Posts Tagged ‘Firefox’

How to share text/URLs of your PC with your mobile phone?

January 5, 2010

What’s your answer? What’s the best way? Is there a common way?

My answer is QR (Quick Response) code!!!

It’s really convenient.

Here will introduce a Firefox extension – Mobile Barcoder. You may get the currently workable version from:

http://github.com/jk3us/mobilebarcoder/downloads

But this version don’t support Unicode (such as Chinese) well. So here I made some little change to support Unicode and upload it.

And this is an introduction article about this extension, via:

http://jazzy.id.au/pebble/2009/04/04/copy_and_paste_between_firefox_and_the_iphone.html

Today I decided to have a go at diagnosing why the reversing lights on my car weren’t working. I quickly worked out that the bulbs were fine, so I jumped on Google to see if I could find some information about where else problems may occur with reversing lights in a car. I found some very detailed instructions, but I had a problem. These instructions were on my computer, in my room, but I wanted to take them to my car, in my garage, and I don’t have a printer. However, I do have an iPhone, so I thought I’d copy the URL into my iPhone and read the instructions from Safari. The URL however was rather long and copying by hand would have been painful, what I really wanted to do was the equivalent of copy and paste from my computer to my iPhone.

Enter Mobile Barcoder. Mobile Barcoder is a Firefox extension that allows you to generate QR Codes from Firefox. A QR Code is a 2D barcode designed to be read particularly by mobile devices. Using Mobile Barcoder, generating a barcode for the current page is as simple as hovering your mouse over the icon it puts in the bottom right corner of the window:

Generating a barcode from the current page

You can also right click on a link to generate a barcode for that link:

Generating a barcode from a link

You can even create a barcode from arbitrary text on the page, by selecting it and then right clicking:

Generating a barcode from selected=

So I have my barcode, but what use is that to me? Enter BeeTag. BeeTag is a free iPhone App that reads QR Codes and other 2D barcodes, and, depending on the type of code, lets you act on it accordingly. For example, if it’s a phone number, you can dial the number, if it’s a URL, you can open it in Safari, or if it’s plain text, you can save it as a memo. Scanning is as easy as taking a picture:

Taking a picture of a barcode with BeeTag

Having taken the picture, it will read it, and then prompt you for what you want to do next. I chose to open the URL in Safari:

BeeTag prompt after successfully reading a barcode The webpage on my iPhone in Safari

Now all I need to do is wait for the iPhone 3.0 firmware with copy and paste, and I have full end to end copy/paste from my computer to my iPhone.

PrintPDF – A Firefox extension to save web pages as pdf files

January 5, 2010

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5971

Not like other similar Firefox extensions,  such as Nitro PDF Dowload, PrintPDF extension does the work locally and don’t use the external server. I sometimes want to convert some internal web pages of company (there is a HTTP proxy) into PDF files, so this extension is specially useful. And it is very fast and stable (at least for my experience).

After installation and restart Firefox, select File->PrintPDF.