assignments
• PowerNotes: helps you capture important notes in an organized system that allows you to search for keywords
• Project Manager: allows you to quickly organize and track simple projects and integrate project tasks into your daily planning

Here are some screenshots:

The central home view:




Screen shot of projects:



Take this app for a ride and see if if you feel the same. There is a 30 day trial period available and I've some deep discount coupons as well, if you decide to purchase it.

You can read more and download the software from Franklin covey's website.

Am I the first person on this earth to use the official Blogger non-beta ???

I was just in the middle of posting something when blogger suddenly went down. After about 10 minutes it came back up. Before it went down, it was clearly in beta mode, once it came back on it's no longer in beta mode with the text "We're out of beta! See what's new". That probably makes me one of the first people to post on the new blogger version. This happened around 8.30 P.M. on 12/19/2006.

Well..I don't think you really care but then this is my rave and rant blog isn't it :)

Rip streaming music with a ripper

Let's set the stage for this one.

You are working on some programming or finance or whatever it is you do - late in the night and you have some really good streaming music playing (maybe some trance or techno) and you just happen to love the music that's being played right now. How many times do you wish that you could stop time in it's track and just download that music.

Well.if you want to, you can use one of the many stream ripping software. One of the very best ones is an open source software which can be found at http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/

You can run this as a plugin for Winamp 5 or in a stand alone mode.

All you gotta do is simply click start on the stream ripper any time you like some streaming music and it will start downloading the music onto your hard disk. Kapeesh?

DISCLAIMER: Please don't rip copyrighted music and if you do then I ain't responsible!!

Here's a screen shot to help you with: