Ask DACS
December 2009

Moderated and reported by Jim Scheef.

AskDACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem.

Q – How can I synchronize browser bookmarks (favorites, shortcuts) between browsers on one computer or between computers for PCs and Macs?

A – While this is not the exact question, it expands it to cover the solutions discussed. Given time, the possibilities seem to expand forever to solve various subsets of the total puzzle.

One member suggested Xmarks (xmarks.com). Formerly called Foxmarks, this solution works across Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari (Mac OS), so it is both cross-browser and cross-platform. Chrome will be supported when Chrome includes extensions. Xmarks seems to require an account on their website.

I use a Firefox add-on called PlainOldFavorites (iosart.com/firefox/plainoldfavorites). This allows Firefox to directly use your IE Favorites. It adds a Favorites option to the Firefox menus and looks and works exactly like IE to add or use a favorite. Since IE Favorites are a special kind of shortcut, each one is a separate file kept in your Favorites folder. There is nothing to add or change in IE. Synchronizing IE favorites is a matter of copying these files between computers. When all computers have the latest files, then they are all in sync. There are many tools available to synchronize folders. For automatic synchronization, I use GoodSync from Siber Systems (goodsync.com) or a PC Magazine utility called WMatch for manual sync.

There are many other Firefox add-ons (extensions) that synchronize favorites so I suggest searching the Firefox add-ons page (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox) to find a solution that suits your needs. I even found one or two that support Opera.

Another option is to use a website that stores your favorites somewhere online. Yahoo and Google both have Favorites services that are more convenient if you also install their browser toolbar. Both support Internet Explorer and Firefox on the PC only. I use the Yahoo Toolbar which makes using Yahoo Favorites very easy. When your bookmarks are online in this manner, you no longer care about synchronization and just use them where they from Yahoo or Google.

Moving toward the social networking side of this issue brings us to things like Delicious (delicious.com) and Digg (digg.com). Both of these sites are geared as much to sharing bookmarks as to making them easily useable. Both have search features that allow you to benefit from the shared bookmarks of other site members.
 
So far we have totally ignored Linux. Some, but I dare not say many, of the Firefox add-ons are Linux-friendly. Linux presents a unique situation as it has a different set of browsers like Konqueror and various forks from the old Mozilla. Synchronizing between browsers on Linux may be as simple as pointing all browsers to use the same bookmarks file, although this would not work if more than one browser were open at the same time. [Background: Many browsers follow the bookmark storage method first established by the original Mosaic from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois – yes, before Netscape. Such bookmarks are saved as entries in a file and are coded the same was as a link in a web page. The unfortunate side effect of this is that individual bookmarks become difficult to copy, let alone synchronize, between computers because the program must parse this bookmark file. Microsoft made life much easier when they made bookmarks work like shortcuts, but naturally none of the browsers that came later could adopt this model for political reasons.] Versions of Chrome for Linux and the Mac are imminent as I write this; see the Chrome and Chromium (open source version) websites.

After all this discussion, another member mentioned a sync solution for the Macintosh, but I could not hear the name on the tape. Searching for “sync safari bookmarks” found a surprising number of solutions that include Safari, Chromium and IE for cross-platform to a PC.

Q – Using Skype software when the call reaches a voice menu, I can’t signal to pick an option like “Press one for English”.

A – The suggestion was to get a keypad dialer. This is a small device that is held over the mouthpiece of a phone. It has a keypad on one side and a speaker on the other. Pressing a number sends the appropriate dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency) sound into the phone. For Skype you would hold the device up to the microphone on your computer or headset. These were popular long ago as a way to speed dial calls on a pay phone. They could often store long strings of digits that included your calling card number (remember those?) plus the number you were calling. Another member offered that amateur radio operators (hams) use to access repeaters. Where these are available today is left as an “exercise for the user.”

A more likely solution is a “Skype phone” handset. There are a variety of such devices on the Skype website (Skype.com).

Q – When I use my iPhone to visit websites like the New York Times with video require Flash. Is there a way to make this work on the iPhone?

A – Apparently Flash is not supported in the iPhone browser – so far. My quick web search seems to indicate an impasse between Apple and Adobe over the development tools and libraries need to make it work. The first blog posting I read on the topic was from 2007 and ones from this year sound the same. I would not hold your breath waiting.

Q – The touchpad on my laptop will autoscroll – make the screen jump – when I don’t want that. This happens in Excel.

Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org.

Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warrantee as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!