Kevin Becker dot net

Android Rocks!

As you can see, I made some changes to the website. I was starting to get tired of my theme, so I found a new one. It’s not made by me, but I like it enough to use it anyway. It’s called PhoenixBlue. I just made some small modifications to add support for the Quoter plugin.

I also upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress, upgraded some old plugins, and installed some new ones. The main new thing you will notice are social links below each post. If you like what you’ve read, you can submit the article to one of the social media websites listed. I currently have buttons for Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, Google, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Pownce and Reddit. If you would like another website added, let me know. The plugin I use has a ton more options, but I only added the most common social media sites.

I love YouTube and Google Video. Sure there’s genius parodies of music videos, but there’s important stuff too.

Like a pivotal event in computing history, the demo of the first GUI by Doug Engelbart in 1968 …



…and a retrospective of the origins of the little operating system that could by Linus Torvalds in 2001.

I just noticed a milestone in my Gmail account. For the first time ever, my spam count (the number that shows how much spam Gmail has blocked in the last 30 days) passed 10,000! It’s currently at 10134. I’m glad Gmail’s spam blockers are as good as they are. I rarely get spam anymore.

I was talking with Jonathan about search keywords in Firefox today and said I’d send him my search keyword bookmarks file because he hadn’t used them before. This is one of those things that is too valuable to not share, so I’m posting the info here. The Firefox search keyword is an excellent feature that unfortunately few people know about. It’s basically an extension of the bookmark. Here’s how it works: You can assign bookmarks a keyword. You can then type this keyword into the address bar and the browser brings you directly to the bookmarked URL. In addition to that, there is a special identifier, %s, that you can insert into the address of the bookmark. Then if you put text after the keyword in the address bar, the text will be inserted into the URL where the %s was.

Here’s an example: If you have a bookmark of “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s” and give it a keyword “g”, then typing “g linux” into the address bar will bring you to “http://www.google.com/search?q=linux”, which is a Google search for linux. That’s it.

Here’s a bookmark file that includes the search keywords I use: Kevin’s Search Keywords

Just import that into Firefox to use them. After the cut is a description of each included search keyword.

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I probably should have done it sooner, but I finally did it today. I deleted my MySpace account. I’ve never been a big fan of it. It’s ugly, unintuitive, slow, buggy and stale. The new update to facebook released today puts MySpace so far behind that it’s pathetic. There’s just nothing going on at MySpace anymore. I log in occasionally to see if there’s anything new, but there’s nothing new that’s worth looking at. The only thing i ever find are friend requests from fake accounts or tons of annoying chain letter bulletins that I don’t want to read. It feels like the slums of the internet. Besides, most of my friends are on facebook too, so it’s not a big loss. For those of you that I abandoned on MySpace that aren’t on any other service, I welcome you to join facebook. You’ll enjoy it. Promise.