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.

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.