Stumbling with IE
I just saw an article over at the IEBlog mentioning that there’s now an IE plugin for StumbleUpon. If you haven’t played with StumbleUpon, you should. If you use IE7, you should get the toolbar (the Firefox one has been available for quite some time, I think).
I’m still digging IE7 (shock/gasp/horror!) and I love finding useful or interesting extensions.
Usenet Reader Quest – followup
I’m back from vacation! Well, I worked every day I was gone so not sure how much of a vacation it truly was… but at least it was from a different city. And honestly, a change of scenery and visiting with family in another state is always fun. Even if you have to work a bit around the edges.
Few weeks ago I posted about my quest for a Usenet Reader. Shortly afterwards I decided to give Mozilla Thunderbird a shot. Hadn’t used it in years so it seemed like a good excuse to take another run at it. First thing I found interesting is that you have to dig pretty deep at that website to find any mention of being able to use Thunderbird to read Usenet! Definitely not something the mozilla folks are touting any more it would seem.
I also see, from the Account Settings dialog (thumbnail at left), that I can also use this as an RSS reader (also not touted at the product page). I probably won’t mess with too much as I like web-based RSS readers better (I use too many different machines). However, I did toss in a few subs just to see how it looked. Nice! Very simple to add new feeds and very easy to read as well. Seems to do the job just fine if looking for a desktop based RSS reader.
The usenet reading portion of this thing is just as easy to use as the RSS reader. Assuming you know your Usenet server info (comcast makes it pretty simple to find online). I got it setup and added a few groups in just a couple of minutes. For basic reading it seems quite functional. One thing that I haven’t figured out yet though: With Agent, I would delete threads after I read them to help keep my list nice and tidy. Not an option with Thunderbird as far as I can see. So… I’m wondering how to keep the thread list pruned. Does it just grow forever? But other than that, it seems to do the job just fine for now.
Note: I haven’t tried with any binaries groups. Rich commented that he was underwhelmed by how it handles ‘em. I don’t tend to wander into ‘em these days so haven’t factored that in yet.
I may continue to investigate options over time (still open to suggestions) and as time allows. Usenet isn’t nearly as interesting too me as it was 10 or even 5 years ago. But it is nice to be able to check some old favorite groups from time to time.
Vacation!
Oops… forgot to post here a few days back when I left — I’m on vacation! Doing family stuff and doing a lot of driving. Remembering what “humidity” is too. Back next week at some point with some new posts. 
Vongo Videos
The family is about to head off for a week long vacation. Last week, I was pondering the idea of looking into ripping some video from our DVD collection to my laptop when a friend sent me a link to Vongo. As they tout over 1600 titles, I figured I’d have a look. (you can sign up for a “free” 2 week trial)
The website is this slick shiny flash thing and it took me a while to figure out what I was after, but long story short: download the client. From the client you register and do all the searching. Grab movies to download now or schedule for download later (I set mine up to just go in the early am so as not to hog bandwidth). You also watch the movies through the client.
The good news: Downloaded movie quality is great. Size isn’t too horrible — the movies I grabbed all appear to be around the 940 – 1.3GB range. The Starz live video stream is rather nifty to have around while I’m working in the home office.
The bad news: For a family with younger kids, the selection for younger folks isn’t all that great. And you have to be careful not to grab a Pay-per-view title as that’ll cost extra. In fact, overall, the selection is a bit of the limiting factor here. While I found a fair amount of movies I personally wouldn’t mind seeing, I dunno how much movie watching on my laptop I’ll be doing after next week’s trip.
Neat service and at only $10 a month, not a bad price. The two week trial thing is a great way to try it out and get a feel for it. And now we have “National Treasure” and “13 Going on 30″ for the trip. As the library isn’t as deep as I was hoping for, I don’t know that I’ll keep the membership after the initial 2 weeks, but I may sign up again for future trips.
That last sentence sums it up for me: I just don’t see me or my family watching videos on a laptop unless there’s a trip involved. Wonder if we’re the norm with that attitude?
MSN Messenger <--> Yahoo! IM
Well holy cow, we’ve got interoperability between Yahoo and MSN IM clients! Here’s the MSN Messenger info. And here’s the Yahoo info. Regardless of which way you swing, you need the latest client.
Now if AOL would join the party… and Google Talk. (and before you rush to post comments here about Trillian, Miranda, Gaim, Meeba, Mabber and other, be aware that I’m well aware of them and have used most of them. Daily. And am typically 95% happy but there’s always something that I wish I could do…)
I’ve added all my Y! contacts over to MSN Messenger. Now just have to wait for some of ‘em to pop online to see how it works. Will it allow file transfers, I wonder?
Referrals and Ads
Flair and Sparklies
