Currently reading Musashi and came across this gem:

The human mouth is the gateway to catastrophe.

Update: Zagula finds a gem as well.

6/8 issue of pc mag has a big utility review (i don’t see it online). Cool stuff I saw:

* RipDigital: Convert your music CDs to a digital music library – you send them all your cds, they send them back ripped on a dvd. Sure you can do yourself but this is a huge timesaver. * A lot of keyboard macro utilities – Quickeys or Perfect Keyboard seem worth trying * I really have to try Object Desktop one of these days, I see continual references to it

Out of the forums in the last week or so:

• FL-Studio recommended for crafting your own scary soundtracks.  With all the existing soundtracks out there, hard for me to get into creating my own, but maybe someday
• Scary Terry – lots of great little prop construction ideas – using wiper motors, driving a servo with sound, etc.
• Handy note about scavenging old PCs for power supplies – And while we’re talking about PC supplies, I’ve found that the new ATX supplies are NOT good (for me), because you’ve got to get the Power-On signal jumpered and supplied just right to get it to actually turn on.  (No, the switch on the back does not turn it on…it just allows the supply to be turned on.)  I found several websites with connector pinouts (it’s a motherboard connector), but I still managed to toast a new 300W ATX power supply.  On the flip side, an old power supply often has a button attached to it - the part that is actually secured behind the front panel on/off switch and this will turn power on/off. 
• Cheap wall warts at Parts Express – these are great for generating DC cheaply – I switch AC on/off with DMX and X-10, and use wall warts to convert the AC to DC signals for solenoids.
• Guide to color organs

GhostDroppings.com – found via bloglines

Microsoft Playing Nicer with ISVs, Company Exec Says

Microsoft Playing Nicer with ISVs, Company Exec Says

evhead: Venture fund focuses on buying back tech startups swallowed by big companies – not a terrible idea at all.

Spent two hours yesterday trying to get one of our machines to correctly point to Google for searches from the IE address bar. Thru a combo of spyware, browser helper objects, toolbars, the IE search function had been slammed over to a variety of different search providers.

NewDotNet was the evilest. It kept re-slamming settings no matter how often we changed them in the browser. And no matter how many times we removed it as a startup item, it would reinsert itself – spyware/virus-like behaviour. This ought to be criminal. Spybot S&D didn’t seem to pick this one up.

SAHAgent was on the machine too – installs as a Winsock Service Provider! How do these people sleep at night? Spybot seemed to get it.

Clearsearch was on the machine too, Spybot got it.

After multiple runnings of Spybot, MSConfig, Sysedit, and Regedit, we are now down to one remaining slammer. Lycos is grabbing all our autosearch traffic, tho there does not seem to be an associated browser helper object or an process running, and i’ve tried to reset a dozen times thru the IE search UI and the Google toolbar UI. Nothing detected by Spybot. But clearly something still going on.

It is amazing how hard these have been to get rid of. What does a regular user do – just reformat their hard disk? This spyware stuff is a plague. Pisses me off more than viruses.

Great recent posts from Rich:

• Cleaning up Nvidia driver problems Part I and Part II.  Sadly if you want to live on the bleeding edge of video cards, you need to learn way too much about maintaining the drivers.
• Anandtech system guides – the low end is a bit too low end for my uses but a great site and service
• Dual core chips – basically no one has any idea what to do with all the gates provided by Moore’s Law so we might as well start stacking up multiple CPUs on the chip. 
• MT to Wordpress Migration tips and more flailing away on SixApart.

As an alternative to Rdesktop and WinXP’s remote desktop I tried out RealVNC. Oh my gosh the performance was baaaad between two XP machines. Latency, and really bad glitchy repaint. Hard to recommend this. I’d stick with XP’s facility for XP to XP connections (tho this kind of requires XP Pro for most general use) and rdesktop for *nix machines.

In the context of a discussion about RSS use in place of newsletters, Jon Udell asks The obvious alternative is a personalized RSS feed. Does anyone have this already? What a great idea. Now if feedster provided this service, that would be something special.

* Geekman discusses LAMPPIX and points toa list of Linux live distributions.  I had no idea there were so many bootable cd variants of linux, this is very cool. * Alienware yokes two GPUs together.  Wow.  If this is a reliable solution, how cool. * Sony’s Liquid-cooled media PC.  Is liquid cooling going to become mainstream? * Nvidia lowers power reqs for 6800.  Good thing, they are going to get toasted by ATI if they don’t lower the footprint of the 6800. * Rich is excited about bloglines.  I’ll have to try out the Mozilla integration. * Paul Thurrott is excited about Far Cry.  I’ve mentioned Far Cry before, it is a beautiful game and is a great value – much longer set of single player missions than most games.  It is incredibly demanding of your hardware. * Blogware – yet another blog tool to look at if and when i upgrade my blog software. * 7 tuner DVR.  what a beast.  But for college football saturdays I could actually imagine using it. * Encrypted monitors.  Funky.  * 2nd display over the network or what to do with an idle laptop. * Guide to steganography software.  One man’s guide.

* Blogjet. A nice posting utility but doesn’t seem to deal with Textile2 formating very well – blogjet tries to insert a bunch of formatting codes which collide with textile2. I’d like a posting tool that emits clean textile2 output. * Notepad2. Seems like a pretty nice casual editor. Scott’s hint to rename to N.exe is a huge timesaver. * Regex coach. Very cool, I need a lot of coaching. * The Ultimate Troubleshooter. You have to pay for it to get any value but it seems like a worthwhile tool (and I’ve always liked the site).

Going to be a great summer for Saturn images from the Cassini-Huygens mission

Wildseed (I’m a board member) had a great show at E3 – lots of great press coverage:

* The Inquirer * From Wireless Week, “Dobson Cellular gets into SmartSkins” * From Mobilemag.com, “Dobson Cellular first to Market SmartSkin Phone Identity” * From WirelessWeek.com, “Nokia Reaffirms Gaming Commitment” (Wildseed mention towards the end) * From PMN, “Wildseed announces first Gaming SmartSkin” * From LinuxElectrons, “Wildseed Announces First GameSkin Featuring the Top-Selling Fighting Game Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance” * From PhoneScoop.com, product page on Identity * From Linuxdevices.com, “Snap-on skins add games, music to Linux mobile phone”

Great job folks!