gf-tech.com

Hotmail shows ads, and always has as far as I can remember. This is fine with me since I don't pay for using it, and I don't user Hotmail that often. What gets me is that both Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger don't seem to show context sensitive ads. I expect that functionality in this internet era.

Half the ads served to me are for singles dating sites. I don't care about these sites and would rather not see ads from them. My Hotmail profile shows me as married, yet these ads continue. I doubt I am the only one seeing this.

An update on the Kindle book deleting scandal that I wrote about previously. The eBooks were being sold through Amazon were not authorized versions, and the owner of the copyright requested Amazon to stop. Amazon could have simply stopped selling new copies, but they went a step further and deleted already purchased copies from everyone's Kindles.

Apparently the Terms of Service on the Kindle don't mention Amamazon can/will do this. From the New York Times article

Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”

Not so much eh? I never considered buying a Kindle due to the DRM scheme involved. Now I definitely won't. There are lots of other eBook readers out there that don't have any DRM that I will consider buying. There are also more and more places to buy PDF's instead of dead tree tomes. Sometime (soon I hope) there will be a tipping point and book shelves will become more and more bare as society turns to digital books.

There is a news story popping up all over the place today. Apparently a published asked Amazon to stop selling the electronic version of a certain author's books.

Amazon agreed and then

It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

Yikes. This is yet another example of why DRM is horrible, and bad. You can read more here.

Another huge strike against the Kindle for me.

The other day on ThinkGeek I saw they had something called a Mimo Mini. This is a small gadget, totally USB powered, and highly geeky (I think). This gadget is a USB powered mini monitor. At 7 inches diagonally, it adds a bit more screen real estate.

On a whim I decided to buy one. After making the purchase, and waiting for my delivery, I got it set up.

Setup is extremely easy. Run the installer, click OK a couple times, plug in the monitor, and that is it. There are some tweaks you can do to arrange where WinXP thinks it sits, but other than that, you can start using it right away.

On my main monitor I used to run a Rainmeter system display. I also had to run a small utility to block windows from maximizing over it. I re-arranged my Rainmeter skin to fit on the Mini, and now I can maximize on my main monitor again.

I also run the Task Mangler on there too. This allows me to keeps tabs on what is eating up the most amount of RAM (usually this is Visual Studio, or SQL Developer). I am also keeping the minimal version of iTunes there too.

TechNewsWorld has a review ( warning: advert splash screen ), where they suggest a few other interesting usages. Twitter client, photoshop palette holder, Yahoo Widget holder, are all good ideas.

I've had the Mimo Mini for less than a week, but already I am loving it. I keep it in landscape mode, but it can also be swiveled to portrait mode.

I've heard a lot about Android, the new mobile phone OS by Google. I am curios as to what it looks like, and what can be done with it. Today I read on Download Squad that there is a live CD version that can be downloaded. You can boot your normal computer in Android to test it out. You can also run it in VMWare or VirtualBox. Cool. I may give it a spin to see what the fuss is about.

Read about LiveAndroid here.

I have a recurring event in Google Calendar that has no end date. Three times a week it sends me a reminder to do something. It was set to never end.

Recently I noticed I had stopped getting the email reminders. I checked my calendar, and saw that the event was no longer there. I went back a week and the event still showed on M,W,F.

I edited the event and still found that it was set to never end. I could not get this event to keep propogating.

The start date on the event was close to two years ago, so I made the start date the current date and that seemed to reset the event. That was a weird glitch.

I was installing a defrag utility today on my work machine. The installer went through the usual installing stuff, then I got asked if I wanted to install the Yahoo! toolbar. Absolutely not. If I had wanted it, I would already have it installed. I was greeted with this:

The installer states:

By clicking the "Next" button, you agree to these software license terms

Technically if I don't agree to Yahoo's terms, I can't install the software I downloaded. Sure I can uncheck the two Yahoo related checkboxes, but by clicking next I am still agreeing to their terms.

Maybe I should uninstall that defrag utility and email the author and let him know why.

A while ago I read about Jeff Atwood donating a sum of money to an open source project. It got me thinking about all the tools and utilities that I use at work on a daily basis. I find lots of open source apps to help me work better, to enhance my computer (which helps me work better), and to manage my data.

Last year I decided that in 2009 I would purchase a licence or donate to an app's author each month. Lots of projects have a donation button, and for those I am still trying to figure out an amount that makes a difference. I want to let the author know that their app makes a difference to me, but I can't break my bank account doing that. I had this idea before the economy started its downward slide, and now I think it is more important than ever to do this.

Some of the commercial apps I will be buying a licence for can be pricey. I think that for the year I will end up spending close to $350. Stay tuned to learn about where I spend my money.

After moving my technology books from one house to another and giving many outdated ones away to charity, I've decided that something has to give before my back does. I have also been thinking a lot about what I want to take to read on my next vacation. Do I take magazines, novels, geek books?

Dead tree tomes for geek topics really need to be in a digital book format. I've heard good reviews of the Kindle from Amazon, but I will not be tied down to their DRM. The other ereader that I have read about is from Sony and is too expensive for my taste (and Sony has a history of proprietaryness).

Then I saw the eSlick by Foxit (I am a fan of their software). I hope this device comes to market. It has the features I want at a price that is more reasonable than others. No DRM is huge as well. The downside to all e-ink displays is that currently they are only black and white. This is excellent for novels and reference material, but not so good for magazines that I like to read.

For me the sticking point is that we need more publishers to sell a PDF version of books at a reasonable price. I will not pay the same amount for a digital book that I will pay for the paper version. The resources needed for a digital version are a lot less, and the price needs to reflect that. Give me a good price and I will buy more books.

I hope Foxit can get publishers on board. Perhaps we need Foxit to open a digital book store?

via Gizmodo

One thing I have been experiencing at work lately is that my office is mostly comfortable, but not 100%. The things that bug me are crappy lighting (something I can change), and a finicky temperature.

Currently, the only lighting in my office is one crappy overhead fluorescent. I need to change this, and get a good full spectrum desktop lamp that I can move around to suit my needs. This is sheer lack of time that is prohibiting me from fixing this.

The temperature problem is tricky though. So far today I am comfortably warm and cozy. I am wearing a t-shirt, a thermal top, a hoodie, and a down vest. Yesterday my hands were cold all day, and this was a big distraction. The problem here is that I don't control the temp in my office alone. The control is outside my office, and affects 3 or 4 larger offices. Making myself warm makes others hot. Not sure if there is a compromise somewhere, but having difficulty typing because my hands are too cold is no good.

I find that I can get distracted by my environment. Cold hand and poor lighting make me think about ways to fix it, cause me to fixate on those problems instead of my work, and generally make me not want to go to my office. I think I need to fix this.