Microsoft has a new version of their Reader software available for download (for desktops and laptops, a 3.58MB download if you don’t already have it installed, a 1.74MB download if you do — see the site for Tablet and Pocket PC versions).

Reader is Microsoft’s free product to allow you to read eBooks — electronically distributed versions of regular old books … books that you’d buy at a bookstore. You can buy eBooks at Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, eBooks.com (of course) and a number of other online shops. eBooks are “locked” which means you can’t just loan a copy of an eBook to a friend like you can a paperback but, still, if you don’t mind reading on your PC, it’s a good way to pick up books and not worry about them getting lost or dog-eared. The new Harry Potter book isn’t available but Stephen King’s “Dreamcatcher” is, for $6.99.

To help motivate people to download and use Reader, Microsoft’s offering 3 free eBooks each week from now through November of this year. I heard about this last week but couldn’t find anything about the books on their site until this week. Now they’re on the site and available for download (see this link to the Free eBooks page for a synopsis as well as the download links). You’ll need to have the Reader software installed for the download to work. This week’s titles:

“Candy and Me” by Hillary Liftin
“Last to Die” by James Grippando
“A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson

Both will supposedly generate RSS feeds for sites that don’t have the capability (like Blogger).

In-store only and you need to print out this ad and take it with you. 802.11b router for $30, 802.11b PC card for $30 when purchased with the router, 802.11b USB adapter for $30 when purchased with the router. Then, separate from that router deal, they have an 802.11g PC card for $50, and an 802.11g router for $80.

Boy, this service sounds like it’s a real nothing but, after signing up and playing around just a little, this looks like it’s gonna be a pretty neat-o keen thing. So, here’s the deal: when you sign up you get to create web pages at http://yourname.bloki.com. The account includes a weblog at http://yourname.bloki.com/blog which includes an RSS feed. Take the tour or sign up and play with it.

Oh, yeah, you can allow other named users edit access to your website, too, so you’ve got something like a Wiki in it, too. More when I’ve played with it a bit more.

It’s a privacy concern. Heck, it’s paranoia but remember, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Anyway, here’s a TechTV article on it.

Apparently they’re kept in /.hidden. I’ll have to check this out!

Saw this in one of the Mac OS X mailing lists. The discussion centers around Safari but it work just as well with anything that supports JS. I’d seen this before at Bookmarklets but forgot about it until I saw it on the list. See the Bookmarklets site for a description of bookmarklets, what they are, how to use them and so on.

This will move the window to the upper left corner of the screen and resize it to 800×600 (note that 800×600 may not be the size of the actual display area of the window):


javascript:self.moveTo(0,0);self.resizeTo(800,600)


This will move and resize it so it’s an 800 pixels wide window that runs the entire height of the display:


javascript:self.moveTo(0,0);self.resizeTo(962,screen.availHeight)


self.resize or window.moveTo can be used instead to put the work into the hands of the user.

Not a bad list here and it looks like it’s been updated recently … well, about 3 months ago, but, still, it’s a pretty long list and includes browsers, word processors and HTML editors.

Yesterday’s Lockergnome Webmaster’s Weeky points out that www.example.com, www.example.org and www.example.net are all domains reserved for use in documentation. There are a couple of top-level domains (TLDs) reserved, too. See RFC 2606.

Web2POP costs about $20 and supports just a whole bunch of webmail accounts including Hotmail, Yahoo, Netscape.net, MSN, AOL, OneBox and Excite. it acts as a POP3 proxy — you point your email client at Web2POP (localhost, 127.0.0.1, using the standarde, but modifiable, POP3 port of 110) and during the login process Web2POP will log in to your webmail account, retrieve your email and pass it back to your POP3 client. It won’t send mail but there’s gotta be an SMTP proxy for that, too, doesn’t there? 🙂