KPAO by Dave Cortright

You are not so smart (.com)

This is a fantastic blog on basic concepts in human psychology. I have gotten something out of every article I've read so far.

Infectious song: Your Heart Is an Empty Room by Death Cab for Cutie

And all you see
Is where else you could be
When you're at home
Out on the street
Are so many possibilities
To not be alone

Tabberwocky trumps Tab Candy for Firefox tab management

I appreciate what Aza Raskin from the Mozilla Labs team is trying to do with Tab Candy. But the fact that it requires the user to actively manage the organization of tab groups immediately turns it into a 10% feature at best.

People are lazy. They don't want to manage meta-data. Hell, they don't even want to manage their regular data (e.g. finances) but reality is a forcing function. The stakes are higher.

What I like about Tabberwocky is it the simple approach helping you manage your tabs: it reduces the minimum width for tabs to prevent horizontal scrolling. I set my minimum to 54px, which is just enough to show the favicon. I can fit over 20 tabs on my screen this way. If I forget what a tab is, I can mouse over to see the tooltip, or just click it. Or use keyboard shortcuts like Cmd+1-9, or Cmd+Option+left/right.

Tab Candy adds another layer of hierarchy for me to manage, and that is one additional layer too many for me.

Update: You don't need Tabberwocky. Just go to about:config and type tabMinWidth in the search field. Set the value to 40.

Weeding out the cruft on CraigsList

This is the query I use for searching CraigsList:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=%s&srchType=T&minAsk=2

I have it saved as a Firefox keyword bookmark.

There are 2 important aspects of this query:

1. It searches for items priced above $1. This weeds out all the DBs who claim the item is $1, but then in the body of the post ask for a different price, or a best offer. I got tired of seeing these, and more tired of flagging them. Now I just don't look at them anymore.
2. It restricts the search to keywords in the title only. Another annoying tactic is to cram keywords at the bottom of a post so that people searching for related products will see it.

Once I get to a search results page, I can always tweak these settings if i want to expand my scope. But it's a good way to start any CL search.

One more search tip. you can use a dash before a keyword to exclude it from the search results. This is a good way to avoid seeing accessories when you want the item itself. for example:

iphone -case -jailbreak -connect

Happy searching!