Server Testing

If you happen to run some sort of server on your computer (running your own FTP server or SSH server is a very handy way of transferring files) you probably already know how hard it can be to tell if everything is working, without someone helping you. Routers and port forwarding further complicate things, making it almost impossible to know if you have a working setup or not. hq42.net has some tools to help you test the most common servers (web, ssh, ftp, mail, dns,etc). All you have to do is pick the appropriate tester, and enter your server's address. Depending on the protocol, you will get some of the homepage or a welcome message of some sort (dependant on your server's setup) if all goes well. If you are ever setting up a server, go here and click "Networking Tools"

Ultimate Boot CD

I have been meaning to try it out for some time, and Ultimate Boot CD has so far held up to its name. If you haven't already heard of it, Ultimate Boot CD is a free boot cd that includes a collection of many other boot cds and floppies. It includes the utilities that come with most hard drives, several boot loaders, all the major memory test programs, a small linux distro, a NT password editor, some virus scanners, and some other useful odds and ends, in under 200M. If you ever fix computers or have problems with your own, this might be a  good disc to have laying around. If it doesn't include something you want it to, there is also an option to add more images. You can get a copy of Ultimate Boot CD (just unzip and burn the .iso image) here.

RSS Owl

If you are looking for a good RSS reader, or a way to collect up content from all the many websites you check daily (or if your just curious about RSS/Atom/XML feeds) then RSS Owl is a good program to check out. RSS Owl is a fairly powerful, yet usable RSS newsreader for most operating systems (java based). Typically, all you have to do is go to the tools menu and "Discover Newsfeeds on a website" and enter the URL of the website in question (assuming it has a discoverable RSS feed). RSS Owl also has a nice tutorial to get you started. When you get all your sites entered in, you end up with a nice list of posts from each site, usually in a cleaned up form (no backgrounds/ads/flash/junk), similar to reading email. This can save a lot of time if you check a lot of sites. If you own a PocketPC or other mobile device, you may want to look into a RSS reader for it as well (simply export from your desktop to an opml file) so you can read your feeds on the go. If you aren't already using RSS, you should really give it a try, especially since many sites are providing feeds at this point.

If anyone else has a favorite RSS reader, I would be interested to hear about it, feel free to post in the comments. I normally use Liferea, but it is Linux only, so I have also used RSS Owl and usually recommend it to friends.

Find Airplanes in Google Earth

As many of you already know, Google Earth is a very cool program with satellite images of the world.  Some people in the Google Earth Community  have started a database of planes, caught in flight by Google's imagery.  Chances are you can just click here, to have the planes marked for you, but if not (depends on your OS and configuration) you can import it by going to Add => Network Link from Google Earth. For more information about the planes, and another link to a pair of planes doing an in-flight refuel, take a look at this post on the Google Earth Blog.

Neat Stuff!

Windows Activation

Microsoft is irritating about activations. One of my friends had to reinstall Windows XP today and call Microsoft to reactivate, so I thought I would share this tip. If you backup C:\windows\system32\wpa.dbl and c:\windows\system32\wpa.bak you can copy these backups back after a reinstall, from "minimal" safemode, and windows will be reactivated without the fuss.

Commercial Videos on Google Video for Free

Google is testing  a new advertising model on their video site today (and hopefully for awhile), offering some of their commercial clips (shows) for free, with ads. They have an ok selection today, if you want to check it out click here.

Blogs, Vacations

Its been a couple days since my last post, sorry about that. On that note, if there are any other bloggers reading this, I saw an interesting article linked by LifeHacker about time away from your blog. I'm not sure how many of the tips can be carried out on a blogger blog, but it is worth a quick look. Hopefully I will get a chance to post for real tomorrow, though I have a LAN Party to go to, and some other things to do.

Links

I am currently working on a list of some of my favorite/the best/most useful websites, if anyone wants to check it out. Still a work in progress, but maybe worth a look.

Gmail and SSL

This was news to me, when I heard about it, but it's probably documented someplace (sorry if you already knew).

Anyway, if you use Gmail you can get the web based interface with SSL encryption. Just use https://mail.google.com instead of the usual http://.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, SSL encrypts data between your computer and the server. This helps to keep people out of your account, but it doesn't make your emails any more private, since email is sent as plain text (unless, you use PGP or something similar). Still, it can't hurt to secure one more part of the process (unless you have a very, very slow CPU).

Soccer World Cup, in ASCII?

If you are a soccer fan, and a computer geek this just might be for you. I saw this post while idly sorting through my rss feeds this afternoon, and found it interesting, if a bit weird. It looks like you can watch the world cup, live, in ASCII over telnet from ascii-wm.net if you are so inclined. Right now, there is simply a message saying that the feed starts 10 minutes before a game (whenever that is). If you aren't familiar with ASCII, take a look at the Wikipedia Page, but basically its a simple standard for representing letters.  If you are new to telnet, you can just type "telnet ascii-wm.net 2006" at a command prompt on most operating systems. If you use Windows, PuTTY might give you a better experience (enter ascii-wm.net as the host, 2006 as the port and select telnet as the protocol).

If you are looking for some more fun with ASCII art, check out

StarWars
ASCII Art Generators, such as this one
Wikipedia

Webby Awards

I'm catching up on old news a bit here (from May). Anyway, If you are looking for some new websites, every year the best websites are nominated and voted on by webbyawards.com and a list is published. The 2006  list came out back in mid May. There are a whole bunch of categories this year, so there should be something for everyone. If you haven't already, you can take a look here.

Google Earth, For Linux!

It's about time! It looks like Google has finally released Google Earth for Linux, ( and some other updates for other operating systems). I haven't had a chance to test it out yet, but the Google Earth thread on the Gentoo fourms has some limited discussion.

NeroVision and Quicktime

I have been busy with (among other things) a video project this weekend. I have a collection of quicktime movies off a digital camera, and have been putting together a little slideshow/video clip collection using Windows Movie Maker and NeroVision. It has taken an unreasonable amount of struggle to get everything to cooperate, so I figured I might as well share my experience. It turns out that NeroVision (6 and 7 demo), while it will import quicktime (.mov) without complaint, quicktime causes it to become seriously unstable. Nero was locking on me every couple minutes, so I ended up converting all my quicktime files to DV files, and everything has been going smoothly since.

I have read that another common cause is bad video drivers, if you are also having this problem.

 

The moral of this story, don't use .MOV with NeroVision even though it is a "supported" format ;-)

 

Anyway, tomorrow is the last full day of school for the summer so I should have more time to post, and less ideas, so feel free to email me if you have something you want me to mention (no promises, but I'll see what I can do)

Looking for Something?

Usually the top three search engines (MSN, Google and Yahoo, last time I checked) are good enough, and you can find what you need right off the bat.  Sometimes something different is useful though. For example, if you are looking for info on something a bit less known, that you don't get very many results for on your favorite engine you might want to try ProFusion. ProFusion searches most of the major engines, and some lesser known ones, and compiles results (though it can take a few minutes to do it).  On the other hand, if you are getting too many results, you might want to try out an engine like Clusty, which groups results into clusters (categories). You might also find a socially driven search engine, like Seekum useful. Seekum allows users to vote on whether or not a website is related to a certain keyword ("tag"). If you are a heavy shopper at Amazon, you might want to check out A9. If you log into A9, and use it frequently, Amazon will give you a 1.5% discount. A9 also has some specialized search functions, a bookmarking function and a "diary". If you are looking for something on a specific type of website (forums, blog, etc) you might want to check out Whonu. Whonu lets you search for specific categories of things, on specific types of websites.  If you are a bit of a "geek", enjoy command line interfaces, and are looking for a more interesting search engine, check out YubNub. YubNub can do a huge number of things based on what command you type in the box (search, etc), even including a couple basic games. You can look at some of the commands here and here or just type "ls" in the search box (just like UNIX).

On a side note (news), If you use the Google Toolbar for Firefox, they released an update today, as well as another extension to sync your Firefox settings between computers (announcement).
If anyone is interested, Microsoft also released a public beta of Vista (the next version of Windows) today (actually, lateish last night), you can get it here but the server is having trouble keeping up with demand right now. This beta times out next June.

Qwerky

It's been a few days, sorry about that. I'm busy with testing, and other things, so I only have a quick link for you tonight. Qwerky, is a blog that talks about the reasons behind the naming of some of the new "Web 2.0" sites (I mean, flickr? or how about the completely useless beggr). The naming aspect really isn't the interesting part though. If you go through Qwerky's archives, you can find posts about many different, useful sites. Next time your bored it is a good way to find new sites to visit (or you could just go waste time at Pogo or Popcap).

Anyway, Qwerky is one of those sites to check out, then add to an rss reader, and keep track of until they mention some site that interests you.

Hopefully more posts from me soon ;-)

Mazda contest

If you are looking for something to do, Mazda has a scavenger hunt on Google Earth (giving away a car and some other things). All you have to do is install Google Earth, and go to this page. Then you will be given a hint in Google Earth, you are looking for a small yellowish X under 5000'. If you need more hints, you can look here. The first 3 are fairly easy, but they get hard after that. It may help to take screenshots during the videos (alt+printscrn, then paste into something in Windows).

 

Good luck.

Update Mozilla

It has been a couple days, I have been busy preparing for the end of school/ more tests. Anyway, quick post today.

 

If you haven't already, you should update Firefox and Thunderbird if you use them. For most systems this should happen automatically, but if not (or if you still haven't tried Firefox) you can get the updates from the Mozilla.com (new site I guess)

 

Off topic, but if you are looking for something to read, check out this article on Wired. It's sad, but paranoia really is hindering education significantly.