Yesterday, May 5th, I walked my dog Spencer in the SPCA fundraiser that took place in downtown Raleigh. It was a 3K (1.8 mile) walk through the city streets. My mom came along for our walk, too. Hopefully it was a fun outing for Spencer. He was a bit nervous and shy around so many hundreds of dogs, but he did get through it. It feels good to donate money to the SPCA. They do so much for homeless pets.
I listed some of my favorite Firefox extensions in a post earlier this year. One of them was VideoDownloader. If you watch online videos on YouTube and other sites that use Flash-based video, you can save those videos locally by using this extension. The extension has now been around for a while, so if you haven’t tried it, you should. Once you have it installed, you’ll find yourself using it more often than you think. For an example, I stumbled upon loads of old music videos from some of my favorite bands that people had uploaded to YouTube. I saved them after I watched them and now I can play them anytime and store them on my own machine.
When you save online videos locally, they are saved with a .flv file extension. This is a flash video file. To watch these files, you’ll have to download a viewer that plays this kind of file, such as the popular free FLV Player, which I use.
This post may be out of the blue, but I was just thinking about how much I love this movie. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is one of my absolute favorite 80s movies. I went to the theater with my brother and saw it the summer it came out, back in 1986. It is hard to believe this movie is now 21 years old. It is on TV all the time and I always enjoy seeing it again. Recently, AMC had it on their network with popups at the bottom of the screen with facts about the movie. Perhaps the DVD has this as well, but I am not sure. The fun tidbits about the movie were really interesting and made sit and watch it all over again. This movie contains some of my favorite movie quotes, including the greatest movie quote of all time (made by principal Ed Rooney): “I did not achieve this position in life to have some snot-nosed punk leave my cheese out in the wind.”
A brand new version of Thunderbird has been released. Finally! Version 2.0 adds new features, improvements, and stability over the older 1.5x versions. A list of features can be read here. I have upgraded and it feels a little tighter to me. Though, I am having trouble finding much of a difference in the feature set over the prior version. I had a hard time trying to create Search Folders that would show up as a folder in the Local Folders to show only starred or unread messages. I finally figured it out. You have to create search terms for your mailbox and then choose to save those options as an entire folder. This needs to be a little easier, but I am very thankful the feature is finally included in the program. The on-the-fly spell checking that was rolled out with version 1.5 continues in version 2.0. That one feature makes this program a true winner. Thunderbird is a solid email application. I would suggest for anyone over Outlook Express.
Have you seen the cool new show on VH-1 called Acceptable.tv? It is both a TV show and a website. On this show, short skits are featured that viewers vote for on their computers or cell phones. Shows that don’t get enough votes do not return the following week, and new ones are added. Visitors to the website can even vote for user-submitted amateur videos that could make it on the air if they garner enough popularity. So far, several of the skits have been quite funny. Regardless, I absolutely love the premise of the show, where the viewers and users are in full control of the content. It is a revolutionary idea. I hope it lasts.
One complaint I have had about Windows is the silly way the Disk Cleanup feature is implemented. In the Start Menu, it is under Accessories, then System Tools. It doesn’t clean out the user temp folder for some weird reason. Also, the default setting of always trying to compress old files to see the space savings is unforgivable. It grinds the entire process of the disk cleaning to a halt. First off, you should not compress old files anyway using this feature. Second, they should have put a checkbox in there to turn this off. Fortunately, you can delete a single key from the system registry to turn this behavior off and make the disk cleanup feature worth using. Information on that can be read here.
To really clean out old PC gunk, I use the free program CCleaner. It cleans files all across the Windows system and in many applications as well. It helps get rid of the cobwebs that eventually end up slowing my system down. This program is great and even erases files you may not have thought about before, such as the Windows prefetch data and the system tray notification cache. Check it out.
I got Casino Royale in the mail from Netflix and held onto it for over a week once I found out it was 2 1/2 hours long. I had heard great things about this movie. I finally watched it last night. It was indeed incredibly long, but it is a good movie over all. I don’t quite know how much I like Daniel Craig as James Bond, though. I had seen him in a movie that I’d caught on Showtime once (which I don’t know the name), and I thought he was a good actor. His acting is great and he had great stage presence, but to me he still doesn’t quite fit the Bond character, in my opinion.
Still, this is a good movie. The stunts are well carried out, though somewhat ridiculous in the realism of his injuries (or lack of). There is plenty of action to go around. In fact, this movie almost feels like Die Hard 4 European Edition. There is a lot of class and style, but James Bond never quite got officially introduced until late in the movie. In fact, I don’t remember Bond saying an entire sentence for the first half hour of the movie! He felt thrust upon the audience without a proper Bond introduction.
There also isn’t a lot of gadgetry in this movie, as in previous Bond films. The gadget man Q in the earlier Bond films has died and his role wasn’t resurrected or mentioned in this movie. So there wasn’t a lot of fanfare about what his car or clothes could do for him. Despite that, the movie is filled with plenty of thrills, though I wish it had been about 20 or 30 minutes shorter.
In February, I posted my thoughts on wireless LAN security, and today I am posting again to revisit the topic. Before, I was stressing raw speed for the wireless network by using minimal security. While speed is of near utmost importance, I have done some more experimenting with my wireless network settings since that time. I should reemphasize what I said before about using at least some kind of security for your wireless network. Don’t just let it run wide open with no security at all. That is probably not in your best interest.
Since my last post, I have been using WPA security all the way, without looking back. I endorse WPA now over WEP. It is certainly more secure. If nothing else, it is definitely easier to enable on your local machines. Memorizing a passphrase for each machine is easier than printing out a long WEP key and praying that you can type it correctly, twice. I have not noticed any sort of speed slow down of any kind with WPA, that I can tell. I have a relatively short security key length, but I am not as paranoid as some people. Wireless runs snappy on my laptop, and even my old computer, which is slow, but still handles it with ease.
I love using Yahoo Widgets. Since I tried it out a while back, I have gone through periods of using it and other periods of not using it. I am back to using it now and and I haven’t wanted to look back. Using widgets makes the desktop look cool and flashy, but it is only worthwhile if you get something productive out of it. Personally, I use the weather widget, memory usage widget, WiFi signal widget, the analog clock, and a GMail notifier widget. There are reportedly thousands of widgets available. You can set the transparency of each widget on the desktop. Every open widget runs as a separate system process, so don’t go overboard when you start adding them.
I just found out today that version 4 has been released (4.01 being the latest). I have upgraded and it claims to use less system memory than version 3. Also, there is a new widget dock that previews your open widgets in small form. Whether you care to use the dock is your preference. I am using XP, but Yahoo Widgets is also available for the Mac. Of course, Mac OSX and Windows Vista both have built-in widget support, so I don’t know how useful Yahoo Widgets will be on those systems. Still, Yahoo claims to have the most widgets compared to the competition. A lot of them are ridiculous and have practically no use whatsoever, but the ones that are really useful soon become hard to live without. I’m hooked…again.
Check out this video on how to fold your shirt in two seconds. This is really cool. There is even a whole website dedicated to it. The link to the website is in the video. Watch it here.
