CHRISdotTODD

I have documented all the keyboard shortcuts for Windows XP that I could come up with. Most of them I use on a regular basis -- it is so much quicker than using the mouse. Let me know if I have missed any of your favorites. ( Click on the image to get the full-size view. )

I recently started listening to Buzz Out Loud , a podcast from CNET. It is a daily podcast that reviews tech news -- I am going to replace Slashdot Review with this, as I am tired of the errors from Slashdot Review, and there are now too many commercials. Anyway, back to my original point... Buzz Out Loud, hoasted by Molly Wood, Tom Merritt, and Veronica Belmont is just one of many offerings from CNET. I discovered today that they introduced CNET TV a several months back, and there appears to be some good content to help beginner and intermediate Internet users. These are small in length too, 3 - 5 minutes in most cases. Here are some programs to view: How to stop spyware How to stop computer viruses Get your music off your iPod Digitize your old photos Fix your digital photos Don't get scammed by phishers And if that is not enough, CNET also offer free online course in subjects such as Home PC, Home Entertainment, and Digital Camera & Design. Now I have not taken any of the...

Sony furthers its losses, this time with a battery recall 1.8 million Apple laptops , for a total of 4.8 million batteries. At a cost from $170 to $250 million for their battery problems, I do not think a 2% loss in shares is that much. Interestingly enough, if you look at Sony's stock over the last 12 months in comparison to the NYSE, they are not doing so bad. I plotted closing stock price and trade volume for some of more notable Sony announcements over since the Rootkit problem reported on October 31, 2005. I looked at the day before, the day of, and the day after each announcement. With all the bad things going for Sony, perhaps their recent $65 million purchase of Grouper is good news. Robert Cringely thinks so . Mr. Cringely, in his "i, cringely" column talks about how Sony can use this purchase to learn how to play in the new video era. At number 8 in volume, 1% of video traffic, I think this could be another loss for Sony. How many people have even heard of Gr...

I think next time I take my car into the shop, I will watch much closer. See what can happen if you are not watching.

If you are like me, you get very irritated by the time it takes to open a PDF file. And once open, Adobe is asking you to update to a new version. Worse, if you do not have the original CD (e.g. your IT department installed it), then once all the files are downloaded, the update fails. Oh, and did I mention that Adobe thinks it is okay to run all the time and consume some of your processing power while sending information about you back to them? FoxIt Reader is a great replacement. It's fast, it does not nag me, and I do not have to worry about someone stealing my processing power or my privacy. Do you still need to create PDFs? There is a better solution for that too... Try CutePDF Writer or PDF Creator . Both work like a printer driver, but instead of printing out your document, it prompts you for a file name.

I ran into a new site, TurnHere , that gets local talent to make short films about their city or town. Places include New York to Los Angles to Tokyo. TurnHere is pushing its services as a way to visit and learn about a place before you make travel plans. It was fun to view the films on Portland (my town), though there were a few errors in the interface. For example, the Chinese Garden in Portland was listed three times with slightly different names -- TurnHere needs a local to review before posting. Another error that was quite surprising is that there were videos for LaConner and Seattle Washington within the Portland listing. I like Seattle and all, but it is not close enough to bundle together. That is like putting Philadelphia and New York together. All that aside, it looks like a promising new site.

eEye Digital Research notified D-Link in February of a flaw in their firmware in several of their routers. After six months of not correcting, eEye has notified the rest of us. If you have one of these routers, you may want to put some pressure on D-Link to correct this bug. In the mean time, if you turn of Universal Plug-n-Play (UPnP), it will prevent the problem. For that matter, you may want to turn off UPnP whether you have this router or not. UPnP was designed to make it easy for non-technical types to get their router properly configured by software. The problem is that when enabled, any malware running on your PC could change your router settings without you knowing. Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte first discussed the dangers of UPnP in Episode 3 of Security Now in September 2005. Why then do we have UPnP? Microsoft has an article that talks about all the benefits to UPnP here . Regardless of the benefits, turn it off -- Learn to make the manual changes required, so you fully und...