Windows Money Savers
Oct 5th
Today I checked out Ars Technica’s latest Week in Microsoft, and came across two articles that might save Windows users some money.
The first is about Microsoft’s freshly-out-of-beta antivirus suite. First look: Microsoft Security Essentials impresses. In 2006, Microsoft released a retail antivirus program called Windows Live OneCare. By the end of 2008, Microsoft had announced that it would discontinue this product in favor of a free replacement called Microsoft Security Essentials.
For years I’ve been using AVG Free, but today I uninstalled it (you don’t want two antivirus programs running at the same time) and installed MSE. It looks like it’s a bit easier to use than AVG and I must say, it’s got some beautiful system tray icons. I might write a post in the future with some expanded impressions of the product, especially with Windows 7 coming out this month.
Microsoft Security Essentials can be downloaded here.
The second article is about something I’ve known about for years but to which I’ve never committed. Newegg reveals Windows 7 OEM prices. I’ve known about OEM versions of Microsoft Windows since before Windows Vista was released. From what I understand, an OEM copy of Windows is only supposed to be used on a newly built machine. However, I believe that is more of a suggestion in line with the “Student and Teacher” edition of Microsoft Office (which has since been renamed to the “Home and Student” Edition.) On Newegg’s listing page, the text appears to be cut off, but here’s the part that caught my eye:
software requires the assembler to provide end user support
That made me think: Hell, I’m capable of that. I’d prefer it that way, in fact. If I were married with kids, I’d probably put an OEM copy of Windows on each of their machines, too. I wouldn’t suggest it for my parents or my sisters, or even my best (nontechnical) friends, though. But for me, why not? Oh, and why is this a money saver? Depending on the edition of Windows purchased, the OEM version is about 50% cheaper. The greatest savings percentage-wise appears to be on the Professional Edition, which is the one I’ve got my eye on.
Newegg lists every version of Windows 7 it’s selling here.
So if you’re a technical person, take a look at both of these articles. If you’re not, consider using Microsoft Security Essentials. Because it’s free antivirus software.
Timberlake hhgregg Commercial
Sep 30th
An ad I’ve been seeing on TV lately:
The commercial is unremarkable except for the end when Justin Timberlake rubs it in against Peyton Manning. I laugh when I watch this, probably because I’ve done a similar sort of thing with a video game controller.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Aug 30th
I picked up Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on Friday, as I’m sure many people did.
Somehow, the improvements I notice the most are visual. Apple has adjusted the default gamma from 1.8 to 2.2. I don’t know what that means. However, I can tell very easily that all the colors I’m seeing are more saturated. It was slightly off-putting at first but I’ve quickly come to appreciate it. The second thing I’ve noticed — and I might just be imagining this — is that the glass dock’s magnify effect seems to be smoother than it was on 10.5 Leopard. This doesn’t make sense to me, because I’m under the impression that such things should only be improved on machines with discrete video cards. My late 2006 MacBook has an integrated Intel video card.
Someone at Apple decided to put the Applications folder in the dock by default. This is appreciated, since it’s one of the first things I would do after installing Leopard. There are other changes to the dock. Menus are charcoal and transparent. Exposé is available on a per-application basis by clicking and holding on each application’s dock icon. Also, Exposé is available as an icon, which can be dragged to the dock. I recommend doing this.
I have no complaints about the software. It was inexpensive at $29. The previous update — 10.5 Leopard — cost more than $100 if I remember correctly. Installation was very similar to that of Leopard. I performed a clean install. When I purchased the software at the Apple store, the clerk asked if I had an Intel Mac with Leopard. I did, and Snow Leopard requires an Intel Mac. And I read on the Internet some questions about whether a clean install was even possible with Snow Leopard. Like I said, I was able to do it. But I do wonder if the process will be any different when performing a clean install of Snow Leopard on top of an existing install of Snow Leopard. Will the installer ask me to insert my Leopard install disc? We’ll see.
Overall, Snow Leopard is an inexpensive update which provides some worthwhile new features and clears up some disc space.
Gmail Tasks and the Scrollbar
Jul 10th
The other day I created a grocery list in Google’s Tasks as it appears inside Gmail. I resized my browser window briefly and discovered what I thought was a Firefox 3.5 bug — The tasks pane rendering above the horizontal scrollbar:
The Behavior as I First Spotted it, in Firefox 3.5 Mac
Before asking anyone about it, I decided to check if the same phenomenon occurs in other browsers. My research:
Not Just a Firefox Thing
I thought, maybe this is a Mac OS X issue. I booted into Windows and fired up IE8:
Definitely not Limited to Mac OS X
Then I wondered, would Google let this slip through in Chrome, too?
Sure Enough
Finally I booted back into Mac OS X and loaded up Gmail in Opera:
Op ... Wah?
I’m not sure what to conclude about all this. Is this a bug from which all major browsers suffer? I can hardly believe the functionality got into all these browsers accidentally. So is it a Gmail bug? It does get in the way of the horizontal scrollbar. I guess the moral of the story is this: When viewing Gmail with Tasks, don’t make your browser window too narrow.
Firefox 3.5
Jun 30th
Just downloaded Firefox 3.5 from Mozilla’s FTP site (yeah, you’re not really supposed to do that). It’s clear that JavaScript runs faster (which is a big deal to me), but I’ll give the latest browser a thumbs up just because of the New Tab button. For years the first thing I do when I install Firefox on a machine is add the New Tab button to the toolbar. Now it’s there in almost the exact same spot.
Dear ESPN.com: Your Article Layout Sucks!
May 22nd
Hey, ESPN.com.
We’ve known each other a long time. We started spending a lot of time together in college. You’ve gone through several redesigns in that time. Heck, I even blogged about some of them. But lately, I’m not feeling it.
Here’s the thing. Your article layout sucks. Take a look at what I’m talking about:
Click to Embiggen
See the smallest column, over there on the left? That’s the text of the article. The second column is a sidebar. The third column is a statbox. The fourth column, which is empty, runs the length of the page but is only occupied near the top, with an advertisement.
Note that on several lines, only two words fit in the first column, and on one line, only a single word fits. And this is just one screen’s worth of one article. It’s so painful that it makes the article unreadable.
Here’s my suggestion: Change the article layout so that it has two columns of equal width. The first column contains the body of the article, and is untouchable. Nothing may encroach upon it. The second column can contain anything else — advertisements, sidebars, statboxes, whatever.
A second option might be to take inspiration from the iPhone version of ESPN.com. Let’s take a look:
We’ve got an ad, the section header, the score header, then hey — what’s this? It’s a pseudo-tabular nav header. We could apply this to the main site! Solve the layout problem by hiding elements (additional analysis, links, stats) until the reader wants to see them. If we were to scroll down on the iPhone site, we’d see that for the entire length of the article, it occupies the full width of the browser window. No element encroaches upon the article’s space. In this respect, the article is easier to read on my phone than it is on my computer. Not only that, but the layout of the article on my computer — at its narrowest point — is not as wide as the layout of the article on my iPhone. That’s measured in characters or inches, take your pick.
So, ESPN.com, I still really like you, but you’ve got to work on this stuff. Or what? Or else, that’s what.
Comcast Offers Upgraded Service to Customers, Anticipates Loss of NFL Network
Apr 24th
Today I received an envelope in the mail from Comcast. It was addressed to “Comcast Customer” and through the window in the envelope I could see the words “Important update re: your programming.”
I expected it to be a procedural letter of minimal importance, but I opened it anyway. At the top of the letter there was some more text: “POSSIBLE NFL NETWORK CHANGES.” If you haven’t read about it in the news, Comcast (abd I believe all of the cable companies) are in disagreement with the NFL over whether NFL Network is a premium channel or a basic channel, how much the NFL should charge the cable operators, and how much the operators should charge customers for the channel.
Also from the letter: “The NFL Network may stop providing its programming to Comcast on May 1, 2009.”
Because of this, the letter offers me Starz free for 12 months, or an Internet speed upgrade free for 12 months. Starz isn’t bad, but it only offers one HD channel, so I went with the speed upgrade.
When the NFL Network started showing live NFL games, I added a package to my Comcast service so that I could see it. I wonder if this offer has been extended to all Comcast customers, or only those who currently pay to have the NFL Network as part of their service.
Nuke the Fridge … to the Future?
Apr 13th
If you haven’t seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you may not be familiar with the phrase “nuke the fridge.” In the film, Indy finds himself on a nuclear test site in Nevada and climbs into a lead-lined refrigerator to survive the blast. The phrase has been adopted by popular culture and has a meaning similar to “jump the shark.”
I recently read the Wikipedia article on Back to the Future. From the section on the film’s development:
Originally, Marty was a video pirate, the time machine was a refrigerator, and he needed to use the power of an atomic explosion at the Nevada Test Site to return home. Zemeckis was “concerned that kids would accidentally lock themselves in refrigerators”, and the original climax was deemed too expensive.
The footnotes seem to indicate that this information comes from Empire magazine, but I couldn’t find the article.
Steven Spielberg produced the three BTTF films. He also directed the four Indiana Jones movies. Did he pluck this (previously) impractical scene from an old project? Who knows.
Fav.Premo.Biz
Mar 4th
Around the new year, I had some problems with my Netvibes page. For two days, I couldn’t access my bookmarks. As a result, I began to build my own bookmark manager. Then Netvibes answered my support email with a resolution to the problem, and I stopped working on my project.
On the same day Netvibes responded to my email, I was laid off from my job. After a few weeks of not writing any code, I got the itch, and decided to move forward with the bookmark manager. For two or three weeks I spent up to five hours a day, five or six days a week, getting the thing up and running. Once I got it to a feature-complete state, I stared at it for a few days, enabled user registration, and gave the URL to a couple friends.
I applied twice to Google AdSense, and got shot down both times. I was waiting to blog about it until I incorporated ads, but now I don’t know if that’ll happen.
The site is fully functional. Still, there may be bugs, and there may be some obvious features that I missed. If you register, you’ll get an email, and I set up feedback at fav dot premo dot biz for, well, feedback.
If you sign up, remember: each link can have more than one tag. For example, I might tag ajc.com with news and atlanta, I might tag espn.com with news and sports, and might tag atlantafalcons.com with sports and atlanta.
Oh — the URL: fav.premo.biz.
Safari 4 Beta
Feb 25th
Wow, Safari 4 includes built-in functionality extremely similar to a Firefox extension I use almost daily — Firebug. It’s accessible through Safari’s Developer menu, which is hidden by default. I wonder if technology like this being built into browsers will become the norm. I seem to recall that Mozilla had decided to strip the console or DOM inspector out of future versions of Firefox, but a couple minutes on Google and Wikipedia leave me with no evidence of this.
The conclusion here is that competition is good for the consumer, and developers aren’t often thought of as consumers. It’s also interesting that Safari, which lacks Firefox’s robust extension architecture, now has built-in functionality similar to my favorite Firefox extension. This reminds me of the progression of Mac OS (and perhaps Windows) — imitate popular third party applications, and include them with the OS. Think of iTunes: MP3 player, CD ripper, podcast manager. Many popular (free) third party applications have faded into obscurity because people don’t need them anymore.