July 2003

See http://email.about.com/cs/rssfeedreaders/. It’s got an introduction to RSS and why you might like it as well as a review of 10 of the most popular readers.

Personally, I use the bloglines.com online service. For a local client, I’m undecided between FeedDemon (still in beta but it will ultimately be a commercial product) and WildGrape’s NewsDesk (free).

Actually, it turns out that just about every ad in the San Jose Mercury News is online at http://newpaperads.mercurynews.com. You can browse by category (“Electronics & Appliance Stores”) or by advertiser. You can even set up an email alert so you’ll be notified when an ad shows up that matches your search criteria. Typically the ad will be displayed in a smaller format which can be zoomed. Today’s Fry’s ad, for instance is here. There have been 19 Fry’s ads in the Murky News in the past 7 days!

www.techbargains.com lists deals and rebates on technical merchandise, from both online vendors as well as brick-and-mortar stores.

eCost sells online and has a list of bargains that will expire soon. Sometimes there are good deals (SMC EZ Connect 802.11b Wireless PC Card for $17 due to expire in 38 hours) and sometimes not so hot.

… at http://www.microsoft.com/reader/promotions/free_shop.asp. The books are

“I Am Madame X” by Gioia Diliberto
“Open Innovation” by Henry Williams Chesbrough
“Joy luck Club” by Amy Tan

… but the default MTU size on Windows XP systems will often reduce the throughput of PPPoE connections. You need to check out your provider’s MTU size and adjust accordingly (thanks to Scot’s Newsletter for this). In it he makes reference to SpeedGuide.net, a site I haven’t been to in a long time, spending instead, a lot of my time on the DSLReports site. But the SpeedGuide.net site has got a lot of good information on it that DSLReports only has in its forums like its Windows 2000/XP Registry Tweaks as well as downloads like the TCP Optimizer which will optimize your settings for your provider.

Some of the stuff is wildly out of date (a review of Tiny Software Personal Firewall V1.0 from 2000?) but the downloads and the tweaks and the news are worthwhile. Just wish they had an RSS feed.

BTW, check out the current issue of Scot’s Newslettercause he’s got a review of VoIP residential provider Vonage.

There’s a nice collection of online tools at http://www.dnsstuff.com that can give information based on IP address or domain name including DNS server response time, traceroute, reverse DNS lookup, CIDR/netmask lookup and ping. Thanks to 07/10/2003 Lockergnome Windows Daily for this site.

I think I heard of these two before but Dan Gillmor’s weblog entry brought them to mind again. Give it a shot.

In case you have something against going to Gillmor’s journal, go to Google and search for “French military victories”. Click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button instead of the “Google Search” button.

The other one is to search for “weapons of mass destruction” and hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

Found this posting in the Scobleizer weblog listing RSS feeds from and about Microsoft. This link at Microsoft lists all the MSDN-related RSS feeds. He’s also got this link to a feed that lists the newest additions to the Microsoft download site. And don’t forget the Microsoft Watch.

Kevin Savetz has compiled and maintains a list of commercial and free faxing services that that you can use via email or the web (yes, eFax is one of them). His list includes international sites as well as U.S. domestic.

A couple of note here:

eFax (free and commercial)

Fax1 ($1 credit when you sign up, no monthly fee, $0.12/page to the U.S.)

MaxEmail (commercial but it only costs $14.85/year for the basic service)

Kelly’s Korner XP, that is. All sorts of good and interesting tidbits, tweaks, how-tos and … Some require a “donation” (I dunno, if it’s required, I don’t consider it a donation but what do I know?)