Cool Tech Reviews

Adam Pash at Lifehacker makes some interesting suggestions on how to Get Vista’s Best Features in XP. The sad part is that there is so little there beyond eye candy of dubious utility or applications for very specialized niches. In the latter category, I liked:

Take Quick and Easy Screenshots: PrtScrn has been around forever, but it’s never been the most user-friendly way to get a screenshot. In Vista, Microsoft threw in a screenshot utility called the Snipping Tool. Fact is, if better screenshots are important to you, there are gobs of excellent free screenshot apps available for XP like Screenshot Captor (original post), Clip2Net (original post), and Jing (original post), among many others.

Choose Clip2Net or Jing if you want to share your captures on the Web or Jing if you want to grab a screencast, but for my usual chore of taking screenshots and saving them on my PC, Screenshot Captor does the job and more. Screenshot Captor is for Windows only and is donationware.

The NY Times’ Laura Holson reports on the latest battleground with spammers as they have figured out how to hit cellphone users with unsolicited and unwanted text messages, which depending on your service plan, you may well have to pay for.

American consumers are expected to receive an estimated 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, according to Ferris Research, based in San Francisco, which tracks mobile messaging trends. That is nearly double what they received in 2006.

Of course that is a small percentage of the overall number of messages: an industry survey showed that consumers in the United States sent and received about 48 billion text messages in December alone. But for many people who are charged as much as 20 cents for an incoming message or are interrupted in the middle of dinner, even one is too many.

“The reason this really burns people up is because they have to pay for messages they don’t want, and they shouldn’t have to,” said Chris Murray, senior counsel for Consumers Union, a nonprofit group.

There’s some discussion of fighting with your carrier to get refunds, but more interesting is cutting off the spam before it arrives:

Most phone spam is actually e-mail that comes through gateways linking the Internet and cellphone networks, industry executives said.

Most wireless phones have a dedicated e-mail address. At AT&T, for example, it is a customer’s cellphone number followed by @text.att.net. Using computers, spammers create millions of possible number combinations, then send messages to those addresses.
…
All major communications companies give consumers the ability to thwart spam by changing the easily guessed e-mail addresses for their phones, or completely blocking messages coming from the Internet. They can do this by logging onto the company’s Web site and changing their preferences.

“I did that six months ago and I have not received any spam,” Mr. Melone of Verizon said. “No one, not even me, wants their cellphone to ring at 2 in the morning.”

The utility of blocking all messages from the Internet depends on how you use your phone, but changing the default email address is a precaution that everyone should take. And there’s more danger on the horizon:

But inconvenience is not the only downside; there is also the threat of viruses as phones become more like personal computers. Some companies are already preparing for this.

Last winter, Symantec, a maker of security software, introduced a product for smartphones that connect with the Internet to detect mobile threats, check for viruses and automatically delete spam or corral suspect texts in a folder.

Khoi Nguyen, a product manager for mobile security at Symantec, said the company developed the software mainly for Asia and Europe, where creative spammers try to steal credit card information or banking data through phones. He said he expected to see the same trend here in the next 6 to 12 months.

What percentage of mobile phone users do you think will install and correctly operate a mobile security package?

Download Squad has a post on the The 5 most annoying programs on your PC and I cannot disagree with their selections:

1. Acrobat Reader
2. iTunes
3. Real Player
4. Internet Explorer
5. Microsoft Outlook

There’s no help for some of them, but they suggest Foxit Reader as a substitute for Adobe Acrobat Reader:

Acrobat reader does one thing poorly — read PDFs. To do this it needs to download updates at least twice a month. Acrobat’s other big feature is the ability to bring your system to a roaring halt while it boots up its massive amount of plugins and libraries. All this to display (wait for it) — a page.

FoxIt Reader is a much better solution. Download it, and you’ll no longer cringe each time your accidentally click on a PDF link while browsing the internet.

I gave it a try and it is fantastic as well as free unless you want some advanced features. Highly recommended.

Microsoft really, really wants students to buy Microsoft Office and to that end today started a promotion where students can pick up Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95:

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The news that Symantec was working on a anti-botnet protection tool was fine and dandy except for the fact that they want an additional $29.95 yearly subscription. If you are beginning to wonder how many different security programs Symantec can think up to separate you from your cash, so is Ryan Naraine:

The anti-botnet tool is being marketed as “complementary solution to existing antivirus or security suites,” adding yet another application to the list of security tools needed by PC users to avoid computer takeover attacks.

Here’s a list of the products sitting on your machine, sucking valuable system resources under the guise of protecting you from hacker attacks: Anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-rootkit, anti-spam, drive-by browser protection, etc., etc.

It has to be the biggest con job in IT to convince consumers that they should pay a separate subscription for each of the above “protection” products.

$29.95 here and $29.95 there - sooner or later it adds up to real money.

No, Microsoft isn’t going into the genealogy software business. It’s just that they badly want developers to use the facilities of the new Windows Presentation Framework (WPF, codename “Avalon”) that shipped with Windows Vista to create spiffy new graphics programs. To that end they are providing a variety of demo programs and:

Today, in collaboration with Vertigo Software, I’m pleased to announce the launch of a brand new end-to-end reference sample for WPF. Available for download immediately, Family.Show is a genealogy explorer that allows you to create or import a family tree and explore, annotate or save it to XPS.

We’ve shipped the source code for a number of demos before, but the bar for a reference application is somewhat higher. The goal here is to show best practices for the construction of an application and to try and include as much reusable code as possible that others can use both to understand the framework and to “borrow” for a real application.

(XPS is the XML Paper Specification, a document format like Adobe PDF that Microsoft also introduced with Vista.) Still using Windows XP? Not to worry - you get much of the WPF functionality and all you need to run Family.Show just by installing the .NET Framework version 3.0 on XP - it’s available at the above link.

Family.Show is a good idea for a demonstration program since most genealogy programs are understandably heavy on their database attributes, but usually light on the graphics which can get quite complex.  The use of WPF allows Family.Show to provide a really nice graphical explorer interface for family trees and it will import (and export) standard GEDCOM files so you can load it up with the data from whatever genealogy program you are using now and give it a spin. If you want to start from scratch building your family tree, Family.Show is fully capable and easy to use as the demo video illustrates.

Bottom Line:

I would have to say that Family.Show seems remarkably full featured for a demo program, but I did have some problems with it losing relationships in my personal GEDCOM file. For that reason and questions of long term support, I don’t recommend that you shift all your family records over to it, but it is still a neat way to browse around.