Which begs the question - is he going to end up in that large garden up in the sky where he can dig holes and bury bones half-assedly to his heart’s content? I really hope so. I couldn’t have asked for a more loyal dog. Every time I brought a girl home he would either stand between her and I or he would stare at me with contempt in his eyes as if he were asking me “Why? Am I not good enough for you?”. He’s a class act. He’s 91, but he can still outrun me. I am 182 (in dog years) after all. At least.

Over the past 7 years I haven’t seen too much of him, just during the monthly visit to my parent’s house. Each time I arrived he’d be standing at the gate, anxiously awaiting my arrival after my mom told him that I’d be arriving soon. I’d always end up taking a bit of him home with me after each visit, seeing as he’d plaster shit around my car during the few hours I’d be there. It’s like he stored it up, anxiously awaiting me to grace his lawn with my transportation device - finally allowing him to relax his asshole. Maybe that’s why he was always so glad to see me… hmm.

I’m gonna miss you buddy. Hopefully you’ll still be around when I next get a chance to come through.

Edit: 26/02/08: He’s actually still alive. And moderately healthy. Thanks for caring.

Thanks to the 7 people who regularly come back to check for new content. I’ll try pick it up soon-ish.

TiddlyWiki likens itself with Google Notes. The only reason I’d prefer Google Notes is the fact that you can access your Google Notes from anywhere with an internet connection.

It consists of a single .html file which you access from within your browser, allowing you to edit it on the fly. You can post it on the web for other people to see but they won’t be able to edit it. The javascript that TiddlyWiki utilises requires the file to be opened on the local computer before it is editable. I found minitiddlyserver which allows you to edit and save your tiddlywiki to an online location. All you need is hosted webspace with access to PHP 5.1 or greater.

TiddlyWiki becomes very useful when used in conjunction with the tiddlysnip FireFox add on, allowing you to add selected text to your wiki at the right-click of a button.

According to batteryuniversity.com, for example, a worst case scenario is when using a notebook plugged into an AC socket with it’s battery fully charged. The problem comes in with the amount of heat the battery is subjected to, as heat decreases it’s lifespan. I’d suggest removing the battery when you’re working off an AC socket.

A Li-ion battery should also never be stored when it’s fully discharged. Apparently the best charge to keep a battery stored at is around 40% (how manufacturers ship the batteries). So to be safe, apply a charge to the battery before storing it, and charge fully before use.

A few guidelines taken from batteryuniversity.com:

• Avoid frequent full discharges because this puts additional strain on the battery. Several partial discharges with frequent recharges are better for lithium-ion than one deep one. Recharging a partially charged lithium-ion does not cause harm because there is no memory. (In this respect, lithium-ion differs from nickel-based batteries.) Short battery life in a laptop is mainly cause by heat rather than charge / discharge patterns.
• Batteries with fuel gauge (laptops) should be calibrated by applying a deliberate full discharge once every 30 charges. Running the pack down in the equipment does this. If ignored, the fuel gauge will become increasingly less accurate and in some cases cut off the device prematurely.
• If you have a spare lithium-ion battery, use one to the fullest and keep the other cool by placing it in the refrigerator. Do not freeze the battery. For best results, store the battery at 40% state-of-charge.

edit 05-06-2007: As a reader pointed out, KDE4 uses KWin Composite, and not Beryl.
edit 06-06-2007: Wesley from ubuntu-nl points out that this is merely a mockup, and not yet available in KWin. I guess KDE4 applications will crash beautifully, someday.

Boomshine

Psychedelic colours? Check. Soothing Music? Check. Embolism from frustrating game play? Check. If you end up putting enough thought into placing your single chain-reacting dot then you might end up not getting frustrated by this game. If you end up getting past the “get 55 out of 60” dots level then email me to win a free membership to this site!

Gears consists out of:

* A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
* A database, to store and access data from within the browser
* A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

The only thing is that sites need to be set up specifically to be compatible with Google Gears. The main market for this extension is most likely large sites that offer access to huge datasets and their clients who directly interface with these sites on a large scale, or it can be used to just download part of a website that you would need access to while travelling abroad.

A Gears tutorial is available here and some sample applications can be found here.

Google Gears is compatible with Windows XP (and higher), Linux and MacOS X, running Firefox 1.5 or higher.

edit: 02-06-0-2007 Google Reader now makes use of Google Gears. Very handy indeed.

CORE FORCE provides inbound and outbound stateful packet filtering for TCP/IP protocols using a Windows port of OpenBSD’s PF firewall, granular file system and registry access control and programs’ integrity validation. These capabilities can be configured and enforced system-wide or on a per-application basis for specific programs such as email readers, Web browsers, media players, messaging software, etc.

While I usually rely on routers for my firewall needs, having a program like this around has it’s benefits as well. The most useful part I found is the ability to block specific programs from sending or receiving data from the net. From what I can remember, you should start off with relaxed security settings. Selecting maximum security settings while not knowing exactly what you’re doing will end up blocking all legitimate traffic.

Launchy

Launchy is pretty good at what it does. You load this tiny app, it sits in the background indexing the files on your hard drive, including but not limited to: documents, mp3s, pictures, shortcuts, etc. You can specify what it must index, so you don’t have to worry about any sensitive information coming up accidentally.

Colibri
Colibri is similar to the app above, but I like it more for some reason. Launchy seems to have improved a lot since I used it a few months ago, but at the time Colibri felt more “solid”. As with pretty much anything, you’re going to have to make up your mind since personal preferences play a big part in these types of software.

The point of Colibri/Launchy is to make the Start Menu obsolete. Once it has indexed the start menu, you run Colibri with ctrl-space and start typing the name of the application you want to run. After using this app for a few days, you will wonder how you ever got around without it.

WinDirStat

Ever wonder what happened to all your hard drive space? Use this program to get a statistical and graphical view of directories listed by folder size. Click for screenshot.

Uninstall Tool
Although this package isn’t free, it’s worth a mention. I discovered it while scouring the net for useful utilities and it is really a pleasure to work with. It replaces the standard Windows Add/Remove Programs control panel utility and it much more informative and very fast. It’s a 30 day trial, but honestly, how much time do you devote to uninstalling programs?

Hamachi
Your own personal Virtual Private Network that allows you to link in with friends and groups to securely share files and play games like you would do over a regular network, but over the internet. Sound fantastic? I thought so too.

Sysinternals Defrag
If you’ve ever used any of Sysinternals’ utilities before, you would agree that the quality of their programs is absolutely amazing. Their “defragger” called Contig is a command line utility you can use to defrag single files, directories or an entire disk. Now, I’m not much for command line utilities on Windows, so you can grab a free GUI for contig here. Just put the contig.exe file in the same directory as the GUI’s .exe and you’re set to go. I recommend that you always do a chkdsk or a scandisk prior to running defragging utilities if you value your data at all.

Netlimiter
If you’re worried about where your bandwidth is going, grab Netlimiter Lite. It’s a free bandwidth monitor that logs all traffic coming in and going out of your PC. It keeps reports on a daily, monthly and yearly basis as well. When you have the utility open you can actually see which program is using bandwidth, so if there’s a background process downloading something from the net, you are able to pick up on it.

If you don’t mind forking out a bit of cash, you can try the pay-for versions of Netlimiter which include the ability to block certain programs from sending/receiving data, and even to throttle the amount of bandwidth available to them. Really an amazing utility to have.

That’s it for this free software roundup. Be sure to check back every now and then for more posts about free utilities.

Yes, free. If you are an aspiring programmer without the millions of dollars available for software development tool licensing fees, then these Express editions might give you that nudge in the right direction. Anything from Visual C++ to SQL Server is available at your disposal. I think the worst thing you have to do is accept the EULA.

The files download as .ISO files, which can in turn be extracted with WinRAR

Also, if you’re thinking if going the C++ route, please check out Thinking in C++ 2nd Edition by Bruce Eckel. An amazing introduction to the world of making your computer see things through your eyes.

FireFTP
FireFTP is pretty amazing because it gives you a 2-pane ftp client view when you access an ftp site with your browser. This will end up being a huge time saver for me since I frequently need to upload a single file to a site, and having to use a seperate FTP client for that purpose is overkill. Don’t get me wrong, using a proper ftp client has it’s benefits but for small, quick transfers, FireFTP is the right tool for the job.

Chromatabs

Tints browser tabs with a color specific to the website loaded. It can pick a random color automatically (based on the site’s hostname), or it can pick a colour based on the site’s tab icon.

I think it’s pretty neat. It adds some colour to the drab grey firefox themes we have no choice but to stare at all day long. Admittedly, I haven’t been able to get it to work. I’m sure it’s because of a conflict with the TabMix Plus extension. REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO WHEN I FIX IT, THOUGH.

edit: Yep, it was tabmix.

So I came up with a brilliant idea today. From now on, when I get a call from an unknown number, I’ll be sure to answer the phone thusly:

“Hello you have reached js’s office, how may I help you?”
A telemarketer will then ask if he can speak to Mr. js, but I will promptly side-swipe him and demand to know what the call is about. When it becomes clear that it is a sales rep, I shall be able to put the phone down promptly before the telemarketer has a chance to start his long-winded read.

On the other hand, if it is a call I am willing to take, I will be sure to put the person on hold for a few seconds while he gets put through to Mr. js himself. Then I’ll answer the phone in the same tone of voice, thereby producing hilarity or a sense of creepiness to the person on the other line. It matters to me not.

Jokosher makes it very easy to record sound/music, podcasts, mixing mutliple sound sources, splitting tracks or tracks to create audio worthy of being played on radio. You can import multiple formats (Ogg Vorbis, WAV, MP3, FLAC and more) and also allows you to export it to another format, should you wish to do so.

Unfortunately, this is only available for Linux distributions. Seeing as it’s still quite a new project, I wouldn’t rule out future Windows releases just yet. If you are looking for a Windows program that can do the same, take a look at Audacity

Found this amazing site today while using StumbleUpon.

From the site:

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a research tool dedicated to scientific studies of nature. Enroute to illuminating the forces shaping our cosmos, HST has accumulated a cosmic zoo. The Hubble Heritage Project sees this instrument also as a tool for extending human vision, one that is capable of building a bridge between the endeavors of scientists and the public. By emphasizing compelling HST images distilled from scientific data, we hope to pique curiosity about our astrophysical understanding of the universe we all inhabit.

In other words, click the link for awesome space pics!

Thumbnails copyright NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).

There’s also a thread on somethingawful about this very topic.

I’ve been actively using a computer since I was about 11 years old, and by far the most comfortable mouse I have used was a Microsoft one. I’m talking about those old, heavy ceramic types that absorbed your palm sweat and turned an odd-yellow after a few years of use. I think I actually still have that mouse buried in a cupboard somewhere.

Fast forward a few years and suddenly Microsoft is releasing amazing looking keyboard and mouse peripherals. Myself, I’m using a Laser Mouse 6000 and the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (pics of mouse and keyboard). Great for preventing carpal tunnel syndrome.

Specially aimed at games, Microsoft brought us the Habu! The mouse that can handle 20-G of acceleration! Hardcore gamers’ demands are finally being met. I must admit, it does look very appealing. Not sure if that bright blue light will end up distracting me or burning a hole in my cornea.

LifeChat LX-3000
I’ve been searching for a decent USB headphone/microphone combo for years now and I finally settled on this here hardware. It feels decent. Doesn’t have that cheap, lightweight design that we have come to expect from cheap chinese knockoffs. The sound that is recorded from the microphone is clear and the noise-cancellation works as advertised. Also, when the headphones cover your ears, you can hardly hear any outside noise. Perfect if you feel you need to disappear from the background noise of your nagging wif busy lifestyle.