It’s been a mere five months since my last update on here, which means that for five months, there’s basically nothing that tickled my fancy. But, this changed a few weeks ago, when I started testing Glue.

Developed by Adaptive Blue, this Firefox plugin is what you want when you’re interested in movies, books, music, restaurants and a few other things Glue can work with. Adaptive Blue is also the creator of the BlueOrganizer, which worked similarly, but is being discontinued in favour of Glue.

After signing up and installing Glue, whenever you are browsing sites Glue can work with, a little toolbar automagically appears at the top of your screen. Like this:

You’re then presented with all the other people who’ve recently looked at what you’re looking at. It may not sound too exciting, but surfing Amazon, Librarything or IMDB (which are among the rather extensive number of supported sites) is a whole lot more fun with Glue.

And it’s of actual use too. You may see that someone who is interested in Palahniuk’s “Choke” is also interested in a book called “Zombie” by one Joyce Carol Oates. And incidentally, “Zombie” is just as sick and twisted as “Choke”, so you’ve just been alerted to yet another sick and twisted book you can add to your reading list.

Glue does not have, what some people in the know call a “destination site”, meaning there’s no website where your and all the others’ activities are displayed. Which isn’t necessarily a downside, since it removes the need to keep going back to a site to see what all the others are doing (like, say, Facebook). It’s all there, right inside the plugin, baby.

The plugin also adds something to your browser that looks like a bookmarklet. It contains the most important links, not least the one to the things you’ve saved, or liked, as they call it:

The plugin of course integrates with, among others, Twitter and Facebook, lets you perform searches on the items saved and, since Monday, also has a sleek little iPhone app.

And apart from other similar tools that let you save and comment on various items, Glue is actually really smart. Even though it supports a plethora of websites for every sub-section, like Amazon and LibraryThing for books, or IMDB and Wikipedia for movies, the item you save is always recognized as a single one. Meaning that when you save “Choke” from Amazon and someone else from LibraryThing, you’ve still saved the same thing and Glue displays it as such. This, Ladies and Gentleman, is how semantic shit is supposed to work! And if you don’t know what I mean, just try it out already, will you?

Glue’s installation website contains a little FAQ and a Quick Start guide, which holds a bit of information on the sites supported by Glue. Check it out!

Oh, and since I just can’t shut up, here’s what I would like to see in Glue in the future: The ability to not only “like” stuff in order to save it, but also to just mark stuff and put it into certain categories, like “I wanna” or “I hate” or “I don’t know why I’m saving this, but it looks like sometime maybe I want to get back to it”.

As you may have gathered from my rather telling title, Xoopit is a plugin that helps you manage all the media you receive or send by email.
So what exactly does Xoopit do? It lets you install an add-on for Firefox, and once you’ve installed the addon (and given them your GMail credentials), they start scanning your inbox contents. When they are all done scanning, they display little links to your images, videos and files, allowing you to open up pages filled with pretty thumbnails of your media, including a nice search option.

But, and this is for all the skeptics who say that it’s actually a lot easier to just search for whatever you’ve got in your inbox by using the powerful built-in Google search, this is not it! Because Xoopit not only displays the images and videos currently residing in your inbox, but also takes all the links to images and videos and creates thumbnails of those.

Which means that you won’t have to sift through scores of links to find that one image of a cute little kitten dressed up as Yoda, because Xoopit has already created a thumbnail for it and you can simply click it. Phew!

For the visually inclined, a screenshot of a GMail inbox with collected images displayed:

Right now Xoopit is available in private beta only. Which means you probably won’t get in and will have to rely on my judgment. Which is exactly the way I like it!

Here’s something to keep you occupied for a while. If you’re a geek and command-line fanatic, that is.
Because goosh.org has created something that’s both extremely helpful and, well, extremely cool. What is that tool of tools, you may ask? A Google command-line of course.

Check this out: typing a query displays four results, hitting enter again shows four more, and so on. It’s very basic, but blazingly fast! And typing “help”, “h” or “man” produces all the shortcuts for the various Google services or to other stuff (like our beloved Wikipedia).

Command-line specifics are included as well, like using the cursor keys to access previously entered queries. Typing go and the number of the search result takes you there, so no need for a mouse anymore. And since it’s a command-line, when it gets all too crowded, just type “clear” or “c”, and you’ve got a blank page with a blinking cursor all over again.

Here’s a picture, in case you actually don’t have a clue what I’m rambling on about here:

PS: You can even add goosh as a search engine to the Firefox search form. Awesome!