So, everyone (almost) knows about the PDF download plugin that exists for Firefox right? It’s really popular although I suspect not as much because of some ownership changes. The original plugin author got bought out by NitroPDF software which sells PDF-authoring solutions. The biggest thing I noticed after NitroPDF got involved was the branding and how it integrated into my Firefox experience. Well, as you may know, I already have Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.1.2 installed on my computer so I didn’t need the extra stuff that the PDF download plugin came with. So, I uninstalled the plugin and started tooling around in Firefox for a way to download PDFs automatically. It turns out that you don’t need the NitroPDF plugin if all you want to do is download PDFs (like I wanted to simply do with the plugin initially). All you have to do is get to the “Options” entry (under “Tools”) and get to the “Applications” tab. As you scroll down to the application that you want to change Firefox’s actions for, you will see that you can click the drop-down box and in the case of PDF files, you can sent it to: (i) automatically save the PDF file (ii) always ask you what to do with the PDF file (iii) automatically open the file in the web browser (iv) automatically open the file in the alternative PDF reader of your choice or Adobe Reader as the default application. It is dead easy to you and I would encourage all who are looking to declutter their plugins list to look at the options available in Firefox. Once I discovered that I could do this for PDF files, I went down the list and changed settings for other file types like Microsoft Word documents, etc. So feel free to play with thei settings! I’m not doing an excellent job of explaining how cool this is, but I hope that this picture will speak a thousand words to you. Visit the mozillaZine Knowledge Base article on this very topic and happy tweaking! Not that kind of tweaking, the good kind. π
In other news, the school’s team is set to play today. Okay, I need to chill out with the football references. π I’m not even going to watch the darned game! I will however be wearing my home team’s colors. lol. I plan on watching movies all day long because the dollar theatre finally has a kick-ass selection of movies that I can bear to watch. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is going to be playing and I am sure that I will be seeing it To.Day. I ain’t playin’, folk! I hung out with M at his workplace again and they finally have WiFi in the fastfood restaurant (Subway) that’s inside the center. I’m in total heaven now although my paranoia won’t let me anything, but read news and blandly surf the web. I’m in constant awareness that the traffic is being monitored. I don’t know if it’s benign monitoring or malicious monitoring so I play it safe except in cases where my entire web browsing session is SSL-encrypted. I can check my gmail account because I’ve enabled a setting in my gmail account for my entire mail session to be SSL-encrypted. I can also check out my employer’s sites because they employ SSL-encryption for a lot of the content. I was trying to explain the problem with surfing on free WiFi to a companion and I fear that I didn’t fare too well in my explanation of SSL and web security. I still don’t, but web security is one area that I would dearly love to learn about. With my home WiFi network, I use Network Magic to help with visualizing who’s online, etc. I’ve also taken some extra security precautions such as preventing broadcast of my SSID. Thus, some stranger won’t be able to just log on because they won’t see my network in the first place. My SSID is somewhat unique so this helps out in preventing guesswork. Also, I’ve put a strong password in place and the encryption protocol is WPA2 – Personal. The final thing that would make me happy is the finding a host that will let me send my internet traffic through an SSH-tunnel. I thought my web hosts (DreamHost) would allow this, but it didn’t work out when I tried it according Paul Stamatiou’s directions. So, right now, I won’t mind paying a $5 monthly fee for an service that supports SSH-tunneling as it relates to web browsing. With that, I’ll wrap my musings up and go cuddle with the hubby. What? It’s a Saturday. π