Here's a quick tip to increase page render speeds in Firefox. If you get confused, you can watch this tip on video at CNET TV.

As with most of these tricks, you'll need to head on into about:config.

The new Firefox 3 gives you a little warning when you go there and I will too. You need to be aware that messing about in about:config can destabilize Firefox. There, you've been warned. Now the fun part. Making your own strings.

By default, Firefox waits 250 milliseconds before it begins displaying a page. We can change that.

Right click anywhere in the about:config page area

Select "New" and "String".

Type nglayout.initialpaint.delay in the box press enter.

Then type 0.

This reduces the wait time to 0.

Mozilla recommends you also create content.notify.interval and set it to match with the nglayout value.

This will make pages start to appear faster, but remember it will increase the overall page load time, since you're starting the page display earlier.

That's great, but what if you frequently visit a Web site, that's perfectly healthy, and you'd rather not let people know that you visit that site if they're borrowing your computer for a minute?

Thanks to wickednix for sending us this tip. You can see this tip in action at CNET TV.

In the "awesome bar," type "about:config".

Go ahead and agree that you'll be careful.

Find "browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped". Click it and the value should change to "True".

Exit the browser, restart, and Firefox will no longer show your private bookmarks.

Get a few more non-video Firefox tips at Webware.com.

So watch the video then come back here to see some of the ideas we didn't use in the top 5.

• Wii weightlifting - trejo35
• Wii chainsaw - matthewnet
• Wii Dishes - Socom01
• Wii fly swatter - Peacekeeper666
• Wiihawken nights et in Weehawken, NJ - waderockett
• Wii litter box - surfpark
• Wii shop vac - tetfsu
• Wii house painter - Elkaintmoose
• Wii diaper change - tpet
• Wii morning commute, Wii water cooler in office, Wii boring boss presentaton - which led to our idea of Wii meetings - adravan
• Wii spelling bee - dbrodbeck
• Wii gymnastics - Sokkratez
• Wii animal petting - buddyjr
• Wii janitor, Wii butcher, Wii t-shirt sweatshop, Wii Chernobyl cleanup - joshlawrence
• Wii grass growing - stnlss
• Wii waiter - Sudat
• Wii IRS audit - reginalynn
• Wii snow shovel - relo
• Wii stripper pole - kerotab
• Wii Fit pole-dancing trainer - tomiwk
• Wii spin - macosken
• Wii jar opener - rzwo

Brewster Kahle of Archive.org dropped by to chat with Brian about the group's effort to preserve Internet history and how they fought the FBI and won.

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If you, like Fabio, are moving from a WordPress.com blog to a hosted WordPress blog of your own, here are some links for you. Official tutorial from WordPress on transferring between two blogs. The new XML IMport/Export. Migrating from wordpress.com to wordpress.org or self-hosting. WordPress Support » How do I transfer images from wordpress.com to a custom hosted site?

The beautiful LG Viewty.

Isaiah wanted some cheap single board computers. You might try out eWayco.

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The Internet can be a scary place, with all kinds of bad guys, and even good guys, trying to spy on what information you're sending through the tubes. Even if you have nothing to hide, maybe the thought of folks snooping on you makes your skin crawl. In this Insider Secret, you'll learn how to surf anonymously.

Watch the video to see all of this in action.

For basic Web surfing, there are free services coming and going all the time that allow you to avoid cookies and other tracking while using your regular old Web browser. A good place to keep track of your options is thefreecountry.com.

However if you want a more reliable and tested anonymity network, may I suggest The Onion Router (TOR). TOR was created by the U.S. Office of Naval Research to get around censorware in countries like China. The EFF took it over and ran it for a few years and it is now run by the Tor Project, a nonprofit organization.

When you run TOR, your Internet requests are sent through a series of computers that pass along the request. The computers don't know where the request originated and the request itself is encrypted. It only emerges in the clear when it reaches the destination server.

Imagine an onion. Or watch the video version of this article to see a real onion. I initiate an encrypted request that gets sent to the first layer, which then gets sent to the next layer, then on to the next layer. But the layers only know the last layer they got it from. They can't trace it back to the onion's skin. See? Hence the name, onion router.

It's very easy for you to use TOR on your end. Go to torproject.org and download the right software bundle for your computer. You get a few pieces of software in addition to TOR. Vidalia is a graphical user interface. It starts relaying traffic through TOR, and allows you to manage how TOR works for you. There's also something called Privoxy, that I'll explain later.

First though, you have to configure the different programs you use to take advantage of TOR. Read the guide or visit the TOR Wiki to learn how to configure specific apps. I'll explain how to set up Firefox.

My version of Vidalia automatically installed Torbutton in Firefox and configured it. If yours didn't for some reason go to addons.mozilla.org and find Torbutton.

Once Firefox is up and running, go click on the words "Tor Disabled." They should become Tor Enabled. Now your Web traffic is securely running through TOR.

The final piece of the software installed with Vidalia is the one I mentioned earlier, Privoxy. This is a filtering proxy server that adds additional security at the application layer. Privoxy hides your true location. You appear to be surfing from somewhere you are not. Cool, sort of. Some sites autodetect your location. With Privoxy running, they get it wrong. Google may force you to use another country's search engine for instance, and network television video may complain that you are out of the country and refuse to stream video.

If you don't want the added protection of Privoxy, you can turn off the proxy settings in Firefox. Go to Preferences, advanced, settings, and choose No proxy. That decreases your anonymity though. Just remember that you have to have TOR enabled every time you browse, or what you're browsing can be tracked.

Also keep in mind some security researchers have found some possible vulnerabilities in TOR. Nothing is 100 percent. But the Vidalia interface with Privoxy and the Firefox plug-in greatly increases your anonymity.

We've only touched the epidermis of what TOR can do. If you want to learn more, start at torproject.org. You can even volunteer.

So that old, ancient, worn-out, first-generation iPhone is headed out the door. Maybe you'll sell it on eBay. Maybe you'll give it to a friend. But before you send it on its way, you need to get all that personal data off it, such as your e-mail passwords, and those compromising photos of you, and of course, all your friends' e-mail addresses and phone numbers.

Watch the video to see this tip in action.

If you're not too paranoid, the following is all you have to do:

• Plug in your iPhone.


• Launch iTunes.


• Click on the iPhone and press restore.

This will return the iPhone to its virgin state. No files visible, no nothing.

However...as any sufficiently paranoid geek worth his salt will tell you, that doesn't actually get rid of all your data. I showed you in another Insider Secrets video how deleted files can be recovered. You don't want that happening here. An Oregon State Police detective was able to recover personal data from a refurbished iPhone bought from Apple.

Jonathan Zdziarski posted screenshots of what the detective found. He also posted his own way of wiping the iPhone. It is the most secure way I've seen, but it involves jailbreaking the iPhone and then obtaining shell access via SSH. So...you decide your own paranoia-to-work ratio. If you want Jonathan's rock-solid way, head to Zdziarski.com.

Meanwhile, here's an easier way that will still rid your iPhone of much of its data.

• First, change your passwords, especially for e-mail and social-networking accounts accessed from the iPhone.


• Next, do the restore we demonstrated above.


• Then--and a little thanks to Securosis.com for this one, go into iTunes and on the info tab, uncheck all options.


• Do the same on photos, podcasts, and video.


• Now, create three separate playlists that are all the same size as your iPhone's storage capacity. If you have 7GB of storage free, make your playlists 7GB large.


• Go to the Music tab and select the first three of your playlists.


• And sync--the storage bar should look full.


• Now uncheck that playlist and check the second playlist to sync.


• And then do the same with the third playlist. What you're doing here is a fumbling, unofficial "three-pass overwrite."


• Now restore the iPhone again, and if you can, preferably do it from a different computer.



This will make most of your old data mostly unrecoverable, but it can't guarantee that every last shred is gone. For that you either need to be geeky like Jonathan or wait for some fancy software engineer to make it easier for you.

UPDATE - June 8, 2008
Just got a note from Jonathan Zdziarski with a still slightly geeky, but easier secure wipe. He points out that the music fill-up described above is not so great if you don't have 8 gigs of music. You could copy and rename files until you appear to have 8 gigs of music, but instead, try this.

Jonathan has prepared a RAM disk that can be launched from the iPhone Utility Client.

First get the iPhone Utility Client

Download Wipe

Follow the instructions in the read me. Essentially, you'll place the iPhone in recovery mode. Exit and re-enter iPhone Utility Client. Then you'll enter some commands to execute Wipe. It says it will destroy all data. So only do it if you mean it.

Thanks to Jonathan for passing this along.

Daniel Newman, executive director of MAPlight.org showed us how his Web site lets you trace how money is influencing politicians.

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To make sure you can watch all CNET video, turn off ad blockers, or white list CNET.com. If you have more general Flash video problems here's a possible solution.

Use iPodifier to convert videos to an iPod-friendly format on a schedule.

Here's how fix the Firefox memory leak.

Try Samba to share printers between a Mac and PC.

If Aero no longer works after running a registry cleaner try this. Otherwise we suggest a system restore.

This is not what you want to hear when you call tech support and tell them your operating system is OS X.

"What's that?" or "OSN?"

But that's what happened when I called Verizon to troubleshoot connection trouble on my EVDO card. I had to say it was a Mac before they understood. Well, sort of understood.

I was having difficulty where I would make a connection and within 30 seconds the connection would be terminated.

The first person I talked to asked me to launch Verizon's VZ Access Manager software. I explained that the instructions for Mac that came with the device said to just plug in the card and I would be able to manage it from within the OS. They did not tell you to install software. So therefore I could manage the card, but I did not have VZ Access Manager. This seemed to stymie the person on the other end and I was told that they don't get a lot of Mac questions.

On my own, while the tech fumbled for an idea of what do for a Mac user, I poked around on their site during the call and found an OS X version of the Access Manager and installed it. Once I did that we were able to troubleshoot and fix the problem.

But when I got home, I was still having access trouble. So I called Verizon again and gave them the case number. The support person asked me to choose tools from the menu option in VZ Access Manager. I explained that there was no tools option. I got another response that Macs "sure are different" and that they don't get many Mac calls. This technician fumbled around trying to give me steps for the Windows version of VZ Access Manager that I couldn't implement. Eventually it was suggested that I go outside and see if it worked outside the building. I agreed I'd try and we ended the call amicably.

Strangely, after I got off the call, the card connected and worked fine thereafter.

Now I must make clear that both techs I talked to seemed intelligent and were trying to be helpful. They just acted as if they had never seen a Mac before. They had no idea what this crazy "OS X" was, and had no scripts to help them support a Mac user.

Get it together, Verizon. If you advertise, as you do, that your card works with Macs, then you need to train your support personnel to know how to use them.

How many times have you deleted a file, emptied the Recycle Bin, and then had that sinking feeling in your gut. You need one of those files. Or maybe you just had a hard-disk crash, and suddenly all the files have disappeared.

I'll tell you how to recover your files, and show you how to do it, in this video.

For this example, I'm going to use a USB drive. But the same thing applies to most data drives. If your disk is still readable by the computer, you can recover all kinds of cool stuff.

See when you delete data it's not actually wiped off the disk. When a file is written to the disk, its location is noted. So the system knows where to go to read that file--kind of like a book index.

When you delete a file, the system removes the entry in the table. The file appears to be gone. This is akin to me blacking out or even tearing out the entry in the book's index.

The file itself stays on the machine, though. Just like Page 9 is still in the book even if I rip out the index page that refers to Page 9. But don't forget the computer thinks that location was empty. So if another file was written to that area, you may only recover part of a file.

Regardless of how your lost file was deleted, if you haven't performed many--if any--operations on the disk, you have a good chance of recovering it.

I'm going to use PhotoRec from cgsecurity.org, a free and open-source program, in my example. There are a lot of other programs to choose from, such as PC Inspector File Recovery.

Let's say I have a few MP3s on a USB drive, then I accidentally delete them.

No worries.

Just launch PhotoRec. Your USB thumbdrive should show up. Select it and make sure "proceed" is highlighted then press "enter."

Then you need to tell PhotoRec what kind of file system the machine uses. If it's Windows NTFS or FAT32, choose Intel. If you formatted the disk from a Mac choose "EFI" for Intel Macs and "Mac" for G4s or older.

If the disk has more than one partition, you'll need to choose which one to scan. Otherwise, choose the only partition available and make sure search is selected.

Then tell it what file system was used. FAT/NTFs/HFS for Windows and OS X, and EXT for Linux systems.

Next, you can tell it to look only at the unused space, which is faster, or if you're obsessive, choose to extract files from the whole partition.

Finally, tell the program where to store the files. It will suggest a folder based on where PhotoRec is running from. Just don't choose the drive you're scanning as the location. Then press "Y" and let it do its work.

Once it's done, look in the folder you specified earlier. You may have a lot of little pieces of files but you should also have some of the files you thought lost. If you're lucky, you may have all of them.

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders gave us an insight into how to get more organized with all your e-mail.

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