Just found another great time-limited gift for the Christmas season.
AVG Pro usually goes for $29.95, but Computeract!ve is giving away free licensed copies through Jan 18, 2008
Download AVG Anti-Virus Pro for free – Download Squad
Personally, my favourite so far is ZoneAlarm, switched from Norton because
Open source keyword launcher Launchy grows up a little with a 2.0 release
Featured Windows Download: Launchy 2.0 Adds Polish, Easier Configuration
Launchy is one of my favorite applications. It makes my Windows machine a little more like Mac.
My other favorite is Texter, a Windows alias tool, much more powerful than Unix’s alias.
All newbies who is looking for a good blog platform to start a blog, a marketable, searchable blog, go with WordPress.
In this interview with Matt Cutts, he said that WordPress blogs are SEO.
Step number three is smart marketing and that can involve good SEO. If you do everything on WordPress you’re pretty much automatically covered as far as SEO
After reading about Yahoo’s new search user interface, I decided to head over to Yahoo to try it out.
I was having a problem with my notebook not hibernating. So I searched for :
notebook cannot hibernate
The results I got was irrelevant. (See below)
The results are a bunch of links to Java Hibernate stuff – largely irrelevant to what I was searching for.
I then tried it on Microsoft’s Live Search and got:
It got me some minorly relevant stuff and also the same Jave Hibernate stuff.
Lastly, I tried it on Google and got:
The results were more relevant.
Going from the above, Google will remain my favourite search engine for now.
Windows Live Writer Beta 3
There are several tools that make me love blogging.
One of the is a good blogging client.
Today I discovered that Windows Live just released another update.
Great features (Pasted from Windows Live):
Writer can to publish to Windows Live Spaces, Sharepoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, Community Server, and many other weblog services.
Writer knows your blog’s visual theme. So you can see exactly what your posts will look like as you write them, before you publish. No more wasting time previewing your posts online.
Writer makes publishing rich media as easy as sending e-mail. Insert and customize photos, videos, maps, tags, and lots of other cool content—then click the “Publish” button. It’s that easy.
Creating compelling blog posts is much easier with the ability to insert and edit tables, check spelling as you type, and format and hyperlink content at your fingertips.
Now you can blog anytime, from anywhere. Writer synchronizes drafts on your blog with changes you make when you’re offline, so you don’t have to worry about reconciling different versions.
And in Beta 3, they added (pasted from Download Squad):
new in this beta of Live Writer?
Because of this update, I have churned out 4 posts so far today already.
I read this tip at Problogger:
“My #1 tip: Stop reading blogs that help you blog. I used to read around 10 a day, but I’ve cut it down to one (ProBlogger). I’ve saved a LOT of time.”
We don’t have a lot of time to read long blog posts like this.
So I can add value by condensing blog posts and posting a digest here, sort of like Reader’s Digest version of Blog Digest.
I will be posting some posts that I read here.
Some are posts that I like and some are posts that I don’t think highly of because they are more fluff than stuff. But it’s a reality that a lot of blog stuff has to do with marketing fluff. So I include them too.
I will classify my digest posts under the digest category.
Dropping my old theme for the current new theme.
It will load faster (claims Devlounge) where I got the theme from.
I like it because it shows excerpts of my most recent posts on the home page with the pictures.
I think the blog looks more interesting this way.
And I will know which post you click to read further since the home page only shows excerpts.
I have not posted much to this blog. It’s the story of my blogging ventures.
I dole out some USD for a domain name, some more dole for a hosting plan, some more dole because there is a 3 year advance payment offer and then fizzle out after a few months.
This is becoming another of my long string of blogging non-starters.
So, I am setting a new direction for this blog.
This will be things to do, not to do to make a blog fail.
I have plenty of material for this.
*this is a wow moment, therefore this is a wow post*
Finally.
I have been looking for this for a long time. Before I bought my Inspiron, I was seriously considering buying a notebook that came preinstalled with Linux.
My main motivation was to get it cheaper. My Inspiron came with Microsoft Works, Microsoft Vista, some DVD burner software that I do not use at all. I inquired with Dell about getting a refund. They said these software were complimentatry ie no cost were attached to them. I seriously doubt this because I have read of cases of refund in Germany and UK. But I will one day sell this Inspiron and maybe the next chap will appreciate them.
Anyway, back to Linux, I was seriously considering a Linux notebook because I was hearing Ubuntu everywhere. The only option back then was IBM and it was not cheap (as I am cheap).
The other thing that held me back was that I currently use Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Money and X1 Desktop Search extensively and they run on Windows now.
Today I read that Dell is going to offer Ubuntu Linux.
I hope it comes with some migration tools – to help migrate my current Windows notebook to the new Linux notebook.
Google released a StumbleUpon-like tool to its toolbar.
I briefly used StumbleUpon before this and it didn’t stick very much to me. A huge part of it is because the random websites were not interesting to me. They were just random. In a later version, they allowed user to specify categories that interest them to make the random websites more relevant. That was still configuration to do.
I like Google’s new service better. Zero-configuration. It serves up random websites based on the history of my web searches.
Some say this invades my privacy. This does not bother me. As the Cheers song goes,’.. sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name..’. Sometimes I want to go somewhere where everybody knows what I want.
Om Malik says Google got punked by eBay. I don’t understand this argument. Just as I do not understand how Yahoo won by buying del.icio.us. To-date, Yahoo still offers both its own bookmark service and the del.icio.us service. Just because del.ico.us is owned by Yahoo does not make it more Yahoo-ish or gives Yahoo some superior edge.
As a end-user, I like Google’s dice service better.