NslMail

I have finally gone live with a project I’ve been working on for awhile. Head over to nslmail.com and check it out. The basic idea is that when you sign up for websites, you can use an NslMail alias instead of your real email address. Messages are all forwarded to you, and you can even reply through the alias without disclosing your real address. This model does a few things for you:

1. It gives you complete control over the spam you receive. Each alias has its own whitelist & blacklist, so spam becomes almost non-existent.

2. Because you use a separate alias for ever site, when you do get spam, you know where they got your address from.

3. As a nice side effect, you get a log of every website in which you have signed up for something.

To make using the tool as easy as possible, you can install a bookmarklet that will let you access your aliases from any site. A firefox extension is being tested as well.

Exploring Dvorak

I’ve always seen the name floating around the internet as an alternative to qwerty but I’ve never known anything about it. Well, after some boredom enticed browsing, I found this page on the Dvorak keyboard. A little intrigued, I changed my keyboard settings to Dvorak and started on the tutorial. After about 20 min I was able to type (slowly) without looking. I can easily see this layout outperforming qwerty. I will post again after I have a bit more practice. Maybe in a week or two.

Gmail Invites

If anyone is interested in a gmail invite, let me know. I have about 20 of them to give away. For now this offer is open to people that I actually know. If nobody bites I might offer them out to all.

World of Warcraft

I’ve been playing for 3 weeks now and it still has my attention. Overall this game was well designed. I especially enjoy the speed at which the game starts. It’s quite differant from what I’ve seen in other MMORPGs. If I had to compare this to another game, I would say its alot like everquest (pre-suck) but without the long zone loading times and with much better quests. WoW is very quest oriented as opposed to simply killing monsters for XP. My only negative comment is that I think the profession system in the game is almost worthless and adds little value. If you’re not playing already, go buy it and look me up. You can find my player info in the Games section.

Future of P2P filesharing

Give it a read, I think they might be onto something here.

Gaim Filesharing Plugin

Open Source Myths

I saw this article posted on slashdot today and felt I needed to pass it along. It sums up most of my thoughts on the current state of OSS and hits on a few areas that I haven’t yet thought about.

da gmail, da gmail, wat wat da gmail

I finally got signed up with Gmail today. My new email address is nicklargent at gmail dot com. I’ve only used it a little bit so far, but I’m already quite impressed. Unless the others like hotmail & yahoo play a little catchup, Gmail could very easily take over the webmail market. Before I talk about some of the cool features I just wanna say that all you idiots out there that have privacy issues with Google need to get a freggin life. If you don’t like it, don’t use it and stfu. For the rest of you, here is what you have to look forward too….
[Read more...]

Skype me already

If you haven’t checked out Skype yet, then head over to skype.org and hook yourself up. For those of you who don’t know what it is read on. Everyone else can find me online as arack99.

What is Skype?
Skype is free and simple software that will enable you to make free calls anywhere in the world in minutes. Skype, created by the people who brought you KaZaA, uses innovative P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to connect you with other Skype users. If you are tired of paying outrageous fees for telephony, Skype is for you!

This app actually works. I’ve tried them all before. SIP Phone, MSN Voice chat, Netmeeting, etc… Skype actually worked through my firewall with zero configuration. The voice quality is excellent and the fact that you can have more than two people in a conference makes this app superior to the rest. The interface could use a little work, but I’m not complaining. I just need a couple more headsets and I’ll be using this everywhere I normally use IM.

New technology sux!

I just picked up a copy of the new Splinter Cell this weekend for a little multiplayer action. To my surprise it wouldn’t run on my 1 year old gaming laptop which has a GeForce 440 GO in it. Of course the box (that I looked at afterwards) says it works with GeForce 3 and 4 as well as lots of Radeon cards. Then it says “Will not work with the GeForce MX or GO models”. It starts up and tells me that I have inadequate pixel shader support. WTF!!!! Just let me turn off that feature, every other game does.

Palm Zire 72

After deciding to retire my old HP Jornada I wanted to venture into the world of Palm OS and see what it was all about. I picked up a Palm Zire 72 handheld which is a major improvement from the last palm device that I had played with (the palm V). As far as the hardware goes, I’m very pleased with the design. The two main features of this device that set it apart are its built-in Bluetooth and the 1.2 MegaPixal camera.

Since this is the only Bluetooth device I own, I have not yet had a chance to test out that functionality but the camera has been useful to me thus far. I have found it useful as a poor-mans scanner and for those frequent moments when you wish you had a camera on you. However, it is certainly not a replacement for a decent digital camera. It has two flaws that prevent it from replacing my Canon Digital Elf. The sensor requires plenty of light. Even a moderately lit room will turn out almost completely black. Also, because of its relatively high resolution, you must hold the camera still for about 2 seconds while taking the picture. This is fine for snapping documents and whatnot, but is very annoying when trying to capture anything that moves.

Onto the software…. as I said, this is my first experience with Palm OS. Coming from Windows CE I have found Palm to be much easier to navigate and find the data I’m looking for. The only thing I don’t like so far, is the way software is removed. Installing software is no big deal but to delete it, you can only find it by the internal names. WTF is SndEnPhr? or SS_P2P? or PMHDB? Why can’t they just show you the same list that you see in the main menu? Anyway, that�s my only rant with it. Overall I would recommend this device to those of you looking for a new PDA in the mid price range.

Update 6/27/04
My first real complaint with the Zire…. After a couple months of normal handling, the blue paint is starting to flake off.