Tips and Tricks

The Tombuntu blog has posted an interesting method for improving the really ugly "early Win95" look of Windows programs running under WINE. Unfortunately, it slows some Windows apps running under some versions of WINE to a crawl on some systems -- mine included. The ability to "theme" WINE applications is a new feature in recent builds of WINE and should improve in the future.

According to this article from PC Magazine, Fantasy Football is the most popular game on the Internet with 15 million or so players. Most of them do not pay a dime to play either as they use the basic (aka free) version of Fantasy Football sites. This PC Magazine article goes on to review the major Fantasy Football sites. If you are thinking about setting up or participating in a Fantasy Football league this fall, you'll want to read this article now.

Article: The Ultimate Fantasy Football User Guide

PC Advisor has just published an article suggesting ways to check if your PC is infected with "Zombie software" that allows others to control your computer and use it to send out Spam or to attack other computers. Unfortunately, there are no surefire ways to check according to the article, but there are things you can do.  And there are things your ISP could do, if only they would.

Read the article: Find out if your PC is a zombie

As most people reading this blog probably know, I've decided not to upgrade to Vista. I would need a new computer and really have no need for one, other than to run Vista. I have, however, upgraded to 1 gig of RAM over the weekend and this has finally allowed me to run Windows and Linux together on one desktop.

My wife likes to email me urls, but doesn't like to have to type a subject. The new Thunderbird 2.0 pops up a warning dialog when you leave the subject blank and does not provide a way to turn this warning off.

Thunderbird 2 has taken remote image blocking to extremes. They have removed the option to allow remote images to display from the options dialog in an attempt to force users to add every address from which they they want to see images in emails to their address book. The idea of a whitelist is good but it needs to be separate from the address book -- at least I don't want my address book cluttered with lots of addresses I will never use.

Don't you hate it when a nice freeware program decides not only to go commercial with new versions, but removes all the old freeware versions of the program from sites they control or influence in an attempt to make people use the new payware version? Sure, the newer versions generally have more features, but many times the old freeware version will do what you need with zero impact on your pocketbook -- if you could only find a copy.

There are a number of web site you can go through to download videos from sites like YouTube to your one system, like KeepVid -- but you have to wonder if such sites are tracking what you do.

Microsoft announced yesterday that support for the consumer versions of Windows XP (Home and Media Center Edition) will not end in April 2009 as previously announced. Instead, XP Home and XP MCE will then enter the same five Extended Support period that has always been promised for XP Professional.

I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 over the weekend as a release candidate for the new version of my "must have" Tab Mix Plus extension had been released. The upgrade seemed to go smoothly. Several extensions had to be disabled as they were not marked as working in Firefox 2.0, but I expected that. Unfortunately my theme was not compatible and the upgrade did not notice this. When Firefox 2.0 came up for the first time, the user interface was quite broken.