technology

It looks like Google has launched another service without much fanfare. Gmail’s “New Features” list modestly advertises the new service as “Personalize the Google homepage”, but it looks pretty much like a full featured portal. You can choose which content to display on the home page. Available choices include Gmail (top N messages), weather, stocks, bookmarks, news, arbitrary RSS feeds, search history, and more. I’m not quite sure if I like it, even though it could undoubtedly be useful....

Gmail just keeps getting better. I’ve been using it for about half a year now, and I’ve been extremely satisfied with it. But a few days ago, they added another very useful feature: It is now possible to associate your Gmail account with one or more other email addresses (verification required) and specify those in the “From” field when sending emails. You can specify the default address in your settings, but you can also conveniently change this using a drop-down on a per message basis....

The name may sound a little dirty, but Greasemonkey is a superb Firefox extension that acts as a decorator and allows you to customize the look and feel as well as the behavior of any website you visit by means of custom Javascript files. If you know Javascript, you can write your own scripts - or you can take advantage of the large number of user submitted scripts. Some scripts are generic and act on any website, while most scripts apply to specific websites....

Ken Adams left a comment for my previous posting about my CafePress store and recommended that I check out Spreadshirt instead. After checking out their website, I am pretty impressed. Spreadshirt operates pretty much the same way as CafePress, which means that you can either create a design for yourself and order your own items, or you can open your own virtual store and sell items at a markup. They seem to have a slightly smaller selection of miscellaneous items than CafePress, but in return they offer far more colors for their T-Shirts....

I’ve been playing a little with CafePress. I have to say it’s a pretty cool concept, and very powerful. My daughter Julianna is drawing the cutest pictures these days, and I thought I’d use that opportunity to put my scanner to good use and upload some of those pictures to CafePress. Check out my CafePress store. So far I have uploaded one image called “Happy Guy” (not sure if this is supposed to be me; he certainly has a bit more hair than me ;) )....