Deal News

Looking for a great deal on a new laptop or PC?  Dealnews.com is a great site that aggregates all the deals on the net each day.  Worth checking out daily like you do with Woot.

Speed Up Firefox

If you have a broadband connection (and most of us do), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup connections). 

• Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Type “network.http” in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
• Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
• Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

SMS on Android - a useful app for work/personal cellphones

Since getting an Android phone, I've been trying to find a way to be happy with the SMS function. Each message from SiteSeer and Orion comes in as a unique thread. When we get pages (lots of them sometimes), they are difficult to clean up unless you want to delete all SMS messages. But this deletes your personal messages too. You can use "batch mode" - but you still have to select each one you want to delete, which is not good if you have tens or hundreds.
Now I'm using GO SMS EX, which is a replacement SMS application on the Android market. This app allows you create a filter list using keywords (I'm using "DataNetwork" and "SiteScope"). These messages aren't really filtered - they are automatically sent to a separate folder. So, this allows you to have a separate "personal" and "work" SMS area. Then you can perform functions (like backup and delete) on an entire folder of messages without affecting the other group of messages.