Misc

From Lifehacker.com comes a link to the Confusing Words website whose purpose is to help you understand the difference between words. Good examples are “lay” and “lie” and “affect” and “effect”.

UC Berkeley, that bastion of freedom of expression and weirdness in the 60s (heck, today, even!) is making its lectures available on YouTube.

(Thanks, Steve.)

You probably already know about this but it’s such an egregious failure that I feel I have to post something about it. Excel 2007 sometimes has problems with the result of calculations in the range of 65,534.99999999995 to 65,535 and 65,535.99999999995 to 65,536. Excel can display the value as ” 100,000 ” instead of the proper value. Microsoft’s working on a fix but I haven’t seen anything so far. This week’s Office Watch newsletter has a decent write-up of it. It’s an email newsletter but a rundown of the failure is available at this link on their news site.

I don’t know how many of you are GMail users but Lifehacker recently had a pointer to a page on Wired.com’s How To Wiki entitled “How to get the Most Out of GMail”.

Just came across a mention of Humyo. Unlimited free online storage that you can access from your PC or your mobile phone. If you store media, you can stream them to your PC/phone, too. Not a lot of frills at this point — no backup/restore application for instance, but they say the plan to sell “premium” services at some point and, assumedly, that will be one of them. In the interim, give it a look-see. Yes, they’ve got a rather brief discussion about security on their questions page. And, just for the record, here’s their registration information from nslookup:

Domain name: HUMYO.COM

Administrative Contact:
    Team, Domains  [email protected]
    227 Bawtry Road
    Doncaster, South Yorkshire DN4 7AL
    GB
    +441302538565
Technical Contact:
    Team, Domains  [email protected]
    227 Bawtry Road
    Doncaster, South Yorkshire DN4 7AL
    GB
    +441302538565

Registration Service Provider:
    PIPEX Communications Uk Ltd, [email protected]
    +44.115-917-0000
    http://www.123-reg.co.uk/
    This company may be contacted for domain login/passwords,
    DNS/Nameserver changes, and general domain support questions.


Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 20-Sep-2007.
Record expires on 12-Dec-2008.
Record created on 12-Dec-2006.

Domain servers in listed order:
   NS2.HUMYO.COM
   NS1.HUMYO.COM

OK?

According to TheUltimateSteal.com, if you’re a student with a valid email address that ends in .edu and you’re carrying at least a 0.5 course load, you can get a perpetual license for Office 2007 Ultimate for $59.95. What’s in Ultimate? Well, everything! Access, Excel, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, Word and more. Is this offer legit? Sure looks like it to me — check out Microsoft’s Utimate Steal Promotion. There are some restrictions and they’re speeled out on the Microsoft site along with the particulars of what’s in Ultimate.

Good until April 30, 2008, it almost makes me wanna sign up for some classes!

IE7Pro brings a number of features from the most popular Firefox extensions to Internet Explorer 7. It includes ad blocking technology, can automatically open new tabs from addresses typed in the address bar, session recovery, GreaseMonkey-like user scripting and inline searching among other things. I’ve added it to my standard IE7 kit bag.

Was out looking for the newest version of SyncToy (which, by the way, is up to V1.4) and came across the following goodies: Microsoft Photo Info 1.0 which allows you to view and change a picture’s metadata from within Windows Explorer (puiblished Jan. 22, 2007), XML Notepad 2007 (published Mar. 22, 2007) which makes it a little easier to view and edit XML documents and Microsoft Network Monitor 3 (published Feb. 21, 2007), a network monitor and analyzer. That last one is nice and runs on Vista but I still prefer Ethereal

I can’t believe I haven’t heard of Jajah before! If you haven’t heard of it either, here’s the scoop: jajah users can call each other over standard landlines for free. When calling someone who’s not already a Jajah user, you pay a rate based on the originating and receiving countries — currently 2.8 cents per minute for USA to USA and 3 cents for USA to UK. And if you’re not already signed up, they give you 5 minutes for free so you can try the service. Don’t really know why people would want to use Jajah with their mobile phone since just about everyone I know already has free long distance with their mobile plans but if you don’t I suppose it’s worthwhile. Their mobile site is http://mobile.jajah.com

OK, so, how do you do this? You go to the Jajah website, enter your number and your friend’s number, Jajah call you then calls your friend and connects you. When you register, you can enter your home, office and mobile numbers. Next time you want to call someone, you can select which number you want to originate from, key in your friend’s number and go. And, yes, they’ve got an address book so you can save your friends’ numbers.

Update, 4/3: Note that here in the USA you only get 30 minutes of free calls per day (and 150 per week and some other limit per month). Not great but better than nothing.

I guess the industry will soon be moving away from rotating memories. SanDisk has announced a 32G flash drive that’s SATA attached (see this story from ExtremeTech