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A couple of cool tools to make life more fun

As some of you know, I dabble in technology from time to time. I've been using a few new things that I thought I would mention. First off, I installed Ubiquity on Firefox. Its supposed to be part of Firefox 3.2 according to this site. So far, I find the interface a bit clunky and I haven't had my Oh wow moment, but it still is pretty cool and makes Google and Wikipedia searches a lot faster. The other really awesome thing about this is the ability to change tabs etc without using the mouse. I know you can use Ctrl-Page Up and Page Down to do that and there are extensions to cycle through to the most recent tab via the Ctrl-Tab extension (which I use as well), I still like to type the tab names to go to where I want. I would still like to see cool things like... me being able to link to something I search for (sort of like a link to chumbawumba tubthumping on youtube) or plugging into facebook. I am sure some of those kinds of features will come online soon. On the whole though, it is a good first attempt and something I use.

I was browsing the Gmail blog and found a couple of neat things you can do with Gmail now. Multiple Inboxes is just awesome, especially if you have large wide-screen montiors. I've been usuing Google Lattitude for a while now and I am not sure whether its coolness evens out the creepy-ness of it... but it is cool none-the-less. I found out about Google Sync from the blog today and I am absolutely stoked. I've wanted a way to integrate my Google Calendar with my BlackBerry for ever since I got my Gmail account integrated and finally, it has happened. This will make personal/non-work calendar items stay out of the office Exchange server. For example, I don't really want anyone at work to know that I am going to cut my hair (or go on a date or see the proctologist). But that's how it was because you created a calendar item, the phone sync'ed it to the Exchange server. Now, only Google will know :). Google Sync also updates your contacts; this means that all your contacts are now stored as Google Mail contacts. This is good because you may have contacts in your Gmail account or on your phone but may need to have them in the other place... anyway, its just very useful. And it syncs as you update on either side, which is nice as well.

So far, these things have made my life a bit easier and I am glad to use them. Try them out and see what you think.
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