RadicalStu Blog

NBBC

nbbc
The service aggregates video content, monetizes content by connecting it with advertisers, and distributes content to a network of heavily-trafficked websites.

SpeedFiler

Claritude Software: Products
Good looking tool to help you file emails in Outlook

2006 Hanselman Tool List

The latest edition of Scott's fabulous list of resources.

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Scott Hanselman's 2006 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

FairUse4WM

Freeware program FairUse4WM removes the digital rights management (DRM) from your Windows Media files.

Download of the Day: FairUse4WM (Windows) - Lifehacker

Recent Links 4 Aug 2006

QUINN RENTALS LTD
Glasgow area car rental company

How to Set Goals You Will Actually Achieve
Steve has recently been experimenting with different types of posts; not always successfully. Here, he is right back on form with a paradigm shifting thought that could change your life.

InformationWeek | Windows XP Management | Langa Letter: XP's No-Reformat, Nondestructive Total-Rebuild Option | June 19, 2006
how to completely rebuild, repair, or refresh an existing XP installation without losing data, and without having to reinstall user software, reformat, or otherwise destructively alter the setup.

How to Prepare a Vacation Countdown Checklist - eHow.com
Make sure you leave with everything--and with everything taken care of.

Reviews of vacations, hotels, resorts, vacation and travel packages - TripAdvisor
Invaluable source of reviews and ratings about hotels and attractions.

Download of the Day: ZuluPad - Lifehacker
"Notepad on crack" desktop application ZuluPad is a cross between a plain text editor and a wiki.

Paint.NET

Paint.NET
Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2003. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

It was written in .NET and just keeps getting better and better.

Ripping DVD's

Download of the Day: RipIt4Me - Lifehacker
Rip DVDs even with copy protection.

Bit-Torrent Tweaking

T - Spot » Tweaking Bit-Torrent Speeds
how to tweak your Bit-Torrent client so that you can achieve the fastest speed possible.

Link Dump

isoHunt - IRC and Bit Torrent search engine
Recommended by a friend. It's a struggle to keep up with the latest episodes of Lost.

Keston Park Directions
from: Red Cleveland Blvd, Sanford, FL, 32773 to: 1888 Boggy Creek Rd, Kissimmee, FL, 34744 - Google Maps

Fare comment! | the Mail on Sunday
He is the BBC's latest star - the cab driver who a leading presenter believed was a world expert on the internet music business.

Recent Links #7

Go for a Presence Walk
Go for a walk alone — anywhere you like, as long as you want. As you walk keep your conscious attention focused fully and completely on the present moment.

A VC: False Positive Penalties
In a settlement of a class action lawsuit announced yesterday, Verizon is providing refunds to customers who had their legitimate email blocked by overly agressive spam filters in Verizon's online service.

Apple: Windows on a Mac is here
Interesting that Apple's shares rose sharply on this news. Is Apple's main strength perceived to be hardware?

Lovenkrands mulls move to Spain
I'm no longer sure I want him to go. A few months ago there wasn't a question but now there is something to be said for hoping he stays. I actually think he has a good season and if this was his first season at Ibrox, everyone would be raving about him.

Ophcrack 2.0 - fastest Windows password cracker - The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog
If you have a Windows machine that you have somehow forgotten the password to, or one that you genuinely require access to but for some reason do not have the password, this little utility might be just the ticket to gain access.

FavIcon from Pics

FavIcon from Pics -- how to create a favicon.ico for your website
Now it's easy to create icons for your web pages with FavIcon from Pics. Simply select a picture, logo or other graphic (of any size/resolution) for the "Source Image" and click "Generate FavIcon.ico"

Recent Links #6

CNN.com - 25 words that hurt your resume - Jan 20, 2006
Instead of making empty claims to demonstrate your work ethic, use brief, specific examples to demonstrate your skills.

tech.memeorandum @ 5:35 PM ET, February 1, 2006
Politicians on Wednesday attacked Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Yahoo for declining to appear at a briefing about China's Internet censorship and called for a new law to outlaw compliance with such requirements. Surely some mistake.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Luke 6:41
Some of the collateral damage from Bush's war on terror.

Google Earnings Disappoint; Shares Plunge: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
I'm pretty sure that Google's share price is way too high.

A Sabre Geek: TwoDollarPixel.Com
Innovation Analysis Group has taken the concept to the next level. Not only will they put up an ad link to your web site for $2 a pixel, they will also incorporate their WebMonitorXP tool that will tell the ads owner when someone visits their site.

Mr. Speaker » Blog Archive » Hacking Windows Pinball
Load up the game and type the words hidden test.

Remember the Milk

A website that I use every day is rememberthemilk.com.  This is an online task list with an excellent user interface and general usability.  It’s all done using AJAX, which means that much of the processing is done on the client with background updates back to the server.  This allows it to be very fast and allows a very intuitive interface.

You can set up as many lists as you like and the new tagging facility allows tasks to belong to more than one list.  Smart lists allow you to save searches as lists and these will be dynamically updated.  You can assign tags, due dates, repeating patterns, time estimates and multiple notes against each tag so you have a lot of flexibility in how you use it.

I’m finding that more and more of my life is scheduled in RTM and I can publish lists so that other people can see what I’m doing.  All this despite the fact that I have a corporate Outlook/Outlook Web Access facility that theoretically should provide all of this functionality.  RTM just does it better and easier and I would definitely recommend it.  The only caveat is the absence of any sort of  obvious business plan for the site.  There has obviously been a lot of work put in to it and it appears very professional.  How long it can continue without making money is not obvious.  The publishers of the web site say that it will continue to be free and that they are not going away.  But then they would say that; I would rather see some evidence of a plan to keep it around.  Especially as I now appear to be addicted.

Window XP Home Support Scheduled to End This Year

Microsoft appear to be saying that they will discontinue support for Window XP Home at the end of this year.  This would mean that there would be no more security updates for Windows XP Home; an operating system that is likely to still be installed by default on new computers bought well into the second half of this year before the release of Window Vista.

This would be a public relations nightmare for Microsoft and I really don't think that they can go through with it.  They may go for the solution of making updates for Windows XP Professional continue to work for the Home version.  The problem here is that there is likely to be confusion about what the end of support means and there will be much negative publicity.  To avoid this, Microsoft must extend the support period in the same way as they did for Windows 98 and I am sure that they will.

Recent Links #3

ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman - Virtual Machines and External Hard Drive throughput
The conclusion is that either USB 2.0 or Firewire are both very reasonable solution for the power user's external HD needs when running Virtual Machines.

City-wide wi-fi rolls out in UK
The Cloud will bring wireless broadband to nine cities including London, Manchester and Birmingham.

Audible.com - audio that speaks to you wherever you are
Buy downloadable books and spoken word.

Recent Links #2

BBC - Radio Homepage


Starting Javascript with ASP.NET
One of the areas that I have trouble getting right and need to work on is manipulating DOM elements. As a first start to this I am going to remember a piece of code that changes the value of a Select when the value in another select is changed.

Recent Links #1

These are some of the bookmarks I have noted recently.  This should be the start of a series.

7 Powerful Ways To Make Money From Adsense Using Only Free Tools - Sketch Ideas
Basically, some ideas on getting people to visit your web site.

My Wife Won’t Let Me Start My Own Business
Your wife won’t let you? Are you a homo sapien or a wimpus maximus?

Is That the Best You Can Do?
Good is the enemy of the best. Is that the best thing that you could be doing right now?

17 Ways To Drive Traffic to Your Blog - Sketch Ideas
Blog marketing is all about word of mouth.

OpenFootball Rangers
"Big Eck" writes insightful and entertaining essays about the Rangers experience.

Squidoo : Lenses : Rangers FC
News, links, reports and opinions about the Glasgow Rangers and related matters.

Glasgow Rangers Football Club News.
Rangers news with linked but pretty inactive forum.

Squidoo : Lenses : RadicalStu Lens
Lense showing my various stuff from various places

Windows Live Local
The new name (and location) for MSN Virtual Earth. Currently in Beta but looking pretty good.

Discover Music - Pandora
An amazing site where you put in an artist or track and it plays similar tracks that you can say you like or dislike.

Banking on a virtual economy | Newsmakers | CNET News.com
Late last month, Jon Jacobs, an independent filmmaker from Miami, became the first person in the history of online gaming to spend $100,000 on a single virtual item when he bought a space station in the game "Project Entropia."

evhead: Ten Rules for Web Startups
Useful for any startup really.

Do It Now by Steve Pavlina
Time Management strategy and techniques - still to read

PowerToys for Windows Media Player - The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog - microsoft.weblogsinc.com
The latest Microsoft Downloads newsletter has a link to a really interesting set of PowerToys for Windows Media Player.

FILExt - The File Extension Source
search for the programs that use files with a particular extension.

Polyphasic sleep - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Polyphasic sleep is a sleep pattern specification intended to reduce sleep time to 2–5 hours daily. This is achieved by spreading out sleep into short naps of around 20–45 minutes throughout the day. This is supposed to allow for more waking hours wit

10 Business Models for Bloggers | Performancing.com
Whether you're blogging full or part-time, if you expect to make money, you need to have a clear business model. It's no good just posting and expecting the cheques to roll in, you need to plan for how that cash will start flowing.

Seth's Blog: Understanding Local Max
The local max is where you get stuck. You have to go through extra pain to reach a global max.

Seven Habits Book Summaries
A summary of each of the chapters of Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

I am a Lensmaster at Squidoo

Fred Wilson has pointed out a new service called Squidoo that allows you to create a focused web page, called a Lens.  You can add text areas, links, and content from RSS feeds all with a consistent look and feel.  You can also add modules to show content from Technorati, Amazon and Flickr.  I would expect more of these type of modules to follow.  An obvious one would be a mapping component.

I’m not entirely sure of its value as yet but I have been playing around with it and it is remarkably easy to pull together a useful site.  With a few minutes work I created two lenses.  This one and this one.  I’ll keep playing with it and it will either become useful or I’ll forget about it.

XBox 360 Availability

The XBox 360 is here.  Sort of.  Reportedly 300,000 were in Europe for the launch.  I'm not sure how many found there way to the UK but they all went immediately.  Those that managed to buy them may well have been paying a bit of a premium but not nearly as much as those that missed out but were still determined to get them with prices on EBay going from £500 to over £1000.

My experience was fairly similar.  Penny was told that Toys R Us would have them and that "if you were here at 9 you will get one."  Judging by reports elsewhere this seemed a bit optimistic and they also seemed to be more expensive than Amazon.  So we ordered from Amazon although they were saying that orders wouldn't be fulfilled until next year.  When the confirmation email came in, the predicted delivery date was the end of February.  A bit late for Christmas?  Well, it will allow Jordan to exercise some patience.  And, just maybe, they will have solved the quality problems by then.

The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

Gizmo's The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities is a fabulous list of free programs for almost every purpose.  I am already using some on his list and I'll certainly be trying out some more.

Number 1 is the Best Browser.  There really is no question in my mind that this is Firefox.  The tabbed interface, the extensions and the extra feeling of security all make this a must have.
Number 3 is Best Free Adware/Spyware/Scumware Remover. Again, the recomendation is one that I would heartily endorse.  Microsoft Antispyware is one of the first things I install.
I've been trying out Number 14.  The Best free Clipboard Replacement Utility.  The recomendation is Clipboard Recorder.
I have also tried Number 15 - the HTML editor from Nvu.  My immediate requirement was to edit some ASP.NET custom controls.  Nvu didn't like these, so I was back to editing the text and Nvu was gone.

Many of the others I have used, some I still use and others I have never had a use for the type of product.  There are a few others that I will be trying, though.  Any fantastically good or bad experiences will be reported here.