News and Views

Mozilla has released a new security update to Firefox. If you are set to receive updates automatically, it may have already happened for you. Check to see that you are using version 1.5.0.2 (Help, About). Nothing noticeable has been changed, it just improves your security. All my extensions are still working fine.

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Well, my 60″ Sony TV is going back from whence it came. The picture was beautiful, colors saturated, excellent detail. But that “grainy” overlay (the much lamented “Silk Screen Effect”) was just too intrusive for me. Whenever I sat down to watch, I’d be absorbed in the show, and then suddenly the grain would pop […]

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Here’s some more free software that I’ve used recently. Why pay money, when there are such good free alternatives! I’ve used the commercial program “Retrospect” backup software, and it works OK, but I’ve recently discovered a free backup program that I like even better. It’s Cobian Backup. It will back up the files on your […]

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Now that I’ve got an HD TV, my old Tivo seems very deficient. I can’t record any of the HD signals, and the defects in the picture from the Tivo show up much more on the high-def screen. What to do, what to do? Tivo hasn’t said much about when they will introduce an HD […]

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I got my SXRD TV for my birthday last week. I am both ecstatic and disappointed. It’s a 60″ Sony HDTV using “LCOS” technology (a kind of microdisplay rear projection similar to DLP or LCD Projection). At its best, the image is astounding, jaw-dropping. The local PBS station broadcasts full HD (1080i) travel, cooking and […]

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The newest Intel CPU (due out in the fall) leap-frogs AMD in performance. See here. It has 20 – 40% better frame rates on games than the AMD chips, and outperforms generally across all tests. This is very good news for Intel — AMD has been kicking their butts for a couple of years, especially […]

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Here’s a cool extension for Firefox: IE Tab There are a few web pages that don’t work right in Firefox, and you have to open them in Internet Explorer (IE). IETab will open them in IE embedded in a tab in Firefox. Furthermore, you can tell it once when a site needs to use IE, […]

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I love the FoxIt PDF reader; it’s much faster and cleaner than Adobe Acrobat. However there were a few printer bugs in the version I have been using — some things didn’t scale or rotate correctly. Foxit Software has a new realease out (still version 1.3, but build number 1413) that seems to fix the […]

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This is a pretty cool illusion. Stare at the center cross. What happens to the pink circles? There are lots more here. I know some of you have seen some of these before, but this pink dot one was new to me.

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Here are three more free programs that I’ve found useful. KeePass is a program to keep all your passwords. It requires a password to access, so you still have to remember at least one. You could do the same thing with a password protected Word file or something, but this is pretty convenient. If you […]

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