Call Management, ‘Google Style’ - Free, Useful, Revolutionary

Grand Central is a company that was purchased by Google about a year ago. It is the greatest new addition to phone management on the market and it’s free! Everyone should check this out. It is currently in Beta but I signed up a long long time ago and, while supplies last, I’ll send you an invitation if you leave a comment asking for one on this article…

When you sign up for Grand Central you get a new phone number. It is the last phone number you will ever need. It assigns you the number and then, through an intuitive GUI, it enables you to forward all your phones so they ring on that single number. You might think, why would I want to do that? It’s a little hard to explain all the advantages but there are many. I’ll do my best to outline the basics but to really understand things you should go to Grand Central’s website and check it out there. For one thing, now all your calls are logged on your computer, so you have a historical database of your incoming calls in a managable format. It replaces your answering machine so you also have a historical database of all your incoming messages… It allows you to leave ‘group defined’ greetings for the incoming calls that you miss. This means that if you have someone you’ve been dying to get a hold of and you want to tell them something if they get to your answering machine, you can leave a customized message that will play as your announcement just for that phone number. This is a really impressive feature for both business and home use. You can have calls coming from certain numbers sent forward to certain phones. This way, if you always want your Mother to ring your home line instead of your business line you can assign all her phones to ring on your home line! As well, now you only have to remember one number and everyone can contact you via that one number and you set up the rules so when the call comes in it is sent to whatever number you would like it to be sent to. There is even a way to put a web call widget on your blog so anyone can call you and you don’t have to worry about them abusing the number because you have total and complete control when your calls come in! There are a hundred other great things that Grand Central can do to make managing your incoming calls more efficient so check out their website and if you want to give it a try, let me know and I’ll send you an invitation to the beta so you can get your own Grand Central Phone Number!

http://www.grandcentral.com/

Legal and Free Music Downloads- Qtrax Still Not Allowing Downloads

I wrote this post January 28th 2008 yet the Qtrax site still does not allow downloads.  It says “downloads are coming soon”.  I’ve downloaded Qtrax’s client and have it on my system.  Which I won’t advise you to do, at this time because downloads are not yet available. However, they claim they are coming so we are all waiting and hoping that some day soon, Qtrax will enable the downloading of free music via their peer to peer network.

Original Story Starts Here:

As Butthead might say, Free music downloads rule. I was surprised and pleased to see this article come across the wire.

From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs - legally - Times Online

Apparently, the music industry has caved into the demands of consumers, powered by technology that makes sharing and transferring files between people and devices a snap, to offer free and unrestricted access to nearly every song available. This time it’s no joke because the music companies have signed on with an organization that has developed a peer to peer network which will earn income through advertising and pay the music companies a fee based on ‘use statistics’. Hopefully, this will trickle down to the musicians who wrote the songs. I knew, the first time that I downloaded a song, this day would come. The ability to search archives, download single tracks, and transfer them from computer to mobile devices, is a technology that is far better than the old system of music distribution. It was obvious to me that the music companies and the


musicians would need to reinvent the way they made money. Being a ‘DeadHead’ (The Grateful Dead allowed recording and encouraged the distribution of their music from shows), I’ve always felt that musicians should make most of their money from performances and not from the copyrights of their songs. I wrote to my senators and congressmen when I first saw the technology in an effort to explain why things would change but copyright protection has been in place for hundreds of years and it took some time (about 7 years) for the reality to sink in with the music industry. This demonstrates and confirms my theory that, legalities can not stand in the way of practicality because the best solution will always become ‘common sense’. BTW, don’t steal that phrase or I’ll sick my copyright attorney on you! No really, I’m not kidding, but I don’t demand money just credit…

This is the link to the new peer to peer music service. I’m sure there will be other services like this one working to sign deals with the music industry, but hat’s off to Qtrax because they ‘broke the ice’. I will write another post after I have a chance to try out the service and review it.

Qtrax

Protect Yourself - A Black Network of Corporate Vigilantes Are Connecting to Your PC, and Stealing Data, To Incriminate You

There is a gap between today’s technology and legislation to protect your privacy. Technology has moved so quickly that the Internet is a largely ungoverned place, and most of us would prefer it to stay that way. However, this new frontier may expose computer users to an invasion of our privacy that could end up costing us a bundle or possibly even land us in jail. It is likely that today your computer will be queried by over a dozen computers who are downloading copyright data (and who knows what else) from your computer without your knowledge or permission. But these are not hackers or criminals, at least they are not organizations that you would normally consider hackers. I was shocked when I saw who the corporations that owned the list of blocked IPs. It is a who’s who of the computer industry and it bothers me that they are taking establishing what I would call a “covert connection” to my PC and downloading data from me. I’m willing to bet that nearly every PC has a few files on them that technically belong to someone else and contractually speaking, are illegal for you to have. You might not be using these files or you might not even be aware these files exist on your PC but you are responsible for having them and if they get redistributed you could be on the hook for more dollars than you care to think about. I’m not comfortable interpreting this “movement” or “trend” as being related only to copyrighted music either. It could reach into video clips (Youtube, Google…) , software evaluations and shareware programs, pictures, articles… anything that has the potential to be copyrighted. When the going gets tough, cash is tight, and companies will look to whatever source of income they can find. But the real issue isn’t whatever scenario I can come up with or whether you think you could possibly be liable for something, the real problem is the invasion of privacy and the question if search and seizure laws apply. I consider the data on my PC as my personal property. I’ve taken measures to lock it down and secure it. It disturbs me that corporations can establish a “hidden connection” to my PC and steal my data. But the straw that “breaks the camels back” in this situation is that they can use that data to incriminate you in a court of law! It is unthinkable that our society considers this process legal and it has to change. An equivalent example in the physical world would be if a private organization (not even the police) could break into your home and look for information to prove that you are guilty of something against the law and use that information in a court of law to incriminate you. In the real world this isn’t just trespassing and a violation of your privacy but it is a criminal activity and in most cases it would be classified as a felony. Our privacy laws exist to protect you from a person or an organization, which may have self serving motives, from becoming too powerful. As discussed, in cyberspace organizations are breaking into your private area (your computer) and gathering whatever data they can (without your permission or knowledge), with the intention of using that data to incriminate you in a court of law. Unfortunately it is perfectly legal for them to gather this data now because our laws have not caught up to the unique environments the Internet has created.

So we need to protect ourselves and luckily there are organizations working to keep track of these issues and building programs to enable users to stop the offending sites from connecting to your PC. I tried several programs and the best solution I found is Peer Guardian2. These programs work from a large list of IP addresses and the need to update and process those lists can be resource intensive. Most of the other programs I tried took an enormous amount of resources to run but Peer Guardian2 ran well and didn’t max my system out even when it was updating the lists (which is the most intensive cycle). There are some issues in compatibility with some of the popular firewalls (specifically Outpost and Macafee’s Black Ice). However, it runs well with the Sygate firewall which is my Best of Breed pick. If you have questions about compatibility you should check out their FAQ. Peer Guardian2 also has a lite version that takes even fewer resources to run. Regardless of the resources I’m recommending that everyone download, install, and run Peer Guardian2. If you need to use a different firewall, make the change. If you need to spend 70 bucks and add some RAM it’s worth it (you probably need it anyway). It would probably be pushing it to run Peer Guardian on a PC with only 512k of RAM on it and I’m guessing it would choke on a CPU with 256k. However, If you’ve got more than 512k you will be fine.

One minor issue: I am currently having trouble getting the primary P2P list to update but I hope to resolve the issue and I don’t want to my readers to wait. Protect yourself! We all owe the developers working on Peer Guardian2 a thanks for developing the software. They do accept donations so if you really value the work they are doing please support them.

You can download Peer Guardian2 from the link below. It is in BETA but it is working well.

http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/

If you are interested in reading about copyright infringement or if you have received a letter from a recording company you can check out this FAQ.

http://wiki.phoenixlabs.org/wiki/Infringement_FAQ

Straight Shot of Life’s News!

I can’t stomach Rotten’s daily photo montage but their news page is a refreshing change from the rest of the Net’s myriad of white washed, politically scrubbed, vanilla sources. Rotten’s news page is the best place on the net to have a sobering look into the mirror of our culture. No punches pulled here, no political correctness, no washing down or hiding stories that don’t fit into prime time, this is the real deal scraped from the underbelly of humanity’s culture. So look, read, and learn, about how “Rotten” (and fascinating) our world really is.

http://www.dailyrotten.com/

Fast Friendly and Efficient Way to Change Icons!

As most everyone knows, there are several ways to change your desktop icons. Some of them work but have problems with things like the “recycle bin” or C:…. Some of them require you to boot up a program and manage it from there. I’ve even run into some that will change the icon but the icon won’t stay changed until you run their program every time after you boot your system. Explorer does an OK job of it but you have to open the “properties” of each file and then select the customize tab and then “browse” and it always starts you off in a window that is buried somewhere deep inside sys32… So, after using just about everything that is available I can now make an informed recommendation to you. By far, the easiest, most efficient way to change your icons is with a free program from Horizon Software named “My Folder”.

After downloading and installing and when you first pull My Folder up there is a slightly clunky initial interface where you select what Icons you want to show in your quick menu. Don’t be discouraged, you won’t have to deal with it very often. Once you point to the folder where your icons are stored you can just right click on a file and then select the appropriate icon from their list. This is the way to go… You can change or color your icons very quickly.

I have had some minor problems with their quick menu lists disappearing and not being available. When this happens I just kill and restart their program and everything works well after that. It doesn’t happen very often and it isn’t a big deal to fix. I highly recommend My Folder to anyone who wants to customize their desktop.

http://www.grafile.com/software/myfolder_free/myfolder_free.html

Context Menu Too Big?

Firefox Menu Editor:  After you add some extensions you’ll find the context menu in Firefox gets pretty big.  Fix it with Menu Editor.  You can install it here.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/710

 

Hyperwords - Hype What You Can Do in Firefox

Hyperwords is one of the most functional extensions in Firefox. I use this all the time through the context menu. I use it consistently for the following things;

1. it allows me to highlight some text and send it to the printer. This is good for a lot of things, including Google directions

2. copy url

3. copy link location

4. look up definition in dictionary

5. send highlighted words to Google search

6. get similar pages through delicious

7 and many more…

There are a lot of things it enables you to do. You can also see a report of everyone who links to the page, see a wayback report of the page… It makes all the sense in the world to install this extension because many of the things that you would normally pull up a different site to do are part of hyperwords and it is much faster to use it as opposed to pulling it up individually. It will take you a while to get used to everything and know what you can use hyperwords for but once you’ve figured it out I’m sure you’ll appreciate how useful it is.

One word of warning on this extension, when you first install it the default settings will enable a bothersome auto engage. Whenever you click on a text box it will bring up a ‘hyperword menu’. Disable this bothersome function in the options and you’ll be happy with the abilities of the extension.

 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1941

Manage Gmail Accounts Easily

I use several Gmail accounts, and you should too, even if you have plenty of room left on your 2GB of free email storage that Gmail gives you, it’s nice to have another Gmail account so you can set it up with your Gmail drive  and backup your important files.  It’s easy to get another Gmail account.  Simply log out of your existing Gmail account and request another one.  Once it is setup you can manage multiple accounts with the Gmail Manager.   You login by simply clicking on the ‘live icon’ which Gmail Manager puts on your Firefox statusbar and selecting the appropriate account.

This Firefox extension has always kept current with Firefox’s new releases. It works well with the rest of our configuration so it fits right in.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1320

Flick The Pic - Quick Access to Your Photos From Firefox

I use the Flickr photo service because it’s a great photo management site but also because there are a lot of tools available so I can manage my entire online photo experience. One of those tools is the Flickr Sidebar and it’s a great way to look up pictures while you are working on your blog or website or when you want to send an email of a picture… You simply click on your AllinOne Sidebar and it gives you a list of thumbnails on your left panel. If you don’t see what you want you can either search for your photo or just page through them. If you are not using Flickr yet, you should. They are one of the best sites for managing, organizing, and sharing photos. They helped define the online photo business.

You can download the Flickr Sidebar for Firefox at the link below. 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1717

Sadly, the one thing that Flickr doesn’t do well is organize their ‘tools page’. To download the flickr uploader that I’m using and recommending in this post click on this link.

Breedlink: Flickr Uploader for Windows

The Flickr page of tools is at http://www.flickr.com/tools/ They have a new uploader specifically for XP and a plugin for Windows Explorer that I have yet to use, so I can’t recommend. I’ll be checking those out in the next couple weeks and I’ll post my opinion on them then.

Up Yours - With Firefox Universal Uploader

This is an extension that you can’t live without if you want to store video and/or pictures on the Internet. And you should use the Internet because you can get a lot of free space and they have several features that you and your friends and family will benefit from.

The Firefox Universal Uploader is a ‘one stop shop’ for uploading files to several of these online photo services. You can upload to Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, Box.net(1GB of free space), Facebook, Webshots and OmniDrive.

This extension works well with everything else in our suite of Firefox extensions. I use 2 of the services mentioned, Flicker and Picassa. I have multiple Picassa accounts because I have multiple Gmail accounts. You have virtually unlimited space because you can sign up for as many Gmail accounts as you want and this upload manager will allow you to manage them seamlessly.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4724

Fontashia Fonterrific fontellicious fontout fontorino fontolla fontetaboutit

OK today we’re talking fonts. It’s been a while since I ventured out into the font world to have a look at what’s available out there. I’ve done a couple of things that I hope will save you some time. I’ve picked through most of the free sites and I can fill you in on their individual strengths and weaknesses. If you don’t want to look through a bunch of fonts, and you trust my taste, I’ve linked directly to the fonts that I’ve installed on my system. One more thing before I turn you loose: the term ‘breedlink’ refers to something that links directly to a file and it will start downloading. So whenever you see that term, you’ll know that when you click on it a download will start. Below, I’ve given you a link to the sites and a ‘breedlink’ to the fonts on that site that I found to be something I could read and may use.

At Font Freak you can download an endless supply of free fonts. The site layout is very basic. They just list the name of the font in the font’s ‘type’ and that’s all the information you get before you download. This makes for fast downloads but you don’t know what you are getting… The one thing that I really didn’t like about this site is that they mixed in shareware fonts with the free fonts. About 1 of every 10 fonts on the site is a shareware font. I don’t know how they hope to sell anything because you have every size and shape of font imaginable on the site for free.

Visit the fontfreak site at this link:

http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts-a.htm

These are breedlinks to the fonts I installed on my PC from this site.

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/a/AccidentalPresidency.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/a/AntiKwa.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/a/Aramis.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/a/Arcitectura.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/m/machinescript.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/m/maize.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/m/mechanihan.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/s/sanity.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/s/sanskritroman.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/s/shrewsbury.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/w/wesley.zip

Breedlink - http://www.fontfreak.com/fonts/z/zrnic.zip

———

Fonts 500 advertises themselves as “The Webs Top 500 Free Fonts”.

This site has quickest and easiest layout for downloading fonts. They list several on a page but you don’t get to see much of the font before you download. Same as above only in smaller type but at least you know they are all free so you can download away! I did notice some overlap between this site and Font Freak.

This is a link to the site itself:

http://fonts500.com/

Here are the ‘breedlinks’ to the fonts I installed on my PC from this site.

Breedlink - http://fonts500.com/zip/altea.zip

Breedlink - http://fonts500.com/zip/devroye.zip

Breedlink - http://fonts500.com/zip/ghostwriter.zip

Breedlink - http://fonts500.com/zip/adventuresubtitles.zip

Breedlink - http://fonts500.com/zip/queensland.zip

Breedlink - http://fonts500.com/zip/calligraphicav2.zip

Breedlink - http://fonts500.com/zip/rackham.zip

Breedlink - http://fonts500.com/zip/calligula.zip

Breedlink - http://fonts500.com/zip/oktoberfest.zip

Breedlink - http://fonts500.com/zip/nonpoint.zip

—————————-

Urban fonts was a laid out a little differently. When you ‘mouse over’ a font type it shows you the alphabet in that font and that helps with the selection process but it also slows down your ability to grab a bunch of fonts quickly. So the tradeoff is better knowledge for time put in. Their site is well worth a look. At this point, I was getting tired of downloading fonts and I was getting there seemed to be a lot of overlap with the other 2 sites but it is still a good site and I was happy I found it.

This is the link to Urban Fonts:

http://www.urbanfonts.com/

These are the ‘breedlinks’ to the fonts I thought were best at this site:

Breedlink - http://www.urbanfonts.com/scripts/index.php?aardvarkcafe.zip

Breedlink - http://www.urbanfonts.com/scripts/index.php?acens.zip

Breedlink - http://www.urbanfonts.com/scripts/index.php?salamander.zip

——————

Exljbris, is a totally different site. This is a guy that makes his own fonts and has created a website to distribute them. He has 8 different high quality and original fonts that are all readable and will be nice additions to your font library. I’d recommend you go to their site and download each of them. One bit of advice, if you look at the list of fonts on the left of their web page, you’ll notice that the first is named delicious, I was confused and thought it was a hot link to bookmark their site but it isn’t… Just click on deliscious and it will download the font…

http://www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/index.html

————

Those are the sites I’ve collected over the last couple of years. Please let me know if you know of a better site and I’ll try it out and probably put it in. This is a post that will be updated frequently so come back often to see if I’ve changed anything. Any new posts will be at the top and they will be marked as ‘new’.

Don’t Forage - Terabytes of Free Storage Available Online

This post is about file storage, not to be confused with photo storage, or a backup service. File storage can be used for a lot of different things and I’ve done my best to describe each service below. Generally, I’m talking about any type of file, could be photo, video, audio, text, word… files that you want to share with people, files that you want to store just to be safe and have another copy somewhere, or files you use for a website or a blog. All the services below allow you to link to the file you have uploaded to their site. Today you can store files and grant online access to your friends or the world. The amount of free storage available to everyone in the world is unlimited now. The computing industry has changed so dramatically. See the last paragraph of this post for my thoughts on this subject. But immediately below are links and descriptions to plenty of free storage on the web. I have not identified a ‘best of breed’ in this category because, as you will see, they all have slightly different market niches, messages, limits…

eSnips - Create an account and you can upload 5Gb of music, pictures, video, whatever you want. This site is designed to share with your friends and/or everyone in the world, however, the site your friends go to has so many scripts on it that it some browsers can’t read the page. I don’t want to put a negative spin on eSnips at all because their back end, which you will deal with, is great and I’m sure they will address issues as they come up. They have a flash uploader that works well for uploading several files. You can select several files at once, the file structure is straight forward, and you can mark files as private and manage a nice little 5GB archive for yourself at their site. They also have an uploader that integrates into your web browser and I really like the features it provides. You can tag, describe, and name your files before you upload and you can select to resize photos… If you can, this native uploader that integrates with your browser is the way to go. So enjoy eSnips because they are truly a great site.

http://www.esnips.com/SignInAction.ns

MediaFire - is the first free storage site that I found that offers unlimited space. I wasn’t that wild about their upload page, it is pretty basic but it works and you can set it to download several files at once (about 8 I think) but you have to select each file. I bet they come up with something better soon, because today they are a little behind the curve on uploaders but that could change any day. MediaFire gets points for it’s file structure and sharing ability and, of course, the unlimited space.

http://www.mediafire.com/

Microsoft’s SkyDrive - offers a puny 500mb free and I recommend that you use it! They are a very stable organization and who knows what is going to happen with the economy. This site is not designed for you to put a file up and share it with the world. It is designed to be thought of as a remote drive for you personally. I keep personal documents that I really need on this site. I also have a Window’s Live Space account which is like your Windows homepage and is integrated with SkyDrive. I think you’ve got to have a .net ID, which I recommend you take the time to get if you have not done so yet, and the site also integrates with your xbox 360 gamertag. The uploader is file by file so nothing special there but the file structure is the most familiar the most secure and dependable. So if you’ve already drank the coolaid go get yourself your 500MB and sing your praise to the great SkyDrive in the sky.

http://skydrive.live.com/?lc=1033

SendSpace Lite - This service was originally organized as a site to transfer large files and that is still their primary marketing spin. I think they used to have a limit on the amount of data that you stored on their site but they evidently have switched it to ‘unlimited’ recently. The individual file transfer size limit (not to be confused with total storage limit) for free users is 300MB but you can split and join files and they have a good FAQ on their page about it. SendSpace has an uploader (beta) that you download and it runs on your PC. This is not a site you should use for backup because they are very clear about the service being ‘as is’ and without warranty and basically, if the service is available, you can use it. However, with the unlimited restrictions on the amount of data that you can store and the effective locally running uploader, you could push a lot of data out to them very quickly and efficiently but their marketing message is pushing strongly away from providing the type of service you need to depend upon for backup or general availability. You can read about it on their FAQ.

This is a great site to use if you’ve got some large datasets that you may want to share with other people and/or you just want to keep ‘casual’ backups of that data around. It is a great spot to put the large files that you might normally delete from your system. Their ‘MAX’ service (fee based) offers a lot of options which I think would be really valuable to software developers or copyright owners who need to manage the distribution of media. You can set limits on the number of downloads or the amount of time a download is good for. But everything I link you to in this site is free. I only wanted to point out the marketing position of the site and their major direction. Regardless, SendSpace can be of great value to home users like us who take advantage of free services.

I’m giving you 2 different links to SendSpace, they have a program that gives me points if you sign up for a free account through the first link. The points go towards their fee based service which I don’t know if I would find value in or not. Regardless, I guess I would prefer that you sign in through the first link but if you have any reservations about doing that please go a head and use the second link (which is the same you would get if you Googled ‘SendSpace’).

http://www.sendspace.com/invite/t7dt1x

http://sendspace.com/register.html

Divshare - I can’t find a size limit to the amount of space a registered user has on this site. They don’t advertise ‘unlimited space’ like some of the others but they don’t talk about size restriction either. They talk about the limit of a single file transfer of 200MB (2GB if you are a paying customer) but they don’t mention a ‘total size’ for any single user. Divshare has a great flash uploader and you can upload entire folders with it. They also have a native loader that is fast, easy and works really well. DivShare is clear about your files being available “forever” and they give you a link so you can share your files with anyone you please. You can also password protect your files. There is no search engine at their site so files are only shared with the people that you refer to the site. You can create your own ‘player’ at this site and put your logo on it. This is a great tool for maintaining a blog or a website and I may utilize it for that purpose in the future, especially if I decide to add video. I just found out they have an uploader that is integrated with WordPress so I’ve downloaded that and will report back and update this post once I see how it works.

http://www.divshare.com/signup

Whew, this was a more detailed post than I intended it to be. However, unlimited space free of charge is truly worth taking some time to explain and I do wonder how all this will effect our computing environments and our culture. It is an amazing change that the market will take a while to digest and figure out how to use. Once that happens and the value is recognized and taken advantage of, the implications of this free unlimited space will reach deep into our culture. 15 years ago a 40MG drive ran you a couple hundred dollars and now you can get an unlimited amount of space for free on the Internet. You can store and grant on-line access to files of nearly any size and content (varies by service - IE nudity). It is truly a revolution and it is changing the way we think about computing. Once data transfer rates quadruple (or more, next 5 years) and space isn’t a problem, then think of the amount of media that will be hitting us. It’s out of control today but in 5 years it is going to have a gigantic impact on our culture.

Don’t Point, It’s Rude. Change Your Cursor to Something Pleasant.

If you are running windows XP or Windows 2000 you can take advantage of Cursor XP freeware. Which is, by far, the best solution for changing your cursor available. Their are hundreds of animated cursors available for you to download from the ‘Wincustomize’ site.

Download CurserXP from this link!

http://www.download.com/3001-2317_4-10357248.html

-

If you’re running something other than XP or if you want to try something other than CursorXP then you can check out Realworld’s Cursor Changer. It is a more ‘basic or standard’ solution. If you’re on a different operating system you’ll need to check and make sure it will work for you. There seems to be a fuzzy line here… If your operating system stores cursors in c:\Windows\cursor\ then it would seem like it would have a good chance at working for you but you should check out the compatibility statement and decide if it is worth checking out.

Realworld has developed a freeware product named ‘change cursor’. It took me a while to figure out how to engage this because after I loaded it I couldn’t figure out if it was doing anything, and it wasn’t (I’m terrible at reading directions). After you install the software you need to go to C:\Windows\Cursor\ and right click on one of the cursor pictures you see and it will bring up a context menu and you select ‘change cursor’ and there you will see that you can assign different pictures to the functions listed. There are 3 different kind of files in this directory; .ani = animated, .cur = just a still image, .crs = a complete configuration. If you pick a .crs file it is like picking a theme of cursors. The first time you do this you’ll probably have to go through and pick different .cur and .ani files for the different functions (normal, precision select, busy, working…) and then you can save it as a ’scheme’ and that is what creates the .crs files.

http://www.rw-designer.com/change-cursor

You can also download cursor pictures from Realworld’s site and a variety of other sites also carry these standard cursor pictures (.ani & .cur). Or, if you prefer, you can create your own cursor pictures! RealWorld has a free cursor editor package. I have not tried that out so I can’t really recommend it here.

http://www.rw-designer.com/cursor-library

ps - While searching for .ani & .cur pictures to download (after download you just drag the individual files into c:\windows\cursor\) there are so many icon and cursor editors that I had a hard time finding sites to download just the .cur and .ani files from. Those files are out there and you can find them but you have to weed through all the editors to find them.

GDrive - Google Hard Drive - 2GB, Searchable, Backup Space…

When Gmail really opened up their doors and allowed anyone to sign up for an account I created one for each of my children and another one for me. This meant I had 5 gmail accounts each with 2gb storage limit (total 10gb) and I remember thinking that it would be a real asset if I could use it. I’ve found a freeware program that really makes gmail accounts efficient for file storage.

All you do is install this and it creates a gmail hard drive. So it shows up in explorer as C:\My Computer\GmailDrive. Click that drive and it asks you to login to your Gmail account and you check the box that tells it to keep you logged in. Then you can just drop files on that gmail drive and it takes care of sending them to your gmail address as an email (totally transparent to you) and it works pretty quickly. I have not tried it with super large files, I think Gmails new attachment cut off is 20mg so I’m sure it will not work with a file much larger than 20mg. It does not move the file that is dropped on it, so that file still exists on your PC, it just copies it and sends it to gmail behind the scenes.

I normally wait to write about new freeware until I have the opportunity to test it for a while but this is such an important breakthrough for everyone that I thought I should tell you about it right away. This program will really improve the home user’s ability to backup important files easily and quickly and then having a great way to search for those files on the front end is truly wonderful. The fact that you don’t have to deal with setting up where to save the files to and how to retrieve them or deal with any of part of that is a really wonderful thing. All you have to do is have a Gmail Account, install this program, and start dropping files on it and everything is free of charge to you! I can’t say enough good things about this program and what it means to myself as a home user.

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/GmailDrive/GmailDrive.html

ps - If you don’t have a Gmail account yet I really think you should sign up for at least one. Even if you don’t plan on using it for email, you should grab it for the space. You’ll also have access to blogger and picassa (photo storage) and a whole bunch of other Google stuff (Google Groups, Google Reader (newsreader)…. Just go to www.gmail.com and sign up… it is quick, easy, and very beneficial.

Flick and Get The Pic

Flickr Sidebar: It’s great to have the ability to search and locate pictures from your sidebar and Flicker integrates well with the All-in-One Sidebar really well. I use both Flicker and Picassa so getting pictures up and down is important because I’m

always sticking a photo in a blog or a webpage and if you don’t have good tools it will take you a lot longer and it can be frustrating… This will make it easy for you to find your photos and link to them quickly. I use it all the time.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1717