I was having a look at Google Labs when I came across their Google Extensions for Firefox page. There are the obvious ones listed that most people will already know about, including the Google Toolbar, but the one that caught my attention was the Blogger Web Comments Extension.
Basically what this extension does is allow you to see what people are saying on their blogs about the page you are currently looking at. It does this by querying Google Blog Search, so it’s not limited to only supporting blogs hosted by Google on Blogger accounts. Provided a blog is indexed there, comments from it related to the page you’re currently looking at should show up. You can also post a comment about a page directly to your blog, although this feature only works with Blogger accounts, and you have to be running Firefox 1.5 in order to install the extension (but of course you’ve all upgraded your browser anyway, right?).
I’ve just installed the extension on my copy of Firefox and it produces some interesting results, although I don’t know if I’ll use it very often. It’s a little bit obtrusive at first, but you can always close the comments box it shows and from then on there’s just a little icon near the bottom right of the window, so you’ll barely notice it. For anyone who’s interested in blogging in general, or just receiving some commentary on the pages you’re browsing, the extension is definitely worth the thirty seconds or so required to download and install it.
City-wide wi-fi rolls out in UK via BBC News – Technology
Wireless communications company The Cloud is planning to launch wireless broadband services in nine cities across the UK this spring, including Manchester, Birmingham and London. Unfortunately though the networks will only be open to users of BT Openzone, O2, SkypeZones and Nintendo WiFi, which is a bit of a shame, although hopefully other service providers will express an interest in joining. The existing offerings are also ridiculously overpriced, most of them don’t offer unlimited plans (unlike wired broadband provided over your telephone line) and o2’s rate of £6 for 60 minutes is extortionate. It’s a real shame that wireless providers seem to want to charge so much for using their networks, because if there was a reasonable plan with unlimited usage (I refuse to pay per minute/hour, the days of dial up when you had to do that are over) that didn’t cost too much then I’d sign up without hesitation. At the moment the lack of such a scheme doesn’t bother me, because I still have access to the University of Manchester campus wireless LAN, but six months from now I won’t be able to use that and at the moment there isn’t a commercial scheme available that would provide the same service for a reasonable cost.
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Web Developer Extension 1.0 via 456 Berea Street
Web Developer Extension for the Firefox and Mozilla browsers has just reached version 1.0. This plugin is incredibly useful for anyone who does web development as it allows you to see how your site looks without images and/or CSS, resizing of the browser window to 800×600 and quick links to all the W3C validators, plus lots of other menu options to help you test web sites. Admittedly a lot of the options are just redirecting you to URLs with the right parameters already supplied, or making available options that already exist in your browser, but it’s so much more productive to have all these features available in one toolbar rather than having to go through all the Firefox menus to edit one preference.
Quake 2 for PSP via Forever Geek
Although I don’t own a PSP myself, I know a few people who do and this has got to be one of the best pieces of software I’ve seen for the handheld console yet. Quake II was an amazing game in itself when it was first released on the PC, so to be able to carry it around and play it whenever you have a few minutes spare (or on a long train/car journey) is pretty impressive. The first public version has yet to be released, but it’s expected at some point this month. In the meantime, you might want to subscribe to McZonk’s Dev to keep up to date with all the latest news on the project.
Camino 1.0 Hits Beta 2 via Forever Geek
Camino, the browser from the Mozilla Foundation aimed exclusively at OS X users, and the only native OS X browser to use the Gecko rendering engine (Safari uses KHTML, in case you were wondering), has a new beta available for download. I don’t use Camino myself as I find that Firefox generally works reasonably well on, plus I like to use the same browser in Linux, Windows and OS X.
If you’re interested in the details of what’s changed in this version, you can read the release notes. A quick skim reveals built in SVG support, which is quite interesting, although I doubt that many sites use it at the moment so it’s probably not a major feature for most people.
