DVD not working? Give it a wipe

Ross, like most buyers of DVDs and CDs, had assumed that a new disc would be clean, but that's not my experience. I've found so many wearing all sorts of laser-confusing lint and micro-grit that I now clean every disc I buy before the first playing. Rented movies are far worse. They're so often pock-marked with scratches and fingerprints it's a wonder they play at all, especially in the new-generation Blu-ray players, which are proving to be rather fastidious.

Here are some important tips for cleaning disks, courtesy of The Age, via Stuff.

Gmail notifier

Email programs like Outlook and Outlook Express have an alert that sounds when new mail arrives. I find that particularly helpful, as I have the program set to automatic download, but I don't have to keep checking while I am working on other things. So how can you get a similar feature if you have a Gmail account? One answer is Gmail Notifier, of which there are two versions. There's a Firefox add-on, which adds an icon to the browser toolbar, and a general version which adds an icon to the toolbar at the foot of the Windows screen and alerts you to incoming mail.

New Microsoft security tool

Microsoft today released a new security tool called Security Essentials. It's free, it's XP, Vista and Windows 7 compatible, and it's getting very good reviews. Like this one from PC World.

How to choose the fastest line at the supermarket

Murphy's Supermarket Law states that whichever checkout line you choose, it will be the slowest. However, the folk at Lifehacker have come up with a rule of thumb they reckon will give you a faster through time:

When choosing which line will be the fastest, it might surprise you to learn that the "express" lane may not always be the best choice. Meyer took a scientific look at supermarket checkout times and came to the conclusion that the number of people in line adds more to the wait time than the number of items each person has in their cart.
[W]hen you add one person to the line, you're adding 48 extra seconds to the line length (that's "tender time" added to "other time") without even considering the items in her cart. Meanwhile, an extra item only costs you an extra 2.8 seconds. Therefore, you'd rather add 17 more items to the line than one extra person!

A rule of thumb I learned years ago for McDonalds and other fast food joints is don't choose any line where an adult has children.

Keeping passwords safe

I remember the first time my mother and father started locking the doors of our house, back in 1963. (I think it was just coincidental it was also the year of President Kennedy's assassination.) Up to that time, the house had always stood unlocked, and as a young kid I couldn't understand why we now had to start locking it. I had a brief return to those days of innocence when I spent two years in what is now Vanuatu, on Volunteer Service Abroad. Crime was almost non-existent there in those days and I didn't even bother shutting the door, let alone lock it. My flat was across the road from the prison, which was surrounded by a low hedge, and the front door stood open all day long. Prisoners were used for public works around the town, and each day you would see them taking their constable out for his daily walk. He would proceed to lay down in the shade and go to sleep while they, armed with machetes, would happily slash the grass around him and do their bit for the community. Most of these men were in prison for wife-beating (a national sport at the time) or drunkenness, but seeing they didn't get drink in prison were perfectly safe. How I long for such crime-free times again.
Sadly, locks, passwords, and multiple layers of security are utterly vital these days, even more so in the digital world. I seem to have hundreds of logins and passwords for the many websites I visit in the course of work, and keeping track of these is a job. Some people use the same password for everything, but it poses the danger that if it is stolen or cracked, the intruders have access to every detail of your life. Keeping passwords secure is even more problematic. The worst thing you could do would be to write them on bits of paper (although I have been guilty of that on occasion). Better is to copy them into a Word document, and then password protect the document. Even better is to keep them inside password-storing software, and I have just started to use a simple open-source applicaton called Password Safe. Password Safe allows you to safely and easily create a secured and encrypted user name/password list - all you have to do is create and remember a single "Master Password" of your choice in order to unlock and access your entire user name/password list.

Panorama photos

I have blogged a couple of times about software to stitch together several photos into a panorama. In the process, I overlooked the obvious. Microsoft has a neat free program called Image Composite Editor that also does the job well. Admittedly, it's one of several rather unsung projects from Microsoft Research that the company doesn't talk about much, so I'm using that as my excuse.

Speed up Firefox

Firefox is my favourite browser, particularly because of the amazing range of really useful add-ons available. But I have become increasingly frustrated lately with the treacle slowness at which it loads, which seems to have got worse over time. Apparently this is a common problem, caused by fragmentation of the profile databases that Firefox uses. If you are a new user of Firefox, it loads fine, but as your usage expands, so the program slows. Thus I was delighted to come across a free utility that really does speed up Firefox. I installed it today, and immediately noticed a major improvement. Thanks to Gizmo for the heads up - you can read his article here, along with a pointer to the download.