Category: software

PC Annoyances

A few days ago, I did a full spyware scan on my desktop PC with CounterSpy. It identifed a few registry entries as spyware and suggested quarantining them. I was pretty sure it was wrong about that, but I let it quarantine them anyway. I think that was a mistake. The machine has been acting a bit weird ever since, and it pretty much fell apart today. To make a long story (relatively) short, I went back to a system restore point before the CounterSpy changes, uninstalled CounterSpy, and reinstalled StarDock’s ObjectDock, which had gone quite wonky. I hope I’m back to normal now. The moral of this story is: Never trust CounterSpy.

Notetaking applications for the Mac

  • NoteTaker from Aquaminds — nice look and some interesting features.
  • StickyBrain from Chronos — lots of features. Can sync with iPod and Palm.
  • NoteBook from Circus Ponies — big on outlining and general note-taking. Very colorful.
  • MacJournal from Mariner — oriented towards keeping a personal journal and blogging.
  • Formation from Radical Breeze — almost like a database program. Custom fields/forms, stuff like that.
  • Hog Bay Notebook — appears to be a fairly simple notebook app. Nice-looking, though.

All of these are pretty interesting. Meanwhile, I’m still using iOrganize, which isn’t as flashy as any of these, but does the job.

NeoMem

Neomem looks like a really neat little organizer. I played around with it a bit yesterday. I’d probably switch to it over my current organizer, Vault, if only there was a keyboard shortcut to paste the current date & time into a note. That’s a must-have for me. It’s open-source, though, so maybe I can figure out how to add that feature myself.

Living in text files

Here’s a crazy idea: keep all your stuff in one big text file! I really can’t see myself doing this, though I see the advantages. I use OneNote and Vault (an old shareware program) on Windows, and iOrganize on the Mac to keep track of all my stuff. Oh, and of course Palm Desktop in conjunction with my Palm i705. The result: stuff all over the place!

Opera

I’ve pretty much switched from Firefox to Opera now, though I’m not sure I’ll stick with it. It does a few things better than Firefox, but it renders some pages kind of funny. (Some of the stuff on the Blogger home page looks off, for instance.) It does seem to be generally faster than Firefox.

Google Talk

Just for yuks, I downloaded Google Talk today. I’ve never been much into IM, but since this is from Google, maybe I’ll be able to do something interesting with it at some point. I’ve been kind of curious for a while about the possibility of using IM for various system notifications and stuff like that. Other IM clients I’ve played with haven’t had useful command-line versions (or APIs) that could be called from a script. I’m kind of curious to see what’ll happen with this one.