WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language / is a neat site, perhaps suitable for an English classroom experiment?
“WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.” (from the WORDCOUNT about page)
I have been using Gmail on and off since I received an invite a few months back, but have never been a big fan of the “relevant” text ads that are displayed alongside each message. To avoid having to see these, all that is required is a simple user CSS style-sheet that is applied to the Gmail pages by your browser (PithHelmet has a rule to accomplish this, but for some reason it didn’t work when I upgraded to the new beta today, I quickly applied this stylesheet). For those who know how to do this, the style-sheet I am using (which has successfully filtered out all the Gmail ads) is as follows:
body,td,div,.p,a,font,span {font-family: arial,sans-serif;}
body {margin-top:2}
.tl {
background-image: url(/gmail/help/images/corner_tl_sharp.gif);
background-position:top left;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
}
.tr {
background-image: url(/gmail/help/images/corner_tr_sharp.gif);
background-position:top right;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
}
.bl {
background-image: url(/gmail/help/images/corner_bl_sharp.gif);
background-position:bottom left;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
}
.br {
background-image: url(/gmail/help/images/corner_br_sharp.gif);
background-position:bottom right;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
}
.bubble {
background-color:#C3D9FF;
}
.caption { FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #000; white-space:nowrap; background:#eeeeee;text-align:center; margin-bottom:5px}
.form-noindent {BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff; BORDER-RIGHT: #C3D9FF 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: #C3D9FF 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: #C3D9FF 1px solid; BORDER-BOTTOM: #C3D9FF 1px solid}
/* Destroy ads */
#ad {
display: none;
}
I used the new PithHelmet beta to set the site-specific stylesheet for Gmail. Although I haven’t tried it, I imagine this would work just fine with Mozilla/Firefox and the Web Developer extension (has an “Add User Stylesheet…” option, I believe).
After getting over my fear of the ominous “this is a public beta, and may cause a kernel panic” warning on their homepage, I finally tried out the handy SideTrack trackpad driver for OS X today. One word — amazing!
This handy little utility basically does for your trackpad what QuickSilver does for your keyboard: decreases the time that simple, repetitive operations take, so the cumulative effect is that you save massive amounts of time over the long run.
SideTrack allows you to map the corners and sides of your trackpad to perform certain actions, from right-clicking if tapped in a certain corner to setting scroll wheel emulation on a particular side of the trackpad to calling Exposé with a corner tap. It’s a great utility, and I highly recommend giving it a try.
Although I haven’t begun to use gmail as my primary email (waiting until they support either IMAP or POP3 access), it is really handy to have a webmail system that has all of your contacts information available from anywhere. To this end, I just imported all of my contacts in my Mac OS X Address Book to my gmail account.
The only tricky part is getting the contacts exported as a CSV (comma separated value) file, since this is not built into Address Book by default. Thankfully, there is a free
AddressBookToCSV application availabe (you might want to download the application directly). After using this application to export the contacts as CSV, the contacts will be imported in Gmail without a hitch. Nice.
