Nilesh Kapadia

I was recently listening to TWiT and they were discussing what e-mail clients they used. Steve Gibson and Steve Wozniak mentioned they still use Eudora for their e-mail. One of them said they considered using something newer, but all their old e-mail is in Eudora and there is no way to convert it to something like Thunderbird format. That is true that there is no direct conversion, but the solution to that is to use IMAP.

Yahoo! has bought del.icio.us. Just goes to show that the dotcom boom is coming back. Small companies without a revenue stream popping up in the hopes of being bought out.

The interesting thing about this acquisition is that Yahoo already has a social bookmarking product called "My Web 2.0." It has one feature that del.icio.us does not have: the ability to search the content of yours and your friends' bookmarks. I wonder if they are going to merge the two, and if they do, what it's going to look like in the end. del.icio.us certainly could use the ability to search bookmarked content. I might actually start using it with the addition of that feature.

I've always found task switching to be something that just isn't inefficient enough, and I tend to struggle with my window managers a bit to get things working the way I want them (and usually have to settle for less-than-optimal solution). I recently read a blog that pointed me to TaskSwitchXP, which is an excellent replacement for the Windows task switcher. I've always wondered why you couldn't select a task with the mouse when hitting ALT-TAB, and this allows just that. It also lists the full titlebar for each app and gives you a preview if the window isn't minimized. There's plenty of configuration options and I was able to get it to work the way I wanted.

With search engines becoming less and less useful, personal and social bookmarking may become one of the new ways to find information on the net. I had some ideas about this before social bookmarking started to take off (probably the same ideas as other people), but sat on them for too long. Meanwhile Yahoo has created almost exactly what I envisioned. del.icio.us was something like what I was thinking but not quite. The basic idea I'm going to discuss here is being able to search the content of your bookmarks, and using a social network to share bookmarks to form a social search engine powered by people's bookmarks.

Update: Looks like Google has something close to searchable bookmarks - the Search History feature). But no social features and no proper integration into their personal home page. They really could do a lot to make this feature more useful, the interface for it can use some work. If there is an easy way to add/remove bookmarks from an external application (maybe they have an API for it), this could really be useful and would do part of what I'm talking about.

For those in search of good quality PC keyboards, Unicomp makes excellent "buckling spring" keyboards and also has models that have an integrated mouse. Read on for my personal experiences with keyboards...

If you haven't heard of PuTTY, it is the best SSH/telnet client for Windows available (there is also a Linux version which I haven't tried). I recently got tired of entering a username for one of the accounts I SSH into (it was a random combination of letters and numbers) and was wondering how I could specify that in a PuTTY session config. I could not find that documented anywhere, so I tried the obvious: I put username@hostname under "Host Name (or IP address)" and it worked.

Although the Linux version of GAIM (a multi-protocol IM client) has always worked well for me, the Windows port I found too buggy and unstable in the past. This may have been the fault of the Windows port of GTK+ which seems to have improved recently. Recent versions of Gaim for Windows have been running smoothly.

In Firefox, you can make any bookmark open up in the sidebar. To do this, open the properties for a bookmark and check "Load this bookmark in the sidebar." Now the page will load in the sidebar, and any link you click in the page will open up in the main browsing area. This would be good for a page where you have a lot of links such as a collection of bookmarks (e.g. del.icio.us). You can even use it to place the JavaScript Console in the sidebar.

Although the Notepad included with Windows is fast and easy to use for viewing and editing random text files, the lack of UNIX compatibility made it useless for editing many files. I was using Wordpad in the case of UNIX file format, but that was awkward for its own reasons. So I switched to Notepad++ for all my text editing/viewing needs. It has syntax highlighting for many languages, tabs, UNIX file format support, zoom, regexp replace, and many other little features that are nice. Much nicer than Notepad AND it is open source.

If you want to skip to the point of this blog, just go get Amarok which is an excellent music player for Linux.

I've been dreaming up my ideal music player lately. I use a lot of different computers on a daily basis. At home I use Linux, Windows, and (recently) OS X. At work I use Windows. Winamp 5 has been my favorite player for a while. Unfortunately it is Windows only and when I'm at home I prefer to leave my Windows machine powered down unless I have a real need for it (for example, running Visual Studio .Net). So when I got my Mac Mini I started using iTunes to play music. It works, but isn't quite the same as Winamp 5. I'm so used to have the Winamp-style playlist, which is more of a "scratch" playlist that you arrange for listening right now, but disappears after you're done with it. Winamp has iTunes-style playlist as well when they are necessary. iTunes added the "Party Shuffle" feature which is cool, and could function a little like Winamp's playlist, but not quite. I could go on about how iTunes is lacking compared to Winamp 5, but it doesn't matter. I don't want to run Windows at home anymore just to listen to music.