The Best 46 Free Utilities

:: Rita Vine at Sitelines draws attention to The 46 Best-ever Free Utilities, compiled by Ian "Gizmo" Richards, editor of Tech Support Alert. Free utilities covered included best web browser, anti-virus software, adware/spyware/scumware remover, spam filter for the average user (and one for the experienced user), best BitTorrent client, FTP client, etc etc. The list extends to 64 utilities if you subscribe to Gizmo's monthly newsletter, Support Alert, which I just did myself.

Value Added

:: This weekend, Geoff was over again, helping me with the home renos. He cut and installed a few sections of baseboard, as well as a couple pieces of transition moulding. I stained some smaller pieces of moulding, to be installed around the piece of slate in front of the fireplace. In the evening, I visited Geoff and Kim, we had Chinese food and watched this movie on their big basement screen. Today I drove with Amelia to Smoky Lake, where we, along with her Harvest Moon Fiddlers, performed for the locals as part of a celebration in honour of town volunteers.

I was also in a spending mood this weekend. I bought one of these, to be delivered on May 27th. The model is called South Beach, but I can't find an example on the web site. Then I went to Best Buy and bought this, this, and this.

There is more to come: new clothes, a cell phone, and a few more items for the home renovations. I think I will enjoy the laptop. My Dell 4400 is three years old, and somewhat sluggish, but still useful. I'm surprised at the ease of transition to the laptop, and look forward to learning more about it. The wireless mouse works well so far, and the wireless router is a godsend.

Update

:: The problem detailed previously with Outlook 2003 not working on my home computer has been solved for now. In Norton Internet Security 2005, I turned off the AntiSpam function, and e-mail began to flow into my Outlook 2003 inbox.

I'm now working with a template designed by Neil Turner in the UK, with the goal of moving it to STLQ when it's ready. You can see my progress with it at http://stlq.info/open, if yer bored...

:: I have a couple hundred e-mails to process (here and at work.) Please be patient with me. I'm also nearing the end of the book chapter I am writing. I estimate I've spent anywhere from 60-80 hours on it in the past four weeks. I underestimated how long it would take to finish it.

The Problems Continue

:: Perhaps the planets were out of alignment when I made a number of upgrades to my home computer recently, because I continue to encounter nothing but problems. To wit, I've loaded Office 2003, Moveable Type 3.121, Firefox 1.0, and Norton Internet Security 2005, within the last few weeks. I've detailed problems with Firefox already, and continue to delay facing the inevitable regarding getting new templates for my blogs, which needs to be done to make them work in Firefox, especially STLQ.

The non-stop aggravation is now with Outlook 2003 at home. It has now decided it doesn't want to work anymore, and keeps giving me this error message:

Task 'podbaydoor.com - Receiving' reported error (0x8004210A) : 'The operation timed out waiting for a response from the receiving (POP) server. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'

Yes, yes, I've searched the error on the 'net, found pages at Norton and Microsoft that discuss it, and tried to replicate the suggested solution within Norton 2005 - makes no difference. And with the new version of MT, when I save an entry, it kicks me out, back to the login page - I log back in, and the post is there, saved. D'oh! Of course, this also means that if you are e-mailing me, I may not get it, and you may not get a reply, either, until this is fixed.

I'm plugging in the iron so that I can use it on the white flag I plan to raise soon. Why is it that when you upgrade to improve the functionality of your machine, it never seems to work right?

That sound you hear is me sucking my thumb in the fetal position on my bed. First, ice cream. Good night.

Skype - Free Long-Distance Phone Calls Anywhere on the Planet

:: While browsing through Time Out New York #437, I read an article called Talk is Cheap - No-hype Skype lets you make long distance calls for free, by Lisa Sweetingham.

Skype is a Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, program that transforms your voice into data and then transmits it over the Net. The London-based Skype company joins a string of other VoIP players: Net2Phone and Vonage (see TONY 400) already offer VoIP plans, and Time Warner Cable and Verizon are gearing up to enter the game. But only Skype lets you make calls to anywhere for free—all you have to do is download the beta program.

Developed by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the two Swedes who created the peer-to-peer file-sharing program KaZaA, Skype is like Friendster for your phone—but no invitations are needed. And while commercial VoIP providers use a centralized system of computers to route calls, Skype cuts out the middle man; your computer calls your contact's computer directly.

Skype works on PCs running Windows 2000 or XP operating systems (Apple users are out of luck for now, but Zennström says they may introduce Apple platforms in the future), and the download takes about 30 seconds. Just plug a mike/speaker headset into your computer (about $30 at any electronics store) or go speakerphone-style with a mike and your computer's internal sound card, and you're ready to chat it up with your long-distance Skype friends.

Naturally, I am curious to see how good it is. If you download the program, let me know. The latest version allows for conference calls for up to five people at once. The one weakness, as mentioned in the article, is that you can only call other Skype users for now - to me, not a huge issue. If you have friends or family that you call regularly, and you want to save $$$, this might be the solution. I'm looking forward to trying it as soon as one of you loads it on your machine.

Comics I Don't Understand

:: Garth (old Wpg friend living in Mpls area) sent a link to The Comics I Don't Understand Page. The owner uploads comic strips published during a one-week period, the punch lines or points of which he doesn't get, and asks readers for their interpretation.

:: Keith advises that Microsoft is offering its Windows Security Update CD free of charge. "This CD includes Microsoft critical updates released through October 2003..." It's useful if you are have a slow 'net connection. More info available here. As well, updated info on the Mydoom and Doomjuice worm variants is available, including a free scan of your computer to see if it's infected with either of these products.

Various

:: The Directors Guild of America has announced its nominations for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 2003. One notable absentee is Anthony Minghella, for Cold Mountain. Overall, it hasn't been the best year for film. Sales of tickets in the USA dropped for the first time since 1991.

:: With the Spirit Rover firmly in place on Mars, the US will now move its search for WMD to the red planet itself. Meanwhile, The Beagle isn't doing too well.

:: The Writers' Union of Canada is "aghast" over cuts to Regina's public library system.

:: I'm a bit cranky tonight. Last night while falling asleep, my right eye began bothering me. This morning I woke to a burning feeling in said right eye, and it has yet to subside. I know, I should have it examined.

Really, Really Tiny Guitars

:: As a guitar player of some 37+ years, I was interested to see this news release about the new, Flying V NanoGuitar. It falls under the category of NEMS (Nanoelectromechanical Systems), which is two orders of magnitude smaller than MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems).

The original "nanoguitar", about the size of a blood cell, was developed in 1997.

I'm looking forward to the first CD release of nanoguitar music!

Sore Shoulder, Amazon Breaks New Ground

:: My right shoulder and arm were examined today by a doctor with a specialty in sports medicine. Turns out my shoulder is somewhat out of whack - can't give you much more of an explanation than that. My muscles, rotator cuff, and so on, are ok, but the shoulder blade is out of alignment, bulging a bit at my back. I will need physiotherapy. Unfortunately my first appointment is on November 12th, so in the meantime, I'm getting a massage and stocking up on pain killers.

:: Amazon.com announced last Thursday that it is making the full-text of ~120,000 books (>33,000,000 pages), searchable to its customers. The searching is done at the same level as a title or author search. So I took the book Moonwatcher's Memoir by Dan Richter, flipped it open to a random page (116), read the phrase "some Velcro slipping" in a sentence, typed that phrase into the Amazon search window, and boom, the first item retrieved was Richter's book, with a link to p116, where it found the phrase. What was interesting was how fast the results appeared, in less than five seconds. Given the size of the db, 33 million pages, never mind how many words, I was very impressed that it found the one book with the phrase so quickly. The search algorithm retrieved other books and pages with the words "some", "Velcro", and "slipping", but not the phrase itself.

However, I tried three times to retrieve the text of the page, and finally received a response; I suspect Amazon's servers are burning a lot of coal right now, trying to keep up with the new service. So to see the page that contained the phrase, I had to wait over 10 minutes. Once the page with the phrase you searched appears, you can browse two pages on either side of that page in the book.

This is an impressive feat on Amazon's part. Within my profession, a growing number of full-text databases exists, mostly of primary and secondary journal literature, along side a smaller number of databases which offer the full-texts of monographs, such as books24x7. None of the book dbs remotely approach the content of Amazon's 120,000 books. It's a unique feature that will no doubt increase sales. Amazon's customers now have another powerful search tool to retrieve books (and CDs, DVDs, etc) of interest to them while browsing and searching. The question is: how quickly will their competitors move to offer a similar feature to their web sites?

It Takes ... Balls

:: I was at the Netspeed 2003 conference today in Edmonton, and attended a number of interesting sessions, including ones covering virtual reference services, and PDAs in the library. One of the keynote speakers, Ian Whitten, currently the iCore Visiting Professor at U Lethbridge, and Director of the NZ Digital Library at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, discussed Greenstone Digital Library Software, a suite of open-source software used to build and digitize library collections. During his engaging and at time hilarious talk, he showed us examples of digitized collections created with Greenstone, including this page on castration from Basic Husbandry Practices and Veterinary Care. (The foreword of the book states: "The manuals are based upon experiences documented through a series of intensive field work activities over a one-year period with a group of livestock small-holders living and working in Cavite province of the Philippines.")

Note the picture of the farmer tossing the animal testicles onto a roof of made of galvanized iron. This is an indigenous practice done on hot days, as the belief is that the testicles will dry up faster, and thus so will the wound to the animal.

The attentive crowd watching Ian, myself included, had just finished eating lunch at this point in time.

:: I've been playing around with Blogger sites again, ones I've created to keep myself familiar with how to set up an instant blog on that site. Among these sites is my original blog from July 2002. I need to maintain familiarity so that I might sound somewhat intelligent and coherent when G and I present blogging sessions in the not-too-distant future. As some of you might notice, I'm also experimenting with the font size and styles here as well.

Transferring video to DVD

:: Hewlett Packard has introduced a device called a DC3000 DVD Movie Writer, that lets you transfer VHS and other formats, including BetaMax, to DVD. Another new toy!

Firsts

:: I experienced two "firsts" today. At work, we began our Librarian On-Site! service. For the first time in my 25-year career as a librarian, I left the library to do information and reference work, and went to where the users "live", on their turf. I set up shop in a large computer lab, and offered consulting to any engineering student or faculty who needed help. It was a lot of fun, especially in the second hour, when a class of chemical engineering design students descended upon me with a propane pricing and chemical property question.

The other "first" was more personal - I was fitted for a hearing aid. Yah, you read that correctly. It's wonderful getting old. I've had a version of low tone conductive deafness in my right ear since 1985 or so. It's never worsened or improved, so my ear doctor suggested I consider a hearing aid. I'm going to try it for a few weeks, and then decide whether or not to purchase (~$1,500Cdn, just a pile of chump change).

A hearing aid. I can't believe I typed those words. It seems to work well most of the time. It doesn't work well with a telephone or headset or headphones, so I'll have to get used to using the phone in my left ear. It has two settings, one for group noise (used in a meeting or a party), and a basic setting for conversation. The device feels ok in my ear, not too much of a bother, and most people I spoke to didn't even notice it. That's cool because it protects a bit of my vanity, but inside, a small part of me is very, very sad.

Gallery Revisited

:: I discovered this afternoon, by serendipity more than anything else I suppose, that I had the wrong binaries loaded for NetPBM. Er, duh. Like, how would I know? Anyway, I uploaded them to my server, and Gallery started working on my site. I've loaded a handful of photos so far, and will continue to work on tweaking things in the next few days.

:: I'm feeling slightly better than yesterday. Bones and muscles not aching as much. It was very cool in town here today, and is 1^oC at the moment. Apparently snow has been falling heavily in other parts of Alberta. Still, I'll take this over what Hurricane Isabel is about to give the eastern seaboard.

:: Some time back, during an NYC trip, I was introduced to Rainsong guitars. They haven't been available in Alberta, but a rep for the company was scheduled to come through Edmonton this week and visit Avenue Guitars, far and away the best guitar shop in Edmonton, and the only one I frequent. I'm looking forward to playing one again soon.

Bloody Worms, Competitive Stuffing of One's Pie Hole

:: A couple of days ago, I started receiving random e-mails, 82 of them since Aug 31st, each infected with the W32.Sobig.F@mm worm. What a pain in the ass. I've run the removal tool, which confirms that the worm isn't on my machine, but the feckin' e-mails keep coming. Every one gets caught by Norton Antivirus and automatically deleted, but I don't know how to prevent them from coming in. The Symantec page includes a list of IP addresses correlating to the master servers, so I added those to my firewall restricted zone.

*sigh* One wishes those who waste their lives creating destructive worms and viruses might do something productive, like discover girls, or breath through their noses instead of their mouths. Or at least consider getting a life.

:: Tomorrow I'm on campus to deliver a couple of short presentations during Orientation'03, and then teach to 110 Chemical Engineering 200 students. Classes don't actually begin until Wednesday. The hordes are back, long live the hordes.

:: I've heard of this before, but this article in the NYTimes Magazine (ID and PW: podbay) about competitive eating, well, turns my stomach. It details how one competitor "trains" for these events:

It is 11:30 p.m., the end of a long night of gastronomic training for Hughes. For the past four hours, he and his wife, Tereasa, have been buffet-hopping with me in and around their hometown of Newport News, Va. First came Captain George's Seafood, where the 44-year-old Hughes systematically attacked the 80-foot spread, downing 10 soft-shell crabs, 120 or so shrimp, a small steak, a handful of crawfish, a plate of crab legs and one (purely symbolic) asparagus stalk. At one point, he peeled and ate 60 shrimp while Tereasa timed him with her electronic wristwatch. Tossing them into his churning maw as if they were M&M's, shellfish shrapnel spraying the table, he finished in 4 minutes 32 seconds, an effort he pronounced ''respectable.''

After abortive trips to the Golden City buffet and the Golden Palace buffet, each of which Hughes deemed too low on food, we headed to the Szechuan Inn, where Hughes inhaled 10 pieces of sushi, another 20 shrimp and some chicken. Finally, we drove to the County Grill and Smokehouse. Before entering, Hughes, a stubby, cherubic man imbued with childlike enthusiasm, lifted his shirt to show off his distended stomach, which had swollen to just under the size of a beach ball and made an elastic pinging noise when he thwapped it with his finger. Inside the restaurant, he ate two orders of collard greens, a pile about the size of two fists, in 18 seconds. To an untrained eye, the evening was an astounding digestive display. But to Hughes, who eats heavily at buffets like these two or three times a week, it was a grave disappointment. ''You see, this is my problem,'' he said, small pebbles of sweat clinging to his forehead as he surveyed the obstinate wieners, which had been ordered post-collard greens. ''I'm good on speed, but I just can't do the volume yet. If I'm going to be a champion, I need to be able to go big on volume.''

Such is the state of the world. Gee, imagine that those who compete must also actually consider long-term health. The 25-year old hot dog-eating champ, Takeru Kobayashi, set the world record in 2002, eating 50.5 hot dogs in 12 minutes. In those 12 minutes, he consumed 15,600 calories and >1,000 grams of fat, and gained 8 pounds. Heart attack on a plate.

The scariest thing is that all of this is actually so important to enough people that there exists an association, The International Federation of Competetive Eating. Read their mandate. They consider this activity a "sport". I wonder if they ever hold competitions in third world countries in which most citizens are starving. Please forgive me if I find this activity morally repugnant.

Road Trip

:: The day has been spent preparing for the drive tomorrow, on the way to Winnipeg. I am not a fan of that long drive anymore, but am looking forward to being in town to attend the high school reunion, and see a few good friends. Today I enjoyed a 90-minute full-body massage, and later in the afternoon, met Avalee and had a very enjoyable two-hour coffee visit with her. Thanks, av, I enjoyed it and hope you did too. Av and I are fellow EFMF volunteers. She's moving to Toronto soon to study web design.

:: There is too much happening, too much to do, all the time, all the time...

:: While exiting my car this afternoon (decarring?), I shut the door on my watch band and broke it in two. *sigh* I have no idea how that happened.

:: I just discovered that my new HP 5550 printer does double-sided printing! Trees will be saved. Lordy. It's a noisy little bugger, though.

Farewell to PDA's?

Do you own a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)? I don't, but have been thinking about it for some time. Yet technology seems to move faster than one can keep up in the 21st century. Ephraim Schwartz, editor at large at Infoworld writes that General Motors believes the time may be approaching for you to get rid of your PDA.

General Motors announced last week that it will partner with wireless carrier Nextel to use Nextel’s Motorola cell phones with data capabilities to market a field-force management application to its commercial truck fleet customers. The announcement casts a shadow over the future of handheld devices in the business marketplace.

By selecting a cellular phone, GM in essence said no to Palm, HP, and Microsoft.

IT departments should consider the reasoning behind GM’s decision before recommending a handheld solution of their own.

The technology includes GPS, Java, and push-to-talk, and in tandem with ease of use, it becomes hard to chose a handheld over a handset. Cell phones are also considerably cheaper than PDAs.

Can someone slow technology down for just a few minutes, please? (From: Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends)

"What's So Great About Really Deep Thoughts?" Wiki Wiki!

:: Here's a compelling and interesting essay from Andrew Grumet: Deep Thinking About Weblogs.

:: I didn't buy shoes tonight, but gave the idea some deep thoughts.

:: Seen this term popping up lately?: social software. Here's an article about it by Stowe Boyd. There is a social software blog. There is a Social Software Alliance Wiki. Wiki?

:: In an effort to keep up with developments in all things web-like, Wiki came up in conversation today. I investigate a few sites before my brain exploded, including the original site and the FAQ, which notes that "this Wiki thing" is: "A collection of web-pages which can be edited by anyone, at any time, from anywhere." Wiki Wiki is Hawaiian for "quick". One major project is the Wikipedia, a "multilingual project to create a complete and accurate open content encyclopedia. We started on January 15, 2001 and are already working on 120,700 articles in the English version." How did they create 120,700 entries in just over 2 years? Regardless, the creators think Wikipedia is great. A Wiktionary is also being created.

:: An entrepeneur in Spokane purchased 10 Segways, and is renting them to people looking for cheap, quick transportation. He couldn't do this if he lived in San Francisco, however. In the end, it may not matter.

:: We try to stay in at least the slow lane on the information superhighway, but lately I feel like I've pulled over on the offramp to change a flat tire.

The Dual Boarding Bridge

:: This is way cool. WestJet, the Canadian indie airline, and DEW Engineering have introduced a dual boarding bridge (or OTW: Over The Wing) at the WestJet operations base at the Calgary International Airport. The bridge allows passengers to enter and leave the plane from the front and rear doors.

Libraries Are Cool Again. Oh Really?

:: In today's Edmonton Journal comes a column by Scott McKeen, titled: Civilization's safe after all. Libraries are cool again. Um, er, well...duh. Those of us in the profession have a news flash for Mr McKeen - our hallowed halls of employment were never uncool. Dude. McKeen observes that when All Things Pop Culture exploded (in the 90s, I presume), such as computers (read: Internet), home theatre, big box bookstores, instant gratification, and so on, the prediction was people would stop frequenting libraries, and by extension, their services. I've been a librarian for 25 years, and don't recall any particular point in time when my colleagues and I thought the sky was falling on our vocation and the buildings in which we work(ed). Read McKeen's column, and one might conclude that it's a modern miracle libraries didn't collapse from within when the Internet and Napster and stadium seat theatres and Digimon and all these fast food thrills took hold of Planet Earth. Well, public libraries at least. In academic and college libraries, we've spent the last 10 years doing our best to help students understand why the Internet isn't the Answer to Everything, and why their research and studies will take them to the library and its resources. *Cough*. (BTW, am I the only person who thinks the Edmonton Journal's web site really, really sucks? Like, badly? Unfortunately, the EJ website is the mirror image of all newspapers in Canada owned by the National Post.)

In fairness to McKeen, he does sing the praises of (public) libraries, and notes that Alberta municipalities are lobbying our provincial government for higher library grants. Um, I won't lose sleep waiting for that to happen very soon - increased library funding in Alberta could lead to a better educated populace. God forbid that might happen here.

:: Speaking of public libraries, this is such a cool idea, I wish someone in Canada would do it, too: The Third Annual New York Times Librarian Awards for public librarians across the United States. This year the awards have gone national in the USA.

:: An interesting "editorial observer" on William Gibson by Brent Staples in the 11 May 2003 NYTimes: A Prince of Cyberpunk Fiction Moves Into the Mainstream. (Note: ID and PW: podbay)

:: Have you been following the amazing success of Apple's iTunes? The iTunes Music Store sold over 1,000,000 songs (@$0.99US a pop) in one week. Read Rebecca's observations. Interestingly enough, hackers have already found a way to share the tunes among Macintosh owners.

Let It Snow

:: Test Below, I mentioned the snow to which we woke up last Sunday. Well, that snow melted, we had a few warm days, and then yesterday it started snowing again. Oh yes, it's May 5th. Anyway, it's been snowing now for 24 hours. It's getting ridiculous. Check out my backyard and the front of my house at 8:30 pm MDT tonight. The grass is green, by the way, and until two days ago, I had plans to mow my lawn for the first time.

In the meantime, to remind me of warmer climes, I uploaded a few photos using a free photo gallery program called Web Album Generator. Thanks to Dania for telling me about this one.

:: Changing gears, this 1 May 2003 editorial in the Wall Street Journal got it right regarding the WHO's embarrassing and baffling travel advisory to Toronto re: SARS, noting that no new cases have been reported in Toronto since April 9th, and that all 144 cases have been traced to one person who had visited Hong Kong. The WHO did lift its travel advisory, and John Fund writes that the American Library Association will make the right decision regarding holding the joint ALA/CLA conference in Toronto, where up to 25,000 people are expected to attend. Thankfully, the day after the editorial appeared, ALA did just that.

:: Did you know that the planets, satellites and spacecraft in our solar system have been assigned IP addresses by the Interplanetary Internet (IPN)? If you are interested, participate in the ongoing discussion. (Thanks, Karlin.)