Notice how with every release it takes longer and longer for Adobe Acrobat to load? Turns out there’s a simple solution to this problem on windows – check out this blog entry for details, but the gist of it is, go to your acrobat folder, and move all the plugins from the plugins folder to the optional folder. This radically decreased the launch time (basically to instantaneous) and memory footprint of reader for me, and I’ve yet to have trouble reading any pdf’s after I did it.

On the mac I note if you get info on acrobat there is a plugins section to the preferences pane where you can turn off the plugins, but this led to a host of error messages when I launched acrobat. It still opened pdf’s with no trouble, but it’s annoying dealing with the error messages. On the mac you’re better off with preview.app anyway so I didn’t dwell on the issue.

The scenario – you download some Win32 shareware game, launch it, play, quit, and come back to discover the icons on your desktop have moved all over the place. Curse, then spend 10 minutes playing digital janitor cleaning up the mess. No more – go get yourself a copy of Pix-art. It’s free, svelte, and works beautifully. Just launch it, save your current setup, and then the next time windows decides to emulate the perfect desktop storm, launch it again and hit restore. Problem solved.

Check out the Netgear Storage Central. $150 gets you a 2 bay SAN device that can hold as much as a terrabyte (or more as drive capacities increase), connects seamlessly to your network, and is cross platform. I’ll have one of these by Christmas. The only downside is it’s IDE – I’d prefer SATA since it’s gradually displacing IDE in terms of volume of drives shipped. Still this thing rocks for the price.

Yeah, all 12 of you. Speak up! Back during the first dot.com heyday a host of different companies all jumped on the ‘We’ll offer free online disk space!’ business model. Software pirates and music enthusiasts worldwide thanked them for assisting in their distribution efforts before these services went out of business. Now I find myself needing such a service.

We have this dilemma at Skidmore, which I also had at Bowdoin – namely how to enable file sharing between faculty at different institutions. Sad but true, mostly they’re too technically illiterate to use, say, IM transfers (and generally the firewall gets in the way anyway) and college’s have an inherent resistance to adding accounts to their own authentication systems (not without good reason – what happens is, they add these accounts, and everyone forgets about them, and suddenly you wake up one day and find you have 55k accounts in your ldap directory and only ~6k that you can readily identify). Never-mind that these issues could be resolved by simply applying good management practices. Sounds great in theory, in practice it just doesn’t happen. At Bowdoin they punted and licensed ftp space from an outside vendor. I’m looking for alternative solutions and am all ears. Basically I’m hoping for a free file storage service similar to the once free xdrive. Any suggestions? Pipe up in the comments. Oh and the ‘use gmail as online storage’ won’t fly since it doesn’t really enable sharing and also see my earlier comment about lack of technical acumen on the part of the folks who will be using this. It needs to be drop dead simple.

Check out the timeline clock. I wouldn’t mind seeing it spruced up a bit visually but this is pretty cool nonetheless.