Awasu now has a cool third party plugin that pops up a notification when things get posted to the event log. If this worked on all machines to create an rss feed, this could/would be a killer app and a great excuse to run an RSS reader on the desktop all the time, not just first thing in the morning,lunchtime and evening (which is when I tend to run mine)
Month: November 2003
I often have a requirement to send emails from an address that is not really mine. Normally this is used for testing relays or sending unsubscribe messages to mailing lists on behalf of people who have left the company or have got on a mailing list they can’t get off. Exchange is really helpful in that it insists you can only use your real email address to send with in Outlook. Blat is a useful command that I use when writing batch files, but its not very useful for sending quick emails as a user. QuickSend from Xtreme Webware does the trick and enables me to send emails by specifying the to,from and email server that I want to send mail to. Works a treat.
Intravnews looks like a good (free) rss aggregator that integrates with outlook. I’ll have to try this one out next week.
With the upcoming change in law of using mobile phones whilst driving, the register has summed up the details fairly well in their document. Interesting to me is that companies that require or encourage people to use the phone whilst driving are breaking the law….wonder how that will go down with the boss! The interesting thing is that the use of two way radio’s or cb’s are not affected by this (as long as they also can’t be used as a phone). I’m not quite sure on the logic of why this is the case unless the powers that be are frightened of offending hgv drivers, or for some weird reason they reckon hgv drivers are better drivers than the rest of us.
I totally sympathise with this report that mentions that 12 million european workers have asked for a cut in salary or work shorter hours due to the amount of stress they are suffering and the lack of a quality of life in their (permanently shrinking) personal life. Now I wouldn’t have thought people would have been asking for a drop in salary OR shorter hours – I would have thought it would be both. At one point a couple of months back I was seriously considering reducing my hours by 10% by requesting to take every other friday off. That would mean a drop in pay and it would be really hard if I ever needed to go back to working 5 days a week again.
Finished reading the 2000+ pages of Underground on the pocketpc last weekend. It’s been a really interesting read about hacking and has kept me entertained whilst waiting for tape restores/backups to run, dinners to be served in hotels etc whilst i’ve been out on the road. Interestingly one of the hackers lived in Salford at the same time I was there as a student and he got busted for hacking.
Downloaded the Regseeker program from Hoverdesk which has quick links to installed applications, startup programs, history etc within the registry. This is the same site that also has Hoversnap. This is another one of those screencapture programs that automatically saves the desktop when you press prtscrn. If you hold the alt key down you get the current window. This is the same behaviour as the normal prtscrn button but saves the end result to an autonamed file. However if you press the control key it gives you a crosshair cursor that you can drag to select the area of the window. This is pretty useful and therefore Hoversnap is now replacing GrabClipSave (which has the advantage of saving the files after the window title)
Thankfully all the various dependencies in PHP are now back in place after cpanel was upgraded on Thursday night by my hosting company…I can now blog again.
Thankfully all the various dependencies in PHP are now back in place after cpanel was upgraded on Thursday night by my hosting company…I can now blog again.
Further to my post about heat issues with the laptop I had several comments from readers (who had not posted on the blog before) and one *extremely* nice email from the uk distributor of the ByteCC laptop cooler who very kindly offered me a complimentary one due to the number of referrals my blog had passed onto them! I then had to wait a couple of days for the postal strike to ship it to me and I’ve been using it in the office for a couple of days so far.
My intitial impressions have been very favourable. With it on the desk the pc is really cool and there is NO heat felt on the laptop when iyou place a hand on the bottom of the machine. The toshiba is a bit too big to fit on the shelf as the whole laptop balances backwards if placed up against a the bottom ridge so instead it has to have the bottom ridge resting on the bottom of the laptop but this does not seem to detract from the usefulness or effectiveness of the device and it also holds the laptop at a convenient angle for typing with. I brought it home tonight to use with Kristens laptop which fits nicely on the shelf.
My initial concern was how it would work when placed on my lap as I didn’t really fancy getting my trousers or legs stuck in the fans which are placed underneath the shelf. From my experience so far this is not a problem as the fans are well protected with grids over the bottom and plastic “walls” around the side of the fan casing (as you would get in a normal pc fan). The cooler is fairly noisy and you certainly notice it when it first starts up or if you are the only one in the room with it running although its not *that* noisy and you soon get used to it. I’ve not had any complaints from the three people who sit at the arrangement of four desks in the office about the noise and in our office environment it really is not noticable.
I’d certainly recommend it if you need to keep your machine really cool and it will save your legs from getting burnt!
