Friday, December 31, 2004

Wired News: You, Too, Can Be a Podcaster

Interesting Wired article: Wired News: You, Too, Can Be a Podcaster
Talks about Adam Curry's Daily Source Code and others. Worth a read.

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1 Year on Mars

Those wonderful little rovers have been on Mars for year. 4 times longer than expected. View their scrapbook here: JPL Multimedia

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Tuesday, December 28, 2004

American Red Cross - Donate How-To

Link to donate to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.

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The Internet: Blogs Provide Raw Details From Scene of the Disaster

Interesting New York Times article on how bloggers on the scene are covering the quake disaster in more personal ways than traditional journalists.
Includes likes to a few interesting blogs.

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Monday, December 27, 2004

Recent World Earthquake Activity - RSS info

With all the quake activity of late I decided to start pulling down RSS feeds of earthquake info. Here ia a link to the US Geological Survey RSS info. Love the fact that their info page links to Firefox and the Sage RSS reader.

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Thursday, December 23, 2004

Use Firefox for a Safer System

Interesting eWeek article: Use Firefox for a Safer System Great quote:
"How many times must Windows desktop users be hosed before they start using a more secure desktop operating system?"

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Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Paint.NET

Ineresting freeware replacement for the Windows paint program. It requires .NET 1.1. It is a project of Washingting State U. and Microsoft. Paint.NET:
"Paint.NET has many of the powerful features that expensive commercial applications have, including the ability to use layers. This is the second semester that Paint.NET has been a project at Washington State University, and we have the goal of adding as much functionality as expensive commercial applications provide, but of course, for free!"
Via Slashdot

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Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Linux Client Migration Cookbook

Interesting looking book:Linux Client Migration Cookbook A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux
Available in PDF form as well.
The goal of this IBM Redbook is to provide a technical planning reference for IT organizations large or small that are now considering a migration to Linux-based personal computers. For Linux, there is a tremendous amount of “how to” information available online that addresses specific and very technical operating system configuration issues, platform-specific installation methods, user interface customizations, etc. This book includes some technical “how to” as well, but the overall focus of the content in this book is to walk the reader through some of the important considerations and planning issues you could encounter during a migration project. Within the context of a pre-existing Microsoft Windows-based environment, we attempt to present a more holistic, end-to-end view of the technical challenges and methods necessary to complete a successful migration to Linux-based clients.

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Monday, December 20, 2004

Google Desktop Search Release Notes

I don't remember seeing a release notes page before but here is a link to is that includes a 'thank you' to the gang at Rice University that discovered the vulnerabilities that have been talked about in the press over the last day or so: Google Desktop Search Release Notes

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FoxyVoice - A text-to-speech extension for Firefox

This is pretty cool. If you have poor vision or just don't feel like reading, check out FoxyVoice. It is a text-to-speech extension for Firefox. It give you a little icon at the bottom of your browser window that you can click on and have it read the page. Or, the method I like, you can select a portion of the page and then right-click and then select 'read aloud' from the context menu.

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Updated: Google Desktop Search Plus

Trivex.net updated their excellent GDSPlus to version 1.01:
"GDSPlus 1.01 has been released. Added is support for the GDS new version 121004. Please note that when Google updates GDS, you must also update to the latest version of GDSPlus or else GDS will stop indexing custom file types."
Emphasis mine.

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Sunday, December 19, 2004

Rice University Computer Scientists Find a Flaw in GDS

Looks like this may be the reason for the mysterious update to Google Desktop I reported yesterday.
The New York Times > Technology > Rice University Computer Scientists Find a Flaw in Google's New Desktop Search Program
"In a statement over the weekend, the company [Google] said that it had been notified of the flaw by the computer researchers in late November and had begun distributing a new version of the desktop search engine that repairs the potential security hole."
"The Rice researchers said that it was possible for users to tell if their version of the Google program had been patched by examining the "about" page from the Google Desktop icon in the browser task bar. Version numbers above 121,004 indicate a newer edition of the program."

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Saturday, December 18, 2004

Give the Gift of Google

Google has packaged up all their software into a zip file you can burn to a CD. They even give you lables an inserts to print. Aren't they nice?
Give the Gift of Google

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Google Desktop Search updated today

Several people posted to Google Groups : Google Desktop Search that their GDS updated to version 121004. Others reported that theirs didn't update. Mine didn't update either. My guess is that Google has these staggered so that their server isn't taken down one morning when the world auto updates.

I took a look at the registry and there is a key that may be of value called next_update_check. It's in hex so I don't know how to change it. It's here:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop]
'next_update_check'=hex(b):68,f5,ba,6f,3c,e5,c4,01

So I stopped GDS, opened the key and deleted it's values and saved it.
After verifying I was connected to the Internet, I started GDS and a minute or less later, the about page showed 121004 and ZoneAlarm reported that autoupdate.exe was trying to access the Internet.

I don't know what all was changed but I can tell you the autoupdate.exe is NEW

Just before I did all of the above I ran a test of all the file version dates in my C:\Program Files\Google\Google Desktop Search directory.
GoogleDesktopIndex.exe was dated 10/14/2004 08:40 PM 427,520
and there was no autoupdate.exe

The only new files now are:
12/18/2004 10:39 AM 259,176 autoupdate.exe
12/18/2004 10:39 AM 431,104 GoogleDesktopIndex.exe

So, GoogleDesktopIndex.exe grew a little bit and autoupdate is new.

Note that this will probably break Google Desktop Search Plus if you have it installed. I've emailed the author.

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Friday, December 17, 2004

Job Search, Indeed

Once again, via John Battelle's Searchblog
"Indeed.com is a new service which scrapes jobs from scores of services and then wraps a familiar interface around the entire thing - a search interface."

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Get Yer Traffic Reports Here...

This is very cool. I love Yahoo Maps and now you'll be able to see real time traffic information right on the route you are looking for. This would work the best if you log in to Yahoo and save your locations so that you can do a quick search right before you leave so you know the real time information.
Now if it could be pushed to a pda...

Via John Battelle's Searchblog

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Tuesday, December 14, 2004

FeedSpeaker

This is interesting. You put in an RSS feed and it generates an MP3 via text-to-speech. It's like your speak-n-spell has it's own podcast! Read more here.

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Monday, December 13, 2004

Sign and encrypt your mail

Volker Weber has an interesting post about how to obtain a free certificate for your email so that you can begin to sign and encrypt your mail. vowe dot net :: Sign and encrypt your mail:
"The basic certificate is free and certifies nothing but your email address. Once you added the certificate to your mail program, you can sign mails. When you receive signed mails from others, your mail program can use the attached public key to encrypt your reply."

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Friday, December 10, 2004

InsideGoogle: Google Suggest

InsideGoogle points to a Google Labs feature called Google Suggest:
"By offering more refined searches up front, Google Suggest can make searching more convenient and efficient, because it eliminates the need to type the entire text of a query. In addition, the service can connect users with new query suggestions that are useful, intriguing, and fun."

Google Suggest is available here.

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Thursday, December 09, 2004

CNN.com - Invasion of the podcasting people?

Good article on CNN.com about podcasting: CNN.com - Invasion of the podcasting people? - Dec 8, 2004

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Updated: My Firefox Help, Tips and Tricks

Updated my Firefox Help, Tips & Tricks Page:
Added details about Smart Keywords
Rearranged the list of extensions I like. Ad Block is too awsome to leave closer to the bottom.
Added a link to the Firefox Extensions page.
Just realized I didn't link to the Spell Bound page. Have done so now.

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Tuesday, December 07, 2004

There are dumb questions

Next time someone askes one, send them here.

Via vowe dot net

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Sunday, December 05, 2004

Created Change Logs

I got some feedback that people can't always tell what has changed on my tips pages since the last time they visited. While I usually blog about changes to My Firefox Tips and My GDS Tips, I've created change log pages for both. Hopefully this will work out well.

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Friday, December 03, 2004

GDS Caveat: Using a Move program

There have been a few threads on the Google Groups : Google-Desktop-Search forum where people have one machine and for whatever reason try to migrate everything to another machine using software like PC Relocator or some such like that.
It appears GDS gets a little confused and stops working in cases like this. Either the user name is different or the machine name is different or some deep internal thing is different enough that GDS doesn't work.
I suggest you uninstall GDS before attempting to use a move program like this. Or maybe these programs let you not move a specific application? Try that if you can.
It's been my long experience that you are always better off doing a fresh install of everything, run Windows update and any other updates then moving your data files (word docs, mp3s etc). Things just run better that way.

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Secrets of Firefox 1.0

Windows Secrets latest newsletter arrived today containing Secrets of Firefox 1.0. Most of what they cover is is covered in my Firefox Help, Tips and Tricks. They go into a little more detail that I do about some of the settings and why to make them. All the about:config tweaks are already in my user.js file.

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Thursday, December 02, 2004

Awsome adblock filterset

I had a little filter set on my Firefox tips page for strings to block but this list is the Mother of All Filtersets and is updated often. Go to
here and search for the latest file. It's easy to install if you know Adblock but you may also want to read the instructions.

Via Quoth the Stephen

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Feedster RSS Search Subscriptions

If you haven't seen this yet, go take a looks. Feedster has a feature, not sure how new it is, but you do a search and then you can subscribe to the results via RSS. Then, each day you can check the feed a view new results. It's a really cool way to keep up with what people are saying about things you are interested in.

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Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Updated My Google Desktop Search Tips

I've just updated my GDS Tips. I reworked it a little bit and created a new section titled Third Party Tools. Within that section I've put details about gdSuite, DNKA - remote desktop search and GDSPlus.

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