Desktop Publishing

As an addendum to my last post, I thought I'd give anyone who cares a guided tour of my computer as it generally appears of an evening:

1-8: Opera control panel

1. New tab

2. Open file

3. Back 

4. Reload / Stop

5. Forward

6. Side-panel toggle

7. Home-page (local version of my own website)

8. Closed Tabs graveyard

Nothing much to say about these. I've gone with a minimal look, with a cassette player vibe. The Closed Tabs list is a particularly useful function.

9-12: Opera Extensions

9. Translate page / text

10. Launch Google cached version of page

11. Launch Wayback Machine history of page

12. Index image links on page

Opera Extensions are useful gadgets, and some are good fun too (if sometimes a bit clunky). The translation tool is particularly handy. I have a number of other extensions running that don't require icons. Some of the better ones include: Facebook Photo Theatre Killer (which suppresses the new photo viewer in Facebook and uses the old system instead), Image Preview Popup (which displays a linked image as a tool-tip), Mouse Trail (which allows me to draw on the screen with a right click), Re-Enable ContextMenu (which allows right-click menus on sites that try to suppress them) and WordCount, which displays the number of words in a highlighted selection. These Extensions are additional to the suite of lovely tools that come with Opera as standard (page resizing is particularly useful, and the speech plug-in allows me to keep reading a page while I go to the toilet!). 

13-16: Search engines 

13. Wikipedia search

14. YouTube search

15. Google Maps search

16. Other search engines (Google UK by default)

The drawback of such built-in search boxes is that I always miss out on those Google front pages. 

17-22: Opera LED panel 

17. Clock 

18. Security status

19. Image view toggle 

This allows me to turn off images or just use cached versions. It used to be useful in the narrow-band days; it's less so now. 

20. User / Author style-sheet toggle

If anyone wants to complain about my choice of colours on this blog, here's a tool I might suggest to them. It replaces the author's style-sheet with a custom one. So if you'd rather read this as green on red, feel free!

21. Print view toggle

22. Fit-to-width toggle 

This was quite useful once upon a time, but these days websites set their page-widths quite solidly. Indeed, most of these "LED" tools are remnants from a previous age.

23-25: Seesmic panels

23. KingConstance Twitter feed

24. Facebook feed

25. SaintEvelin Twitter feed

Beyond the horizontal page-fold: a list feed, @ mentions, and retweets.

So this is Seesmic: the main control panel for my Twitter empire (mu-ha-ha-ha-ha). It's very good, though it doesn't seem to handle list histories very well. I use Twitter itself for that.

26-27: Opera tabs

26. Seesmic

27. Twitter: SaintEvelin account

In addition to my two accounts (which follow different sets of people), I have two lists: Constant Evelin (a public list that collates the tweets from my two accounts, and which can be seen in a panel at the right of this blog), and Vince Cable (a private list, duplicated in both accounts: a reduced field of key people I follow. It enables me to catch up quickly after a period away from Twitter (near-impossible using my unadulterated feeds)). Had I not set up a second account, I would by now have developed a library list for myself, but SaintEvelin's timeline largely fulfils that function. I may add further lists as time goes on, but the current arrangement seems sufficient so far.

28: IRC

28. IRC window.

This sliver at the bottom of the screen allows me to chat with friends while getting on with other things (or just watching telly in my browser). 

29-32: System tray

29. Clock (you can never have too many!)

30. USB port management (there's other things hiding in there, but I like to keep this icon on top)

31. Language management 

English, Russian, Greek and Arabic, to give me quick access to non-Roman characters; I also keep Unicode character charts close to hand. I like my special characters.

32. File selector

My last computer had a partitioned drive. The partitions were named: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Wogan. When I got this computer, I continued the theme. Consequently, my main drive bears the name "Forsythe". This file selector is one of the ways in which I can navigate Forsythe's badly organized contents.

33-37: Taskbar buttons 

33. Photo-Paint (My paint program of choice; open today so that I can make an annotated screengrab) 

34. X-Chat IRC 

35. Excel (Ooh, look, I'm doing my data analysis for my dissertation (honest!)) 

36. Eudora (My favoured email client (though I still pine for Pine))

37. Opera

38-51: Quicklaunch

38. Foobar (it really whips the Winamp's arse)

39. Notepad (essential tool for any cybernaut)

40. Sea Monkey (WYSIWYG HTML editor)

41. Photo-Paint

42. Opera

43. Eudora

44. X-Chat

45. Desktop

46. Window switcher

47. OED (what librarina could resist having the OED available at the touch of a button?)

48. Forsythe (my hard drive)

49. Computer (my computer, Trevor)

50. Diary (a working spreadsheet for various projects)

51. "Start" orb

52-58: Google Desktop Sidebar

52. Google Desktop search (not as useful as might be useful)

53. Scratch Pad (an oubliette for all manner of cryptic notes-to-self)

54. BBC World feed

55. KingConstance Twitter feed (because I don't always have my browser open)

56. Web Clips news feed (RSS dripped down my eyeballs)

57. Facebook notification gadget (so I know when I've got a message on Facebook)

58. Google Desktop Sidebar

So that's that: every feather in my desktop's nest. This is how the internet looks from where I sit. I hope you enjoyed the view.