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One of the new features in Internet Explorer 9 is “Tracking Protection”. It’s an improvement on IE8’s “InPrivate Filtering” feature, which allowed users to block third-party tracking sites. Unlike InPrivate, which required a user to manually enable it, Tracking Protection is enabled at all times. Even better, Tracking Protection works through automatically updated lists provided by third-party vendors (InPrivate required the user to manually download and install blocking updates).
EasyList, the group that provides the filters which power longtime Firefox favorite AdBlock Plus, have figured out a way to convert their block lists to work with IE9. While IE9 + EasyPrivacy isn’t quite as powerful a combo as Firefox + AdBlock, it’s still nice to get rid of most web ads… especially if you’re forced to use IE for some reason. To be fair, IE 9 is pretty awesome. Since Firefox seems to choke on Flash videos when you have 48 open tabs, I had been using Chrome to watch YouTube vids. But I have switched back to IE in those cases as it’s as fast as Chrome on my system and more compatible with various websites.
To add EasyPrivacy to your IE 9 install, just go to this Microsoft page (using IE, natch) and click the “Add TPL” link next to the EasyList entry.
Once installed, if you’d like to disable or remove the list, click on Tools > Safety > Tracking Protection, highlight “EasyPrivacy Tracking Protection” and click the “Remove” or “Disable” box.
– The word of the day is velleity, which is “a wish or inclination not strong enough to lead to action.”
– Conservative? If so, The Episcopal Church hates you. From a guest commentary on their official website:
In an all-wired, let’s-go-viral world of non-information posing as information, these outliers can gain traction. In a saner era, somebody would have told Trump to go back to building unprofitable casinos. No newspaper with sense would dignify today’s bigotry with 24/7 coverage. No network claiming authority would employ people whose wild-eyed extremism makes a mockery of the Fourth Estate.
But here they are, the nutcases, parading in prime time as if they were a legitimate alternative in a deeply divided nation that is struggling with huge and vexing issues.
Thanks to Rupert Murdoch, they even have their own television network to legitimize streams of vitriol, conspiracy theories, fears, rages, and suspicion. In the brave new world of leveling-by-Internet, anybody can say anything and claim to be an authority.
Nice. This wouldn’t faze (or surprise) me in the least if it were on some TEC-affiliated site. But to see it on their official site? Shocking! And they wonder why ASA continues to decline.
– Speaking of religion and politics, an English man is facing being fired for displaying a cross in his work van… but his boss has a poster of notorious racist, homophobe and anti-Semite Che Guevara on his office wall. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others, eh?
– The Metro Design Language isn’t a computer language like Java or C++. It’s actually a set of design standards Microsoft started using in Zune and Windows Media Center and made front and center in Windows Phone. And, like it or not, it’s coming to Windows 8 and the next version of Office. Here’s a confirmed genuine screen cap of a beta version of the newest version of Outlook:
Man, that’s pretty sexay!
– Speaking of sexy, Chickipedia is the Wikipedia of hawt celebrity women. But while it’s nice to have a giant list of babes and their biographies, what truly makes the site is the “Assets” and “Vices” list at the top of each entry. They’re sometimes mundane, but often hilarious! Check out the list for Heidi Montag: “Assets: Great ass, huge set of tits, cup sized triple D’s maybe triple F’s and going for triple H’s as per her wishes when she’s ready for them. Vices: totally devoid of talent.” Or Jenny McCarthy: “Assets: funny, likes to get naked, tall. Vices: inability to use deductive reasoning, masculine face”. And Ashley Judd: “Assets: Southern sweetness, natural beauty. Vices: race car drivers, bad scripts”. It’s worth a visit.
So a few nights ago I was surfing the ‘Net, looking at open-source help desk software. I was thinking that I might add a help desk app to my business website, so that my clients could simply log on and report their problems via a web interface.
One of the apps I was interested in is called “PHP Support Tickets”. But when I went to their website, I was greeted with this:
Sites offering online storage and file sharing are not new. My all-time favorite such site, Visto, offered a free email account along with a desktop client that would sync your Outlook contacts, calendar and tasks between computers. The software even offered limited (250MB) file synchronization between computers. The whole thing was called the “Visto Desktop” and it was really cool… when I started using it… back in 1998! Sadly, Visto stopped offering their services to the public in 2002 so that they could focus on licensing their synchronization tech to cell phone companies and large corporations.
A lot has changed since then. But since I work from one computer at home, I haven’t had much need for such services. This changed this past Christmas, when I got a netbook and a smartphone. Suddenly, I had a desire (if not a need) to share data between devices. And although there are several sites out there offering such services, the hands-down favorite with the geek crowd is Dropbox.
Dropbox offers 2GB of storage space for free, with 50GB and 100GB accounts available for $9.99/month and $19.99/month respectively. You sign up, then download and install the client. It creates a folder called “Dropbox” in your user profile, and any files copied to that folder are automatically synced between that computer and Dropbox, and any additional computers you install the client on.
There are also two subfolders inside the Dropbox folder, “Public” and “Photos”. Files copied to the “Public” folder can be viewed by anyone on the Internet, which is handy for sharing documents with colleagues. A helpful context menu in Windows Explorer even copies the public URL to your clipboard for easy pasting to an email or IM conversation. You can use the “Photos” folder to create instant photo galleries: just create a new folder inside the Photos folder (“Ashley’s Birthday”) and copy pictures to the new folder. You can then send a link to your friends, who can view the pictures even if they don’t have a Dropbox account.
Internet giant Amazon launched a new online storage service called Cloud Drive this week. But it’s far more than just online storage. Here’s a quick round-up where you find out what it is, why it’s cool, and why Amazon’s looking at the Big Picture with it.
Cloud Drive is an online storage service. You can get 5GB worth of disk space for free, or you can upgrade to 20GB for $20/year, 50GB for $50/year, 100GB for $100/year and so on. As a “limited time offer”, Amazon is offering a US residents a free one-year upgrade to 20GB if you buy any album from their mp3 store. And I do mean any album: I bought Radiohead’s Kid A album for $2.99 and got the free upgrade immediately.
So here’s what the Cloud Drive looks like:
(click to embiggen)
As you can see, it’s a pretty basic interface. There are default folders for documents, music, pictures and videos, and you can create any additional folders or subfolders you wish. There’s also a “Deleted Items” folder, just in case you accidentally delete the wrong thing. It’s pretty cool so far, right? But not very revolutionary?
Well check this out… Here’s Amazon’s Cloud Player:
(click to embiggen)
You can access and play your music from any other computer via a web browser. Playlists are supported, and are easy to edit via drag and drop. Embedded album art is also supported, as is sorting by artist, album, or even genre. It might not be the prettiest interface ever written, but it’s functional, simple, and gets the job done.
But wait! There’s more!
Here’s Amazon’s updated Amazon MP3 app for Android:
(click to embiggen)
Yep, the same song that was just playing on my desktop computer is now playing on my phone! And this is Amazon’s Big Picture, and it’s why Cloud Drive is so cool.
It’s no secret that Android is, by far, the most popular smartphone operating system. In fact, Android recently hit a 53% market share, which exceeds the rest of the smartphone operating systems combined. And it’s only going to grow in the future, with hundreds of Droid-powered tablets due to hit the market soon.
But while iPhones have had iTunes built-in from day one, Android has been missing a killer audio player. The Android Market is full of apps that claim to work with iTunes and other PC-based players… but don’t. The recently released WinAMP for Android claims to offer wireless syncing over Wi-Fi, but this blog post has dozens of complaints about how it doesn’t work that well, especially on 64-bit versions of Windows. But even if it worked flawlessly, the WinAMP app only offers local syncing, which is great if you want to update your tunes while at home, but simply doesn’t work if you’re already away from home and want to hear a song.
And this is where Cloud Player comes in. I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far its worked flawlessly on my phone. Just upload some songs from home (an optional Adobe AIR upload applet is available) or buy them from the Amazon store and the songs instantly show up on the Cloud Player, either on a desktop PC or your phone.
If you’re a Facebook user, you probably know that the site frequently changes and updates things. Some of these updates are welcome, others are not. One of the least popular changes of late is “theatre view”, in which a black background is displayed around photos:
Sadly, there’s no easy way to get around this. Pages with theatre view enabled have “&theatre” added to the URL of the picture, so you’d think that it’d be easy to add a rule to AdBlock to kill this “feature”. Not so. You can simply reload the FB page, or add the following as a bookmarklet to accomplish the same thing:
javascript: window.location.reload()
But I wanted to fix this directly. And I found a nice Greasemonkey script that will do just that. But, as great as Greasemonkey is, I didn’t want to install it just for this one thing. So I found a way to convert the script to a Firefox extension! So, here it is… my very first Firefox extension:
The extension is around 7KB and works with FF versions 2.0 to (at least) 3.6.15. It is based on this Greasemonkey script by David J. Harvey, was complied using this online compiler, and is released under GPL version 3. Harvey says that the script works most of the time, but you may still see “theatre view” from time to time.
My extension is 100% safe, but if you’d like to download an almost identical extension from the official Mozilla site, click here.
NOTE: If you click on the link and are prompted to save the extension instead of installing it, download it to your desktop and then click File > Open File to install the extension manually. I don’t know why you don’t get the standard extension install prompt (it might be because I have AdBlock and several other features disabled for this site). I will look in to this as I have time.
Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows 7 was released on February 22, and while there haven’t been widespread reports of problems with the installation of it, there does seem to be a higher than normal rate of people having trouble installing the darn thing.
I installed it on three of my home computers. I had no trouble installing SP1 on a 32-bit netbook running Windows 7 Starter, but I ran in to a lot of issues trying to get it to install on two 64-bit computers, one running Windows 7 Ultimate and the other running Windows 7 Home Premium.
The Windows Update based installer, which downloads the SP files from Microsoft via a small executable file, failed repeatedly. Because this might have been due to overloaded Microsoft servers, I then downloaded the entire 900+MB SP file. It seemed to install properly on my Ultimate machine, but the computer did not automatically reboot after install, so I waited 10 minutes and rebooted manually. After the reboot, I received a cryptic error message saying that the “Service Pack was not installed properly” with the reason code of “Operation completed successfully”. I had similar issues with the Home Premium computer.
I ran CHKDSK on both computers, but no errors were found on the disks. In desperation, I downloaded the System Update Readiness Tool and ran it. That, apparently, did the trick.
The file (which is around 100MB for x86 installs and 300MB for x64 installs) runs like any other manually downloaded update or hotfix. There’s no progress bar, so you have no idea who long it will take to run (seems like it took 10 minutes on my triple-core system and slightly less on a quad-core system). Once it’s done you reboot, and SP1 should install without any (more) errors.
It’s been a long time since I answered a reader’s question here on the site, so let’s do this thing!
Reader Jeff was setting up a computer for a co-worker, and wanted to place several website shortcuts on the computer’s desktop. Dragging the website icon from the browser’s address bar to the desktop created the shortcut, but the problem was that those shortcuts only had generic icons, and not the “website icons” Jeff wanted. So how can you create a desktop shortcut for a website that uses the site’s actual icon?
Well, first of all, those icons are called “favicons”, and in most cases they’re located at www.domain.com/favicon.ico. You can use Firefox or Chrome to load each address and save the icon as an ICO file. You can also do this with Internet Explorer, but in many cases IE will insist on saving the file as a BMP file. You can sometimes rename the extension of the saved BMP file to ICO, but a lot of times IE will mangle the file header and you’ll get an error message when you try to actually use it. So just use Firefox or Chrome if possible.
Save each favicon.ico file in a permanent location with a unique, meaningful file name (such as jimcofer.ico). All you have to do then is right-click each desktop icon, choose “Properties” and then click the “Change Icon” button. Use the “Browse” button to locate the correct ICO file you saved in the previous step, then repeat for any additional icons.
Note that the desktop icons will now be “tied” to the saved icons. If you move the saved icons (for example, from My Documents\Icons to My Documents\Stuff\Icons) you’ll need to re-map them via Explorer.
If you’ve been using Outlook for some time, you’ve probably got a folder structure that works for you. And you probably also have a lot of email that could be archived out of your mail storage file.
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s all-or-nothing solution to the issue – AutoArchiving – is quite limited. You can only archive items by their date. You can’t, for instance, tell Outlook to archive all 6 month old emails except categorized ones. Nor can you tell Outlook to archive all emails except this or that folder. You could always copy emails to a new data file manually, but that would mean recreating the folder structure, which can be a lot of work.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could replicate your folder structure in a new data file, and move older emails to it as needed?
You can, and it’s a simple, if drawn out, process:
1) Open Outlook and click “File” > “Import and Export”.
2) Choose “Export to a file”, and then click “Next”.
3) Choose “Personal Folder File (.pst)”, and then click Next.
4) On the next screen, select the top of the hierarchy (usually listed as “Personal Folders”) and make sure that “Include subfolders” is checked, and then click “Next”.
5) Choose a unique name for the new data file (such as “outlookfolders.pst”) as well as a location for the new data file (such as the desktop), and then click “Finish”.
6) If you see an additional screen called “Create Microsoft Personal Folders”, just click “OK”.
Depending on the size of your email archive and the speed of your computer, this process can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 45 minutes or more.
