I went through a little burst of changes on Springsteen, my semi-trusty two year old VAIO laptop, and thought I’d clue all you faithful readers in. All these are free (as in beer) if not free as in speech, a consideration for me without question these days. I’ve been thinking about finding a way, without spending money, to get into some form of .NET programming as well but haven’t yet acted on it (go Scoble!)
First off, a new tabbed browser add-on for Internet Explorer called SlimBrowser. The new tool doesn’t have a huge advantage, yet, over CrazyBrowser (for my purposes, that is) but does have someone actively developing and supporting it, while CB has not had an update in 12 months and the developer no longer responds to email.
Second, I’ve actually adopted an RSS aggregator after resisting for awhile, Luke Hutteman’s SharpReader. This is the first application I’ve used built on top of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, which was the first reason I tried it. But it works quite well, suits my way of doing things that other aggregators I’ve looked at don’t, and so far, so good. My OPML file exported from SR 0.9.1, for posterity.
Third is SpamPal for Windows, “a mail classification program that can help separate your spam from the mail you really want to read.” Works with most POP3 email accounts and Windows email software–I’ve used it with Outlook Express and now Outlook 2002–and works really well, very few false positives or false negatives. Also has a working, active plugin architecture, so I’m using the RegExFilter plugin written by Stephan Slabihoud.
I’ve also installed Knoppix, a variant of the Debian Linux distribution, on another PC but haven’t found the extra monitor necessary to get started on that huge playground.
BillSaysThis 