The Trojan Room coffee pot was the inspiration for the world's first webcam. The coffee pot was located in the corridor just outside the so-called Trojan Room within the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.
The webcam was created to help people working in other parts of the building avoid pointless trips to the coffee room by providing, on the user's desktop computer, a live 128×128 greyscale picture of the state of the coffee pot.
A typosquatter registers domain names which closely resemble high-traffic websites, but feature common misspellings and consumer confusions. A typosquatter might register several domain names like Anazon.com, Amazzon.com, Amazons.com and so on. Customers seeking the real Amazon.com website may accidentally type the wrong URL, which directs them to one of the typosquatter's own websites. These websites are usually nothing more than a collection of lucrative click-thru advertisements. In some cases, the sites are pornographic. Even using .net instead of .com can lead to a typosquatter's website.
See full artice at http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-typosquatter.htm#did-you-know
Declare Inbox Bankruptcy When Necessary, Save Yourself a Lot of Stress
Whether you're declaring email bankruptcy or laundry bankruptcy, sometimes the only way to climb out from under the pile of real or virtual clutter is to start from scratch.
Our advice: Don't be afraid to declare bankruptcy as often as you need.
If your computer is a mess, you’re probably already aware of it. But just in case you’re not, here are some tell-tale signs:
See the full article at http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15677/zen-and-the-art-of-file-and-folder-organization/</A< a>
USBDLM is a Windows service that gives control over Window's drive letter assignment for USB drives. Running as service makes it independent of the logged on user's privileges, so there is no need to give the users the privilege to change drive letters.
It automatically solves conflicts between USB drives and network or subst drives of the currently logged on user.
Furthermore you can define new default letters for USB drives and much more
The ultimate tool for Windows Explorer.
The StExBar provides many useful commands for your everyday use of Windows explorer.
And you can add as many custom commands on your own as you like.
Windows Freeware at http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/
The UNDO command is surely one of the greatest time-saving inventions of the digital age. According to Jensen Harris, the head honcho of the Microsoft Office User Experience Team, undo is the fourth-most used command in Microsoft Word. (It slots in after Paste, Save and Copy and immediately before Bold.) That popularity is no surprise. Before undo, disaster was a keystroke or a mouse-slip away; with undo, we're protected from many of our blunders.
TextSTAT - Simple Text Analysis Tool
Free concordance software for Windows, GNU/Linux and MacOS X
TextSTAT is a simple programme for the analysis of texts. It reads ASCII/ANSI texts (in different encodings) and HTML files (directly from the internet) and it produces word frequency lists and concordances from these files. This version includes a web-spider which reads as many pages as you want from a particular website and puts them in a TextSTAT-corpus. The new news-reader puts news messages in a TextSTAT-readable corpus file.
TextSTAT now reads MS Word and OpenOffice files (OOo 1 (.sxw) and 2 (.odt)). No conversion needed, just add the files to your corpus...
In TextSTAT you can use regular expression which provides you with powerful search possibilities. The programme is multilingual. Because it uses Unicode internally, TextSTAT can cope with many different languages and file encodings. The user interface comes in three languages: English, German, and Dutch.
See http://www.niederlandistik.fu-berlin.de/textstat/software-en.html
Looking for a program to list all duplicate pictures and optionally delete them?
To find exact matches, I use DeDuper: http://www.niftyprograms.com/deduper.htm
Lightning fast and spot on accurate. You can let it do its thing automatically, or, as I like to do, watch it pop up the duplicates and click to confirm one at a time. It's really amazing.
Another one that comes highly recommended is Dup Detector: http://www.freeware-guide.com/rareware/DupDetector.html
You sacrifice a bit of speed, but it is more flexible in that it can find "close" matches too, where the .jpg isn't quite an exact match, but is close enough.
from alt.comp.freeware
Stickies is a PC utility to replace Post-It® notes stuck to a monitor.
The design goal behind Stickies is that the program is small and simple. Stickies will not mess with your system files, or write to the registry. Stickies stores all information in a single text-based ini file.
Windows freeware at http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/index.html
Windows Freeware, at www.dzsoft.com
For Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher.
Allows searching Internet Explorer's Favorites much the same way as you search the Internet Explorer's History.
How To Use
To show DzSoft Favorites Search, in an Internet Explorer window click the View - Explorer Bar - DzSoft Favorites Search menu.
You can also use a toolbar button to show DzSoft Favorites Search. If you don't see the button, please right-click on the Internet Explorer toolbar and choose Customize... to add the DzSoft Favorites Search button to your toolbar. The button may also be hidden under a "chevron" if all buttons of the toolbar don't fit inside the window.
Freeware disk-space reporting tool for Windows
Running out of disk space? Don't know what's eaten it? Then run Disktective, our award-winning disk-reporting tool, to trace used-up space on your system.
With Disktective you can find out the real size of your directories and distribution of used space inside them. Each directory may contain hundreds of subdirectories each containing many files. Simply run Disktective and let Disktective create a complete report displaying the real sizes of all directories and their containing subdirectories.
In 1954, Aldous Huxley wrote a book on the mind-expanding effects of mescaline, titling it "The Doors of Perception." Slightly more than a decade later, in 1965, Jim Morrison was studying film and poetry at UCLA when he and a keyboard-playing friend named Ray Manzerek formed a friendship fueled by their love of rock music and fascination with hallucinogenic drugs. After reading Huxley’s book, they decided to call their newly-formed band "The Doors."
From Dr. Mardy Grothe, www.chiasmus.com
SnagIt is the premier application to use for all of your screen capturing needs. Whatever you can see on your screen, SnagIt will easily capture for your immediate use. Once you've taken your capture, SnagIt lets you edit, enhance, save, and use the capture for numerous tasks.
The registration process requires a valid email address for free registration key to be sent to.
Download SnagIt 7.25, ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/SnagIt.exe
Register SnagIt 7.25 for free, http://www.techsmith.com/snagit/ukdn.asp
AudioShell is a freeware MS Windows Explorer shell extension plugin which allows you to view and edit music file tags directly in Windows Explorer. AudioShell supports MP3 (all ID3v2 tag versions), WMA, ASF, WMV, Apple iTunes AAC (M4A and M4P), MP4, OGG, FLAC (vorbis comment tags), MPC, MP+, monkey's audio, WAV pack, optim frog (APE and APEv2 tags). AudioShell features include full Unicode support.
Mp3tag is a powerful and yet easy-to-use tool to edit ID3-tags, APE-tags and Vorbis Comments of audio files.
Main featues: Write ID3v1.1-, ID3v2-, APEv2-Tags and Vorbis Comments to multiple files at once; Automatically create playlists; Recursive subfolders support; Remove parts or the entire tag of multiple files; Rename files based on the tag information; Import tags from filenames; Format tags and filenames; Replace characters or words from tags and filenames; Export tag information to user-defined formats (like html, rtf, csv, xml); Import tag information from an online database (also by text-search); Import tag information from a local database and much more ... Mp3tag supports the following audio formats: Advanced Audio Coding (aac), Free Lossless Audio Codec (flac), Monkey's Audio (ape), Mpeg Layer 3 (mp3), MPEG-4 (mp4 / m4a), Musepack (mpc), Ogg Vorbis (ogg), Speex (spx), Windows Media Audio (wma), WavPack (wv)
Windows, freeware, http://www.mp3tag.de
Tips on Handling Internet Downloads
Do you download files only to find two days later you have no idea what they are? The filename doesn't help and you don't really want to run the installer just to find out. So you delete it. Or you are checking for the latest driver for your printer; problem is, the filename for the new driver is the same as the old one so which one do you use? If you're like me you just download the file again. Then there's the problem of where you stored the file on your system. You'd search for it--if you could remember the name--which brings us back to where we started. Sound familiar? If so, here is a simple system to put some sanity and time back in your life.
In a nutshell:
* Create special folders to hold your downloaded files.
* Use a special naming convention as you download files.
Here is exactly how I do this on my computer. First I use two special folders. The first folder is named "Install Files." It will hold install files, program updates, and driver updates for existing programs on my system. Some of you will subdivide the "Install Files" folder into folders for drivers, updates, programs, etc. I just drop all the files in one folder. For me it's faster to look through one folder when I need to reinstall something. The key is to use what works for you.
The second folder is called "Interesting Stuff". The "Interesting Stuff" folder holds everything else I download. This could be ebooks, Web pages, saved search engine searches, or programs to investigate.
Name your folders with a name that will catch your eye later. Also make sure you create your folders on a drive with plenty of free space. For quick access you may want to create a shortcut on your Desktop to these two folders.
Now you are good to go. Next time you download a file choose the proper folder then give the file a meaningful name. Here is the naming convention I use. The program I'm downloading is Graph Paper Printer. The file name is gpaper. exe. So the name I gave it is:
GraphPaperPrinter4.21(gpaper).exe
Notice the full name tells me exactly what program this is and the version number. The parenthesis contains the original file name. So when naming files just ask yourself two questions:
* What does the file do?
* What is the original file name?
Often I need to reinstall an update with deadlines looming. When that happens it's so much quicker to find my files than slogging through a support site to find the file and download, losing my train of thought in the process. The time this simple system saves is wonderful. More importantly, someone not familiar with your computer can still understand what each file does.
A couple of notes on renaming the files. Many downloads will ask where to download the file. That's the time to rename the file. Otherwise wait for the download to finish, pick the file, and rename it. Either press F2 or right-click on file and choose "Rename" from the popup menu. Press "Enter" when you are done.
by Dan Butler (originally published in TNPC - 26 October 2000), at http://www.thenakedpc.com/dan/naming/
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is a method of accessing electronic mail or bulletin board messages that are kept on a (possibly shared) mail server. In other words, it permits a "client" email program to access remote message stores as if they were local. For example, email stored on an IMAP server can be manipulated from a desktop computer at home, a workstation at the office, and a notebook computer while traveling, without the need to transfer messages or files back and forth between these computers.
IMAP's ability to access messages (both new and saved) from more than one computer has become extremely important as reliance on electronic messaging and use of multiple computers increase, but this functionality cannot be taken for granted: the widely used Post Office Protocol (POP) works best when one has only a single computer, since it was designed to support "offline" message access, wherein messages are downloaded and then deleted from the mail server. This mode of access is not compatible with access from multiple computers since it tends to sprinkle messages across all of the computers used for mail access. Thus, unless all of those machines share a common file system, the offline mode of access that POP was designed to support effectively ties the user to one computer for message storage and manipulation.
More at http://www.imap.org
Able to rename tens of thousands of files by reading your ID3 tags to whichever naming convention you choose with only a few mouse clicks.
Windows, Freeware, http://www.id3renamer.com
