I’m often acclaimed (and shamed) for my geekiness, and as ruler of my Geekdom, sometimes I will deign to share invaluable tips with noobs and other loyals subjects (kidding) :D

I have to say it now, though - if you don’t have it already, install Firefox. I have had clients replace Internet Explorer with Firefox across their whole company and within days the incidents of virus, malware and spyware problems reduces DRASTICALLY (90-95%).

One of the best things about Firefox is that you can install add-ons. These are little programs that give additional functionality to your browser.

My top 3 favourites are:

  • Foxmarks (if you use multiple machines, or want to be able to access your bookmarks when you are away from your computer and have access to an internet connection, this is for you. If you have multiple computers it will automatically synchronise the bookmarks available on all of them)
  • Piclens (Windows and Mac only - and wow! What an awesome way to look at pictures. Once you’ve installed it, go to Flickr or even Google Images, do a search and then click on the little ‘Play’ triangle that appears over images when you mouse over them… Wow is all I can say)
  • Fireshot (Windows only - takes screenshots and allows you to draw all over them. Very useful if you need to highlight something from the web or explain things to people. Totally cool)

My Productivity Find for this week is something that could potentially be abused and allow you to procrastinate too much, however hitmelater.com is like a snooze button for email. Get an email that you don’t want to deal with until Monday - that’s OK, just forward to monday@hitmelater.com. It will be sent to you on Monday. This may just work for me as my email is like a to do list, and at the moment it is at 100 active tasks, but not all of them are for today. hitmelater.com allows me to forward it to the email address for a specified day (or even for a number of hours - eg. 7@hitmelater.com will resend you the email in 7 hours.

I love the idea of rememberthemilk, however it just isn’t in my face enough like email is.

Hope you find this stuff useful.