Software

Well I finally did it. I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and I decided to make the switch. I’ve instructed my laptop to use FireFox as my default browser. It is just a damn hell ass better browser than Internet Explorer. I like the tabs. (No, I love the tabs.) I like the RSS stuff. I like being able to do so many geeky things. I like the fact that it never seems to crash or hang. I like pretty much everything about FireFox. In fact my only real complaint is that I had to open the help files to find the keyboard shortcut to switch the active tab. (It’s CTRL-TAB, by the way. Why is that so hard to find?) I humbly apologize to all those people I thought were dorks for using FF all this time. You were right. I was wrong. Long live FireFox.

Reason #4,213 Why People Get Frustrated with Microsoft:

Can anyone tell me if I really need Java 2 Runtime Environment, SE v1.4.2_03 and J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 Update 3? These things are ridiculous. Each one is over 100MB! What a waste.

For Christmas ‘04 I got my girlfriend a shiny new HP Photosmart 7960. She loves it. It prints fabulous, high-quality images and it comes with some great photo-printing software. Sure you have to mortgage your house to keep the ink flowing, but you knew that was going to be the case when you bought the thing, right?

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The unsung MVP of professional football? It’s IT. Analysis systems let teams archive stats and digital video from every game.

Aaarrghh. I have just got to get the new one. My iPod quickly became my favorite toy. My girlfriend gave me a 20gb one for Christmas. I upgraded to the 40gb in January, and I listen to it daily. iTunes is even a damn good WinAMP and / or MusicMatch replacement, and Apple did an amazing job with the iTunes UI. Anyway … Can anyone tell me any sob stories about switching from a 40gb 3rd-gen to a 40gb 4th-gen? Was it shmoove? What happens to all my m4p files? Are there issues with migrating “authorized” songs? Talk to me, kids.

If you haven’t installed the Nutshell Toolbar yet, do it today. This is one of the most useful things on my computer and I use it probably fifty times each day.
(I linked to it many, many months ago. I just gave it to a friend today and thought I should hand out some extra props.)

I own an NEC SuperScript 870 laser printer. When I bought it - sometime towards the end of 2000 - I was incredibly thrilled. (I had actually bought one sometime in ‘99, I think. Then I moved to California and couldn’t bring the world’s most-economical, feature-rich, best-performing printer with me. So I bought another one because I was so happy with it.) This printer does everything. And it does everything extremely well. Watermarks, half-tones, headers and footers, multi-column pages, foldable brochures … it had the most incredible software interface! If you were working in Word and clicked Print and then looked at the Preferences (or Options) it was boggling how many awesome things you could do with this printer.

But that was before Windows 2000.

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Many good things can be found on The Island of Overlooked Software.

SetupStream 2 gives you the possibility to create small, powerful and feature-rich Setup Wizards in modern, easy-to-use and user-friendly outlook. It is meant to be a serious alternative to commercial Installation Suites.

The tagline at the web site for the Acoustica CD Label Maker is, “Software should be easy to use.” Acoustica follows through. Their label maker is the best one on the market right now. I just found it last night and in about one minute I had printed an awesome label, insert, and cover for Paul Simon’s Negotiations and Love Songs: 1971 - 1986. I’ve been looking for a good cd label / booklet printing program for (literally!) years and I’ve finally found one. I highly recommend this piece of software.

Trust me. You want to go get HideOutlook from r2 studios. This little app is great! It lets you minimize Outlook to the system tray instead of the taskbar. Click the icon in the systray and Outlook pops open or closed; right-click it and you can create new email messages, appointments, etc. Very hep. And it’s free!

Tag&Rename is a powerful, easy-to-use program for organizing and archiving your library of music files. It’s solid design handles both the .mp3 and .vqf music formats. With Tag&Rename, you can quickly and easily rename your music while also editing the embedded tag data used by popular music players - both ID3 and ID3 v2 formats.

Wow! I am going to have to check out Dave’s Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar. It looks ultra-groovy.