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Google has released its official Google Toolbar for Firefox. The toolbar has been available for M$ Internet Explorer for some time, and if you just have to use IE I highly recommend it for its pop-up blocking capabilities alone; Firefox is good enough at pop-up blocking that this feature is not necessary.

Similar toolbars have been available as third-party extensions for Firefox, but this one seems to integrate more features, including: PageRank; buttons for Image, Froogle, Groups, News, and Site searches; Spell Check for forms; an automatic form filler; Autolink to create Google Maps from addresses; and a Blog This button. Some of these features are not enabled by default but can be easily added when selecting “options” from the drop-down menu beneath the main “Google” button.

By the way, after installing this toolbar, I used the “customize” option seen when right-clicking on the main toolbar area and was able to drag away the default Firefox search box in the upper right, as it was somewhat redundant once the Google Toolbar was installed. However, that search box allows for the use of multiple search sites, so I may yet add it back for its flexibility.

Google Blog reports that Google’s calculator feature now supports currency conversion. This is a pretty useful feature, as it doesn’t require you to navigate away from the search page or toolbar, and it allows for plain language searches [1 dollar in pounds]. However, sites like The Universal Currency Converter and Yahoo!’s Currency Converter are more comprehensive; I found that Google couldn’t handle Ukrainian currency, for example [1 dollar in hryvni].

Animated Atlas: Growth of a Nation is a multimedia Flash presentation that narrates the history of the United States while displaying the growth of its territory on a map.

I think MonkeyFilter summarizes the recent death of Vice Admiral Stockdale very well:

A real James Bond calls it quits. Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale – Decorated vet, POW, Perot VP candidate, Epictetus scholar, Illinois native and all around tough motherfucker, died yesterday from complications related to Alzheimers. He was 81.

I thought it was a real shame that he became “the butt of jokes after he opened the 1992 vice presidential debate by asking, ‘Who am I? Why am I here?’,” because it was not for lack of presence or intelligence:

“The questions were relevant in terms of the evening’s purpose, which was to introduce myself and let the American people know where I was coming from,” he wrote in 1995. “But I also chose them for their broader relevance to my life: I am a philosopher.”

The Grand Canyon Skywalk is “A fantastic glass bridge arcing 60-feet out over the Grand Canyon – giving visitors an unobstructed view 4000-feet straight down.” This sounds pretty cool, but I can’t see myself even getting near this (I have pretty bad acrophobia)…

Now that an official Google Maps API is available, all kinds of Google Maps hacks have been emerging. Google Maps Transparencies overlays street maps on satellite image views, allowing you to adjust the level of transparency while panning and zooming as usual. Very cool…

Dirk Benedict (of Battlestar Galactica and A-Team fame) gave an interesting interview in which he discussed the “re-imagined” female version of Starbuck in the new Battlestar Galactica TV series. Having only seen one episode of the new series, I don’t think I’m qualified to comment on the interview, although his thoughts on the matter are quite clear.

I’m sure that most of you have heard about the success of NASA’s Deep Impact mission, which fired an “impactor” satellite at the comet Tempel 1 at 23,000 mph to study the debris generated by the impact. The Astronomy Photo Of The Day pages for yesterday and today have some nice “before” and “after” shots of the comet. By all accounts, the mission was a resounding success, although it could take years to analyze all of the data.

However, there is a somewhat disturbing development that could jeopardize this success. Apparently, a distraught Russian astrologer is suing NASA for $300 million for her “moral sufferings,” claiming that the mission “ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe” and will “deform her horoscope.” No word yet on any possible settlement… 😉

Ricky Gervais (of the BBC’s The Office fame) has a video detailing Phil Collins’ Live8 plans (embedded QuickTime video). The rest of his site is pretty funny too…