I've just got a new 17" LCD monitor, my first ever,(thanks KFM :p) and though common sense tells me that if it had dead pixels (as is not uncommon with LCD screens) I'd notice them eventually, curiosity got the best of my proverbial cat and I wanted to know Right Now. Ergo, the Dead Pixels Test. The test is really just a patterned background image that makes dead pixels stick out like a sore thumb, but it's handy and does what it claims to. The verdict? Miraculously, my pixels are 100% intact.
What's worse then bills? Getting more bills with interest charges and the possibility for bad credit! If bills seem to get lost, fall under your desk, get eaten by animals, or just plain slip your mind, why not try out billQ. It's a web based application that tracks bills. billQ keeps you notified of how much you have to pay, and when you have to pay it.
billQ is a free web based application, that requires registration with only an email address and user name. Think it's not secure? Think again. billQ requires no sharing of information, account numbers or any real name for a company who's bill you are tracking payment for. Setting up a bill to track simply requires a name, amount, and a date. From there, you can give it a one-time, or a recurring payment status. To make things easier, billQ has added in billing groups. Members can be set up for a special group, and have the ability to view the changes made to a bill. Which can come in handy if payments are being rotated and shared for a particular service. Bill information is easily edited once inputted, and reminders are sent out to Email or SMS. For added convenience for Mac OSX users, billQ has developed a widget where you can quickly view all incoming bills, mark a bill as paid, and track bills. billQ seems like a great little application that helps you stay on top of those ugly bills.
The moment I saw Joe's Goals, I knew I liked it. It's a web-based goal-minder with a great interface for your daily goals. Joe's Goals is for tracking how many times you've worked out this week, how many times you ate out, or how many blog posts you've made. The interface is a simple grid with two kinds of goals: Good (worked out) and bad (skipped class). Clicking on a grid square will add a checkmark (good goals) or an X (bad ones) icon, and clicking on an icon makes it disappear. You can add as many as you want to any grid square, and at the bottom of the grid, your accomplishments are tallied for a "daily score." And to keep yourself honest, you can share your goals with your friends. One thing I really like about Joe's Goals is that at the very top of the front page, before you've registered or signed in, there's a demo grid that you can play with to get a feel for the service.
Then Joe's Logbook, a companion site that's integrated with Joe's Goals and lets you track your life's ups and (if you please) downs with a little more specificity. Its interface looks very much like the Joe's Goals grid, except that instead of just clicking to add checkmarks, you can enter specific information that you want to log, like what exercises you did today or what you ate. Other uses suggested by the site are dream log, writing journal, or travelogue. Of course, like Joe's Goals, Joe's Logbook's utility lies not in its robustness but its simplicity, which is perfect if you want a web app that will let you take quick notes while staying out of your way, but perhaps less so if you're looking to write your memoirs. By the way, if you already have a Joe's Goals account, you don't need a new account for Joe's Logbook. Just log into Joe's Goals as usual and click on "Add Logbook" at the top of the grid.
Have you ever wanted to screw with a co-worker or friend? Okay, let me rephrase that. This site is for when you want to screw with a co-worker or friend. It's a website that allows you to enter information for the title bar, window text, and buttons, and it generates an image that you can then download - like the example above. Unfortunately, the dialog boxes that it generates aren't accurate enough to fool anyone that knows Windows even reasonably well.Speaking about error messages, here's a funny story I found on the internet:
"This is probably the best ever practical joke I played on a friend. A buddy of mine that I went to school with was "the source" - he was the guy that hung out in IRC rooms and newsgroups and managed to get all the latest cracked software. Of course, I'd never recommend running cracked software, but this was a simpler stupider time. He was also the guy that enjoyed finding all the latest "hacking" scripts, and running them against his friends. If I had a dollar for every time he remotely bluescreened my Win98 box, I'd probably have about $30. Still, it was annoying.Anyhow, this friend's claim to fame was that he hadn't paid for any software on his system, including Windows. One day when I was visiting him, I waited until he went out for a smoke, and I slipped a floppy into his drive with a simple .reg file on it. Then I quickly double clicked the .reg file, clicked OK, and stuffed my floppy back in my pocket.The .reg file was a simple registry entry that added a dialog box during logon to Windows - he was running NT Server if I remember correctly. My dialog box popped up with the following:Title: Illicit Software AlertBody: Illegal software has been detected on this system. Press OK to remove.Now the great thing about Windows logon dialogs is that you only get one button: the OK button.My buddy literally fell off his chair backwards. He was terrified. He couldn't bring himself to click OK, and he couldn't get into Windows without doing so. I wish I'd been better able to contain my laughter, because it didn't take him long to figure out that he was being had."For all of you that spent some time to read the joke. Here's some information about the registry entry you'll want to mess with in order to try this trick on your friends
[Start] [Run] [Regedit]
Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon Modify/Create the Value Name [LegalNoticeCaption] according to the Value Data listed below. Data Type: REG_SZ [String Value] // Value Name: LegalNoticeCaption
Value Data for LegalNoticeCaption: [Type the Caption for the Dialog Box] Modify/Create the Value Name [LegalNoticeText] according to the Value Data listed below.
Data Type: REG_SZ [String Value] // Value Name: LegalNoticeText
Value Data for LegalNoticeText: [Type the Data for the Legal Notice]
Exit Registry and Reboot |
Media-Convert is a fairly impressive web service that will convert a file from one file format to another. That sounds pretty benign, but what's impressive is how many formats it supports. There's a good chance Media-Convert supports almost every document on you computer, including dozens of audio and video formats, a ton of common and obscure image formats, documents from Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, and others, compressed archives, and more. One particularly neat trick it can do is convert PDF documents to Adobe Flash (SWF) movies. It can also capture web pages as images, convert Microsoft Access databases to Excel spreadsheets, and, in case you're into this sort of thing, convert text documents to morse code. Of course, it's not lightning-fast. You have to upload your file or enter the URL of a file and then wait awhile while it's converted, but far as convenience and price (free!) goes it can scarcely be beat.
