PUBLIC MARKS from decembre with tag lifehacker

The universal, high-speed-everywhere web isn't quite a reality yet, as anyone who's used a relative's dial-up or a seriously weak airport connection can testify to. Web page re-formatting tool Finch gives you just the text, ma'am, from any site you plug into its address box, stripping Flash, JavaScript, stylesheets, and even images from the layout. Tools like this often crop up for mobile phones, such as Google's Mobilizer, but Finch is made for the desktop browser. Some sites will work better with their graphical navigators removed than others, of course, but for anyone stuck with a fist-poundingly slow connection, or paying for every megabyte, Finch is a great bookmarket to keep handy.

Firefox user Asian Angel loves Portable Firefox for projects like creating a Google Chrome clone, but you can also use it to run multiple, sandboxed instances of the browser at the same time. What's the point? Well, it lets you log into multiple accounts at the same service (like Gmail) in different windows, and run certain extensions and styles in one browser instance but not another. You already know how to create multiple Firefox profiles and even run them simultaneously, but using Portable Firefox you can easily back up your customized installations and run them anywhere. Reader Asian Angel explains how she assembled a colorful "Firefox six pack" using the portable app.

A standalone, portable version of the latest version 2.6.1 of the GIMP image editor is now available to download and run from your USB drive, plus two useful plug-ins: the GIMP Portable Photoshop Layout plug-in, which approximates the Photoshop dock and toolbox, and the GIMP Portable Background Window plug-in, which lets GIMP occupy a single window. [via]

Mozilla's Firefox-like browser for mobile phones, code-named Fennec, has been released as a free alpha preview for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems (and Nokia N810 Internet Tablets). As you would expect with an alpha preview, it's a bit buggy, and not all the features are in place, but it's intriguing to see how Mozilla plans to smoosh Firefox 3's features onto the tiniest screens. If you want to know what Firefox on your phone might look like, read on for detailed screenshots and a rundown of Fennec's features.

The question is, which clients and tools are the best? For this week's Hive Five, we want you to share your favorite utilities in your BitTorrent toolbox. Keep reading for more details and to nominate the torrent tool you love.

after i discovered bit che, i never looked back: Bit Che is a simple tool that quickly searches popular bit torrent sites for files. * Super quick searching * Able to preview torrent details * Opens torrents in your favorite downloader

The site's design is a direct knock off of Google, but it has a few subtle tweaks for BitTorrent. Like previously mentioned torrent aggregator PizzaTorrent, Speckly also allows you to sort results by file type

Weave can match up your Firefox 3 settings, cookies, browsing history, and even tabs between browsers, with experimental support for passwords and form data—in other words, just about everything except extensions, themes, and plug-ins.

The CyberSearch Firefox extension transforms Firefox 3's AwesomeBar into a dynamic search box capable of returning results from popular sites like Wikipedia, Google, and more. The extension is fully customizable

Climb aboard for a look at 10 of the best BitTorrent utilities, tools, and resources for finding and managing your BitTorrent downloads quickly and efficiently.

sing Google advanced operators (like, -site:bizrate -site:ebay -site:shopping.com), Give Me Back My Google removes known resellers from your search results - and it really does clean things up.

Firefox extension RAMBack manually frees up memory from Firefox to keep your favorite web browser running light. Once installed, RAMBack adds a Clear Caches entry to Firefox's Tools menu.

Control your BT downloads from anywhere using a full-featured web interface. With uTorrent's WebUI, you can add, remove, and manage the downloads you've got running at home no matter where you are. Hit the jump and I'll show you how to get it all set up.

Creates a full fledged Firefox XPI (extension) from a greasemonkey script._I modified the output of the compiler to include multiple scripts with the ability to enable and disable individual features.

That way you can keep an eye on the video while you're going about the rest of your browsing business. You can set your preferred size for the picture-in-picture video to make it as small or large as you want,

Adds useful options to the "Server not found" page when you follow a a dead or problematic link. The difference: ErrorZilla Plus adds a Proxify option that re-tries the unreachable URL using a web proxy

if you liked what you saw in the screenshot tour of Opera and were impressed by its performance in our speed tests, you can now grab Opera 9.5 USB to run from your thumb drive

Adds effects to your digital photos through a slick, simple-to-use interface. The program provides an impressive range of effects and can upload the results to photo-sharing site Flickr

Step-by-step instructions on installing and configuring VirtualBox with support for plug-in devices. It's specific to the newest Ubuntu and a little bit more than the "five easy steps"

They don't talk to one another. If at home after a vacation inf Thailand, I had a hard drive loaded with photos and I wanted a way to organize, caption, and publish them all at once without duplicating work. Here's how I did it with Picasa and Flickr.

Auto Context Firefox extension automatically shows your right-click context menu as soon as you select text on a web page, taking a step out of your workflow if the right-click menu is your go-to toolbox.

A three-click affair.You don't need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched, and any files you create or settings you tweak remain in place the next time you boot up.

The Digital Photography School blog has an instructive tutorial on using layers

"Freeware application Some PDF to Word Converter takes your PDFs and—as the name implies—converts them to Microsoft Word documents."