Sunday, June 19, 2005

RSS, USB Drive Tools, Malware Infections, & Freeware Disk-Cloning tools

Have you heard about RSS? I’m talking about RSS feeds. They are like special bookmarks that allow you to see what content has been updated on your favorite websites. It took me a while to get the concept down. Firefox includes the ability to handle "live-feeds" in its basic package and it confused the heck out of me for quite a while. I finally found the “Sage” extension for Firefox after reading a great RSS guide and it all started coming together. There are also standalone versions; FeedReader for instance. It is really cool and useful once you get it down.

HP has a free USB flash drive tool for their flash-drives, but it works on almost all other manufacturer’s drives as well. Not real fancy, but you can use it to format your flash-drive to work as a boot device as well. (Just be sure to copy your flash drive’s data to your HDD before you reformat it!) Another cool USB tool is Remora's USB Quick Launch. Details on the application here.

Want to see the sad sight of a vanship being shot out of the sky? Got two examples of malware infections with screenshots (crash#1 and crash#2). Thanks paperghost! Knowing how it happens helps with knowing how to keep this junk off your pc as well as how to clean them...if navigator/mechanic work on your vanship is more your thing.

Did I mention I like free stuff? Here are two links (HD Clone-2 & Ranish Partition Manager) to drive cloning software that is free as well as a more technical Linux how-to and a Windows XP guide thrown in for good measure. Yes, my vanship is XP-SP2 but I like Linux and enjoy flying a Linux vanship. More flying lessons on that to come...

Listening to The Heartless Bastards...Check them out in an interview on NPR and snag some (legal!) mp3-teases from them at their homepage. Wow! What a voice and sound. Go buy their album. It is just a couple of bucks on iTunes. Groups like this inspire me to start buying CDs again.

See you in the skies
--Claus

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