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So, everyone’s probably already aware that Skype offers free Skype-user to Skype-user calling and outbound calling from the Skype client installed on your PC or Mac to a regular telephone for something like $.02 per minute. Skype now has SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail in beta. Interesting products! The SkypeIn service allows the user to “buy” (i.e. pay for on a monthly basis) one to three phone numbers that are local to whatever area they wish — maybe one in Sillycon Valley, one in Oklahoma and one in London! Calls to your SkypeIn number actually go the owner’s Skype client.

How much does it cost? Well, that’s a little unclear to me. A 3-month subscription to SkypeIn is about $13 US (the price is actually quoted in Euros) for 3 months or about $39 US for a 12-month subscription and includes a free subscription to Skype Voicemail. But I haven’t (yet) been able to find anything about air-time charges which I’m sure are there. If I hear otherwise or I get a price for air-time, I’ll update this entry.

PR annoucement is here.

An update to my entry from March 10, Sysinternals has updated their RootKit Revealer to 1.40.

Windows IT Pro publishes some great newsletters. This month, they discuss eventtriggers.exe. Yes, you have it installed on your XP system. Go to a command-line and enter “eventtriggers /?” and you’ll get a list of options. You can monitor for a specific event ID in a particular event log or all logs and, when the event occurs, have it do something specific. Now, the magazine will have this email newsletter available on the web in a little while. In the meantime, you can read more about this in this article at TheLazyAdmin.com.

At, where else, WeatherReports.com. Currently in beta and free. A U.S. weather forecast can be had from http://www.weatherreports.com/United_States/zip such as http://www.weatherreports.com/United_States/94085 for Sunnyvale, California.

The Linux Documentation Project has come up with the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide — pretty serious HTML document on writing bash scripts. I’ve considered myself a pretty decent shell script writer but I learned loads from this!

Actually, this page on SourceForge discusses using SSH to traverse a firewall and do a lot of things, including how to web surf the other end and how to use SAMBA on the other end, virtually replacing the need for a VPN. It’s a good article to study applications of SSH and tunneling.

See the following entries in my weblog for past information:

More on tunneling Remote Desktop over SSH
The Hazards of X11 Forwarding
Tunneling remote control
Cygwin vs GotoMyPC et al. -OR- Getting to your machine from elsewhere

Read through the article today and it gives a good overview of both of these facilities. I’ve been using Offline files for a few years, now, to keep some files available on my laptop that are stored/archived on my server, and I still learned a few things. Well, OK, not from the article itself but from this Microsoft KnowledgeBase article. There also a link to another Microsoft KnowledgeBase article about the Briefcase.

Security Focus‘s Linux users (Focus-Linux) have sample rulesets available here.

… is at http://sandbox.msn.com. Among other things, it mentions their Anti-spyware beta.

Two things that aren’t mentioned in the Sandbox but are mentioned in this article from eWeek are Microsoft’s experimental service for RSS aggregation (hint, click on the “show” link over on the left side of the page) and this service that let’s you store bookmarks (courtesy of the same article).

Courtesy of Windows Secrets (original article is here):

Uninstall the extension.

Download the latest version of the extension.

It’s really a ZIP file so rename it from Extension.xpi to Extension.xpi.zip

Unzip Install.rdf into the same folder as the .zip file.

Edit Install.rdf.

Find the line containing the word maxVersion. Change the number between the angle brackets to a number equal to or larger than your current Firefox version.

Save the file, then add it back into your Extension.xpi.zip file, overwriting the original Install.rdf.

Rename it from Extension.xpi.zip back to Extension.xpi.

Drag and drop the file into an open Firefox window.