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.

Bookmark managers

Since I’m now switching back and forth between IE, Opera, Firefox, and Safari on three computers at home and one at work (one Mac, the rest PCs), I’m starting to think about bookmark management and synchronization. Here are some links:

  • This page has a pretty big list of bookmark managers.
  • Bookmark Buddy: Windows software. $30. Looks like it’ll import and export from IE, Firefox, and Opera. (Not an online service.)
  • Sync2It: This one’s got Windows and Mac client software, which apparently syncs your bookmarks to their web site. Besides supporting IE, Firefox, and Opera on the PC, it looks like it supports Safari on the Mac, which is nice. The price varies from free to $25/year, depending on what you’re doing.
  • Powermarks: Windows software. $25. Looks like it suppors IE and Opera, with Firefox support in beta. Online sync.
  • del.icio.us: Very popular online “social bookmarking” site. Free. There are some cool things about it, but you have to dig if you want to figure out how to import/export bookmarks from your machine(s). Looks like you could do a lot with the API, and maybe a bit of Python coding.
  • Spurl is also a social bookmarking site. It claims to support IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari on Windows and Mac.
  • This guy has some stuff to say about the differences between Furl, Spurl, and del.icio.us.

I think I’m most interested in Spurl right now, but I haven’t tried any of these yet.

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.