Unfortunately, I use (or at least know of) almost everything he mentioned. Why do I say ‘unfortunately’? Because while those tools all help – and in some cases tremendously – they’re not panaceas (love that word!). The real solution? Get obnoxiously rich and hire minions to do your bidding.

It’s about an hour long, but worth the listen if you feel like you’re drowning in ‘to dos’ and ‘thrashing’.

Just today I received a rather legitimate looking e-mail that could easily be misunderstood to be from Skype. If I had clicked on the embedded link, and installed any of the software I would have been in for a world of hurt. It was one of those malware writers that makes you believe you have a virus/malware and says you need their software to clean your computer. Their ‘software’ in turn ends up being garbage that costs lots of money.

Here’s how to lock down your Skype settings:

1. Go to the menu Skype-> Privacy
2. Ensure that all of the “from” settings are from “people in my Contact List only“

Here’s a screenshot of what that dialog box looks like. Click for a larger version.

There is just one minor drawback. You will need to manually add new contacts before they are allowed to call/message you. A small price to pay for a lot more security.

For those of you computer geeks out there, in particular UNIX aficionados, you might get a chuckle out of this. My cousin saw this photo op in Barcelona and sent me the pic. For those of you who know both of us, you’ll be able to guess exactly who sent me this. We’re both UNIX geeks; he more so than me, yet ironically, I’m just the one who decided to turn it into a half-baked career of sorts. Click the pic for a larger image. BTW, I didn’t even come up with the title to this blog post; that honor goes to the photographer.

Luckily, we’re using Google’s Webmaster Tools and it generates a report that gives us all of the URLs that it can’t find. Since Google first started crawling the new site, we’ve fixed a bunch of those links, but not all, and Google continues to crawl the site as there are thousands of URLs and it’s not done yet. So I don’t really want to go through the entire list by hand to figure out which ones end up in 404s.

Time to write a script!

GWT provides a link to download the entire list of broken URLs in a CSV format, so I pulled that down and stripped all of the columns except for the URLs and saved it as a plain text file, 1 URL per line. Next up is to write a simple script in bash that would loop through the file and try to access the URL. If it generates a 404, stick that URL into another file. Here’s the script; this is pretty simple and should run under the Bourne shell too (sh). It uses the very useful curl program which can be used to just grab the header from a web server (-I flag) for a particular URL without having to pull down the whole page.


#!/bin/bash

while read LINE
do
  echo $LINE
  curl -I $LINE > t0
  T1=`grep 404 t0`
  if [ -n "$T1″ ] ; then
    echo $LINE >> Real404s.txt
  fi
done < 404sfromGWT.txt


I ran this successfully on a WinXP box under the Cygwin environment. Yes, this is a quick and dirty script. Not elegant at all, but gets the job done. I can continue reusing this to see if Google has found any more broken links on my site.

Now, to go fix all of those URLs. *sigh*. Where’s my robot when I need him?

PS> I think this is the first article from a major news outlet that I’ve seen where they used the word ‘wonky’!

Doug and I have just launched our latest venture, MvixCommunity.com. At CES, we hooked up with a small but promising company called MvixUSA that sells a number of very cool products. The most notable line of products they sell are Media Players, which as a product class have been growing over the past few years. In fact, Apple just released their own such product, the Apple TV.

So what’s a Media Player? [There are other names, like Streaming Media device and Media Center. At any rate, Media Player is what Mvix chose to go with.] Let’s phrase the answer in a problem-and-solution format. Problem: you have media (music, video, photos) all over the place (computer, DVR, etc.), and want to get it all in one place so that you can watch it on your TV. Solution: an Mvix media player! With a hard drive at its heart, an Mvix media player stores all of this media and plays it back using a on-screen control menu.

Anyway, we agreed to start a forum site that caters exclusively to Mvix products. So if you’re at all interested in these types of products, or better yet, if you own one, please jump on, sign up and participate. Tell all of your friends too!

Since the A380 that landed at LAX didn’t have the interior finished for passengers, we weren’t given a tour of the cabin, but we did get to go out on the tarmac and get quite close to the airplane. The perimeter that they created was a bit amusing (it matched the footprint of the plane), but we didn’t complain too much. After all, we were standing pretty much almost under the plane.

That morning we stood outside the airport very near to the leading edge of the runway that the A380 was scheduled to land on and watched it land. Later that day, we met a blogger who took a video of the landing [Other YouTube videos]. Not the best video, but it certainly conveyed the excitement of the crowd gathered to watch.

So what’s so special about the A380 [specs] apart from it now being the largest airliner in the world? In my opinion, the feature that stands out most is the double-decker passenger configuration. The wingspan is pretty impressive, but as far as overall size goes, it’s not as if it’s twice as large as the next largest plane in the world. As an LA Times reporter noted, “it doesn’t represent change on the scale its older cousin [Boeing 747] did.” In fact, it’s approximately the same length and width as a 747 give or take a few meters. One of the funny optical illusions is how short the A380 looks due to the height and fatness of the fuselage.

Take a look over at Gizmos for Geeks for some more pics.

Some of my favoriate stats: a week’s worth of the NY Times is estimated to contain more information than an 18th century person was likely to come across in their lifetime. It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 10¹⁸) of information of unique information will be generated this year (an exabyte is 1000 million times a Gigabyte (GB)). That 1.5 exabytes is estimated to be more than in the past 5000 years.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Where was I? Oh yes, Beryl. Having been stuck in a predominantly MS Windows environment for years now, I’ve lost touch with the latest in the windowing advances. Luckily, I know folks who do keep in touch, and I was recently shown an extremely cool demo video of Beryl (and there are probably dozens of videos now). If you’ve seen demos of Aero and been wowed, prepared to be floored. Features in Beryl include warping windows, zooming in and out, using a cube as an abstration for a virtual desktop environment, transparency, wrapping windows around edges, and so much more. Just watch the video here:

But Beryl and Compiz are not the only 3D window managers operating on 2D applications. Last year, Sun introduced Project Looking Glass which is of course Java based. When Jonathan Schwartz did his demo, the crowd went crazy. Here’s another demo that explains better what PLG is and can do along with interviews of the main developer (just try to ignore the robot-like people presenting it).

But the fun doesn’t stop there. I picked up this next piece of coolness from Dave Zatz. It’s a video demo of a two-handed touchscreen windowing environment by a company called Perceptive Pixel. Unfortunately, there isn’t any info on their website, but the demo is amazing. I was left wondering how the system ‘knows’ what you’re trying to do when you touch the screen or a window or whatever. I’m sure there are rules, which means there’s a learning curve involved. And oh yeah, can I sit down?

All of these new windowing environments are cool, but the question is will it revolutionize or at least improve usability? Will it make me more productive? Or am I still just as well off with twm and the apps I need? Next big step – just let me think it.

Doug (a friend I work with at ISX) and I recently built an info/review/community website that focuses on the latest gadgets, gizmos and toys.

We launched the site today and are now in a beta-testing phase. You special folks on my mailing list get to be part of the elite first-view audience. (Do you like how I’m laying on the compliments?!)

We would really appreciate it you can take a few minutes to register, log in, take a look around and give us some feedback. You can e-mail us at feedback@gizmosforgeeks.com.

And without further ado, here’s the site:

Gizmos for Geeks