iGoogle

I try to have a life outside computers (see post below), which means that I frequently come across things which have been around a long time but just did not cross my path. iGoogle is one of those. iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized Homepage) lets you create a personalized homepage that contains a Google search box at the top, and your choice of any number of gadgets below. It's a big step away from the normally very spartan Google homepage. Gadgets come in lots of different forms and provide access to activities and information from all across the web. For instance, you can view your latest Gmail messages, read headlines from Google News and other news sources, display YouTube videos, store bookmarks for quick access to favourite sites from any computer. In other words, a portal just like Yahoo. Well, not quite like Yahoo - there are way more funky gadgets. Recently iGoogle released a "chat" box at the side of the home page that allows Gmail users to chat from their homepage without going to gmail.com, and a whole lot more "social gadgets" are about to be released, although the roll-out is in the US first and may take a while to get to this side of the world.

Hey ho for a life on the ocean wave

I came the realisation recently that too many of my leisure activities involve computers. So instead of coming away relaxed, they can add to my stress. And while I have a major home landscaping project on the go and coach springboard diving (occasionally competing), sometimes they seem more like work than leisure = more stress. So I have decided to try and build a small sailing dinghy. I love sailing, but only get the opportunity about once a year if I'm lucky, and have always wanted a boat of my own (probably stems from jealousy that when I was a kid my cousin had one but I didn't). I found a book titled Ultrasimple Boat Building in the Christchurch library, and this does a wonderful job of demystifying the whole affair. So tomorrow I'm off to the DIY to hunt materials, and then in to it. Probably appropriate considering the wet forecast for the weekend. I'll keep you posted from time to time.

Including Service Packs in an XP back-up disk

If you're running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or even Service Pack 3, what happens if you have to perform a system recovery using your original XP CD? It's not easy. The old CD doesn't have all the patches and updates you've downloaded over the years. It could take hours or even days to redownload and reinstall all that extra stuff, during which time your PC is more vulnerable to viruses and outside attacks. (A lot of those patches tackle security issues.)You do have options, though. For example, you can download the Microsoft Service Packs as standalone installers. Another solution is slipstreaming.
Slipstreaming is the process of combining your existing Windows XP CD and the latest Service Pack into a new CD. When you're done, you'll be able to install the whole OS. It is easier to accomplish than you might think, provided you've got your original CD and the standalone Service Pack. For how-to details, check out Lincoln Spector's "Slipstreaming Service Pack 2 on an Old Windows XP CD". Can you do likewise with Vista? Digital Inspiration has instructions on slipstreaming Vista with SP1 (you'll need a DVD for that), and it will probably also work with SP2.

New Google search engine

Search engine developments are coming thick and fast at the moment. Recently, Microsoft launched Bing, and has also announced it is joining with Yahoo. Now only months after a major revamp of its engine, Google has posted a preview of yet another new version. Previews of the new engine are only available at a separate address at the moment. It looks the same as the current one but ranks results differently, which could affect businesses who rely on Google results to drive traffic. In a blog posting late Monday, Google says the new engine, code-named "Caffeine," will be faster, more accurate and more comprehensive.

Help make Microsoft Office better

Two Microsoft employees have created an online suggestion box where users can submit feature or fix requests for the Office suite of programs. MakeOfficeBetter.com, an unsanctioned site, was created by Steve Zaske, a planner on the Office development team, and Luke Foust, a Microsoft developer in the test group. "If you've got a new feature idea or an idea on how to improve Microsoft Office, please share it here," said Zaske and Foust in a debut message on the site. "[And] vote on other ideas you agree with. Through the magic of crowd-sourcing, the best ideas should rise to the top." Zaske and Foust acknowledged MakeOfficeBetter was not an official company effort, but said they would "do our best to get the ideas posted here in front of the right people within the Office development team."
My first suggestion would be to get back to basics and chop out all the features that scarcely anyone uses, so Word becomes less of a memory hog. My next would be a desperate plea to incorporate paragraph style sheets in PowerPoint - talk about antiquated!

Improving your Windows experience

I have still not switched to the Vista operating system, and am not likely to do so. So while I quite like XP (while drooling for a Mac), it has its limitations. For instance, I will believe Windows is as good as a Mac when you can have wild characters (such as ? and &) in file titles, and when you can colour a folder or the text of a file name without going to a 3rd party extension. However, there are millions of little applications which can improve the Windows experience - your biggest problem is sorting out the wheat from the chaff. To help you out, I have just come across an excellent list of 43 Windows enhancements, and I certainly intend to try out a couple of these.

Murphy's Law extended

Murphy ("If anything can go wrong...") is extending his list of laws by the mile. Here's a new set just for computers and associated technology.

Enlarging photos

Here's a tool I've been waiting a long time for. If you work with images you will have doubtless seen situations where you would have liked to use a larger size image than what you had but could not do so because the image quality would degrade too much on enlargement (e.g. pixellization/artifacts/loss of detail). SmillaEnlarger is a free, open source program that enlarges/magnifies images while keeping up the quality. This standalone software uses a number of filters that are designed to remove some of the typical artifacts generated by the enlarging process and “fill in” image information to achieve a much higher quality image than image enlargement algorithms typically employed in most applications. Photoshop and Irfanview - along with just about every imaging program - enlarges images, of course, and of those two I prefer Irfanview's results by a small margin. But one of the drawbacks with both is they are not interactive, and you can't adjust the results, which is a big plus with SmillaEnlarger.