Helpful Software and Firefox Setup

I recently read an inte­res­ting SH/SC topic over at Something Awful con­cer­ning help­ful pro­grams and neat win­dows hacks, etc… . Inci­den­tally, I now have some lovely and cus­to­mi­za­ble pro­grams on my desk­top that I am now going to share.

1. Rain­len­der — A pro­gram pro­vi­ding a fully func­tio­nal, skin-able calen­dar on your desk­top
2. Rain­me­ter — Made by “Rain” again, this pro­gram moni­tors your sys­tem and dis­plays out­puts on your desk­top. E.g. HDD space, memory, cpu tem­pe­ra­ture, weather, net stats
3. CClea­ner — “Crap Clea­ner”, cleans up mru lists, temp files and lots of unu­sed lef­to­vers from other pro­grams. Lots of peo­ple were repor­ting dele­tion upwards of 4Gb, per­so­nally it only dele­ted 250mb on my sys­tem, mainly fire­fox temp files.

Addi­tio­nally, something I have had for a long time and gra­dually added to:
I have some very cool quick search fire­fox book­marks I made myself, i.e. I type “what giraffe” and it will load the page corres­pon­ding to Giraf­fes on www​.ans​wers​.com. Simi­larly, “define giraffe” gives the goo­gle defi­ni­tion, “goo­gle giraffe” searches goo­gle, img — ima­ges, wiki — wiki­pe­dia, play — play​.com pro­duct search, amg — all­mu­sic guide, word — dic­tio­nary loo­kup, thes — the­sau­rus loo­kup. There are lots more but these are the ones I use most. Com­bine these fea­tu­res with my exten­sions: Gmail Email noti­fier, Adblock and exten­sive fil­ter list of all major ad pro­vi­ders, BlogThis right click exten­sion, Down­load Sort that auto­ma­ti­cally puts filety­pes in spe­ci­fied fol­ders without the anno­ying browse dia­lo­gue appea­ring all the time, Add Book­mark Here lets me quickly and easily orga­nise favou­ri­tes and finally Grea­se­mon­key that lets me edit any site howe­ver I choose using javasc­ript – i.e. all​mu​sic​.com no lon­ger has anno­ying javasc­ript links and ain​tit​cool​.com doesn’t have a shitty design. Oh I also have live RSS feed book­marks from the BBC and other news sources.