Day 15 and the handlebars are coming along nicely… Some have likened my mo to a 70’s pornstar, others to Merv Hughes (-gee thanks!) – and here it is in all its glory,

What’s all this about? Glad you asked!

For the fourth year running, I’m growing a moustache for Movember to help raise awareness and funds for men’s health – specifically prostate cancer and depression in men. Nearly 600 men die of prostate cancer each year in New Zealand and one in ten men will experience depression in their lifetime. Sobering facts, so I’m putting down the razor (partially!) for a month and hoping you’ll support the cause.

To sponsor my Mo, you can either:

• Visit my Mo Space (where you can also track my progress) and click “Donate to me” to donate online using your credit card
• Write a cheque payable to ‘Movember’, referencing my Registration Number 314352 and mailing it to: Movember, PO Box 12 708, Wellington 6144

All donations over $5 are tax deductible, and your donation will earn you a “Mo of honour”,

So how effective is all this? Movember is now in its fourth year and, to date, has achieved some pretty amazing results by working alongside The Cancer Society and the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand. For further details check out Movember Outcomes. This year in particular, the more than 10,000 men participating in NZ have raised more than $250,000 as of today (Nov 16th), with some impressive totals in other countries too – see Mo Money.

If you’re considering donating, please do! And to those that already have, thanks for your support.

Mo Bro Chris.
Boldly growing where few have grown before.

One year old today!

Boy how time flies. This time last year we had our little girl at home after an exceptionally good delivery in the wee hours of the morning, with just 4 hours or so in hospital. Since then she’s delighted us as she’s grown up into a cute little girl who will soon be running around after her cheeky brother.

For a look back on the past year in photos, check out Amy’s Introductions, 3 Months, 6 Months and 9 Months albums.

Damn, our secret has been exposed!

via xkcd

A sneak peek at the add-ons I use in my default Firefox setup at home,

I also run another profile for website management that uses a slightly different set. Combined, you can find all my fav add-ons in my Add-ons Collection over at mozilla.org.

In a New Zealand first, Wellington’s public transport info is now available in Google Maps letting you plan trips via bus and train with Google’s Transit service. To test it out, I gave it a simple trip from home to Molly Malones on Courtenay Place and it presented an interesting solution first up,

The recommendation (to get me to town at the earliest time possible) was to take a bus the couple of hundred metres to the end of the street, walk down to the airport, then jump on the Airport Flyer to town. The second option was to wait 20 minutes and get a direct bus to town arriving 15 minutes after the first option. Think I’ll stick to number 2!

This type of public transport trip planning was already available in Wellington via the metlink website, but Google’s implementation is far superior in that you can enter business and place names, not just streets or addresses as with the metlink journey planner.

The real benefit however, is likely to be for Google Maps users on mobile phones. Google’s services work particularly well on cellphones (esp “smart” phones) and this will be a boon for anyone out and about in town (even those enjoying a beer at Molly’s) wondering about public transport options…

So props to Greater Wellington and Google for further improving an already useful service!

Just when you thought you were getting a nice holiday snap, this little critter jumps into the photo and steals the limelight,

lol

Dubbed “Crasher Squirrel”, the little guy popped up into the photo of a couple of tourists in Canada and he’s now the latest viral fad on the internet, appearing in dozens of places!

A little belated, but hey.

Matt is now 3 years old and Amy is 9 months – oh how time flies!

The lad turned 3 on August 2 and had a fun party with some of his friends at Tinytown in Kilbirnie – toys, playhouses, cars, a bouncy castle and party food! Lots of party food and an awesome clown cake out of our new kitchen!

And his fav toy is of course from his parents(!) – his new scooter,

Along with his third birthday came a new room at Kindercare – his creche – “Pre-school One”. So far so good – he loves the new room, new toys and big kids playground!

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The day after Matt’s birthday, Amy turned 9 months old – meaning about now(ish) she’s spent as long with us as she did growing inside Mum! How’s that for a random fact and celebration?! She’s going great guns with her growing – 95th percentile for height, and weight, well, um, apparently it’s not polite to mention a girls weight (or her thunder thighs!). Moving along, she’s also crawling now and for the most part has abandoned commando crawling in favour of all fours,

This has created all sorts of new challenges for the boy as Amy can now get to his toys! Additionally, she’s very vocal and has teeth,

Actually that popped out around a month ago and now the front two bottom ones are well up.

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So there you go. A quick update on the kids, and for the family we’ll try and get some fresh vids online soon so stay tuned…

A couple of favourite xkcd webcomics on gaming.

An oldie, but a goodie! – I’m sure many a gamer has been here…

Flash Games

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and for those of us slow to get around to playing and completing games (yes I’ve been here!)

Cutting Edge

Gotta say I’m loving Firefox 3.5 – it’s stable, fast, not IE(!) and simply works.

Here’s my top five favourite new features,

1. Clickable links in view > page source (ctrl+u)
   This is great for anyone who frequently dives into a page’s code. Want to know how that site you’re viewing implemented it’s style sheet? No problem. View the page source, look for the style sheet link, click it and you’re viewing the CSS in source view. Nice.
2. Tab tearing
   Previously I’ve used add-ons to enable something like this, but no more with tab tearing built-in. This feature lets you drag a tab out of your current window to have that tab spawn a new window. Great if you want to quickly refer to two open tabs/pages at once side by side.
3. Smarter “AwesomeBar”
   Firefox’s already super useful location bar, aka the “AwesomeBar”, just got even more awesome. You can now search smarter via new operators. Use ^ to search only history, * to search your bookmarks only, and + to search your tags.
4. Private Browsing
   Also dubbed “porn mode”, Private Browsing is just that – a mode you can enter which keeps your session private – meaning no data for the session will be cached or saved to disk (eg cookies, history, search, passwords). Great if you share a computer and want to do some secret shopping for your significant other… (or yourself!)
5. Under-the-hood: Speed and Standards
   A new engine called Tracemonkey makes rendering Javascript faster and changes to database querying make for speedier access to your history and bookmarks. Other changes behind the scenes include more standards support including native audio and video as defined in the HTML5 spec. Anything that improves speed and standards support get a big thumbs up from me.

And the Mozilla Links blog details some more new features in their All about Firefox 3.5 post.

Of course Firefox isn’t perfect for my needs, but with my set of add-ons it almost is! Beyond those add-ons, read on for some other tweaks I make to fresh installs of Firefox…

Compress the window head content
I also make a couple of tweaks to the user interface to increase the size of my viewable webpage area or browser canvas (via the “customise” link when you right click the navigation toolbar or program menus). In particular, I check “use small icons”, move my “bookmarks toolbar items” up next to the program menus and then turn the “bookmarks toolbar” off. The results are thus,

Default UI,

My tweaked UI,

and if we put them side-by-side you can immediately see the increase in canvas height,

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Open search results in a new tab
This is the first change I always make in the “about:config” area of Firefox’s settings. One thing I don’t like is jumping to do a search (via the browser’s search box) only to have the results replace the page I was on. Thankfully that is easy to fix. Enter “about:config” in your address bar, mind the dragons(!) and set the following,

browser.search.openintab = true

and all your searches will open in new tabs.

Use Google NZ for your searches
This is something I’ve detailed in the past, so won’t repeat here. However, if you make the changes in that post and it doesn’t work, try closing Firefox, delete the files “search.json” and “search.sqlite” from your profile folder, then restart Firefox. This should fix it and those files will be automatically replaced.

Get a “close button” (x) on the last tab
In Firefox 3.5 you no longer get a close tab button when you have just one tab open (eg if you closed all your other tabs). I prefer to have one and to get it back you’ll need to add some code to a specific file. First, find your profile folder, then add the following to the bottom of the “userChrome.css” file inside the “chrome” folder,

.tabbrowser-tabs[closebuttons="alltabs"] > .tabbrowser-tab > .tab-close-button {
display: -moz-box !important;
}
.tabbrowser-tabs:not([closebuttons="noclose"]):not([closebuttons="closeatend"]) > .tabbrowser-tab[selected="true"] > .tab-close-button {
display: -moz-box !important;
}

Note however, there’s a gotcha here – clicking that close button on the last tab will close the Firefox window completely, so lets fix that too…

Keep Firefox open when you close the last tab
If you make the above tweak you may want to make this change to the “about:config” settings area,

browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab = false

Now you can close that last tab (resulting in a blank tab) and have the window stay open. These and a few other “tab tweaks” are available on the Mozilla links blog.

And that’s about it. As I mentioned above, I also install a bunch of add-ons and I run multiple profiles that have independent bookmarks and passwords for specific uses. (Note you can also have two different profiles running at the same time.)

Got a Firefox tip or tweak of your own. Let me know below!