I hate it when companies change my stuff, especially whey they automatically link words in something I have written. I am not talking about those hover links that Yahoo and many other sites use (usually underlined twice or as a dotted line), but rather a normal, permanent link that appears even when sent to another site (like Gmail). Google caught some flak for this back in 2005 when they added an auto-link feature to their Google Toolbar. I just recently found out that Yahoo Mail does this.

Rotoscope is a program for Linux and Windows XP that allows you to rotoscope a picture, giving the picture a cartoon-like appearance while maintaining a good deal of realism. If you have ever seen the movie “A Scanner Darkly” then you know what I am talking about.

The new AVG Anti-Virus 8 comes with a component called LinkScanner (sometimes also called Safe Search) that automatically checks the results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN and displays security information in the form of an icon next to the link. You can hover your mouse over a link and it will pop up detailed information.

AVG Anti-virus recently displayed a popup window telling me that I needed to upgrade from version 7.5 to version 8.0. AVG Free 8.0 is no longer only an anti-virus program, it now includes an integrated anti-spyware and a safe search web browser extension. AVG Free also no longer cripples the scheduler, you can now have it run a full scan whenever you want.

DEP (Data Execution Prevention) is a security feature in Windows that prevents a program from executing code in a memory block that is marked as no-execute. DEP helps stop buffer overflows, which are used by many computer viruses and other security threats to take over your computer. DEP is a good security feature to have, but there are a few times where DEP stops legitimate software from running (most likely due to poor programming or hacks).

I am disappointed that a device that we all use (and loathe) every day has not progressed much at all in the last 10 or 20 years. I have looked in every store and compared online the options of alarm clocks both cheap and expensive. At best, the alarm clocks out there are basic, at worst they are complex - having too many features that require multiple simultaneous button presses. All seem to suffer from either poor design, poor implementation, or both. The other day I ran into a device powered by Linux called the chumby. At first, the review I read made it seem perfect, but after reading more about it I found that the alarm clock looked more like an after-thought.

So here is what I think a good alarm clock should be able to do:

Recently, a friend of mine asked me to look at his karate instructor’s computer. I went over there and the computer was continuously rebooting. It was running Windows 2000 and MSN as their internet provider. He, like most other computer users, did not have a backup of his software or data. He runs his business off of this computer, which has irreplaceable information from the past 10 years and has a program that manages all of his students, training, schedules, and billing.

Extensions are plug-ins that add new functionality to Firefox. I recommend the following extensions:

Education is not something that you should consider finished after you leave school. I strive to learn new things all of the time, it helps me form a more complete picture of how things operate, why they work that way, and how I can make the most of it. Most of the time I turn to Google or Wikipedia, but knowing other resources can often take much of the work out of finding the information that you need.

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If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, you may as well find some decent sidebar gadgets to replace the rather pathetic ones that Microsoft gave you. Here are a few I use to get you started. If you have any others that you think should have made this list, please let me know in the comments.

Pandora Radio Sidebar Gadget - Listen to music from Pandora Radio without a web browser. This gadget can do pretty much everything you can do from the Pandora website: it allows you to rate or skip songs, change and create stations, and see why it decided to play the current song. It does seem to display ads at the bottom, which presumably would be turned off if you have a paid Pandora account.