Damn. I ran into this awesome little website: Overheard In New York. It is a collection of snippets of converstations overheard in New York City, usually on the subway. There are some really weird people out there. Be afraid... very afraid!
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Overheard in New York
Damn. I ran into this awesome little website: Overheard In New York. It is a collection of snippets of converstations overheard in New York City, usually on the subway. There are some really weird people out there. Be afraid... very afraid!
Comic Book Artist
I met a fellow American here in Perth through the American Ex-Pats club who works in the comic book industry. Her husband is Aussie, and he is an artist who does the drawings for some of DC's comics. She does a lot of the technical and boring paper work that gets his art to the editors and publishers back in the US.
They are a very nice couple. She is originally from southern California. Graduated from UC San Diego. She worked for DC Comics, where she met her now husband. She is a self-described computer geek.
Robin and I went over to their house last night for drinks. They live in an really neat converted warehouse in Northbridge that was subdivided into units. Very interesting architecture, with high airy ceilings, hardwood floors, and lots of space. They have their office in what would be the dining room. They use the enormous Apple flat LCD monitors, which produce stunning images. They also have two beautiful Burmese cats that are so fun to play with.
When we came over, her husband was busy finishing up some illustrations that were due. The art work was fantastic. It was a very dark and gothic comic, with what looked liked vampirish monsters and violence. He was mixing punch out of real photos, such as snarling teeth, and embedding them into the faces of upside vampires. The effect was both very realistic and detailed fine comic art. I was very impressed.
Like me, she is a big fan of The Daily Show. She misses that about home. She manages to get episodes here, so she burned me some to CD so I can watch them. She also misses Mexican food.
I'm stoked. She sent me home with two CD's chock full of past episodes of The Daily Show. I'm going to have a good weekend!
They are a very nice couple. She is originally from southern California. Graduated from UC San Diego. She worked for DC Comics, where she met her now husband. She is a self-described computer geek.
Robin and I went over to their house last night for drinks. They live in an really neat converted warehouse in Northbridge that was subdivided into units. Very interesting architecture, with high airy ceilings, hardwood floors, and lots of space. They have their office in what would be the dining room. They use the enormous Apple flat LCD monitors, which produce stunning images. They also have two beautiful Burmese cats that are so fun to play with.
When we came over, her husband was busy finishing up some illustrations that were due. The art work was fantastic. It was a very dark and gothic comic, with what looked liked vampirish monsters and violence. He was mixing punch out of real photos, such as snarling teeth, and embedding them into the faces of upside vampires. The effect was both very realistic and detailed fine comic art. I was very impressed.
Like me, she is a big fan of The Daily Show. She misses that about home. She manages to get episodes here, so she burned me some to CD so I can watch them. She also misses Mexican food.
I'm stoked. She sent me home with two CD's chock full of past episodes of The Daily Show. I'm going to have a good weekend!
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Windows PC - Free Software List
Updated 15-July-2007
Since I seem to have always been the family IT geek who is pimped out to relatives and pumped for help, I've decided to post a list of free software that I feel any Windows machine should have.
Make sure that Windows has all the latest fixes installed. Run Windows Update from Internet Explorer, under the Tools menu.
Also make sure that there is enough memory. If there is less than 512MB, then install more. Otherwise, the machine will run like shit.
Install Anti-Virus and Spyware removal software first. Make sure there are no viruses or spies installed.
Security > Anti Virus:
- AVG Free Edition[GriSoft] - Anti-virus
- Avira AntiVir Personal Edition Classic[Avira] - Anti-virus
- Avast! 4 Home Edition[ALWIL] - Anti-virus
- Symantec Security Check[Norton] - These guys make Norton Anti-virus!!!
- BitDefender[] - Can only use with MS Internet Explorer because of ActiveX
- Trend Micro Housecall[Trend Micro]
- Panda Software Activescan[Panda Software]
- Ad-Aware SE[Lavasoft] - Spyware detection and removal
- SpyWare Blaster[JavaCool] - Prevent installation of spyware programs
Windows often comes with services enabled that are not needed and leave it vulnerable to attack. So it is a good idea to disable unneeded services, or to modify the default options.
- DCOMbobulator [GRC] - Disable Windows DCOM service
- UnPlug n’ Pray [GRC] - Disable Windows PnP service
- Shoot The Messenger [GRC] - Disable Windows Messenger service
- Zone Alarm [ZoneLabs] - Firewall
- Leaktest [GRC] - Make sure that your firewall is working from the inside!
- Shields Up! [GRC] - Test your firewall from outside.
- Hosts File [MVPS] - A replacement 'HOSTS' file for you Windows that will stop most parasite software and pop ups from getting going. Simple, free, and highly effective!
- Google Toolbar for IE [Google] - Popup suppression for Internet Explorer
- 4U Only [Dillobits] - Password Manager
- TrueCrypt [TrueCrypt] - The best encryption tool out there. An absolute must of you have a USB flash drive!
- Perfect Passwords [GRC] - Excellent source for perfect passwords. Especially handy for creating passwords for encryption (see TrueCrypt).
- OpenDNS [] - Smarter and safer DNS service to help prevent you from becoming a phish scame victim.
- VLC [Video LAN] - Video player Notes: Will play pretty much all video and audio formats on the planet.
- Windows Media Player [Microsoft] - Audio and video player Notes: MS’s media player. Does OK. Version 9 is the highest that will run on Win98
- QuickTime [Apple] - Video player
- Shockwave Player [Macromedia] -Play Shockwave Audio Streams
- iTunes [Apple] - The best player.. comes bundled with Quicktime. Also works as an excellent ID3 tag editor.
- Audio Grabber [] - Best Ripper out there when coupled with LAME MP3
- LAME MP3 [] - The best codec for encoding MP3 files from your CD collection. You need to install the LAME binary image on your computer, then configure Audio Grabber to use it.
- Media Monkey Standard [Ventis Media] - Rip Audio CD's to MP3. Does a pretty good job and is it little easier to use and Audio Grabber and LAME.
- Audacity [] - A free audio editor. Handy for editing MP3 files to get rid of ads, junk, etc.
- FastStone Image Viewer[FastStone] - Image Browser
- FastStone Screen Capture[FastStone] - Save screen shots
- FastStone Max View[FastStone] - Fast Image Viewer
- FastStone Max View[FastStone] - Batch Photo Resizer
- Picasa2 [Google] - Photo album management
- Fotki [Fotki] - Internet photo album sharing - better than Flikr!
- Paint.net [Washington State Univ.] - Bit Mapped Drawing Program Note: Works on Win2K or WinXP only.
- Gimp [GNU] - Photo Editor (Like Adobe Photoshop)
- Alibre Design Express [Alibre] - 3D Solid Modeling CAD software.
- Inkscape [] - Vector Drawing Program (Like Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X).
- Firefox [Mozilla Foundation] - Web Browser Note: After FF is installed, there are a number of plugins, themes, and extensions that can be installed to increase the functionality of FF. The plugins needed are all listed on this sheet. They are Acrobat Reader, Flash Player, Java, Quicktime, Real Player, Shockwave, and Windows Media Player.
- Google Toobar for Firefox [Google] - A better Google search tool bar. Get rid of the search box that comes with Firefox and use this instead.
- Flash Player [Macromedia] - Play Flash animations
Internet Applications > Email
- GMail [Google] - Web based email client.
- Thunderbird [Mozilla Foundation] - Email client
- Google Reader[Google] - Web based RSS Aggregator. Easy to use and very handy. The best way to keep up with your favorite blogs and news sources.
- BitTorrent [BitTorrent Inc] - Internet File Sharing
- Skype [eBay] - The universal way to make free phone calls world wide. Be sure to configure your profile for privacy. Otherwise lot of bored Chinese teenagers will call you to practice their English.
- Ultimate ZIP 2.7 [Ultimate ZIP] - Manage compressed files. Get 2.7, the sponsored version.
- Rename-It! [Werner BEROUX] - Batch filename manipulator
- Edit Pad Lite [JG Soft] - Text Editor. Much better than Notepad!
- Acrobat Reader [Adobe] - The official PDF reader... slow and fat.
- PDFcreator [SourceForge] - Ad Free open-source PDF creator.
- PDF995 [] - Create your own PDF files.
- PDF SpeedUp [] - Use this with Adobe's reader to make it run much faster!
- FoxIt Reader []
- PDF Action Reader []
- Brava Reader []
- eXPert PDF Reader []
- PDF Action Reader []
- JRE (Java Runtime Environment) [Sun] - Run Java applications and applets
- DirectX 9.0 [Microsoft] - Graphics enhancement
- SyncBack Freeware [Bright Sparks] - PC Backup/restore utility.
- WinDirStat [SourceForge] - Windows Directory Statistics. - An easy graphical way to see where all your disk space is being used. Very handy for finding wasteful downloads you forgot about.
- Atomic Clock Sync [Chaos Software] - For Win98 - Keep your PC's clock in sync. Note: WinXP has a sync feature built into the clock. You just need to config & enable it.
- CC Cleaner [CC Cleaner] - Remove unneeded files from Windows system.
- Power Toys for Windows XP [Microsoft] - Clever little enhancements to Windows from the brains at Microsoft. These are things that should have been put in the official release, but were not.
- Startup Mechanic [OpenSoft] - Speed up tool - analysis of start up procedures.
- Ultimate Boot CD [Source Forge] - Utility to boot PC and fix things when all else fails.
- RegClean [Microsoft] - Speed up Windows by stripping junk from registry.
- TweakNow RegCleaner Standard [Tweak Now!] - Speed up Windows by stripping junk from registry.
- BelArc Advisor [Belarc] - Create a detailed report of your PC's configuration. Very handy report to give to tech support so they can see what you have on your machine.
- SysInternals Utilities [Microsoft] - Advanced and free untilties for advanced users to manage the operating system. Not for amatures!
- Hamachi VPN [GoToMyPc] - The best and easiest VPN system out there! As Steve Gibson says, "Hamachi Rocks!"
- Tight VNC [Tight VNC Software] - Virtual Network Computing Server. Allows remote access and control of PC from another computer on the internet. Note: Install the client on the controlling PC. Install the server on the controlled machine.
- No-IP Free Dynamic DNS Service [No-IP.com] - Static domain name for leased IP addresses. Note: Used to find a computer on the Internet.
- No-IP Dynamic DNS Client [No-IP.com] - Needed for VNC clients to easily find the VNC server. Note: Install this client on the machine you want to access. The same one with the VNC server.
- Be sure to configure these programs to not run automatically!!! They should only be manually started when needed to allow a trusted guest to gain access to your PC.
- Network Stumbler [Net Stumbler] - WiFi (802.11a/b) Network Finder
- Google Docs & Spreadsheet[Google] - Online only Word processor & spreadsheet. Quick and easy.(Compatible with MS Word & MS Excel).
- Open Office [Sun] - Word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program (Compatible with MS Office).
- Palm Desktop [Palm] - Solid PIM (contacts, appointments, notes) replacement for Microsoft's Outlook.
- Google Earth [Google] - I can't say enough about this most amazing program. Wow!
- FreeMind [SourceForge] - An excellent Mind Mapping application. Very easy to use and handy for planning and organizing complex subjects.
- Arcade! Classic Arcade Pack [Neave] - Classic games Asteroids, Packman, Pong, Snake, Space Invaders, & Tetris.
- Su Doku [Microride] - Addicting numeric 'crossword' puzzle Use this to make new games, or to solve those in the newspaper.
Some products are worth every dollar they charge. I would not hesitate for a minute to buy these. I've added this list to the bottom of the page since this page is dedicated to free software for home Windows users.
- MS Office Suite [Microsoft] - Word for word processing, and Excel for a spreadsheet. You don't need to go buy the lastest version. Office Suite versons 2000, 2003, or XP, though no longer supported, are excellent products and can be bought on eBay for not very much money.
- SpinRite [GRC] - The best insurance against hard drive failures and problems. Cheap at twice the price.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Hutt River Province Principality
There is a tiny independent nation just north of Perth called The Hutt River Province Principality. It is run by His Royal Highness Prince Leionard.
Here is the country's official web site: www.huttriver.net
The country was founded in 1970 and has been independent for over 35 years now. The king, Prince Leionard George Casley, started the country by seceding from Australia when he found a loophole in British and Australian law.
This is no joke either. It is the real thing. You can drive up there and camp in his country, for a fee. You can also apply for citizenship, with a passport and everything. The Prince is very approachable too. He will come out and have a beer with you if you go up there.
My boss, Garry, went up there last year camping and spent a few days in HRPP. He met Prince Lionard and had some beers. Garry said that the guy is smart as a whip. He explained to Garry exactly how he found and exploited the British Commonwealth laws to secede from Australia based on real grievances with the West Australian State Government and the laws the Commonwealth has to remedy grievances.
I am going to go up there next month camping. I want to look into buying myself citizenship while I am there. Should be interesting. I'll post how it goes.
I recommend that you check out their web site, or Google for more information about the country. It is very inspirational.
Here is the country's official web site: www.huttriver.net
 |
| Prince Leonard |
This is no joke either. It is the real thing. You can drive up there and camp in his country, for a fee. You can also apply for citizenship, with a passport and everything. The Prince is very approachable too. He will come out and have a beer with you if you go up there.
My boss, Garry, went up there last year camping and spent a few days in HRPP. He met Prince Lionard and had some beers. Garry said that the guy is smart as a whip. He explained to Garry exactly how he found and exploited the British Commonwealth laws to secede from Australia based on real grievances with the West Australian State Government and the laws the Commonwealth has to remedy grievances.
I am going to go up there next month camping. I want to look into buying myself citizenship while I am there. Should be interesting. I'll post how it goes.
I recommend that you check out their web site, or Google for more information about the country. It is very inspirational.
Stolen Years - Australian POW's
The local museum here in Perth has an current exhibit called "Stolen Years". It is an examination of Australian POW's from WW-I through Korea. Yesterday was a holiday here in Western Australia, plus the weather sucked. So I went to check it out. Robin, Loretta, and Robin's friend Roger decided to come along too.
I thought it was very interesting, but very sad and very depressing. The worst was the section on the WWII prisoners of Japan. They had it really, really bad. The conditions at the German and Italian POW camps were a vacation compared to those the Japanese ran in South East Asia.
The girls and Roger got bored about half way through and left me there by myself as they went off to gossip and catch up on news. That was fine with me. The exhibit was very sobering and there was a lot of material to read. They had on display many of the diaries and logs that were secretly recording by the POW's. One in particular was hard hitting. It was a log maintained by an Aussie doctor who worked on the Burma railroad. He kept track of the deaths of the fellow POW's, recording the date, rank, name, cause of death, grave number, and other details if possible. It was heartbreaking to read. Day after day, dozens of deaths from dysentery, and some executions.
Another interesting item was in the WWII Europe POW's section. There was a photo taken in one of the bunkhouses. On one wall of the bunkhouse was a gallery of photos of girlfriends. Standing in front of the wall was a handful of very glum looking Australian and British POW's. The wall was an American bashing "shrine". All of the girls in the photos had given up on their Aussie and British POW boyfriends and had either hooked up or married American servicemen. So it was a wall dedicate to the betrayal of the POW's by their girlfriends who could not longer wait for the war to end. The anti-American sentiment was very obvious in the section.
I thought it was very interesting, but very sad and very depressing. The worst was the section on the WWII prisoners of Japan. They had it really, really bad. The conditions at the German and Italian POW camps were a vacation compared to those the Japanese ran in South East Asia.
The girls and Roger got bored about half way through and left me there by myself as they went off to gossip and catch up on news. That was fine with me. The exhibit was very sobering and there was a lot of material to read. They had on display many of the diaries and logs that were secretly recording by the POW's. One in particular was hard hitting. It was a log maintained by an Aussie doctor who worked on the Burma railroad. He kept track of the deaths of the fellow POW's, recording the date, rank, name, cause of death, grave number, and other details if possible. It was heartbreaking to read. Day after day, dozens of deaths from dysentery, and some executions.
Another interesting item was in the WWII Europe POW's section. There was a photo taken in one of the bunkhouses. On one wall of the bunkhouse was a gallery of photos of girlfriends. Standing in front of the wall was a handful of very glum looking Australian and British POW's. The wall was an American bashing "shrine". All of the girls in the photos had given up on their Aussie and British POW boyfriends and had either hooked up or married American servicemen. So it was a wall dedicate to the betrayal of the POW's by their girlfriends who could not longer wait for the war to end. The anti-American sentiment was very obvious in the section.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)