Archive for January 2009

Firefox Add-on Mojo

January 23, 2009 TechMojo No comments

I use Firefox for just about everything — including writing articles — and even though Internet Explorer is playing catch-up I doubt it will ever have the vast array of fun and useful add-ons available to Firefox. These are the ones I use personally:

  • Foxmarks – Synchronizes Firefox settings between home and work computers (replaces Google Browser Sync, which Google abandoned).
  • Evernote [Website / Firefox download] – Allows saving web-based information from websites (among other things) with notes, while browsing (replaces Google Notebook, which Google abandoned).
  • IE Tab – Brings up Internet Explorer as a Firefox tab for those (dwindling) sites unfriendly to Firefox.
  • PayPal Plug-In for FireFox – Awesome tool that not only makes it simple to use PayPal for online purchases, but will also instantly generate one-time-use credit card numbers to purchase from places that don’t take PayPal.  You can get the PayPal plugin by logging in to your PayPal account and looking in the left sidebar.
  • Video Download Helper for Firefox – Allows you to capture YouTube type videos as local files.  You know, just in case you find something you know that YouTube will yank within twenty minutes.
  • Xinha Here – Full WYSIWYG editor in a window.  Awesome for blogging, etc… but becoming increasingly unnecessary, due to AJAX.

There are a zillion more. This is where you can find the rest: Firefox Add-ons

Also, if you’re using IE Tab and want a spell checker inside, get the Internet Explorer extension IE Spell.

(This is an updated version of a article posted originally in 2007)

Outbreak of Salmonella

January 8, 2009 FearlessMojo No comments

image According to Reuters, the CDC announced today that there’s been an outbreak of Salmonella food poisoning, affecting 388 people across 42 states.  Sounds scary.  But…

There are about 300,000,000 people in the United States.

Three hundred million people, and 388 of them get sick.

Odds that it will affect you?  Roughly 1 in 773195.

Plus, only 18 percent of them (70 people) ended up being so sick they had to go to the hospital.  That puts the odds of you being sick enough to be hospitalized to 1 in 4,285,714.  On top of that, this didn’t just happen … the outbreak began in September, so it’s not like 70 people all ended up in the hospital today.  Seventy people over the last four months.  That puts your odds of being affected by this on any given day to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in five-hundred-million.

Always keep these numbers in mind when the news media announces these brash, fear-mongering reports.

Anyone remember the Bird Flu?  Are you dead from it yet?  No?

Right.