Google Mars

If you haven't already, click the Google logo today. Google has a shaded relief map of the surface of mars up today, with a lot of historic and scientific landmarks, well, marked. There are also options for infrared photography and visible, black and white, images. Not particularly useful to the common person, but cool to look at.

Link for future reference

Edit: If you are interested, Google has officially posted about this on their blog now.

Free Microsoft Visual Studio

Whats the catch?

All you have to do is go here and watch three webcasts on web development technologies.  It is the "Standard" edition, but should be more than enough for most hobby developers.
Free Software and free info, what more could you want. I did this to get a free copy of VB.NET awhile ago, so they do actually ship the software.

Thanks to Dad and FatWallet for pointing this out.

If you can't wait and have a fairly fast connection (or way too much time) you can always download the normally free "Express" editions. These are much more limited than the software being offered for watching the webcasts though (see MSDN for details).

OpenOffice Charts

I wrote about creating charts with OpenOffice awhile ago at the request of some of my friends. Techtarget.com has some more tips on the "hidden treasures" in the OpenOffice chart drawing tools. While I wouldn't call them treasures my self, There is a lot of good information for people just starting to experiment with charts, so it is definitely worth a quick look.

Also posted on Slashdot (as soon as something like this comes out, its all over the web, very fast)

RSS/Atom and Blogger

I am surprised how few people use RSS instead of visiting the site. I find that RSS is much easier to work with. Some of it may be, that until today the autodiscovery meta-tags on this blog were set to the default blogger generated feed. I have changed them to a feedburner version. Since there is no convenient option to do this, I expect a few of you might be interested in how it is done. There is a little info in this thread on the feedburner forums, but the basic trick goes as follows:

1. Open your blog in a web browser and view the source code. This can usually be done by right clicking an empty spot on the page
2. Select and copy the first few lines (control+c), starting at the title tag (</title> and ending before the <style type="text/css"> tag. My code looks like the following (after I adjusted it):
   

<meta  http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"  />
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content= "true" />
<meta name="generator"  content="Blogger" />
<link rel= "alternate" type="application/atom+xml" t
itle="Ben's Computer Tidbits"  href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedName" / >
<link rel="service.post" type= "application/atom+xml"
title="Ben's Computer Tidbits" href= "http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedName" />
<link rel ="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml"
title= "RSD" href="http://www.blogger.com/rsd.g?blogID=19227845"  />
<link rel="alternate" type= "application/rss+xml" 
title="RSS" href=" http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedName" />

1. Open up your blogger template and replace the <$BlogMetaData$> tag with the code you copied to the clipboard
2. Change all the links in the pasted code (they start with href="http://") to your feedburner feed
3. Add a line looking like this, right after the pasted code (and adjust the links): <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href=" http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyFeed" />
4. Your code should be similar to mine above. Make sure you didn't break anything, using the preview button. If all looks ok, republish your blog, and try it out.

Edit1: I made the font size of the code "tiny" to reduce problems. I also added extra lines. The code should still be accurate, but It may not be. Best to follow directions and copy/paste your own.

Package Tracking on Google Maps

isnoop.net , which has some very interesting web apps, and is well known for its' now shutdown, "Gmail Invite Spooler" has added a nifty mapping page. It takes a UPS or USPS or FEDEX or DHL tracking number, and plots the progress of the package on a Google Maps map. It also creates a rss feed with the information. If you are waiting for a package, go try it out. If you have some time to kill, take a look at the main page, and check out some of the other neat pages, like the fridge.

Lectures (and more) from the Googleplex

As those of us who keep close track of Google know, the Googleplex is Google headquarters. Apparently, they frequently have speakers come and keep their employees educated. As pointed out on the Google Blog (google it, I've linked before), they are posting videos of some of these talks on Google video. It looks like they have some interesting subjects, so when you are bored, take a look.

Skype Conference Call Limits

As you may have noticed, it was announced awhile ago that the popular (and rather good) Voice over IP program Skype has limits , allowing people on Intel CPUs to have larger conference calls that users of other processors. Today, a third party has removed this restriction, and published a patch, along with an explanation of how the patch was made. I don't know about the legalities of either action, but it is good news for users, so if you use Skype on an AMD or other processor, then you might want to check it out. Only for Windows users right now. The followup to the original article on Slashdot is also available.

Command Line PDF Creation, for free.

If you want to make a pdf out of another file type, you have relatively few options, unless you want to buy expensive software. You could use OpenOffice (a recent version) and the pdf export function, which is nice, but If your original file was done in MS Word or something else that can't save in OpenDocument Format, the conversion might mess up some formatting. Scribus (a page layout/ graphics program) also has good pdf export features, but has even fewer import options. On a Unix like system, using the CUPS print system, you can use cups-pdf, which works very well, but produces very large files.

A convenient option I have found to work well is GNU Ghostscript, which can convert a postscript file to a pdf quite nicely. On a windows system at least, it is very easy to get a postscript file. All you have to do is create a new local printer that prints to the "File:" port and use a postscript printer driver. I have found that a Minolta color laser driver works very well, but just look for drivers with PS in the name. When you print to this printer you will be asked to save a .prn file, which is basically a postscript file, as long as you are using an appropriate printer driver. Then you can install and use ghostscript (you can find a windows binary on the net, search for ghostscript, there are a few different versions). Recent versions of ghostscript (just about every recent Unix machine will already have some form installed) have a script called ps2pdf, which does the conversion.

Anyway, the main point of this post, was to point you at this great article, on using ps2pdf to generate a PDF. You can also look at the main ps2pdf documentation.

This setup works well for me because, I am converting a huge and complex Word File (on a windows machine) to PDF on my Linux machine, although it may not work well for everyone. If this doesn't meet your needs, Adobe has trial versions of Acrobat and most of its other software available. I expect that is its easiest for most people to simply use OpenOffice though.

Scrabble

If you enjoy scrabble (word game, owned by Hasbro in the US) and don't have (or don't want to deal with) one of the aging official computerized versions, the Internet Scrabble Club might be for you. It is java based so works fairly well with most operating systems, and is free. Definitely worth checking out.

Now back to my Scrabble game ;-)

(Edited 8:31 PM EST, Maybe it would help if I gave you the link)

Norton Security Software, Keyloggers

This should be a quick, but funny post:

According to Slashdot (and other sources), Norton protects against the Spybot worm by disconnecting IRC (Internet Relay Chat) sessions when someone types "startkeylogger", which is overreacting (just a bit). It is always good to know that your security software is working, but this is overboard. If you are looking for an alternative, I suggest AVG or Avast combined with Zonealarm firewall. On Linux (and other similar OSes) I use clamAV, which seems to work (but I haven't had a virus to try it on in a long time).

Remember, At least for Windows, You should defiantly have a virus scanner (as well as some other tools), even if you have to put up with some minor problems.

Oh well, back to my homework ;-(