2004 December

Dear Gentle Readers,
Yesterday Aunty reported that there were rumours swirling that Verizon was blocking most, if not all, inbound email originating from domains outside the United States.
That’s right. The word on the street was that Verizon for some reason known only to them had decided to block all (or at least nearly all) email [...]

We signed up for another American Express card a few weeks ago, hoping to consolodate this month’s other American Express balances. American Express doesn’t work that way, apparently - despite what the salesperson told us. I’ve been a cardholder for about a year now, and have had few complaints about AmEx. Well, there was that [...]

It’s true; the seventh version of the Acrobat Reader is light years better than 6.0 in terms of speed and UI snappiness. PDF is PDC (pretty darn common), so having a good PDF viewer is essential. If you haven’t already done so, go ahead and grab Acrobat Reader 7. I’ve got it installed alongside Adobe [...]

Want to do well by doing good? YOU can make a difference in the fight to help the millions of victims of the recent tsunami disaster. You can also help yourself to some free software at the same time.
The gang at CoffeeCup Software are offering you all a real deal- donate to the relief effort [...]

Two people wrote to me and said they won’t give up their old-fashioned coffee maker for the pod-style ones just yet. Ah, I should’ve mentioned that the review
wasn’t about replacing those, but a review of the single-brewers without comparing them to the good ol’ machines. Should’ve thought to mention that.
I love my Braun FlavorSelect [...]

With the interest generated by films such as “Saving Private Ryan” and the HBO mini-series “Band of Brothers,” the history of World War II has become an interesting topic for discussion and study. Today’s site explores one person’s military service in that war, and tells it from the trenches, not from behind the lines. It [...]

I’ve been a huge fan of Tony Little’s Gazelle for several months now. Out of all the exercise equipment I’ve ever used (at home or remotely), it’s been the easiest, cleanest, and most effective. It’s a glider, not an eliptical. Tony Little is more than a little annoying with his commercial, but don’t ignore his [...]

It’s like the Lycos “Make Love Not Spam” project, only with all that concentrated computing power being focussed on the public good.
The World Community Grid is an organization whose lofty goal is to “create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity”.
They do this by harnessing the computer power of your [...]

Personal File Server is Web-based software that allows Web site visitors to download and upload files using only their favorite browser. It is a very extensible solution in sharing audio/video files, documents, or any other file type with ease. Files can be shared with colleagues and friends on a network, intranet, or Internet without needing [...]

Cobian Backup is a small and simple utility to back up files and directories from someplace in your computer to another place in the same computer or to a shared drive in another machine. A pretty simple concept, really! You can set the program to automatically make a backup within regular intervals of time, for [...]