A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

• Visible Earth – Fantastic images of our planet from the NASA.
• It’s Hidden – Free VPN (e.g. to avoid ISP traffic shaping)
• DotNetPanel – Windows Hosting Control Panel – finally cpanel for Windows web servers (and more!)
• How to do interesting things with Twitter – Twitter can be used for far more than telling people what you had for breakfast.
• Windows command line client for Twitter – Tweet from the command line via the Twitter API
• 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About – For all the geek Dads out there.
• The Ultimate Windows 7 Upgrade FAQ – I’m sure it doesn’t cover everything but it’s pretty comprehensive!
• Product Key Finder – Another tool for finding license keys but this one has command line support (Via Aaron Parker)
• Using Windows 7’s “XP Mode” to run IE 6, IE 7 and IE8 side-by-side… – Duncan Smart explains how.
• Ready. Set. 7. – Hardware and software that’s ready for Windows 7.
• Planning for Hyper-V Security – Some notes from Microsoft on securing Hyper-V (via Clive Watson).
• Aviary – Creation on the fly / blog / Capture any webpage: Just add … – Grab a copy of the entire scrollable content of a web page (via Garry Martin).
• Uninstalling Norton AntiVirus 10.0.x for Macintosh.

A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

• Police face prosecution for obstructing photographers – A judge sees sense and warns the police about wrongful use of anti-terror laws to stop photographers taking pictures of officers.
• Dopiaza – Automatically generate Flickr sets based on defined criteria
• Twitterfeed – Automatically push any RSS feed into your Twitter status.
• PresetsHeaven – This is the site where some of the presets I use in Lightroom originate.
• Top 10 Twitter tips – Liz Male gives some good advice on how best to use Twitter.

A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

• PowerShell cheat sheet – Useful PowerShell reference, originally produced by a Microsoft blogger and converted to PDF.
• NVU – Free, cross-platform, standalone web authoring software.
• Approved memory cards for Nikon D-SLR cameras – List of cards that Nikon have tested and approved.
• Windows Image to Virtual Hard Disk (WIM2VHD) Converter – Does exactly what it says on the tin…
• Manual Gantt Charting in Excel – David Seah has created some Gantt chart templates for Microsoft Excel.
• Enabling concurrent Remote Desktop Sessions on Windows XP SP3 – A patched file for enabling concurrency in Windows XP's RDP stack (which could come in useful with Windows 7 XP Mode…)
• What’s the difference between MSDN and TechNet? – Lady Licensing explains the differences between MSDN and TechNet

Jeff Atwood has a great blog called Coding Horror (I’ve written about it here before) and last year he (and some friends) started a new site for developers called Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow is a Q&A site – but (and I thought this before I read it on Jeff’s blog post announcing Stack Overflow), it’s not like Experts Exchange – the site that charges money for access to community-generated content (thank goodness for Google’s cache) because it’s free – as community-generated content should be. Of course, not everyone will agree with my opinion there – I’m sure the people at Experts Exchange think they have a fine business model but I think it stinks to charge money for something that has been generated by your users. Anyway, back to the point, Stack Overflow is a sort of forum-meets-wiki-meets-blog-meets-digg site for software engineers to ask and answer questions, earning reputation points based on the value of their input.

So Stack Overflow is a great site for developers but I’m an IT admin-type… is there something similar for us? Well, no – not really. There hasn’t been, but now the Stack Overflow guys are launching Server Fault. You can hear more about it in Jeff Atwood’s recent interview on RunAs Radio but it’s aimed at IT professionals and system administrators, running on the same concepts as Stack Overflow.

I wish Jeff and his cohorts all the best with Server Fault and I plan to spend some time over there myself. Right now the site is in semi-public beta – if you have an OpenID and you know the password then you can get in – and the full public beta is expected to commence next week.

A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

• Who Gets Windows Security Updates? – An interesting post that clarifies the situation with security updates for Windows.
• Noteboek – Very clever experimental film by Evelien Lohbeck (via Garry Martin).
• Microsoft server virtualisation resources – Adam Fazio's extensive list.
• Interfacing professional microphones to computer sound cards – Why it’s not always as simple as making sure the wires are connected… signal levels need to be considered too.
• How to connect a microphone to a computer – Three ways to connect a microphone to a computer for recording purposes.
• iOSMaps – An free Ordnance Survey map viewer for the iPhone 3G.
• FTP 7.5 for IIS 7.0 – Extend the IIS 7.0 FTP service in Windows Server 2008 with FTP 7.5.
• How Mac fanatics see the world – This may come from a well-known Windows journalist, but this blog post about Mac fanboys is so true!
• Migrate to Windows Server 2008 R2 (Beta) – Guidance on migrating to Windows Server 2008 R2.
• Remove watermark on Windows desktop – Cool patch for removing Windows watermarks (e.g. on evaluation machine) (via Matt McSpirit) (more information).
• Intel Processor Ratings – Intel Processor ratings (for consumer CPUs), with a star system to see which is best.
• Apple addressing cracks on white MacBook casings – AppleInsider reports on Apple’s acceptance that there is a problem with the plastics on white MacBooks (via David Wall).
• Engineering Windows 7 : Delivering a quality upgrade experience – How to avoid the pre-release code checks that prevent upgrading from the Windows 7 beta to release candidate.
• AirPort Express Compatibility? – Notes on getting an Apple AirPort Express to work with an existing (non-Apple) WiFi setup.
• Audi A4 Driving Challenge iPhone Game.
• Fiddler Web Debugger – A free web debugging proxy.
• Keep SharePoint Simple – Andy Dale outlines why he believes SharePoint development should not be over-engineered.
• UK digital TV reception predictor – Useful reference for TV channels that can be accessed from a given area (including channel information and compass bearing).
• Google removes “on behalf of” from GMail – Lifehacker highlights that Google has removed the “on behalf of” when sending mail from a non-Google domain in GMail.
• How to find BSOD error messages – A useful guide for locating and analysing BSOD error reports.

Like many people these days, I live a pretty sedentry lifestyle. As my ages edges towards 40 (and I said the same thing when I was closer to 30 too!), I need to do something about my weight and overall fitness levels. Not eating half of the food on sale in the Marks and Spencer food hall each lunchtime would be a good start but exercise needs to fit in there too.

I do work from home a lot these days and, as I live in the countryside, I try to get out for a walk most days (it doesn’t always work out) but I’m back on the wagon this week (those who know me well also know how often I fall off this particular wagon), using Weight Loss Resources to track my calorie intake and exercise levels, as well as to follow the trend over time (hopefully downwards… towards my goal weight).

Getting some idea of how far I’ve walked is okay if I walk along roads (Google Maps is pretty useful for that part), but what if I go cross country, or take a shortcut between two residential streets? As it happens, there are some websites that use the Google mapping API to allow the plotting of routes either by road or as the crow flies and, with a few clicks of the mouse I can tell exactly how far I walked this evening. The site I found most useful was the GMaps Pedometer, which tells me how far I walked (in miles or kilometres), how many calories I burned in the process, what the elevation was, and even lets me export the map points in GPX format (GeoDistance was similar, but less fully featured and it didn’t like it when I deliberately retraced my steps).

Of course, I could just wear a pedometer (sadly it seems that the GPS in my iPhone 3G is not accurate enough to trace where I’ve been) but these websites are very useful to know about… now, if only I could find one that uses Ordnance Survey’s OpenSpace API…

A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

• Setting up OpenDNS can protect your network. – Worried about Conficker on April 1? Setting up OpenDNS can protect your network.
• Show Hidden Files in Mac OS X – Application, preference pane and command line alternatives for viewing hidden files on a Mac.
• Mac OS X Startup Shortcuts – A useful note of the various startup key combinations for OS X.
• iPhone lightbox – Another use for the iPhone screen – portable lightbox… pity I don’t use much film these days!
• Getting Canon inkjets to work on a Mac – Ian Jindal describes the hoops he jumped through to make his Canon printer do more than just draft mode printing.
• It’s the latency, stupid – This article by Stuart Cheshire may be old but it’s still worth a read, as it explains how, no matter how much bandwidth you have, latency is often the limiting factor.
• It’s still the latency, stupid – Continuing on the theme in Stuart Cheshire’s original article, this one explains why latency is still significant in modern network designs.
• .NET Reflector – Having trouble with an application? .NET reflector lets you disassemble an application and see what’s happening behind the scenes. This video describes more.
• The Lego Computer – A working computer… made of Lego.
• Lorem Ipsum – All the facts – Lipsum generator – Useful Lorum Ipsum text generator.

Writers/podcasters/photographers/tech-guys Andy Ihnatko and Scott Bourne have kicked off a new blog (soon to be followed up with a podcast) called MYDL.me (MyDL is Manage Your Digital Life… not to be confused with the established tech blog My Digital Life, which, like LifeHacker, is one of my favourite blogs but I rarely read it because the content is produced faster than I can consume it!). The idea with MYDL is that the blog will support the podcast, which will discuss topics around… you guessed it… managing your digital life.

It’s early days yet but Andy’s Backup In Progress post makes some good points… I just wish it would dig a little deeper and provide some real guidance – hopefully that will come later but that’s why the jury’s still out on this one.