The Browser is the OS!

The title of this post is also the title of the last link I bothered to post on Del.icio.us, as I had come close to finding something that I had been searching for for years. The link was to Webconverger, a minimal Linux distro which consisted of only enough back-end to run the Firefox web-browser as a web-kiosk. Now Google plans to go one better, finally announcing that it is, in fact, working on its own long-rumoured OS which, not surprisingly, will consist of an absolutely minimal Linux core - just enough to get Google Chrome up and running.

Interestingly, Google Chrome is not yet available for Linux! - although that may now be attributable to the fact that Google is not as interested in getting Chrome to run on Linux as it is in getting Linux to run just Chrome. As the browser becomes the OS, I think we will see netbooks finally start living up to their names! Now I can hardly wait to nuke XP on my HP 2133 and replace it with the new Google Chrome OS. Watch out Microsoft! Google is hard on your heels...

Did you know you can fit 54 books in one of those large Rubbermaid containers?

I've been trying to clear some space in our little basement suite by packing some of my "haven't read this one for a while" books into boxes. Well, a box... So far I've only gotten one. The only problem with packing books into boxes is that they are less accessible in a box than they are on a shelf - conversely, the only problem with having books on a shelf is that they take up so much wall-space!

Anyhow, not wanting to lose track of these "books I haven't read for a while" that are packed away in Box 1, I've just entered them all into LibraryThing (at www.librarything.com). And, since it's so sad that these books have to languish away in a box, and simultaneously so cool to be able to list a random selection using a LibraryThing widget, I offer here a random selection of the books now stowed away in Box 1 (at least those that have cover pictures in LibraryThing):

Google Spreadsheets

There has been an awful lot of hype on the internet about Google's new online spreadsheet offering. Nicholas Carr's blog post on the subject, Google's Office add-on, comes the closest (IMNSHO) to actually getting it right.

Scan This Book!

The New York Times has just published an excellent article on the scanning of books - not just Google's current effort, but the principle of the thing. It's a must read for anyone interested in reading, writing, publishing, and/or copyright.

I like Skype!

I've been meaning to do this since I experimented with an early beta version of Skype in New York. So, since I was going insane marking papers, I took a break, downloaded, and installed it. I like it! Great quality audio and now video for free from computer-to-computer, free chat, and really cheap computer-to-phone calling. So, all my dear friends separated from me by inordinate distances, please download and install Skype and then look me up online!

Software: Foxit PDF Reader

I've always hated Adobe Reader's slow load times, but always assumed it was the only free PDF viewer out there. Now, thanks to Wikipedia's article on PDFs, I know otherwise...

Just discovered a wonderful little free PDF viewer called Foxit Reader. Not only is it free, but, even more importantly, considering that Adobe Reader is also free, it is (unlike Adobe Reader) small, fast, and it doesn't force you to install the annoying Yahoo! toolbar. And, since it's a single executable file, you can even carry it around with you on your USB flash drive to use on those poor computers you visit that don't have Foxit Reader installed!

I highly recommend Foxit Reader for PDF viewing, and will be recommending that people use it instead of Adobe's slow, toolbar-laden, bloatware, from now on!

PS: Oh, yes, and, while I'm advocating the use of free PDF software, I should also mention that no computer should be without PDFCreator, a free, open-source, virtual printer that allows you to print absolutely anything that can be printed on your computer as a PDF!

Get Outfoxed!

Slashdot recently posted on a pretty nifty little experiment in social networking on the web called Outfoxed. If you're using Mozilla's Firefox browser (and if you're not, you should be!), you can download the Outfoxed plugin and see which sites your network of trusted informants recommend and which ones they don't. I've signed up myself (using my usual online web-handle, Hugh Nano), but I don't know who to trust at this point, so I'm posting this as an official invitation for any of you whom I know to check out and (if you like it) sign up for Outfoxed, then send me an e-mail letting me know what your handle is, so I can add you to my list of trusted informants. I'm interested to see what sites you like and trust (and dislike/distrust)... I can always use a little help from my friends in finding my way through the internet jungle!

Hello!

Finally had a chance to start poking around at the new "features" of the latest version of MSN Messenger. It is nice, but more commercialized than ever. A few free games and themes, but most now require payment: Micro$oft is trying to milk the Messenger cash cow for all it is worth, it seems... What bothers me most is that the people who are most likely to pay for these features are the relatively uninformed users who buy Windows and don't realize that most of the Micro$oft defaults are nowhere near as good as a lot of the other, free stuff that's out there: in other words, Micro$oft is taking advantage of people's ignorance to turn its monopoly into even more $$$ than ever.

I was annoyed enough the other night to change my MSN Messenger profile name from "ehewlett" to "eh! (switch to Hello: www.hello.com)". Hello is a great photo-chat program from Google, which, while it doesn't totally replace MSN Messenger even for me, provides the most effective photo-sharing/chat interface I have seen yet. And, being a Google app, it contains (as of this writing) absolutely no advertising other than its integration with Google's free photo-organizing program, Picasa - which, like Hello, is the best application of its kind that I know of (and I shelled out a good $40-50 for Adobe's PhotoAlbum, a good, but much slower, more cumbersome photo-organizing program, the second-best that I know of).

My idea is that if those of us who know of good alternatives to MSN Messenger start advertising them in our MSN Messenger profiles, we might eventually raise enough awareness of the alternatives to MSN Messenger (like Hello, or the excellent, interoperable, free, open-source chat program, Miranda) that we eventually might not need the ever-more-ad-laden/commercialized MSN Messenger! Alternative chat-program users of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but M$ ads!

Virus Found

I rather enjoyed this find, Wired Magazine's vision of future virus-detection software...


(click image for full picture)

PocketBlogger Updated!

Well that was quick developer response! PocketBlogger has been updated to version 1.1, incorporating some of the most important features I was wishing for. The most important improvements have been the addition of the ability to paste text and the ability to retrieve and edit previous posts. Having tried a number of the Pocket PC blogging solutions out there, I think I can now safely say that this is the best solution now available to Pocket PC users with Blogger blogs - it has certainly become my first choice for updating my blogs from my Pocket PC. That being said, there are still a few odd quirks that, in my mind, make this not much more than a beta release. Pasting replaces the whole post, no scroll bars appear when the text-entry box has been filled up, the "link" button only adds link text to the end of the post, and any SIPs other than Transcriber or an external keyboard cover up any text that is being entered on the bottom of the screen. Still, an excellent offering, especially considering that it is free! Thanks, ScaleOvenStove, and keep up the good work!

At long last, I can finally blog from my Pocket PC!

This is something I've been wanting to do for some time now - to post to my blog from my Pocket PC. At long last, someone has finally come up with a solution: PocketBlogger, to be found at PocketBlogger.net. Some definite limitations so far: you can't edit posts, text-entry boxes are not bumped up to avoid their being covered by the keyboard, and pasting text doesn't seem to work, but at least basic posting from my is now possible! Thanks ScaleOvenStove! Hope to see more functionality soon.

Pocket PC Mini-Review: Check Out Magic Button!

Anyone who has a Pocket PC knows that the Pocket PC's greatest strength, multi-tasking, is also its greatest weakness. Microsoft made it easy to run multiple programs at the same time on the Pocket PC, but not all that easy to switch between running programs and really difficult to close them. As a result, task managers for switching between programs and closing them have been a part of the Pocket PC scene almost since Day One. I've tried a number of them over the years, starting with the free (and now-venerable) GigaBar, settling for a long time on SpbSoft's powerful, versatile, and inexpensive Spb Pocket Plus, which I have only recently ditched for TranCreative's free, small, and fast Magic Button.

Replacing Spb Pocket Plus was actually a bit of a trick, since it does so many things so well. But the disadvantage of Pocket Plus doing so many things was that it seemed to be slowing down my otherwise very fast, brand new Axim x50v. Admittedly, it might have just been my imagination, for the most part, but loading the Spb Pocket Plus Today Screen plug-in was definitely slowing down startup times after a soft-reset (which I'm having to do far too often with my new, "much too unstable because all the kinks don't seem to have been worked out" x50v). So, I suppose I could have just turned off the Today Screen plug-in, but there was one feature that I didn't like in Spb Pocket Plus: having to tap-and-hold the X in order to bring up the task-manager was much slower and less intuitive than my old (also bloated and often unstable) task manager, GigaBar. Gigabar's visual presentation of the program icons on the taskbar so that all you have to do is tap the icon to switch to that program has always been my ideal, and that is what Magic Button is best at. Plus, Magic Button only takes up 70Kb of RAM and puts extra icons that don't fit into the task-bar into a handy drop-down menu represented by a triangle button at the end of the row of icons.

Ultimately, task-management on one's Pocket PC is very much a matter of taste, but TranCreative's Magic Button sure left a good taste in my mouth! It's now my main task manager, and, with the addition of free zip-file management using Total Commander for Pocket PC, I now have better versions of both the most important functions of Spb Pocket Plus (at least those were the two most important to me) on my Pocket PC for free! If you're looking for a stable, quick, small, free task-manager for your Pocket PC, be sure to try pressing Magic Button!

Site Hacked!

If you were trying to view the main page of my site yesterday or today, you might have noticed it was hacked. Congratulations, oh brilliant hacker who managed to deface a completely innocent and unprotected web-site. Your ability to take advantage of a well-publicized weakness in phpBB leaves me underwhelmed in the extreme.

One unfortunate byproduct of the hack attack is that the old site (though not the original site) has been disabled. I was planning to take it down eventually anyhow, but the hack attack has brought about its demise sooner rather than later. Thank you, Mr. Hacker.

The New Blogger NavBar and Google

I think I like it! So much so that I've actually replaced the custom Google site-search box with the new Blogger NavBar (which you will now see at the top of the site). It's reasonably unobtrusive and actually useful (for searching the site)—exactly what internet advertising should be. But then I've come to expect that from both Blogger and Google.

I was also very impressed with Google when, upon acquiring Picasa, the maker of my favourite free photo-sharing-chat program, Hello, they immediately started giving the $30 photo-organizing program away for free! Picasa may not be the very best photo-organizing program out there (as far as I can see, that honour still goes to Adobe Photoshop Album—also available in a quite-functional, very useful free starter edition), but it is certainly right up there among the best—and its integration with its companion photo-sharing-chat program, Hello, makes it even more useful! While it has not yet replaced Adobe Photoshop Album on my desktop, it has complemented it there and has replaced Photoshop Album Starter Edition on my laptop. If you have a digital camera, I highly recommend downloading and installing Picasa—at least to check it out. After all, why spend $50US on a photo-organizing program if you can get one that does much the same thing for free? It is wonderful that the biggest name in computer search is also such a good corporate citizen.

And if you're interested in photo-sharing and/or chatting with me through Hello, send me an e-mail (webmaster{at}ehewlett.net) with your name and Hello username, and I'll add you to my contact list.

Your Outlook appointments on Desktop

Do you use Outlook for your scheduling? (That's Outlook, not Outlook Express, its cut-down, e-mail only cousin.) I just found this really useful little shareware program, NVN (for Nicht Vergessen), that displays your Outlook appointments and tasks in a neat month-view (or week-view or 5-day view) calendar on your desktop. Very helpful for collecting all your important scheduling info and displaying it on the single most-viewed portion of your computer - your desktop. So far I've found only two (very minor) flaws: the program was originally written in German, so it contains the occasional bits of awkward English (like "no further Infos"), and updating the calendar after new appointments have been entered is rather slow and has to be initiated manually.
A flashier (but, in my opinion, less useful) shareware program that does much the same thing is DeskLook. DeskLook looks cooler than NVN, but can't show a whole month's-worth of appointments at once or display multiple calendars and - the deciding factor for me - kept crashing on my old Win98SE system (though they claim it was perfectly stable on their own Win98 test-system).
Finally, if all you're concerned about is price and/or function, not looks, there's a free solution using Microsoft's Digital Dashboard. Takes a bit of technical know-how to get up and running, but once it's running it does the job admirably.

Computers

Get Outlook Not to Open in Reading Layout

Pocket PC Mini-Review: Check Out Magic Button!

The New Blogger NavBar and Google

Excellent site for learning web-page programming

There and Back Again

Getting Started with a Blogger Invitation

What I've been up to lately...

NVN for Outlook/Windows XP: review

Canadian Spell-checking Dictionary

ICDSoft.com - The Ultimate in Web Hosting

Your Outlook appointments on Desktop

Pocket PC Thoughts - News, Views, Rants & Raves

Welcome to the new ehewlett.