Netvibes runs my life. Something a Palm Pilot, a cell phone and various note books have failed at, consistently. Oh and it tracks my news feeds, friends photos, bookmarks, plays podcasts and its French. You want to make this you home page, go.

Password Maker - looks like a winner, but no storage of account info. My other big problem, aside from not varying my passwords enough, is that all my accounts on various services use different id’s and I need to keep track of them too. Preferably on my cell phone.

House MD is Sherlock Holmes, right down to the pill popping pain killer addiction, “as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence” . What is this with great intellects having a vice? Anyway I’m addicted, If you were ever a fan of Holmes then I recommend this series.

I upgraded WordPress only to find my favourite spam busting plugin stopped working, in came the Mongol hordes. Enter WordPress Hash Cache and goodbye spammers. They are still too stupid to build a JavaScript parser and I think that’s a big enough road block to stop people of such abysmal intelligence. Die Spammer Die!

My ISP ComOne are the worst ISP I have ever dealt with. If you are renting an apartment in the Pensacola area and you want to have any kind of internet access I would not rent from any property that uses their services. They buy business DSL lines from Bell-South and split them on a NAT network. At my complex, ‘Marcus Pointe’, there are 4 DSL lines split between 200 units! I pay $50 a month for 1/50 of a DSL line. Their technical staff is incompetent. You wont like them and you wont have any alternatives, you have been warned.

Porco Rosso tickles me in a way that I enjoy entirely too much. Hayao Miyazaki is a genius, the modern equivalent of Walt Disney. If you have never seen his work I recommend Princess Mononoke as an introduction. Watch it and you will understand why cartoons are good for more than comedy.

Anyway, Proco Rosso I hadn’t seen until tonight. Its a movie about a fighter pilot in the post WWII era Mediterranean, who’s a Pig. He totally captured the way I felt about airplanes when I was a little boy. If you like that sort of thing you should dig up a copy and watch it.

On another note this reminded me of the Schneider Cup and the X-Prize and how the two are in no way similar. The Schneider Cup was an annual event and the X-Prize was a one time thing. The Cup was a race and people love to watch races. A race has the atmosphere of grease and engines and things that work well but not quite well enough. And with an annual event there is always next year to make a comeback. The new space race would be so much cooler if it was for maximum altitude or time above 100,000 feet.

Anyway, airplanes are cool. Old ones are double cool.

I use my TV as a second monitor, its connected via component cable to my GeForce 6600GT. It’s been doing some weird stuff when full screen apps take over the TV display. When one of these apps exists the TV display looks torn at the top, like the resolution or refresh rate isn’t quite right. Nothing I have done seems to fix the problem.

Full screen video always works fine and always fills the televisions entire screen, these apps don’t seam to be the problem. Quitting from Media Center will cause the tearing as will any full screen game. To restore the screen the simplest thing to do is run the ‘TV Wizard’.

I can’t seem to phrase a search for this issue in less than 6 words. If you know where I should post a bug or can get help post a comment.

I’m about to reformat my computer so I made a list of everything I need to reinstall. You might find some of this usefull.

Internet

Firefox Web Browser and first thing on the system. One of the reasons I don’t run anti virus.
The Google Toolbar
Thunderbird E-mail. Another reason not to run anti virus.
Mozilla Backup Save your favorites, cookies and email
BitTorrent The original is still the best
Trillian Talk to AOL & MSN form one client
GrabIt Binary News reader
Win SCP Secure FTP client
Putty Secure Shell client

Audio/Video

Winamp Best music player ever, library sucks
iTunes/Quicktime Good music library
Irfanview Opens any Image file
Picasa Organize your digital photos

Editors

Notepad 2 A basic editor with syntax highlighting & regular expression support
Blog Jet Edit blog posts
Open Office 2.0 Does what Microsoft Office does, for free, plus it makes PDF’s

Tools

ISO Recorder Burn ISO’s easily
Ahead Nero Burns everything else. Not Free
DAMN nfo Viewer see nfo files as intended by the author
Win RAR Unpack most any type of archive, particularly zip & rar
Quick Par verify/repair downloads with par files, check sfv files