2006 April

Based on our Volkswagen TDIs article the other day, we had a few diesel fans submit their feedback. Here’s a few of the more interesting Gnomie stories:
Gabor Kovacs: In Hungary, we already have a law PROHIBITING biodiesel! Smart guys discovered about a year ago that common household corn oil (used for frying food) is as [...]

Cain and Abel is a password recovery tool that enables network administrators to test network security or home users to recover a variety of stored network passwords. The program reports sniffing and recovery of most popular protocols, including FTP, SMTP, POP3, HTTP, mySQL, ICQ, Telnet, and others. It can also recover passwords hidden behind asterisk [...]

Gmail Drive enables you to use your Gmail account as a virtual storage drive that is accessible from Windows Explorer. It adds a drive icon to My Computer that allows you to access your storage space like any other folder, and upload files via drag and drop.
The uploaded files appear in your Gmail inbox [...]

I love watching video online. Streaming technology has been rapidly improving, and the online viewing experience is a lot more tolerable nowadays than it was even a year or two ago. Since the barrier for entry into producing and distributing online video is so small, wannabe directors and actors have been filling up servers with [...]

Should those of us on Windows 98 upgrade to XP or wait until next year when Microsoft releases Vista?
Microsoft announced some time ago that it intended to discontinue support and updates to Windows 98, 98SE and Millennium Edition (ME) by June of 2006.
When the original plans were announced, the expectation was that Vista (now scheduled [...]

Before you install Windows XP or any other Windows platform, you should verify that the hardware in your computer is compatible and that it meets the minimum hardware requirements. Hardware requirements are usually not an issue for new systems. If you are installing on an older computer though, verify your hardware before installing.
Microsoft used [...]

Some computers contain motherboards that support Serial ATA (SATA) hard drivers. The motherboards may have a separate dedicated SATA controller. You can determine if your computer has a dedicated chipset during the POST because a second screen may appear identifying the SATA hard drives.
When you install Windows XP, you may need to inform setup that [...]

Recent urban development in Los Angeles is less scattered than recent development in Boston. Miami is America’s most compact big city and Pittsburgh is most sprawling. Changing the number or size of municipal governments in a metro area has no impact on whether or not urban development is scattered, but controlling access to groundwater does. [...]

Some of our most precious childhood memories are those of the family games we played. Of course, I’m an old-timer, so I recall playing with rocks in the cave while Dad drew pictures of mammoths on the wall!
But seriously, folks… Games like Monopoly, Sorry!, Skip-Bo, Scrabble, and one I particularly fondly recall called Probe were [...]

I’ve seen 1080p content displayed on a 1080p HDTV set. Couldn’t tell you if it was any better than 720p or 1080i, but I believe it is better - for tomorrow, not necessarily for today. I’m not just spewing forth random numbers, folks - these are formats, one being progressive lines (720p) on a television [...]