The photography enthusiasts at weblog Photojojo detail how to use a vintage manual-focus camera lens with your DSLR camera for a fraction of the cost of newer auto-focus lenses. There’s not really much to it—just buy yourself an adapter ring and go hunting for a vintage manual-focus lens on eBay and you’re good to go. As an added bonus, it may even improve your photography:

Using manual focus on those old lenses will slow you down a little. Not too much, just enough to make you think about your shot. You feel more connected to your camera and to the process of shooting.

In my quest for the ultimate web experience, I have tweaked my GMail CSS, added functionality like HTML signatures to my GMail and added vista like features to my tabs in my browser amongst other things.

Post my Firefox 3.0 installation, I was most impressed that the installation process included the migration of most of my FF2 plugins and those plugins that didn’t work in 3.0, were promptly updated to be compatible with version 3 of the browser offering by Mozilla.

So, here is how I built the ultimate browser:

First, ditch Internet Explorer and get Firefox 3.0!

Then add the following 11 plugins to your Firefox:

1) Tab Scope: Allows for fully functional preview screens of each tab on mouse-over. The latest version allows you to treat it as fully functional webpage that is clickable as well!

2) Stylish: Allows you to install CSS files that overwrite the default styles of a webpage as I did with my Cool Gmail Skin!

3) Firebug: A web developers dream! A must have for anyone with the slightest of technical web knowledge!
4) All-in-one Gestures: Allowing for really quick mouse gestures that opens new tabs, opens new windows, goes back, closes tabs, closes windows, minimizes windows, etc. It’s super nifty once you get the hang of things and get used to holding down the right-click to pull off these moves!

5) Cooliris Previews: This plugin allows you to view what is on the other end of a link. Simply put your mouse over a link and it will open up a fully functional window of the result page of clicking on that particular link! Veeeery cool when you are searching for something, but don’t want to waste your time by opening too many links!

6) Download Status Bar: The Firefox standard download status bar is sad! It’s an annoying popup window and gets in the way of browsing effectively. This plugin puts all the functionality into the bottom toolbar with pause and resume features, mouse-over for detailed info and even double click to open the file directly from the toolbar. A must-have!

7) Fast Dial: This is one that I have only just added. It mimics the feature of Opera and allows for speed dial type bookmarks with thumbnail images. Facilitating super fast browsing to often visited webpages. I’m still new to it and it needs some getting used to before it becomes seamless.

Flagfox: This too is a new plugin to me. It displays a small image of the flag that represents the country in which the website is hosted in. With local-only bandwidth starting to emerge as a key pricing standard by many ISP’s here in South Africa, it is good to know which websites are hosted in your country to avoid paying increased ISP rates!
9) Tabs Open Relative: If you are tab junky like I am, you will soon become very annoyed with the fact that new tabs open at the end of the queue and not next to the tab in use. This plugin solves that very problem and will open a new tab relative to the tab that you are currently using, so it becomes so much easier to manage!

10) Tiny Menu: The top menu is just plain annoying. I never used mine, unless it snowed and I’m wearing my left shoe on my right foot on a Sunday. The top menu is now summarized into one very cool, easy-on-the-eye menu item with access to all standard menu items through it. It’s true value is noticed after you install it and you realize that you haven’t clicked on it for a while clearly proving the point that you never use the standard top menu anyway!
11) Update Notifier: A simple but essential plugin that keeps track of all the plugins and the browser for latest updates, it will notify you when one becomes available. This is cool when you have so many plugins and don’t have the time to go back and check for updates manually for each of them.

My search will continue for the most kick ass plugins by sifting through the thousands available, but I will need to make sure that each one that I add to my browser actually adds value and isn’t just gimmicky.

After a VERY successful post about the Coolest GMail Skin on my blog, the same design has now been extended to Google Calendar as well and thanks to ChrisM over at iMod (The 2008 award winning blog) for finding it!

This is a Firefox plugin and overwrites the CSS file for Google Calendar on your browser, which means the performance of the page is NOT affected in any way.

The simple 1-2-3 step process makes it even more attractive:

Step 1: Install the Stylish Plugin for your Firefox Browser.
Step 2: Open the Google Calendar CSS in a seperate tab.
Step 3: Right click on the new icon at the bottom right hand corner of your Firefox Toolbar and select “Add Style to Stylish” and voila!

If you have ever used Vista, you would know how helpful the little scope windows on the taskbar is when you hover your mouse over it. But, if you have any ounce of self respect, you would probably be using Firefox as your browser of choice.

Tab Scope is a browser plugin that mimics this functionality and also extends on it, with the tabs having back, forward, zoom, reload and close functions as well.

I’ve found this plugin to be SUPER useful as I am a tab junky with at least 15 tabs open on each browser window. So, in my quest to configure the ultimate browser, I wholely endorse this plugin and it gets the HoTsTePPa stamp of approval!

If you don’t have Firefox yet, its honestly worth it! Download it here by clicking on the firefox logo above!