A Text File of Your Directory

And you too can get overcharged for as little as nineteen ninety five! Well, more like $25 or $29.95. Oh, and there was one here for $15 ... aren't they such the great guys. Ok, I had a brain blip. It took me about fifteen minutes of looking around before my brain finally clicked through a database in my head that hasn't been normalized since 1993. I slowly trotted back through time as I googled.

The first link in that relational databased took me back to a time that I was learning Unix. I remembered there was an output command that could be used to send a directory structure into a text file. And that little tid bit reminded me of some DOS utilities that had been created to mimic Linux commands.

Ok, so I search a little more and then it suddenly clicked ... err, wait a minute. 'Pipe', hmm. ... ">" ,,, hmmm. Ok, I can't remember what it was; gotta google it. "How to print directory contents in DOS". And there it was! The first hit on the list. You see, there is some use for this old stuff in my head. It saved me $19.95.

Ok, well it didn't save me any money because I wouldn't have paid that for the program. However it did save me time. Because I probably would have stuck to my searching the Internet for a free program that was out there. I'm sure it exist. Please add this to your top ten reasons to not be afraid of DOS. Dig in there. Learn that old stuff it's useful !! Oh, and btw, the command was "dir/b /s > dirlist.txt" :-) Just typed that in the directory that I wanted to create a text file list of; and viola!

Plaxo and Thunderbird

Wow, I don't have time to write about and test all of the cool things that are available out there. Now that Plaxo says it supports full integration with Mac OS X and Mozilla Thunderbird I'd really like to do some testing. For a long time Plaxo was just an Outlook thing and that always made me a little unsatisified with it.

However, take this news and add it to the "Portable App" version of Mozilla Thunderbird and now you 'really" have something that I would like to take for a spin. God gives us all of these cool toys to play with while we are here on the planet :-)

Backing Up Blogger

For those of you that can have a blogspot blog (blogger), a Movable Type blog, or a Typepad blog, then there is a great tool out there which will back up 'everything'.

Just grab yourself a blog at WordPress and their "import" tool will perfectly grab anything from Movable Type, Typepad, or Blogger. It even imports comments from a Blogger accounts! I was the guinea pig so you don't have to be. After scouring the Internet for a solution over the last three days I 'finally' found it and it works! I'm so pumped :-)

Jot Spot

Good afternoon everyone. Just doing my usual Internet exploration and I came across http://www.jot.com. It's a cool online collaboration tool that it's 'reall'y easy to sign up for. No credit card, no muss no fuss. It's a simple and fun way (pardon my marketeez) to get your feet wet in the wiki world. I was able to create an account in less they thirty seconds (huh?). Wow, that's the most painless process that I've gone through in a long time. Ok, says here that I get twenty pages with five users for free. Sounds like a really good start to begin playing, or to begin a small company effort if that is your bend.

Though if you are hoping for something long lasting I would simply play and learn the tools here. But also prepare to 'possibly' move somewhere else just in case; backup, backup, backup. I checked out archive.org and it appears they haven't been around for more than three years though. I couldn't check their past offereings because up until 2005 their robot.txt file was blocking archiving. A few years before that the web site was used for some kind of Asian tour offering company.

The quicky is that a wiki is a website designed for collaboration. In a wiki everyone can edit, update and append pages with new information, all without knowing HTML. That sounds confusing, but believe it or not, there are some ideas like this one that have made it possible to track all of that kind of activity without making an untrackable mess out of it. And this was is great. I loved the easy to view version history. Ok, I'm in now. As soon as I logged on I got this very fluid pop up screen that actually looked pretty as far as pop up screens go. It told me the dirty basics on how to get started. How to personalize your wike, Visit the training center for free video tutorial, invite other users, etc. I'm a jump in and get it kind of guy so I clicked on "hide ths window" and started playing.

Wow "Private" I like that idea. A big red icon in the upper right shows me that no one else can see this unless I tell them about it. That's a good idea. But because I want you to see what I've created, I took a couple of minutes to create a "jottester" account. The password, is "password". Ok, with that aside I started to play. Took me only five minutes to create what I did becasue I just copied and pasted. Then went in and added a couple of pictures. You too can check out what I did using the above log on information. After you've looked at it then you can create your own and play too. Enjoy!

ONLINE TV (FREE)

Oh, this just got ridiculous. Quick everyone throw away your TVs. You have SEVENTY Channels to choose from now and all you need is bandwidth. I promise, if you are into TV at all, Channel Chooser is all you will want and more. You can thank me by sponsoring one of those guys that you have been ignoring on the streets. You know, the one's begging for money. But don't give them money, give the a cheese burger or buy them some voicemail so they have a contact number to get a job. Samaritan House will only charge $10 for three months.

Open Office 2.0.2

Wow Open Office 2.0 is GREAT! I thought that 1.1 and a couple of the other later versions were good. But OO2.0.2 rocks! It already had great support for MS Word, Power Point, Excel and other MS Office documents. But now the support is even better.

If you are ready for a test drive you can download it here. If you want to look at the tutorial of it first (which is good if you are first time user or if you are teaching it to others), then you can download that with this link.

Geeks Spread the News

Wow, go geek police. Sometimes things happen at just the right time and something can be done about it. Top ten reasons not to hide anything.

New Google Web Page Creator

Check out Googles new home pages at http://googlepages.com/. You have to have a gmail account, but hey those are easy to come by these day. You can email me or any one of your friends with a gmail account and I am sure they will be happy to give you one.

The Google pages new slick interface makes it so easy to create web pages. It almost makes a tech like me ashamed to admit that I created a page :-). You don't even need to know what the heck a file name is or what FTP is.

Spoofs and Phishing

Good evening everyone. Thought this might be a useful tutorial for many of you that still are unclear as to a few points on what to look for when it comes to spoof emails. This is also known as Phishing. The following tutorial come from Paypal.
Spoof Tutorial

Paypal and eBay are a couple of the most commonly sent spoof emails, but there are others. If you would like a deeper/advanced look at spoofs you can check out the following web site.
More Details on email Spoofing