therning.org/ magnus

I am very keen on keeping my private and work information separate. E.g. I would never read my personal and work email in the same MUA, instead I read work email in Thunderbird and the few times I read private email during working hours I do that using the web interface to GMail. At home it’s the other way around, Thunderbird for personal email, and a web interface to read work email. I used to have a similar setup for my browsing to keep bookmarks and saved passwords for the different areas of my life separate. Firefox was my work browser and Epiphany was my personal browser.

With the recent move to use webkit I noticed that there are a few bits with Epiphany that really bugs me though. Especially its inability to remember passwords; on my Eee it’s just a killer to not be able to do that. So, I decided to take a look at Firefox again, especially to see whether there are any add-ons that would help. And there are. These are the add-ons I found useful for this:

Profile Manager and Synchronizer

The most important piece of the setup is the addon Profile Manager and Synchronizer. It make sit easy to have more than one instance of Firefox running at the same time, with different profiles active in each one.

At first I tried synchronising profiles via dropbox, but that resulted in a lot of updates each time so I quickly stopped. I can recommend using it once though, to get the profiles to all the computers in the first place.

The plugin author says there will be a version that works with 3.6 soon. In the meantime I can report that I’ve had no issues with manually modifying the version range just to get it to install.

Xmarks

Since I don’t synchronise my profiles I do need to synchronise my bookmarks, and for that I use Xmarks.

Diigo

Diigo is a social bookmarking site. There seems to be about 13 to a dozen of those, but there are a couple of things that make Diigo different.

With the plugin I can easily store away pages for reading at some later date. In the past I’ve had a bookmark folder, or slightly more recently a tag, that I used to mark up pages that I’d like to take a closer look at. I’ve stopped that completely, and now I just mark pages as unread in Diigo. Just another way of reducing the clutter among my bookmarks.

The probably coolest feature is commenting on webpages. I mostly use that to add private comments to web pages, e.g. when I do some research into some topic (so far it’s mostly been for items I’m considering buying), but it’s also possible to make public comments. I’ve found it useful on more than one occasion to have a quick look through the public comments other people have put on pages.

The condensed version: I’ve found both YogaStudio and Yoga United to be excellent online stores for yoga equipment.

Longer version

About a month ago I decided to finally invest in a yoga mat. After a bit of research I found the prAna Revolution, it’s an extra wide, extra long mat made of natural rubber. I decided to order it from YogaStudio. It was completely eventless and slightly quicker than I expected. So two big thumbs up for YogaStudio.

After receiving the mat I realised I really would need a bag for it. I found it very difficult to find a bag that would fit my slightly over-sized mat. Finally I stumbled on Yoga United, who had a good price on an extra long bag made out of cotton. They also delivered quicker than expected, unfortunately they didn’t ship the one I actually ordered. What I got was the smaller size bag, too small for my mat, but it fit my wife’s mat perfectly and she wanted to keep it. Instead of the hazzle of sending it back I agreed with the lady at Yoga United that it would be simpler for them to just let me order another extra long bag and let me keep the one I had. The second bag arrived the next day. Again brilliant service.

Finally, I can really recommend the mat I bought. Yes, it’s pricy, but so far I’ve found it to be brilliant. The bag, you ask. Well, the mat doesn’t really want to stay rolled up, if I put it that way. Also, cotton isn’t a material that natural rubber slides easily on. It isn’t that hard to get the mat into the bag, but it helps to be patient