Google Operating System points out that it’s getting harder to find the free version of Google Apps For Your Domain, which lets you use Gmail and other services with your own preferred Internet address. The free option is still there, but it requires some digging to locate, with most links pointing to the paid-for enhanced edition and the only reference to the ad-supported version being a brief link reading ‘Compare to standard edition’ two screens in. If all that seems too fiddly, you can access the free version directly at this link.
Free Google Apps, More Difficult to FindAfter one too many false alarms, system slowdowns and hopelessly phrased help screens, I decided to ditch my installation of Trend Micro Internet Security Pro and switch to CA’s Security Center. I knew that would involve much uninstalling, installing and rebooting. However, I forgot that in the brief (and offline) period when I’d dumped Trend and hadn’t installed CA, Vista would reactivate its built-in Defender software, creating many a potential conflict down the road if I didn’t banish it from my system start-up.
To disable Defender, run it from the main Start menu, click on Tools, select Options, scroll down and untick ‘Use Windows Defender’ under the administrator section. Click Save and fight your way through the UAC prompts. Double-check that it’s been exited from the task bar as well, and you should be good to go. If Microsoft pushes ahead with plans to provide free security software for Windows users, this process will likely get even more fiddly in the future — but running multiple security software packages is pretty much always a recipe for disaster.
Looking at aggregate data of 3,000 email accounts over a three month period, researchers at Northwestern University say that emails are responded to randomly, but the volume of sent mail follows predictable patterns. Namely, late at night on the weekends it’s much less likely you’ll receive any reply, for the obvious reasons — sleep and time off from work on weekends. The study suggests that the best time to contact someone when looking for a timely response, such as Monday morning, and can help network administrators plan for high-volume periods. Connectivity at home is better than it was when the data was recorded, but is it just me or do you actively avoid email outside of business hours as well?
“Tell the noob to type rm -rf /,” the troll types to his friend in IRC, and suddenly a friendly call for Linux tech support help turns into a formatted hard drive. If you don’t know what a forkbomb is or what it looks like you might want to check this list of seven commands that could prove lethal if typed into a command line shell. If you’re making the plunge into operating systems like Ubuntu but are worried about what not to do, check it out. Any horror stories you readers might want to pass along to save someone else a headache down the line? Photo by zakwitnij
The 7 Deadly Linux Commands [Tech Source From Bohol via Digg]Send that big PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet without clogging up your recipient’s email inbox straight from Microsoft Office using file delivery service YouSendIt. Their new Office add-in puts YouSendIt into, appropriately, the Send to menu above the Email option. The YouSendIt Microsoft Office add-in is a free download. [via Cnet]
Windows only: Free application Process Manager adds an entry to your right-click context menu that adjusts an application’s priority or kills the app. Once Process Manager is running, the kill and priority options are only available when you’ve right-clicked a window’s taskbar item. That’s pretty much all there is to it. The app runs in your system tray and eats less than 1MB of RAM. While Process Manager doesn’t do anything you can’t already do from the Windows Task Manager, it does provide quicker access to a couple of handy functions and is worth a try if you do much force-quitting. Process Manager is a free download, Windows only.
Process Manager [SourceForge via Life Rocks 2.0]Windows only: Free application Eraser Portable puts Eraser —the popular open-source secure file deletion tool—on your thumb drive for secure file deletion on the go. Like the original, Eraser Portable can wipe any hard drive, optical media, files, folders, encrypted data, the Recycle Bin, and pretty much any other data you want to kill. It may not be an app you use every day, but it’s a great utility to throw on your thumb drive, iPod, or other portable device for those times you do need a quick, secure delete. Eraser Portable [PortableApps.com via MakeUseOf]
Whether you work quietly alone at home or in an office where the hum of fluorescent lights is the dominant soundtrack of your day, tune into one of the 31 ambient loops offered on the iSerenity web site. Listen to the clack of typewriters and maybe your own keyboard pace will pick up; if you miss the big city, you can have New York City as your background (at least, the safe-for-work version); expatriate Angelenos would probably prefer “Highway Hiatus.” It’s like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for your ears. Looking for more phonic tonics? SimplyNoise does white noise in your browser and does it well. Serenity now.
iSerenity – Environments [via MetaFilter]New music discovery search engine Mufin finds music you’ll like by analysing songs for similarities. We’ve seen several tools offering similar results from these sort of “audio fingerprints,” but according to tech blog TechCrunch, Mufin’s analysis actually works really well. Apart from the basic search engine available on their homepage, Mufin also offers different software and widgets to integrate the app with other music tools—including Facebook and MySpace apps, a Windows-only iTunes add-on (that sort of challenges the sometimes off-the-mark Genius tool), and a Windows-only Music Finder. Mufin is created by the Fraunhofer Institute—the people who brought us the venerated and time-tested MP3 compression algorithm, so it’s definitely got some cred going in. If you give any of Mufin’s new offerings a try, let’s hear how it works for you in the comments.
Mufin [via TechCrunch]iPhone only: When you see a book, CD, DVD, or game at a friend’s house you want to look up and bookmark instantly, fire up SnapTell Explorer on your iPhone or iPod touch and take a photo of it. Similar to a bar code scanner (except you photograph the item cover, not its bar code), SnapTell automatically looks up your item and gives you links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Wikipedia, and straight-up search engines so you can compare prices and find out more about it. SnapTell’s results aren’t 100% accurate—once it gave me a strategy guide result when I photographed a video game cover—but everything else I tried it on, the results were spot-on. (Though you can bet an Australian bar code might throw it — LH AU ed.) Here’s what the result for the Halo 3 photograph looked like.
