Credit where due: it’s from here.

A friend of mine from back in California has a video blog, and while I was out there a couple of weeks ago he interviewed me demonstrating my XO Laptop (from One Laptop Per Child).

PROTIP: The linked entry above is a higher-quality video than the youtube embed, but I guess we (still?) can’t do raw HTML embeds here?

Edit by Dave: HTML Embed. It’s good to be admin.

While I’m at it, I’ll mention another handy Firefox extension put out by the folks at BugMeNot (with special thanks to Dmytri Kleiner).

The premise here is simple. You visit a website that expects you to register before they’ll serve up their content to you. You don’t want to, so chances are, BugMeNot has some throw-away registrations you can use for that purpose. The Firefox Extension makes it incredibly easy, and you can grab it right here.

Once it’s installed, just right click on the Id field in the login form and choose ‘Login with BugMeNot’ and if they’ve got one on hand for that site, you’ll zip right in.

I want to tell you about a very handy Firefox extension that could save you some money.

My VOIP telephone adapter went on the fritz the other day and I spent a disheartening amount of time on my cell phone with AT&T troubleshooting the problem. When the replacement came, I spent even more time on the cell phone when installation didn’t go smoothly. The result? I exceeded my allotted minutes by a large margin, and will get an extra $31.50 tacked on to my bill. I know that I got off lucky, and there are some real horror stories out there, but I’m kicking myself for a lack of foresight all the same.

You see, a couple of months ago, I bought a new PC and have been slowly migrating my applications and documents off of my old one. I neglected to port one particular Firefox utility that would have helped me to avoid the sting of over-usage, much to my chagrin. It’s a handy little tool created by Winston Huang, that carries the straightforward and self-referential name “Verizon Minutes Used Firefox Extension”. There’s a version for T-Mobile as well, similarly named, and both may be found here. Thank you, Mr. Huang, for these very useful tools.

Installation was straightforward, which is one of the things that keeps us all loving Firefox, and resulted in a snazzy little Verizon Icon in the corner of my browser. This is what it looks like after it’s been configured. Makes it easy to keep an eye on your minutes used, don’t you think?

Hover, and you’ll get full information as shown below:

Needless to say, I’ve ported the sucker and won’t be frittering my minutes any time soon. I’ve also removed the battery to avoid temptation.