Uncategorized

Chad ran across a good article about ontology and how categorization has become much more of a personal thing than it used to be. I’ll refrain from starting a discussion about how the amount of personal information we all manage has become so much greater and just let you read Chad’s weblog post as well as the original article. Suffice it to say that if I had a good way to tag more of my files, bookmarks and such I think I’d search less and find more.

Microsoft‘s free USB Flash Drive Manager is a utility that lets you backup your flash drive, control autorun and a few other things including backing up your wireless configuration settings, according to this week’s Windows Tips & Tricks Update. This is a weekly enewsletter available free from the folks at Windows IT Pro. You can sign up for their enewsletters but don’t bother trying to find this tip on their website until next week — their article archive trails the newsletter by a week.

This article from ExtremeTech gives a good explanation about the power needs and also recommends a few brands. Good article if you’re trying to build your own PC.

And this free online book. What is Greasemonkey? It’s an extension you can use to add scripts to a web page to change its behavior. More (much more) information is available on both sites referenced, above.

Aunty Spam’s Net Patrol reports in this article that a federal appeals court has ruled that the FCC overstepped their bounds in mandating that the anti-copying scheme be implemented in all devices and digital broadcasts. The facility was supposed to be effective July 1, 2005.

I wonder if there will be a further appeal, don’t you?

This article from Silicon Beat (a technology news weblog from our local rag) links you to this site which shows you traffic info from Yahoo! laid on top of a Google map. Yes, you can switch the map to satellite and back. Pretty neat. Don’t know how many applications there are for this … I suppose you could see where construction is being done and recognize it by landmark or something. I liek it, though! It’s a creative application of technology.

At street-level, no less. This article by Dan Gillmor sends you to this T-Mobile page where you can type in an address or select an intersection and see what the coverage is supposed to be like. I check my work location and it says “Good” while I’d rate it only fair — 1 bar, at best. Still, as Mr. Gillmor says, at least they’re willing to show it!

Found this in this post on digg. Clusty and IceRocket. I’ve just given them a light once-over but, so far, they’re decent. Not Google killers as far as I can see but if you don’t like Google or Yahoo! then give ’em a try.

One of the Lockergnome properties has this article on displaying hidden devices in Device Manager. Displaying non-plug-and-play devices is fairly easy: right click My Computer -> Properties. Click on the Hardware tab and select Device Manager. In the View menu, select Show Hidden Devices and there they are.

Devices that are defined but not currently present (e.g. MP3 players or USB drives) is harder. You must create an environment variable that has a particular value in order to force them to show up. Again, My Computer -> Properties and go to the Advanced tab. Select Environment Variables and create a new System variable called devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices. Set its value to 1 and click OK to save it and OK to exit the System Properties dialog. Now you can open Device Manager and see everything, You’ll have to select View -> Hidden Devices but, once you’ve done that, both ghosted and hidden devices will show up.

A friend of mine, came across some info about web beacons on Yahoo, used to track your movements through Yahoo! properties. I don’t think this is new … I seem to recall something about this cropping up a year ago or so. Still, it’s good to be reminded of it every now and then. Chad’s weblog entry is here and it includes links to the Yahoo! Privacy Center with information about their use of beacons and also this link that you can use to opt out.