Category: Geekdom

Frequently I’m asked what sort of software I use for a certain task, and I recently remember looking through a recent MaximumPC Magazine article that featured all the editors software picks, so here are the free/shareware tools that get installed immediately on my system after a reformat:

• Trillian: I’m a pro-user of this ultimate IM tool, but used the freeware version and it works wonderfully as well. I have friends on all the IM networks, and this client puts them all in one place, and doesn’t require me to install all the company’s clients at once. If you’re curious, I’m setup at the following: ICQ: 7739361, AIM: jakeortman, Yahoo! Messenger: jake-ortman, MSN Messenger: [email protected]. It doesn’t have all the features of all the clients, but it’s got a smaller memory footprint than any of them, and runs much faster and stable (and doesn’t send a bunch of ads my way).
• Irfanview: If you can find a graphic file format that this program can’t open and play with, I’ll be amazed. It can even open up sound files, movies, and fonts. It’s incredibly versatile, small, and fast. It also has a pile of command-line processing features so you can do mass-process a bunch of images. For anybody who has a pile of different graphic formats on your hard drive (desktop publishers like me come to mind), this is a must-have tool, as it just takes too long to open them all in their respective programs. Best of all, it’s free.
• w.bloggar: If you need to upload information to your blog offline, this is the tool for you, as it’s a chore to go online, write up your post, and then upload it. This tool will even spell check your post for you, and then do all the login/upload work for you, even working with images if you’d like it to.
• Sam Spade: If you have to take care of a network at all, or manage domains and web sites, or are interested in digging up information on domains and servers, this is the do-all tool for you. And it’ll even help you report and get rid of spam.
• X-Teq Setup: This, along with TweakUI, have been staples in my Control Panel for years. If you want to tweak every system setting without digging into the registry, these are the tools for you. Your system will be much happier if you tweak them and optimize them with those tools, just be aware that you could SERIOUSLY mess up your system if you do something wrong, so just beware.
• RealVNC: I frequently work on computers diagnosing software problems. These systems are usually at other people’s houses or locked up in other rooms, and are running anything from MacOS to Windows NT 4 to Windows 98. I install the RealVNC server on all those machines, and I run the client on my system, and I can run their system from afar, saving me the trip of driving over to their house/workplace to fix it. Obviously, the system leaves a huge security whole if left on all the time, so I have clients run the server as-needed, and saves me a ton of trouble.
• Eyedropper: Have you ever wanted to know the color value of anything on your screen, or wanted to grab a color from a web site without looking at the source code? This is basically a tool that works exactly like the eyedropper tool in various image-editing programs, except it works in Windows. Used along with Screen Ruler and EasyRGB, you have all your odd little image-editing and color pickers you need.

Now, I could spend an entire entry with the online tools that are just tool cool for words, but that’s another post entirely.

Do you have an item you think I missed? I could have very easily have missed something that’s on my system that I take for granted, so post a comment, and let me know!

A friend sent this to my inbox.

Subject: Weird

Body: http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/

Weird indeed!

From the BBC via Fark:

Scientists have set a new internet speed record by transferring 6.7 gigabytes of data across 10,978 kilometres (6,800 miles), from Sunnyvale in the US to Amsterdam in Holland, in less than one minute.

One word: Damn.

Probably the feature I’ll use the most out of the ones they recently debuted will be the URL investigator. Plug a URL into the search box at All The Web and it returns a bunch of information, including how many external pages link to that site, how many pages are indexed by that domain, who owns the site, etc. There’s even a link to the Wayback Machine so you can see what a set of pages used to look like.

Google provides the most useful of these features, too (including their own cache), but not nearly as intuitively as AllTheWeb does.

Examples:

* AllTheWeb URL info for utterlyboring.com

* Google URL info for utterlyboring.com

One for the conspiracy theorists from The Reg.

From Metafilter:

OldVersion.com bears the motto “newer is not always better.” This virtual graveyard/archive of older windows programs lets you stick to versions of programs before they had advertising, before they had Digital Restrictions Management, and even those that no longer exist *sniff*. I can tell sites like this will be coming in handy as we enter a Matrix-like world of advertising, spy-ware, and DRM baked into everything, while a holdout of luddites stick with 0.9 betas of their favorite programs.

According to this Reg article, using horribly complicated mathematical algorithms, a PIN can be produced in an average of 15 guesses. The full paper from University of Cambridge researchers is posted here.

As featured on the SlashDot front page, ExtremeMHZ has crammed an AMD and a P4 system into the same case.

Whoopty frickin’ do.

So now ExtremeMHZ gets a bunch of traffic for something that really isn’t all that spectacular. Yes, it’s cool, and probably hard to do, but what practical purpose does it server to have a PC and another PC in the same box? I just loved this exchange of comments:

Captain Galactic: I always dreamed of this…Play a game on one system, when boss/parent/spouse walks in,push a button & pretend you are working…

Anonymous Coward: Yeah, like some sort of… Windowing… system… Using “windows”, we could quickly and easily switch between two (OR MORE??) different programs all together! Maybe by pressing special key combonations, too! (That way we wouldn’t have to modify our keyboards, too.) Like, ALT-TAB on Windows… maybe COMMAND-TAB on Mac. That sure would fool them! Now if only we could get some techy-type person to make and mass market this! (Or are we just dreaming here??)

Put a Mac and PC in the same box or Sparc/Solaris and a PC, then I’ll be interested, but having two PCs in one box — unless they have a unified disk subsystems and can share more than just the cooling, display, keyboard and mouse, or they can cram it in a small, rack-mountable case — is just over kill. I mean, the case they have it in is huge, and you can get some pretty powerful PCs in pretty small cases.

I really need to find a way to get linked on SlashDot. I think if I (convincingly) setup a site that showed me putting a Mac inside a PC, then I’d get some traffic. Anybody want to help ;-)?

Find out over at Tom’s Hardware, where they tested 65 different x86 processors in over three hundred hours of benchmark testing. CPUs range from the Intel Pentium 100 from 1994 to the latest AMD Athlon XP 3000+. They, amazingly, got Windows XP running on a 100mhz Pentium — with 512 megs of RAM and a GeForce4 on a super Socket 7 board. Some other stats:

• On the Audio-Encoding MP3 test (converting a 117 MB WAV file to VBR MP3), an Intel Pentium 4 3.06 GHZ processor completed the test in 72 seconds, whilst the Intel Celeron 400 MHz performed the task in 922 seconds.
• On the MultiMedia PC Mark 2002 test, our trusty Intel Celeron 400 got a score of 1060, whilst the Intel Pentium 4 3.06 GHz got an impressive 7571.
• In the WinRAR test (compressing a 178mb file), took 53 seconds with the Intel Pentium 3.06 GHz, while the Intel Celeron 400 MHz took 255 seconds.

I don’t remember where I heard about this originally, as I heard about it about a week ago, but this entry from E-Media Tidbits sums things up nicely:

Online revenge is sweet when cooked up by a faux Scandinavian puppet chef. A digital stew began two weeks ago when the Norwegian manufacturer of Web-browsing software Opera claimed that Microsoft was intentionally feeding Opera users a faulty HTML style sheet whenever they visited the MSN website, causing content to disappear and users to think that something was wrong with their Opera browsers. Opera enlisted the Muppet Show‘s incomprehensible Swedish Chef for revenge and released the “Børk edition” of the Opera browser, which turns the contents of MSN into mock-Scandinavian gibberish. The Internet Advertising Report details the delicious ruckus.