Here’s a geekier post than normal. A minor release of Quick Search Box (QSB) just came out, and yes in my computer-bound existence these insignificant moments are worthy of celebration. QSB (its predecessor Quicksilver, rather) is one of those little programs that totally changed the way I use my computer. I put SizeUp in this category, as well.

Anyway, onto the celebration. Here are the release notes. There are various speed improvements and a beefed-up plugin system, which will hopefully allow QSB to finally take over all the functions I’ve been missing since the Quicksilver days. Some more tidbits:

• It’s no longer a project associated with Google: “You will also notice the branding has changed significantly. We are moving from being a Google project, to a fully open sourced project.” Google is still the default search. The lead developer was the guy who wrote Quicksilver, and he developed QSB when he moved to Google. I wonder if there were personnel changes that occurred, here.
• I’ve always found the documentation for QSB lacking, but following some links from the Release Notes, I hit gold with this set of knols.
• Aside from a) opening applications and b) finding documents and folders, the most important thing about QSB is its Finder integration. The CMD-G interface for pulling items selected in the Finder into QSB (from where you can move them, copy them, email them, whatever) works again! Here’s the knol on QSB’s Finder integration.

Just sent this to the geeks list:

Note: FF3 is at RC3, now, and I’ve had almost no crashing issues since RC2. The autocompletion continues to get more useful as I think of new ways to use it. For example:

• Typing in the numerical address of any place I’ve visited in Google maps (e.g. “555″) brings up the map for that location.
• Typing a search term that I’ve used before brings up a list of all Google queries that I’ve made containing that search term.
• Typing words in subject lines of Gmail messages I’ve viewed also brings those up.

~e

P.S. I’m seriously concerned at this point that if I lost access to Google, I’d end up blind, deaf, and dumb, mumbling in some alleyway God-knows-where.

Orange posted about Freedom, a Mac app that disables your network connection for some number of minutes.

Unfortunately, I need the network to do a lot of my work (even going to localhost on your machine will be disabled) but this could be useful if I needed to write something.