Gmail adds themes
The Gmail team have started rolling out theme-functionality. They haven't rolled it out to all users yet, but everyone should have it in a few days.
Go to 'Settings' -> 'Themes', and you'll be able to select a predefined theme.
If you're happy with the default theme - even that has been improved and tweaked slightly. You can also try out the old-school, terminal-style Gmail theme.
Sweet!
Controlling Facebook Privacy
Facebook has functionality to create friend-lists (groups of friends). Nice thing is, you can use these lists to block certain people from viewing specific parts of your profile.
Start out by creating a bunch of lists:
A few examples are (for every part you would like to control):
- No-Basic-Info
- No-Personal-Info
- No-Photos
- No-See-Friends
- No-Updates
- No-Videos
- No-Wall
If you like, you can go ahead and add people to these groups. Unfortunately, a list has to contain at least 1-person before you can use it.
Next, go to your privacy settings, then click on profile:
Customise one of the options, for example, click on the drop-down associated with Wall-posts:
Now add the list you created to hide wall-posts to the "except these people" section - in this case, "no-wall"
This is an organised way of keeping track of friend-permissions without resorting to deleting people. If you find that you would like to hide your photos from someone, you simply add the person to the friend-list "no-photos".
You could also create a limited profile for your account and by default, add all friends to it. Next, essentially work in reverse by only allowing certain lists of friends to view your profile.
Improving Photoshop CS4/CS5 Performance
Note: This was initially written for Photoshop CS4, but from what I've seen, it also applies to Photoshop CS5.
If you're having performance issues after installing Adobe's latest version of Photoshop, try having a look at these options:
Allocating more memory to Photoshop
- Edit -> Preferences -> Performance to allocate more RAM to Photoshop.
- Don't use too much (over 90% for example), your OS will need RAM too!
- Don't allocate too little.
- Experiment, try 60% and work your way up or down.
Set up a scratch disk
- This is similar to virtual memory.
- Photoshop needs at least 2GB, but more is recommended.
- It's recommended that you set the primary scratch disk to a different hard-disk than the one Windows uses for its virtual memory or paging file.
- To set up your scratch disk options (requires Photoshop-restart): Edit -> Preferences -> Performance
Set up your cache-levels
- Used to redraw high-resolution images faster.
- The levels range from 1-8 (default: 4), the more levels, the more image-caches Photoshop keeps and the slower images load.
- Setting the cache option to 1 disables image caching.
- Setting the cache option to higher than 4 improves performance when working on large images (by redrawing faster).
- If you use many levels (50+), set the cache option lower: 1 or 2
- If you deal with large-dimension images, use a cache option larger than 4
- To set up cache levels (requires Photoshop-restart): Edit -> Preferences -> Performance
Purge Undo, Clipboard, or Histories
- This clears up memory
- Edit -> Purge
Reduce the number of History states
- By reducing the number of history states, you decrease the amount of memory used by Photoshop.
- To set the number of history states: Edit -> Preferences -> Performance
Saving PSD files with the compatibility feature
- This increases the size of the PSD file by saving a flattened version of the image too.
- If you don't need the compatibility, save without it.
- To set up options: Edit -> Preferences -> File Handling
GPU use
- CS4 makes use of your graphics card's GPU, instead of the computer CPU to speed its screen redraw.
- The display card must support OpenGL (with at least 128MB RAM).
- The display driver must support OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0.
- Make sure you have the latest drivers for your GPU to improve performance.
Disabling OpenGL
- If you experience really poor performance, you might want to try experimenting with turning OpenGL off all-together.
- Edit -> Preferences -> Performance -> Untick OpenGL
Minimize palette preview thumbnails
- Each layer has a preview-thumbnail, minimize the size of these to save memory
- To minimize (or turn off) palette thumbnails, select Palette Options from the palette menu.
- For Thumbnail Size, select the smallest thumbnail size or select None, then click OK.
Bigger Tiles plug-in
- Disabled by default.
- Located in the Optional Plug-ins folder on your application DVD folder.
- Enable only if you have more than 1GB RAM.
- Copy to your extensions folder to enable.
- When enabled, Photoshop redraws more data at a time because each tile is larger, and each tile is drawn, complete, at one time.
- That is, Photoshop takes less time to redraw fewer tiles that are larger than it takes to redraw more tiles that are smaller.
- If you spend most of your time painting or rapidly tweaking controls in filters or panels and watching the feedback, then Bigger Tiles won't help you.
- If you spend your time watching progress bars, Bigger Tiles can improve performance.
FCKeditor – Add WYSIWYG functionality to MediaWiki
I've always found it annoying that MediaWiki (the backbone of wikipedia.org) didn't provide a richer-editor for editing wiki-pages. Sure, I could learn the mediawiki-syntax, but I keep forgetting it. That just means I end up searching Google for a MediaWiki reference guide or keep hitting preview to see what the page looks like.
The FCKeditor-extension adds a much needed WYSIWYG editor. I haven't always been a fan of the FCKeditor implementation, but this works well.
Firefox 3.1 adds Private Browsing
Firefox 3.1 will come with a Private Browsing feature that can be activated through the Tools menu.
Not sure how useful this function really is - all it does is not store traces of your browsing-history on your machine. It doesn't keep you anonymous from websites or your ISP, and is definitely not meant to protect you from spyware that try to intercept your traffic.
This can also be activated on startup by going to about:config, and toggling:
browser.privatebrowsing.autostart
More ways to access ‘Remember the Milk’
Remember the Milk (RTM) is a simple online service for keeping track of To-do lists and tasks.
I get a little put off with the idea of having to visit a website to keep track of tasks, and the guys at RTM obviously understand this. So they've created some useful gadgets and extensions for other services to integrate with RTM.
Remember The Milk for Gmail (Gmail gadget)
This provides a simple interface for adding and managing tasks.
In short, you'll have to activate the gadgets-lab feature in Gmail, then use this URL to add the gadget:
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/gmail/rtm.xml
Remember The Milk for Gmail (Firefox extension)
This is a Firefox extension that provides features to manage your tasks in Gmail (complete, postpone, and edit tasks) and add new tasks.
Remember The Milk for Google Calendar
Remember The Milk for Google Calendar adds a small task icon to the top of each day in Google Calendar.
WordPress 2.7 Beta 1
The new WordPress is ready for download.
The upgrade was easy enough and didn't break any of my plugins.
Apart from the new pretty dashboard-update, WordPress 2.7 simplifies future upgrades by giving you the option of doing it for you. I'll have to wait till the next release to try it out.
Download it here