KSFO's Web Wanderer

The Links for June 15, 2002

BBC Sport : World Cup 2002 - Dudley

Dudley says: "For those of you who are in to World Cup soccer ("Football???") the BBC has a dandy site with lots of information. Each of the 38 teams has its own page with bios, stats,and news."

There's a ton of stuff on this site:

Features
Sports Talk
TV/Radio Coverage
Photo Galleries
A "Matches Wallchart" with a nice, printable version

Coolest thing - you can download BBC Sport to your PDA, either by syncing, or using a wireless service like AvantGo.

You can also listen to BBC radio online.

World Cup fans will love this site. Check it out.

Thanks, Dudley!

Windows XP Professional How-Tos - Andantino

Andantino says: "Microsoft's How-To page for XP. Granted, some of it is for Sys Admins, but you might want to check out the User Interface section"

This site has a TON of information. Pretty much most of what you'd ever need to find is probably here.

It's a nice front end to TechNet articles. If the article is not exactly right, keep scrolling down, and you'll find related links - what you need may be there as well.

Clicking on an item takes you out of the How-Tos, so I'd suggest right clicking, and opening in a new window.

Also on the site - Office How-Tos, Security How-Tos.

Harry Eng Bottles - Solinas

You may have heard of, or seen, a "ship in a bottle". The idea is to build a ship, piece by piece, through the neck of a bottle.

Among collectors of such things, and among puzzle experts, the legendary master of these bottles was a gentleman named Harry Eng. Harry didn't build ships, but he'd put other odd, seemingly impossible, objects into bottles.

Harry Eng made bottles containing big knots of rope, decks of playing cards, scissors, padlocks, books, washers, tennis balls - even one of his shoes.

>From the site: "A former minister and elementary school teacher, educational consultant and magician. Harry had the most fun with his impossible bottles getting people to think. I must have heard him say "the average person uses only one-eighth of their brain" a thousand times, if I heard it once. Usually after someone would offer a not-so-well throughout solution to one of his bottles. The most common being that the bottle was cut or that it was blown around the stuff inside. Harry would tell you straight away that everything went through the neck of the bottle and that all of his bottles were standard, off the grocery shelf variety. No monkey business with the bottle. The stuff inside? That's up to you to figure out."

Check out the rest of the "impossible objects" category. Other builders have made bottles, and other objects, which are seemingly impossible.

Interesting stuff. Check it out.

LOMOportfolio - Brent

Brent says: "It contains photos by Yuri Syuganov, mostly black and white, that were taken in the Soviet Union from about 1985 through 1992.... all with a little Soviet-made camera made by Lomo in Leningrad (Now St. Petersburg). These cameras are still being made and have achieved a sort of cult status (go to www.lomo.com if you want details on the camera itself)."

Lomo-compact-automat cameras are 35mm cameras, which sell for around $100 (includes shipping). And they are popular - searching Google for "Lomo compact camera" gave me 3,710 hits, including sites to buy them.

>From the site: "LOMOportfolio.com is about nostalgia. It is a collection of pictures I took during late 1980s, early 1990s. These were my student and first postgraduate years; a period in my life when I constantly carried with me a little camera - a LOMO-compact-automat - and shot pictures of virtually anything that attracted my eye. "Around-photography" happenings claimed the rest of my time back then."

All Nettools: the most useful tools available online - Santa Rosa Steve

Santa Rosa Steve says: "A clean, well-designed site... At All-Nettools.com you'll find dozens of the most useful on-line tools.

·Network Tools:
 SmartWhois, TraceRoute, Proxy Test, and more.
·Financial Tools:
 Stock quotes and analysis, charts, business news, major indices. 
·Search Tools:
 Search the Web, newsgroups, or file archives.
·Language Tools:
 Dictionaries, thesaurus, acronym finder, and on-line translations. 
·Telephone & Address Tools:
 Direct and reverse searches.
·Geographical Tools:
 World time, domain converter, weather forecasts, and maps. 
·Privacy Tools:
 Popular anonymizers and anonymous remailers.
·Measurement Tools:
 Convert yards to meters, pounds to kilograms, and many more."

Pretty handy stuff - all in one place. Thanks, Steve!

Free For All!

"Free For All" picks are hot, FREE items or services. It can be software, online services, you name it - but it's got to be free, with no strings attached.

ClockDomain - Solinas

If you want a cool desktop clock or clock screensaver, this site has some pretty cool ones.

There's over 50 models of clocks here - most have fun animations. This is great if you, like me, have trouble seeing the little clock on the toolbar.

Download as many as you want. The install over each other, like skins, so adding multiple clocks takes up very little room.

They are fun - check them out.

DocMemory RAM Diagnostic Test - Santa Rosa Steve

Santa Rosa Steve says: "How's your PC's memory? Does your computer lock up or crash when you run a memory-hungry program? If so, defective memory may be the cause. Here is an easy way to find out. Thanks to an Everything Computers listener I learned about DocMemory Saturday."

>From the site: "DocMemory, an advanced self-bootable PC Memory Diagnostic Software is a user friendly software designed to capture all possible memory failures in PC."

A rigorous test pattern exercises both the PC Base and Extended Memory to locate defective memory, all carried out without the need for user to disassemble memory from the PC."

Download the software and the installation program automatically create a self-booting diagnostic diskette. Simply insert this diskette into the floppy and reboot your PC to begin testing your system memory."

Available memory test patterns includes sophisticated algorithms such as MATS, March B+ ,March C-, and Checkerboard…etc. Selecting "Burnt-In Mode", will capture 95% of PC System soft memory failures. Editing the pattern and other parameter functions are made simple by using a mouse interface."

For Limited Time only - DocMemory diagnostic software, is available free-of-charge. Download your FREE copy now ! If you still need help send us an email to DocMemory with a detailed description of your system and problem and we'll do our very best to help you."

I tried to find a memory checker some time ago, and there were no free ones that I could find. Grab this while you can!

Thanks, Steve!

Gopher Smoker - Santa Rosa Steve

Santa Rosa Steve says: "Microsoft has not issued patches for the latest Internet Explorer security hole which exploits gopher services, but has provided instructions for temporarily fixing the problem. Gopher Smoker automatically applies the Microsoft recommended settings to your Internet Explorer configuration, and can restore the original settings if needed. You only need to run this utility once, however you can run it again at any time to verify the settings.

No installation is required. Simply download Gopher Smoker to the folder of your choice and run it."

Microsoft's "solution" is for you to go in and manually change settings. Not good, especially for new computer users. Gopher Smoker will go in and do it all for you, simply.

As of Late Friday, Microsoft has not yet issued the patch.

Give this a go. Thanks, Steve!