With the release of Froyo for Android came the awesome ability to send stuff to your phone from your browser. Very simple and straight-forward to set-up. From what I can tell it uses your Google account to connect devices. Pretty easy to set up. Here’s what I did…

• installed the app on my phone (appbrain link)
• then install the extension on your browser of choice – firefox or chrome
• fire up the app on your phone and follow the prompts – it will have to log into your google account
• click on the extension in your browser, the first time you do this you will have to log into your google account.

I did a test run of this and the response was almost instantaneous. The best part? Since it’s browser based, it’s not OS specific – this will work in OSX, Windows, Linux or whatever else you might desire that has a firefox or chrome browser. I actually use Chromium (the open-source version of Chrome) and it worked perfectly in it as well.

Oh, and here’s a video of it for your viewing pleasure:

Google tasks is a simple but powerful little task manager. I’ve started using it more and wanted to create a separate application to run it from so I don’t always have to fire up a browser to access it. Here’s what you need to know to do the same thing (and there are a couple of ways to do it!).

The first thing you need to know is the actual web address for the Google tasks:

https://mail.google.com/tasks/ig

Firefox and Chrome can both create standalone applications from websites (basically where a stripped down version of the browser opens the website in a window without all navigation stuff at the top – it looks like a program running from your computer).

Firefox

Navigate to the address above in Firefox and under the “tools” menu choose “Convert Website to Application”. Bam! There ya go. If you don’t want to bother firing up a browser you can open up Prism (if you’ve installed it) and use the address above. You’ll have to sign into Google the first time it opens, but from then on you’ll be good to go!

Oh, to install Prism use this command:

sudo apt-get install prism

Chrome

Navigate to the Google Tasks address above in your Chrome browser and then click on the “Control” button to the left of the browser address bar (directly left of the “tool” button) – the top option is the one you want: “Create Application Shortcuts…” This is really nice because it gives you the option of chosing to create it on your desktop or in the menu (or both).

In the end, I think Prism is a little bit of a lighter load on the system than the Chrome application, but it’s your call. There are various other ways to access Google Tasks, some of which can be found here.

Found a solid little content filter for Firefox. It’s an add-on called ProCon. It seems pretty straight-forward. I’m working on getting Dansguardian up and running on my computer, but I thought I’d use this in the meantime. It seems to work pretty well. I haven’t tried to see if it blocks porn (by going to a site), but I did try it on a site I knew that sometimes has questionable content, and it blocked it right away. Definitely worth a shot if you want to have some filtering to safeguard your browsing.

Okay, I like to periodically post the add-ons I’ve added to Firefox, so that 1) I have an updated list ready (with links) “in the cloud” should anything happen to my computer, and 2) I also like to share those things which I’ve found to be helpful maneuvering online.

Top Five – here are my favorite add-ons:

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – This keeps all my bookmarks synched between computers and OS’es – don’t really know where I’d be without this…

ScribeFire – A blogging plugin which lets you blog from wherever you are on the web. I use this most of the time to post to my main blog. They have some sort of integrated advertising scheme you can use as well – but I prefer to not clutter my blogs up with too much advertising

more…

okay, I figured it out in this thread from Ubuntu Forums. I used these commands to purge the old plugins:

sudo apt-get remove kaffeine-mozilla mozilla-helix-player mozilla-mplayer mozilla-plugin-vlc totem-mozilla xine-plugin

and then these to install the new mplayer gecko plugin:

sudo apt-get install gnome-mplayer gecko-mediaplayer

and I went back to Apple’s trailer site and could watch trailers!

note, if you have problems, check the thread mentioned at the top for troubleshooting.