News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

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.

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 do set it up, look at configuring it so it comes up with the default password database when you run it, so you don’t have to search for the file each time.

Speaking of passwords, I’ve had occasion to help people who have (for whatever legitimate reason) forgotten the administrator password to their computer. There is a program here that will allow you to reset the passwords on any NT, XP or Win2000 system. The program creates a boot disk that lets you access the registry. It won’t work if the hard drive has been encrypted or compressed, but that’s not very common. The instructions walk you through a typical application.

Audacity is an excellent sound recording and editing program. You can connect a microphone to your PC and record WAV files or MP3s. You can also use Audacity to edit recordings you already have, for example taking the hiss or click out of recordings made from a vinyl record, or add sound effects such as reverb, fade in, etc. It’s a very nice program.

“Internet Explorer users can be as much as 21 times more likely to end up with a spyware-infected PC than people who go online with Mozilla’s Firefox browser, academic researchers from Microsoft’s backyard said in a recently published paper.”

Read more here.

I know that I never get spyware anymore, just a few innocuous tracking cookies.