Ok. This time for real, it’s the best possible windows file launcher, a pretty much straight up port of the most useful feature of Quicksilver on the mac (namely the file launching). It’s called Colibri and it works pretty much exactly like quicksilver in terms of file launching capabilities. Free, a tiny download, a relatively small memory footprint (~18k on my machine), and it’s super speedy. The only downside is the lack of documentation, but operation couldn’t be simpler – hit your control key sequence (ctrl-space is default), begin typing the name of whatever it is you need to be using, then hit enter for the default behavior for that object type (for programs, this will launch the program) or hit tab to select from a list of actions for that object type. Right now this is where it’s lacking, in operations (mostly if not exclusively all it does is launch things) but hopefully it will come along in this department. Meanwhile you can stop putting icons of every single program installed on your computer on your desktop.

This approach wouldn’t really scale well for a busy forum with deep and broad threads, at least not without some additional javascript to allow expanding and collapsing the threads, but check out fugi. Responses to the original topic are shown horizontally and followups to responses to the original topic are shown vertically below them. Sounds confusing I know, but check it out, it makes sense when you see it. I’d really love to see this enhanced with some ajax/javascript to allow for expanding and collapsing threads.

TOR has been around for a while. If you’re not familiar with it, it provides a pretty high level of anonymity to your internet use by routing all your network traffic through the TOR network. You sacrifice speed as the tradeoff, and for daily use most folks probably won’t want to use this unless they’re highly suspicious. There are plenty of contexts where you might prefer to remain anonymous however, and here’s a great solution to that – Torpark, a small (less than 20MB) package you put on a thumb drive. Take the thumb drive with you and when you’re in a circumstance where you feel like you’d rather do your surfing anonymously, launch firefox (included with the package) from the thumb drive and all your traffic will get routed through Tor. Simple, free, safe, and effective. Unfortunately it’s also win32 only, at least for now.

If you have kids or cats, or like me you’re still a child at heart, check out this inexpensive little remote controlled plane. $22 gets you a plane constructed of light weight foam, an engine, and an infrared control pad. I’m amazed at how inexpensive this is. Once you can get these in the US I’ll definitely be picking one up.

At this point pretty much everyone has encountered a paper jam in a photocopier or printer. They can happen for a variety of reasons. One of them is the buildup over time of the dust from the paper (and toner if you’re using a laser printer). If you’ve ever had to support printers you’ve gone the can of compressed air/soft brush route to get the dust out of there and clear the paper path. akihabaranews.com has a post about a pretty cool solution to this issue – sticky paper. The idea is to run this sticky paper through the printer routinely to help clear out the dust – as the paper runs through, the dust adheres to it. Clever. It doesn’t seem like a 100% solution since the dust ends up in all kinds of nooks and crannies that the paper never physically touches, but if you used this regularly I can’t see but that it would help.

I’ve been looking for something like this for quite some time – the Trek-Tech, a combination walking stick/tripod that makes it super easy to attach and remove the camera. At $139 this sits very high up on my personal wishlist. It would make shooting the panoramic photos I’m so fond of so much easier and much less prone to distortion.

Some time ago, over a year ago I think, Abit ran into financial difficulty. I didn’t pay close attention to the details but there seemed to be financial impropriety, market manipulation and so on, or at least allegations of it. There was much fear at the time that Abit was in danger of going under. Recently they took steps to address their financial situation, announced in this press release. The wording is curious – first they describe it as a partnership, but in the small print it’s a merger, and when small companies like Abit merge with big companies, the outcome is often not that good, especially for companies like Abit that produce low volume boutique products. I’m bummed by this. I’ve been using Abit motherboards for at least 6-7 years and have almost completely positive experiences with them. My main gaming rig is using an Abit board right now, in fact, as have all my gaming rigs for years and years. I hope Abit manages to thrive as an independent entity within their new larger corporate parent and continues to produce the high quality performance and features focused products I’ve been buying, and doesn’t get forced into becoming a volume/commodity motherboard producer. There are already plenty of those.

In theory the Gigabyte I-ram is a pretty cool device – mount 4 sticks of ram on a PCI card and attach a sata cable, and viola, you’ve got a solid state hard disk. If you’re careful you could install windows and the swap partition to the thing and see enhanced performance, and at current ram prices you could build a 4GB one for under $400 if you shop carefully. I used to use a similar approach on macintoshs back in the system 7 days and it definitely did increase performance back then. Techreport.com runs the device through a battery of tests and basically conclude that it works though not to the level of performance one would hope for. It’s too bad the thing doesn’t support Sata II and larger ram sizes, but even with its current limitations and $149 price it’s a tempting toy. Who knows, maybe I could use it to speed up the glacial map loading times in Battlefield 2, from the test results at techreport it looks like this thing would help a lot with that.

This has been linked to all over the place, but I’ll mention it today since it just got an update – performancing is a firefox extension that adds a featureful blog authoring tool to the browser. I have been using Ecto for a couple of years but its sorry windows version coupled with the fact that I use so many different computers makes performancing a pretty viable replacement for it, giving me a consistent authoring environment no matter what machine I’m sitting in front of. This is also potentially a useful tool in a campus environment. As usual, free, open source etc etc.