(via @gizmodo)
for more gory details, check out this post.

Warning! by proceeding you may subject yourself to bouts of “OH MY GOD” or “CRAP, THIS IS UNREAL”!

….go ahead, click here to see how much Google knows about you. This is not a hack or any kind of special trick, it’s a service that Google provides (out of the goodness of their own hearts?) to all it’s users (albeit it’s  buried in some obscure area of your profile). Does it not just raise your spirits to know how much one company knows about you, your personal life (including your friends, preferences, habits, etc, etc, etc)? I knew that they provide a ton of free services and that all of these services collect some amount of identifiable data but seeing all the data that they collect/have access to laid out this way….gives me the creeps.

This is one reason why I turned off Google Buzz today (an encourage you to do so as well…read this post for a reality check). I liked the idea behind Buzz, it’s the implementation that was a major FAIL. Hopefully they will fix it…soon.

You can opt out of Google’s interest based advertising here. Or better yet, use the Network Advertising Initiative to opt-out of several ad networks at once.

Rock on.

So you’ve upgraded to the latest and greatest version of firefox…awesome. Firefox 3.6 introduces some amazing new tech from the folks at mozilla labs. More on that here. Apart from what’s new under the hood, here are a few new tweaks that you can enable to get your browser going with even more horsepower.

To enable all of these, you will need to type in about:config in the URL bar and accept the warning that is displayed. (Hint: to change the value of a property, just double click it and it will flip from its current value to the next value in the allowed list. So if you double-click a property that is marked as true it will become false.)

1. Tab Previews: To see a preview (instead of just cycling through the tab windows) of the open tabs while you cycle through the open ones, enable the following property: browser.ctrlTab.previews to true.
2. Open links to the far right: In Firefox 3.6, links opened from a page (middle-clicking on them or from the context menu) open to the right of the current page to keep related content closer by default. To restore the previous behavior (open pages to the right of the last open tab), access the advanced preferences by visiting about:config, then look for a preference called browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and set it to false.
3. Keyboard shortcut for tab previews: To quickly access the all tabs preview panel (once enabled using hint #1 above) and search press Shift + Ctrl + Tab.
4. Preview open tabs via menu button: This property will enable a button at the far right of the tab bar that when clicked will show a preview of all open tabs. Handy when you have several tabs open! To enable, set browser.allTabs.previews to true.
5. Forcing extension compatibility: Firefox 3.6 requires a new method to enable forced extension compatibility. The earlier method, which required you to turn the extensions.checkCompatibility property to false will no longer work. To force compatibility in 3.6, you need to add a new boolean property called extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 and set it to false. To add a new boolen, right click anywhere on the about:config page listing and select New->Boolean