More educational websites:

Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics: semiconductor physics, Edge Emitting Lasers and VCSELs

Posted by akaDruid on 26 Feb 2005 at 11:02 am
Posted in with 0 Comments (Visited times)

One more critical extension if you surf through sites with annoying flash ads everywhere:
flashblock

Posted by akaDruid on 25 Feb 2005 at 03:02 pm
Posted in with 0 Comments (Visited times)

What Firefox extensions do I use?
These two you have to have:
Image Zoom
Dynamically resize any image on a webpage. Perfect for zooming tiny thumbnails or reining in those giant digi-cam snaps.
Adblock
Kill those annoying giant banners, flashing gifs, and even the worst criminal: flash!

And these two are nice:
BlogThis
easy access to your blog – I use it for most of my posts.
Delicious Delicacies
Changes the text in your firefox preferences – it’s a tradition.

Posted by akaDruid on 23 Feb 2005 at 10:02 am
Posted in with 0 Comments (Visited times)

Google has gone public with gmail at last. Ironically, the email address I used to sign up to be notified on is forwarded to my gmail account… where it promptly hit the spam filter.

I nearly ignored it, thinking it was a phishing trick to get gmail a/cs but the headers appear to check out (from what I know of these things). I’ve pasted them at the end of this post. They do use Domain Keys too. For obvious reasons, sign up links and my email addresses have been removed.

Anyway, here’s the email:

Hi there,

Thanks for signing up to be updated on the latest Gmail happenings. We hope it’s been worth the wait, because we’re excited to finally offer you an invitation to open a free Gmail account! Just click on this link to create your new account:

Since last April, we’ve been working hard to create the best email service possible. It already comes with 1,000 megabytes of free storage, powerful Google search technology to find any message you want instantly, and a new way of organizing email that saves you time and helps you make sense of all the information in your inbox.

And here are just some of the things that we’ve added in the last few months:

- Free POP access: Take your messages with you. Download them, read them offline, access them using Outlook, your Blackberry or any other device that supports POP

- Gmail Notifier: Get new mail notifications and see the messages and their senders without having to open a browser

- Better contacts management: Import your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Outlook, and others to Gmail in just a few clicks. Add phone numbers, notes and more. Even use search to keep better track of it all.

We also wanted to thank you. For showing us your support and for being so patient. And to those who have already signed up for Gmail, thank you for giving it a try and for helping us make it better. Our users are what have made this product great. So whether you’re just signing up for your account or you’ve been with us since the beginning, keep letting us know how we can build you the best email service around.

That’s it for now. We hope you like Gmail and will share it with your friends. We’ve got lots of cool new stuff planned and we can’t wait for you to see our work in your Gmail accounts! Stay tuned…

Thanks,
The Gmail Team

==
We sent you this message because you signed up to be updated on Gmail. If you do not wish to receive such updates in the future, you may opt-out of receiving Gmail updates by visiting:

(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them into the address bar of your browser)

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

and here’s the headers:

X-Gmail-Received: 7c5fab624c21baf8a046b27fef5ddd3e93c6a002
Delivered-To:

Windows: Right-click ‘Send To’ over SFTP
I created a batch file for windows that allows you to send any file to a remote computer over SFTP (file transfer over SSH) with putty… very basic stuff, but an idea that someone might find handy:

echo put %1 > myserver.psftp
echo exit >> myserver.psftp
“C:\Program Files\PuTTY\psftp” username@myserver.com -b myserver.psftp -bc

Then if make a shortcut to that in your ‘send to’ folder (c:\docs+settings\yourname\sendto) on 2k/xp normally, you have a two click operation to put any file from your filebrowser to your server.

More about using SFTP here:

Using PSFTP to transfer files securely

Posted by akaDruid on 17 Feb 2005 at 05:02 pm
Posted in with 0 Comments (Visited times)

Well, I installed Plaxo on my Outlook 2k PC. It was reasonably slick, not too slow considering the amount of info to work with. My weird set up of folders took a couple of seconds to set up, but wasn’t difficult. I just set the unwanted ones to ‘ignore’ in the client, although it had already uploaded them , so I then went the website and deleted them. Now it is set up, it’s simple to keep maintained, and very useful. I couldn’t get the calander working initally but it seems OK now, and I particularly like the way it can display multiple calanders at once, showing the appointments in different colours.

It’s almost good enough to make me start using OE at home. but not quite. Please Plaxo, support Thunderbird!

Posted by akaDruid on 16 Feb 2005 at 07:02 pm
Posted in with 4 Comments (Visited times)

Since Adam from Plaxo sent me a reply to my earlier comment, I have decided to try out their service. First impressions:

I signed up on the website, which was quick and easy. It requires an email confirmation as you would expect, which is not a problem. I had to rescue the confirmation from my spam folder, as it explictly failed their SPF!

Next, I downloaded the outlook sync client and installed it. Download is small and quick. It fired several warnings on the anti-spyware software I use, but they all look like harmless registry values. I had to resurrect a copy of Outlook Express since the sync client doesn’t have an option to integrate with Mozilla Thunderbird. With a bit of fiddling to first get my contacts into OE, I was able to start the sync process. It was fast and accurate, although the status messages were a little odd (‘transferring 0K of 0K’).

Once I had all my contacts uploaded, I went to the Plaxo website to see how the online service looked. The layout is nice, very clean and friendly. There are a lot of options, and it covers all the basic PIM services such as contacts, calander, notes, etc, similar to the way MS Outlook works.

One thing I thought of: I had my own contact information in the data I synced with plaxo, and it listed it all correctly, and found me as a plaxo user. I would have been nice to have a ‘this is me’ button to automatically fill in my main details, save me copying them out – this might already be possible but I don’t know how.

Unsurprisingly, none of my existing contacts were registered with the plaxo website, so I wasn’t able to update any information from others, but I did send an invite to a friend to try it out.

It would be lovely if plaxo would consider setting up a SyncML service. This would give them a really hot feature, ability to auto-sync your data with all sorts of devices, and since it runs over standard http like the website, and there are free servers available, it should be a very low running cost for them.

Overall opinions so far? It’s a good service, and does what it says on the tin very competantly. It’s not a complete solution yet, but with some extra features, it could turn into a ‘killer app’ for me. Expect more when I have a chance to try out the integration with MS Outlook at work.

So if you’re reading this post Adam, here’s my wishlist!
In order of priority:
SyncML support
Mozilla Thunderbird & Sunbird support
Gmail sync

Posted by akaDruid on 14 Feb 2005 at 12:02 pm
Posted in with 9 Comments (Visited times)

The Tower of London 

Posted by akaDruid on 10 Feb 2005 at 08:02 pm
Posted in with 0 Comments (Visited times)

A Church on Great Tower Street in London, near the Tower. 

Posted by akaDruid on 10 Feb 2005 at 08:02 pm
Posted in with 0 Comments (Visited times)

Here’s the front of my office in London. I think I need more practice at taking photos at night with this new camera 

Posted by akaDruid on 10 Feb 2005 at 08:02 pm
Posted in with 0 Comments (Visited times)