Wired’s GadgetLab reviews the Helicor StressEraser, which purports to be a device that can help you reduce your stress level. Even if this is complete B.S., I want one! Apparently it monitors your pulse and breathing rate, then helps to coach you to the ideal rate of breathing to bring your heart rate down. The device gets a high rating (GadgetLab saves their 9 and 10 out of 10 ratings for truly special devices), but the $399 USD price tag is just a tad prohibitive. Oh well!

Tags: reduce stress, stress, gadget

I’ve listened to more than my share of different podcasts. While I have about 20 different subscriptions in the podcast section of my iTunes, there are three I want to focus on today. The “geek” podcasts:

1. TWIT - This Week In Tech
TWIT is the brainchild of Leo Laporte, previously of Tech TV fame. Leo brings together a group of respected tech people to discuss the top stories in the world of technology. John C. Dvorak is a regular on the show, and is surprisingly compelling as an audio host. The show skews somewhat Mac-centric, but not so much as to devalue it for PC enthusiasts.

2. Diggnation
Digg founder Kevin Rose teams up with fellow video game geek and aspiring actor Alex Albrecht to bring their take on the week’s top stories that were submitted to Digg. The show is frequently more entertaining than I think even they expect it to be. They start each show discussing what brand of beer they are drinking, and frequently get each other laughing so much that they can’t speak. And when they’re laughing, almost every time so am I. Given that the subject matter of the show tends to be geek-oriented stories, this is a perfect fit. The camaraderie between the two hosts reminds me of ridiculous late-night conversations with friends that turned into uncontrollable laughing fits.

3. Inside the Net
Amber MacAurthur, with assistance from Leo Laporte interview the movers and shakers in today’s Web 2.0 movement. In-depth interviews and commentary, with ample time for the guests to say their piece. Inside the Net is part of Leo’s fledgling podcast group, and as such can be found on the TWIT site.

Tags: podcasts, tech podcasts

This is bad, this is very, very bad. Jordan over at Download Squad pointed out a site dedicated to Commodore 64 games. But the thing is, you can play them online! As anyone that knew me around the age of 12 (I’m looking at you, Tim), I was a HUGE C64 nutjob. In fact, mine is still in storage under my parents’ house, and it’s in full working condition.

So far I’ve yet to click on the link, but I already feel myself getting weak. Help me!

Tags: Commodore 64, C64, Retro Gaming

I just sent this note to my family members. I typically don’t make a big deal out of this kind of stuff, but this one warrants it:

I just wanted to send you a note to say that if you’ve been postponing an automatic Windows Update, please do it. Also, if you haven’t, open Internet Explorer and visit www.windowsupdate.com and make sure you install any critical updates.

There’s a really nasty security hole in all Windows systems that can allow the system to be compromised by simply viewing an image file - and the image could be in an email or browser or even Instant Messaging client. This is a nasty one. Microsoft just released a fix for it, so please update!

Marc over at the Unofficial Microsoft Weblog (where I also blog) has the details, and boy, they’re scary. Looks like Microsoft in all their wisdom have decided not to release an update for Windows 2000, as it has reached the end of its product support life cycle. This is simply ludicrous, and can be seen only as a cash grab. Windows 2000 is still installed and working wonderfully on hundreds of thousands of machines on the internet. Not providing a fix for this vulnerability is irresponsible in the extreme, and reprehensible. I’m personally disgusted with this decision.

And to think earlier today I was getting excited about the features listed on the Windows Vista website. Decisions like this push me ever closer to purchasing my first ever Mac, and leaving the Windows world (except at work) forever. Nice job, M$.

[Update]

As Marc notes in the comments below, Windows 2000 SP4 is, in fact, protected by this latest Windows Update; it’s simply versions previous to SP4 that are not. This is very good news.

I may have prematurely cried wolf above, but I think it’s a valid issue that deserves open discussion. Windows 2000 is a solid OS that will run on extremely modest hardware. I know many people that have systems that simply will not run XP, and they are able to safely browse the internet and do all the necessary computing tasks they need to do using Windows 2000. I realize this doesn’t help Microsoft meet their quarterly earnings, but at some point, that hardware will eventually fail, and those people will need to upgrade.

I guess my feeling is simply that upgrading hardware for non-geeks doesn’t need to be done nearly as frequently as the technology companies would have us believe. When you’re operating a company that is effectively a monopoly, if not explicitly so, I believe you should have a responsibility to keep an operating system available for 10 years that is safe to use.

Maybe that’s just me.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, wmf, vulnerability, windows2000

Performancing appears to add a tab character at the beginning of both the Title and the Body of posts I create using it. I just upgraded to the latest 1.0.1 version - this is a test to see if that’s been fixed.

[Update] Well it’s not a tab character, it’s 12 spaces. They don’t show up on the page when you view my blog in a browser, but they do show up in the WordPress editor, and other places (like email notifications when someone comments). This is a pretty big bug that they need to kill ASAP.

Technorati Tags: Performancing, blog

I finally got FolderShare working, allowing me to synchronize files from another computer, and damn it’s cool. My buddy Mike and I are sharing a couple of folders, and right now my computer is dutifully downloading everything from his folder and simultaneously offering up everything from my folder to him, although he hasn’t started his download process.

From now on, every time he updates any files in his shared folder, I will get those updates. Too cool for school. If you haven’t checked it out, this one’s definitely worth a look. It’s free, and works great. Microsoft thought it was worth a look, then they bought it!

A popular blog called Performancing that focuses on helping bloggers improve on their craft has released a new Firefox extension called, appropriately, Performancing. The extension allows you to simply click an icon or press a hotkey, and a composition window pops up right inside the browser allowing you to compose a post instantly. While there are other blog composition tools available (BlogJet and Qumana come to mind), none of them offers the seamlessness that a extension like this does. We’ll see if this post, my first post using it, is successful, but I must comment that so far the user experience is quite good. Performance is very snappy, and it doesn’t appear to tax Firefox in any way. It’s also obvious that this is a 1.0 offering though, as there are little things that would go a long way towards polishing up the user interface. For example, when you open Performancing, you can type a title for your new blog post. Simply pressing the Tab key should jump you straight to the body composition part of the tool, but it doesn’t - you have to reach for your mouse to jump there. Yes, it’s nitpicky, but with competition like BlogJet, they’re going to have to get these small things right. Well, here goes - if you’re reading this, it posted successfully!

Email in and of itself isn’t bad. Even large volumes of email isn’t bad. I love reading relevant information that does not require anything of me, so any lists that I belong to or bulk mail that I subscribe to - all of that is no big deal. Hell, anyone that subscribes to RSS feeds knows what I’m talking about. Passive reading is fun.
Our email tools haven’t changed appreciably in 10 years.
Email becomes a problem when it requires action of us, even if that action is to simply need to think about something. It becomes “something” hanging out there, unresolved. This is why Filers love emptying their inbox as regularly as possible; it means that there are no unresolved items hanging around (at least not email-related ones).

Although I still can’t understand the mindset of a Piler, I’ve come to accept that they have a real emotional need to keep everything in their inbox, and that’s okay too. They still deal with the same issues, those of unresolved emails that hang around nagging them. They just (hopefully) use a different way to flag the unresolved ones.

(My views of email Filers vs. Pilers)

But the real problem here is that the tools we use every day to deal with our email haven’t changed appreciably for almost 10 years. But the content of email sure has. Most of the email I receive these days is extremely action-oriented; I need to do something or get some result before I can finish handling that email. And the best email and personal productivity tool available to me, Microsoft Outlook, by default handles that situation extremely poorly.

I’ve come to use a number of tools in addition to Outlook to help my email situation, and although some of them have competing feature sets, I find them all useful in their own ways, together. I’m planning a post outlining what I perceive to be the best current solution to handle the influx of email we all experience these days. For now, I’ll leave you with one thought: SNARF is not the answer. It’s a nice idea (actually a very good idea), but is very poorly executed, to the point of being virtually unusable.

Tune in later to find out what I consider to be the crucial set of features to un-break email (to paraphrase* a concept by my friend Marc Orchant).

* Can you paraphrase a concept? I guess I just decided that you can.

When I first started getting into RSS, I used NewsGator. Probably the coolest thing about using NewsGator as my aggregator was that it allowed me to synchronize my feed folders in Outlook to my Pocket PC, meaning that I could read my feeds offline. Even cooler was that anything that I read while away from my computer would be marked as read when I synchronized my Pocket PC.

This worked well for me for awhile, but over time a few things became apparent:

1. Outlook is just damn slow. 2003 especially. (Chris Pirillo’s right on this one)
2. The Pocket PC Inbox application only supports plain text, with no image support. Formatting is stripped.
3. ActiveSync, while much better than it used to be, gets flaky and downright unstable when synchronizing a large number of folders. I’m not talking Scoble-like 1000’s of feeds/folders, but more like anything over 100. At that point it gets really flaky.

This is really a shame, because I’ve yet to come across any other way to synchronize the same set of RSS feeds in XP as well as on my Pocket PC. But I eventually became so frustrated with fighting with Outlook and ActiveSync that I decided there must be something better. I decided to divide my RSS subscriptions into “desktop” and “Pocket PC” feeds; I tend to scan more on my desktop, but read in depth on my Pocket PC, so I sorted accordingly.

I’ve been through a bunch of different readers on my Pocket PC since then, most recently Ilium Software’s NewsBreak reader for Pocket PC. I was using the 1.0 trial version, which, while a nice reader, has a number of shortcomings. To be fair, they have apparently released a 1.0.1 version, so many of the problems I’m about to list may have already been sorted out. Anyhow, here were my problems with NewsBreak:

- Navigation between feeds required stylus taps; it can’t be done with navigation buttons
- The application if left running would fairly regularly hang my Pocket PC in a running state, killing my battery dead and requiring me to restore from a backup (if I had a recent one) or reinstall all software (this has happened to me twice)
- Because of the above bug, I could not set it to automatically synchronize, so had to remember to manually do so each time I docked my Pocket PC

This eventually became tedious, so I decided to see if there were any better readers available for Pocket PC. The one I heard mentioned again and again is called Egress.

So far it looks great; navigation can be accomplished solely with navigation buttons, and it apparently will download and cache inline images (I haven’t seen another Pocket PC aggregator that would do that). So I’m giving it a go. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Well, well. It looks like Chris has signed The PodFather to keynote Gnomedex. I’ve paid attention off and on to LockerGnome (Chris Pirillo’s web content company) for some time now, but was most impressed by his presence and speaking at the Northern Voice blogging conference in Vancouver.

Gnomedex is in Seattle this year which is good, since I live near Vancouver, but the date is a little close for comfort with a very important date: the due date of our second child! I can’t imagine getting stuck and my wife having to go into labour south of the 49th. Since our first was 3 weeks early, we have to be ready for anything.

But if things are going well, we may still slip down there.

Meanwhile, yesterday’s RocketBoom explains what I’ve been wondering for awhile now; why has Adam Curry not mentioned Dave Winer on the Source Code in months? It seems the two lovebirds had a falling out. What, Dave Winer not getting along with someone? Say it isn’t so.

[Update] Chris, you’ve got to be joking! $400 US per registrant? It sounds like a fun conference, but I can’t fathom spending that much money to go hang out with other people that were stupid enough to spend that much money to hang out together. Yikes.

Check out this sordid tale at PocketPCThoughts. Another unlucky purchaser of a Toshiba Pocket PC gets burned. Never again, I tell you.

Why can’t someone, anyone, make a Tablet that rivals the M200? I won’t / can’t bring myself to ever purchase another Toshiba product, so someone else will eventually have to fill my need.

For all you Firefox’ers out there, check out the new 1.0.1 beta build which speeds up our favourite browser considerably. Thanks to Lifehacker for the info.