PCIN.net Update

I don’t do them much anymore, but over the years I’ve done quite a lot of software reviews. I’ve tried several different screen capture utilities with varying degrees of success. Sometimes I find myself using a computer that doesn’t have any such utility installed, so I use the old PrintScreen button to take a screenshot. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why taking a screenshot of Windows Media Player (while playing a video) would give me a blank screen.  I was never doing anything important enough for me to look into it, but recently I found out what the problem was. It has to do with “overlays”, and after following the instructions I found on the Quick Online Tips web site, screenshot captured! Good stuff!

Note: I’m not sure if this applies to all version of WMP, but it does work for sure on WMP 11.

What’s a bookmarklet? Well, the Bookmarklets.com home page describes them in this way:

Bookmarklets are simple tools that extend the surf and search capabilities of Firefox and Explorer web browsers.

Bookmarklets are free.

Bookmarklets allow you to:

* Modify the way you see someone else’s webpage.
* Extract data from a webpage.
* Search more quickly, and in ways not possible with a search engine.
* Navigate in new ways.

…and more. Over 150 bookmarklets are available.

Bookmarklets work on all platforms (Windows, Macintosh, Unix,…)

You do not have to download or install software to use Bookmarklets.

In the past I’ve used bookmarklets that have let me download YouTube videos, modify a New York Times article link so that I didn’t need to be logged in, and test a new Google search page before it was “live”. Essentially they are just little bits of javascript code that let you do something on a web page. Check out the Bookmarklet.com web site for a listing of what they have available.

I’ve had a draft for 21 months with these links in it, but never posted it…

I know that people are moving away from Windows XP, skipping over Vista, and heading to Windows 7, but these are still some good links. You’ve probably had the opportunity to reinstall Windows on a computer and then go to WindowsUpdate and find out that there are 100+ updates that need to be installed. Well, one of the ways to help reduce the number of updates is to install the most recent major service pack. For Windows XP that is SP3. If you got a computer before SP3, what do you do? You can “slipstream” it. A simple explanation is to say that this is the process where you can take the installation CD that you have, copy it to your hard drive, copy the XP SP3 files over the old ones, and then burn a CD again. This is a handy thing to do and you can read more about doing this with the Windows XP media here:

• Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Slipstreaming Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (SP3)
• PC Magazine: Build an XP SP3 Recovery Disc

I haven’t tried it, but since the Vista files come on a DVD, apparently it isn’t quite as easy. However, TechRepublic has some detailed instructions.

As of the time of this posting, there is no Windows 7 service pack yet, but once there is, I’m sure if you search for Windows 7 slipstream you’ll be able to find some articles explaining how to do this same process.

From the Toronto Star:

Those seconds you spent playing Google’s interactive Pac-Man fed a worldwide productivity drain of 4.82 million hours, an online calculation says.

RescueTime, a software tool to measure how employees spent their time, found that people who clicked through the Google-Pac-Man logo on Friday squandered an average of 36 extra seconds more on google.com, compared with the previous Friday.

The dollar tally was $120,483,000 in lost productivity, RescueTime said Monday. That’s based on an average Google user cost of $25 an hour.

I played it. Did you?

This is old news, but a recent Ripley’s Believe it or Not! cartoon highlighted it for me…

From Reuters:

Internet speed and connectivity in Africa’s largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive.

Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) from Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg.

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

From the New York Times:

…Almost a decade after Google promised that the creed “Don’t be evil” would guide its activities, the federal government is examining Google’s acquisitions and actions as never before, looking for indications that the company’s market power may be anticompetitive in the worlds of Web search and online advertising…

For the last few days, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten has been reporting on cyber security. It has been a three-part series that started with this:

Americans do not often hear that someone has found a way to overcome U.S. defenses, but military and intelligence officials have been sounding downright alarmist lately with their warnings that the country is ill-prepared to deal with a cyberattack.

I’m a tech guy to begin with, so some of the information being shared seemed pretty simple and basic, but there was some interesting information shared in each piece. Check it out:

• Countries Try To Tame The Wild Territory Of The Net
• Cyberattack: U.S. Unready For Future Face Of War
• Cyber Insecurity: U.S. Struggles To Confront Threat

From the Globe and Mail:

The iPad will not hit U.S. stores until Saturday, but the race to unlock its mysteries started several weeks ago in San Luis Obispo, a picturesque college town roughly 200 miles (320 km) south of Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

On March 12, Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules woke up before dawn. Their plan demanded that they be among the first to get their hands on the device.

So at 5:30 a.m., the minute Apple began taking iPad orders on its website, Wiens and Soules — do-it-yourself repair evangelists and co-founders of a company called iFixit — placed theirs. As delivery addresses, they entered several U.S. locations where their research determined the iPad is likely to arrive soonest. They could tell you which ones, but they would have to kill you.

Armed with heat guns, suction cups and other tools of the trade, the duo will set out on Saturday to reveal some of the tablet’s most closely guarded secrets: the design and components that make it tick.

Jeff Alexander has some great instructions on how to setup a USB flash drive so that you can install Windows 7 from it.

I wonder if the same instructions work for XP and/or Vista…?

From the New York Times:

General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.

The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices.

But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.