Bill’s Web

For readers who track RSS feeds (and if you don’t, why don’t you?) the Sage feed reader for Firefox (and if you don’t why don’t you?) is back, in the form of Sage Too.
Here’s the description from the Fx extension page:
Sage-Too is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox. It’s got […]

A real quickie here.
We just got a new Systemax PC at work to act as server for a surveillance camera system. Being constitutionally unable not to poke around in a computer’s nether regions, I noticed some interesting things about the hard disk hookup. Looked suspiciously like a USB connection.
Going down to the system […]

Gize,
I don’t know if you ever tried (or had an urge to try) Ubuntu Linux.  I installed it a year or so ago, and was massively (sorta) unimpressed.   It definitely showed promise, but the installation was a PITA, and the interface just wasn’t quite ready for prime time.  You had to download an ISO, burn […]

If you use Gmail in the “new version” you should take a good look at Better Gmail 2, an interface package put together with Greasemonkey user scripts by Gina Trapani.  Originally available on Lifehacker, it is now an official Mozilla extension for Firefox 3.
Better Gmail 2 offers a number of enhancements, including

Force Gmail to make […]

Fellow WordPress bloggers who haven’t done so ought to consider installing Gears so they can run Turbo. Go to Dashboard and click the “Turbo” link in the upper right corner. Follow the directions and download Google Gears installer, then run it and follow the directions.
Gears, when combined with WordPress, downloads and stores substantial […]

Perniciously pimping my pitifully pathological perversion, my buddy Gary Lee at EliteLED sent me another flashlight to try out. This one approaches perfection, according to my personal standards, which are as follows:

Priced so that a sane person might want to buy it;
Well-made and able to take most punishment, short of being run over by […]

I’m interested in some opinions here.
There’s a lot of discussion these days about tiered broadband (TB). For those who don’t know, in a nutshell TB involves charging people according to the bandwidth they use, either by selling “high usage” plans or by charging for bandwidth (number of Gigabytes sent) over a certain limit contained […]

A friend and I were discussing colors of flashlights. (Yes, I do get into some odd discussions.) He has a shop, and is thinking about stocking a new model that comes in a variety of colors. However, the minimum order of each is pretty high, and he doesn’t want to stock large quantities of odd […]

Well, Google Docs has finally added the one feature that, IMNSHO, was the deal-breaker as far as using it for everyday word-processing: a page view, as opposed to the “normal” (Web) view that was the only way you could work before.
While Docs has been quite admirable for general use since the Writely days, those of […]

In the previous installment, I wrote about the five absolute necessities: water, light, food, first aid/medical supplies, and medications. I suggested ways to deal with these needs ahead of time and efficiently, based on my own experience in emergencies of several kinds, including direct hits by five hurricanes.
In Part 2, I’m adding to the list […]

We’ve all learned a lot about disasters and emergencies over the past several years. Many of us, especially along the coastlines, learned from personal experience, and the entire world by proxy. The devastations of hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis should have left little doubt in anyone’s mind about the need for at least a […]

One of the PCs I use frequently is an old eMachines box with less than stellar performance. Many of the applications that I take for granted on my desktop at home won’t perform well enough to bother with, and some of those that do perform their jobs only grudgingly.
Try as I might, I don’t […]

The new version of QFX Software’s KeyScrambler is out, and even the free version (Personal) has greatly expanded coverage. The browser add-on protects everything you type into a Web page on all Web sites and in all parts of the browser:

All Web sites: login credentials, credit card numbers, passwords, search terms, and more.
All parts of […]

This is a quickie, but a really important quickie if you use FlashGet.
My buddy Steve Bass, in his Tips and Tweaks blog, relates the following:
I just uninstalled FlashGet, my favorite downloading program. It’s got a big, inviting security hole that can — and did — let a nasty Trojan worm its way onto my system. […]

For those bloggers who use Firefox, especially those who maintain more than one blog, I can’t keep myself from touting Scribefire one more time. The extension (or add-on, as they’re now called) is being maintained again after a several months’ hiatus, and new functions are being added every few days. The latest are […]

I recently wrote in the blog about a problem I had with an online photo and electronics supplier, how I chose to go with B&H Photo Video, and how — based on their service — I would be dealing only with them in the future.
Here’s a good example of why. On the 11th of […]

Love them or hate them, most folks will say that the one big flaw remaining in Google’s applications is the inability to sync reliably with Microsoft Outlook, still the most-used personal and business schedule management tool.
That obstacle has been made smaller, if not removed entirely, by Google’s announcement on Friday that Google Calendar will now […]

Actual Booster 3.1 is a speed-up-your-PC utility that really works. I read about it on Ian (Gizmo) Richard’s excellent Tech Support Newsletter, and tried it based on his recommendation.
The piece of… ah… cheese much-repaired eMachine at work (not my problem or responsibility) runs much faster. My 3.2 Pentium D at home is quicker with processor-intensive […]

I’ve written about Jott at least once before, and I believe someone else has mentioned it on this site, too. I feel as though I ought to tell you about it again, though, since they keep upgrading and adding to the service. If you looked at it before and decided it wasn’t for you (although […]

I don’t generally care to post on Windows Fanatics with just a link to another site. It isn’t what you folks come here for. I’m making an exception in this case, however, because of the importance of this particular series of articles. They are provided by the Knight Citizens News Network, and […]