There are few spare moments between the breakfast my son made for his mother at 0600 and the dinner we plan to share with other mothers and their families.
In that spare time there are two ‘utilities’ I have started to use over the past few weeks worth mentioning.…
I just watched the series of vimeo demos of Mozilla’s Aurora interface.
Very clever and very complicated. It’s shown as an interaction twixt what appears to be a Yuppie farmer and someone who predicts profits in agriculture based on loosely gather data on the Internet.
The strangest part to me was the graphic of usage icons diminishing in size to the horizon according to there place on the “Z” time line. It has the feel of a galactic cloud of cosmic dust, only not as inspiring. 
What was most interesting about the demo was the space station mouse the woman was using. It looked like a globular wheel combined with an inter-lever joy-stick.
I have a feeling this woman runs a high tech winery. If you have read the news lately, they are growing a lot more than grapes in some of these northern California boutique wineries.
Perhaps with hands-on experience I would be better able to critique the interface itself. This is more a comment on the demonstration itself. I felt no connection with the characters used to represent the end-user.
Mr. Jobs does a better job of clearly showing how we may use a product in our day to day lives. This demo did not. 
The first link listed by a newly added feed, Laughing Squid in San Francisco is about San Francisco Liberation Radio. I thought it might be insightful, interesting or at the very least funny. It was self important, attention getting and raided by a government agency. What fun. -S-
Laughing Squid has been sited by several of the more sophisticated on-line commentators. We won’t give it the hook just yet. Tick-tick
The DownloadSquad displayed a systems utility to transform the PrntScrn button to actually print the screen rather than copying the screen to the clipboard.
In the comments section of the program’s page, there is a comment touting another program called Gadwin System. I have never heard of it but its home page is open and will look deeper into it later.
I saved a few news pieces to read about the coming war in South America. It would appear we have a few macho men just itching for a fight. Sound familiar? I won’t bother posting links because this is an ongoing situation and the content will be ever changing.
Freeware Files displayed a 1.3 version of Able RAWer. This is a graphic handler for RAW files to be downloaded directly from the camera. I currently use Picasa for this. The interesting thing is there was an ad for Picasa running on this page.
I am not sure why I saved the link to WordPress, but it was on my list, so, go start yourself a blog. Enjoy!
If you’re interested in the show on BBC called Torchwood, this article from TV Squad will tell you more than you want to know prior to seeing the show. If you have seen it, reading this article may give you insight into the motivation for this episode’s creation. This does rate a SPOILER ALERT!!
IMAP pros and cons from downloadsquad.
Daily Blog Tips is an interesting page if you blog.
The last link was to a song called Cake. Unfortunately my script blocker on Firefox displayed a half dozen blocked scripts that would have to be activated to hear the song. One, maybe as many as three scripts I can understand. When the number gets higher than that, the page writer is up to something.
That’s the evening graze. If we stay up late, which we rarely do on a Sunday night, we may post one more today.
That may sound strange, to take Sunday off, but after a very long week we have canceled all social obligations for the day. I am sitting here in the home office, listening to Ingrid Michealson’s The Way I Am to be followed by Stacy Kent singing Stardust.
These songs came about with my discovery of Amazon.com’s music download. iTunes was just too complicated for me. I am listening to the music on my laptop with the GPL Licensed VLC cross platform media player. It is the simplicity the interface to this programs full set of features that appeals to me.
Mark Knophler’s Coyote (Album Version) just started playing.
This could go on all afternoon, but I would rather just chill, thank you…
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…Stacy Kent is now singing I Got it Bad…
It should be mentioned that Firefox, though no manipulation of my own, is now back up and running.
When it activated all of my add-ons, along with their associated websites. I had to go in and turn off the add-ons not currently in use. It did surprise me there were so many. I am a taster. When I find mention of something that may make the browsing experience more interesting, will try it. Mostly the reason I turn it off as to do with loading time or its conflict with a already running feature. I only delete the ones that have an obvious detrimental effect on my set-up.
I wonder if this huge patch, whose pending arrival was all over ZDNet news. (Google Read Feed), was a precursor to Firefox’s version 3.0.
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You can find information about Quicknote 5.4 at this site. There are many “postit” programs out there, I’ve tried many of the them and discarded them due to clumsy interface. This is because mostly by the authors attempt to recreate the manner of post-it notes, rather then the purpose.
Quicknote is intelligently compiled, with less emphasis on how it looks than how it works. There is a short learning curve easily surmounted by watching the videos available. Once I learned it and customized it, it has already become second nature for me to use it in creating this blog entry.
Take the time to find out all it does, because it is a modest interface with a powerful right click menu. The good news is the interface is easily modified to fit your taste. The green background and gray border have quickly been changed to dark blue with white print and a translucent border. I missed the blue background white print of the original DOS editors.
Five Stars in all reviews.
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Again, happy New Year to all.
There were many emails on my Thunderbird this morning, most from friends and family, and some from a millionaire in strife-torn Kenya that wants me to hold his money in my bank account for a while.
Not too many of these any more with the layers of SPAM protection, both at the provider level, GMail and Yahoo as well as ICQ and our own servers.
The problem with SPAM protection, much like spell checkers, is they are not perfect. A person most dear to me changed her email address for the New Year. I knew she sent a message, but it wasn’t showing up. So, I went to the SPAM volume in Thunderbird, and there it was.
I de-SPAMed it by clicking on the NOT SPAM box, creating a filter so that all mail from this address will now go to a friendlier volume and be starred. I gave it the additional layer of protection by adding the e-mail address to the address book.
Now Thunderbird will welcome this email with open arms, treat it kindly and give it a welcome home until I can open it.
Though I have an add-on icon that deletes all SPAM without having to open it, I scan the list by sorting it by sender, scrolling down the list and then hitting the destructo icon.
As added protection, the SPAM doesn’t disappear with that. It goes into the trash folder. Then, at the end of the day, when I scan the trash folder, if I missed something, here is my last "Are You Sure" opportunity. If all is clear then I hit the SPAM icon once more and it is gone forever.
I have the Thunderbird default set to delete Trash when I close the program. It doesn’t close it that often, but this seems to work for me. I have recovered more emails from the Trash folder than from the SPAM.
To manage the multitude of emails the blogs can produce, I use the Unread Folders, combined with the Threads with Unread settings.
Doing this only brings up only new mail with only their folders when I open Thunderbird. If there is an ongoing conversation, where I may need to refer back, the thread with unread View option allows that.
If I need to find an email, I use the search option which narrows down the selection. If you are like me and don’t delete any email from certain sources, don’t forget to set the compression option to start automatically at certain times. This will save a lot of disk space without hampering your ability to retrieve old emails.
Most of the old emails I retrieve are in the RECEIPTS folder. I find it a good idea to at least copy messages that you may need somewhere along the line to prove a point. Doing this has saved me hundreds of dollars with PayPal this year.
What started out as a simple happy New Year message has turned into a tutorial. Blame VideoJug for that.
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In a few of our blog entries we have complained about being overwhelmed by Google Reader. This is no longer so.
We have made few modifications in the manner in which it is read, while simultaneously adding a doze or so RSS links to blogs and other sites.
Whereas before we were reading each blog separately they are now grouped by general interest. We have BLOGS, NEWS, SOFTWARE, HARDWARE and TO READ. Each of the selected links are placed into the right group.
Next we changed the default view from Expanded View to List View. For a while we tried reading it by group. Then we advanced to reading list with All Items (#) chosen.
The last, and most necessary of the settings is Show # New Items.
After perusing the list, do not forget to Mark All As Read. If you forget to do that, then the rest of the effort was in vain.
We have recently added to Firefox the Read It Later extension. Using this tool removed the last bit of pressure.
Now we select an item from the list, right click to link and choose, Read It Later from the list. Then the link is added to a list activated by the new icon in the top toolbar.
Now, it’s onto the new Kindle from Amazon.
Information Overload. Who would have thought it possible?
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Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device
Now that MoveableType is OpenSource, I couldn’t wait to install it on our GoDaddy Host. After what seemed like HOURS, I finally RTFM and found out “localhost” doesn’t work when setting up the database in GoDaddy. You have to go into your account hosting manager, click on databases and then find the pencil icon on the right side of the screen.
Clicking that brings you to an informational screen where the local host, unique to your database is named. It isn’t even close to “localhost” but it works.
Good Luck!!
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This is a link to a Zoho Notebook published online.
Just want to see if this is something I want to incorporate into Blogging.
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