PC NEWS DIGEST: October 31, 2000 PC computing, hardware, software, searching, closeouts, news, sites, web design, humor. The PC News Digest is brought to you by SERVENET.COM PLEASE NOTE: WELCOME TO THE PC NEWS DIGESTWe're just back from a few days in Virginia, where we learned to powder and pomade our perukes (Colonial Williamsburg) and took lessons in maritime photography from A. Aubrey Bodine (Mariner's Museum at Newport News). Still, we had time to test and try, as we do every week, the software mentioned in the PC News Digest. If it crashes our system (Windows 98 SE), doesn't perform as advertised, or isn't rock- stable, you won't find it here. If you encounter problems, let us know by email. Because several readers had difficulty locating software or a website mentioned in a past issue of the Digest, this week's web edition adds the ability to search our archives by keyword. Now you can search past issues from the Subscribe/Unsubscribe/Suggest/Etc. section at the end of the newsletter. Good hunting, happy Halloween -- and watch out for low-flying turkeys! Colonial Williamsburg Mariner's Museum 0.0 DrDrew.Com: Love, Sex, and Good Advice 0.0 DRDREW.COM: LOVE, SEX, AND GOOD ADVICEDr. Drew Pinsky is a board-certified internist specializing in chemical dependencies and the proud father of seven year-old triplets. As we wrote in the Inwood Journal, he's also a prime example of the power of an individual person to make a global difference. Drew is obsessed with fixing today's culture of broken-down interpersonal relationships. And he's doing it in his practice, his professional affiliations, and for more than 17 years with Loveline. Aimed at teens, Loveline is a nationally-syndicated radio call-in show about sex and relationships. (For broadcast times, check the Unofficial Site.) In 1996, Drew broadened his outreach, taking Loveline to MTV for five seasons, in a show he co-hosted with Adam Carolla. Out of that show came "The Dr. Drew and Adam Book: Groping and Coping with Life and Love." Now Drew is also fixing things online with drDrew.com, a lively interactive website with lots of reasons to visit and revisit. The site has chat rooms (Drew participates), forums, user homepages, celebrity interviews, media reviews, Q&A ("Should I tell my parents I'm gay), and a searchable archive on topics ranging from abuse, to diet, to sexual health, to suicide. Now that's what I call harnessing the power of the PC to the power of the person. Inwood Journal: The Power of the Person Unofficial Site About Loveline The Dr. Drew and Adam Book: Groping and Coping with Life and Love drDrew.com THE PC CLINIC AT INSTALLATIONS PLUS+PC PROBLEMS? Help is just a mouse-click away! PC News Digest subscribers get priority treatment at the FREE personal computer clinic at Installations Plus+. The FREE PC Clinic at Installations Plus+ 1.0 AOL RELEASES VERSION 6.0: WAIT FOR THE CD-ROMAmerica Online (AOL) announced the release this week of version 6.0 of its Internet access software. The new version, which works with Windows 95/98/ME, has improved broadband support for users with DSL, cable, and satellite service. In addition to the usual "all new look," AOL 6.0 makes it easier to locate downloaded files; allows sorting of email messages by date, subject, and sender; uses a central address book accessible from any computer; and incorporates a proprietary Media Player. Users can get the new version at keyword UPGRADE. Although AOL bought Netscape earlier this year, version 6.0 continues to use a customized, some say "crippled" version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 browser. It also works with the new IE 5.5. Our take on AOL 6.0? Good stuff, but wait until it comes out on CD-ROM. Initial public releases of AOL software have always been a little buggy, despite extensive beta testing. The time to go for it is when 6.0 arrives shrink-wrapped in your mailbox. Meanwhile, users running the Windows 95/98/ME (32- bit) version of AOL 4.0 or 5.0 can get a little better mileage by installing a FREE patch from Jordan Russell called AOLSpeed. Russell's patch instructs AOL to work with fewer hard disk accesses, thus increasing speed, and reducing that annoying AOL grind! Check Out AOL AOLSpeed THE LOOK-UP CENTER AT INSTALLATIONS PLUS+Scouring the web for basic information? Find what you need in one place for FREE! The Look-Up Center has telephone numbers by name, by address and reverse. Weather, stock quotes, dictionaries, quotations, package tracking, calories, currency conversion, metric conversions, books, music, and more. The FREE Look-Up Center at Installations Plus+ 2.0 UPDATE INSTALLED SOFTWARE THE EASY WAYOnce upon a time you went to the store, bought a new software package, installed it, and forgot about it for three or four years, until a new version became available. Today you probably buy your software by download, then find yourself checking the manufacturer's website for updates a week later. Now you can delegate the checking to someone else. Norton Web Services analyzes your PC and tells you online or by email when updates are available for the installed software. The service is a joint venture of Symantec (Norton), who pioneered Live UpDate technology to keep their products current, and ZDNet, the technocrats who specialize in technology news, reviews, guides and downloads. The Norton Web Services website includes a hardware advisor which checks your PC and suggests upgrades according to the user profile you select -- home, office, power, graphics, game, or developer. Also on the site are lists of the top updates, newest updates, and updates for your software drivers (video, sound, modem, etc.). P.S. This, like Symantec's other websites, is slow to download, so be patient. Norton Web Services Symantec (Norton) ZDNet 3.0 TRICK OR TREAT: UNMASKING CLOAKED URLSAll of us have seen cloaked URLs. These are addresses like http://3625363507/ or worse, http://%33%36%32%35%33%36%33%35%30%37/, both cloaked alternates for the Classical Music Lovers Exchange (CMLE), a dating service whose URL is http://www.cmle.com. But they look like the masked addresses used by SPAM-ers, pornographers, terrorists, and others with something to hide, don't they? These cloaked or camouflaged URLs work because the actual address of a website is not the people- friendly version we use in our browser, but a set of numbers called the Internet Protocol (IP) address. To obtain it, your browser consults a lookup table or Domain Name Server (DNS) that translates the friendly address into the corresponding IP address. For CMLE the actual address is 216.22.168.51. Go ahead. Try the IP address in your browser. You'll land on CMLE's home page. The cloaked addresses work because your browser can handle the IP address in the standard dotted quad form (216.22.168.51), in hexadecimal, in summed hexadecimal, or in ASCII (text) translations. To see how a domain name translates into its IP address and other versions, download Karen Kenworthy's Discombobulator v1.5. (Would I fool you? That's its name. Karen is a longtime, much-respected WinMag.com contributor.) Karen's program will also work in reverse, finding the friendly domain name for an IP address or its cloaked equivalent. So if you start with http://%33%36%32%35%33%36%33%35%30%37/, you can resolve it to cmle.com. And then you can use AllWhoIs.com to see who's hiding behind the masked domain name. AllWhoIs.com queries domain name registrars worldwide and returns the registrant's contact information. Typically, this includes a name and address, phone and fax numbers, and an email address. Of course, this could be purposefully wrong or misleading. But the registration also includes contact information for the person or organization that hosts the domain, and that is likely to be accurate. Trick or treat? http://3431731023/ or http://3518825476/ ? Karen Kenworthy's Discombobulator v1.5 AllWhoIs.com 4.0 LOOK: COMPAQ PENTIUM 166 MHZ SYSTEM FOR $179!Don't service that troublesome word-processing or data-entry system, replace it. For less than the price of a service call, you can buy this refurbished Compaq system with a Pentium 166 Mhz processor, 32 Mb RAM, a 1.2 Gb hard drive, a CD-ROM, 1.44 Mb floppy disk, and integrated SVGA video. The system is supplied with a new keyboard and mouse. The price for the system is $179, plus shipping, and tax where applicable. PayPal, X.com, M/C, Visa. Limited time offer. U.S. orders only please. 90-day warranty. Call 1-212-567-3705 mailto:specials@servenet.com 5.0 TRICK OR TWEAK: TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR PCFrom Microsoft, but not "officially" supported by the giants at Redwood (go figure!), Tweak UI puts you in control of usually hidden Windows settings. Tweak UI -- the UI stands for User Interface -- runs from an icon in Control Panel and works with Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000. It lets you control: pop- up menu speed; mouse wheel scrolling; automatic network logon; the Windows start up menu; and repair of icons, font folders, and other associations. Other things you can control: recently used file lists; the add/remove software list; which icons show in Control Panel; which drives show in My Computer; and whether Documents and Favorites show on the Start Menu -- to mention just a few. Trick or tweak? No Micro-tricks here, just helpful FREE tweaks. Tweak UI v1.33 6.0 SHOOT DOWN SPAM WITH THE EMAIL NOTIFIERRemember when you got your first email account how you spread the word hoping someone, anyone would take the time to write? That was then. Now you probably hate dealing with all the unwanted email. The Kaufman Mail Notifier is a tiny program that can help with the flood of mail. Written by Alex Kaufman between college classes, it handles multiple POP3 accounts -- you know, the ones you manage with Outlook Express or Eudora -- not AOL, Prodigy, Juno, or web-based email. Notifier runs in your System Tray, checking for mail at regular intervals, then plays a sound and previews the headers (subject, sender, date, etc.) when mail arrives. Here's the part we love. Based on the headers, you can delete unwanted mail from your server without having to download and open it. To handle the good stuff, Notifier will open your regular email client. Notifier is FREE but Alex won't object if you send a contribution to help defray his college costs. Kaufman Mail Notifier v2.0 7.0 WEBSHOP 102: FREE HTML EDITOR AND LIBRARYLike most web developers, we write our HTML code by hand, so the most important tool in our bag is our HTML editor. Although TextPad (FREE to try; $27 to buy) remains our first love, we must confess to a growing fondness for NoteTab, the Swiss Army knife of HTML editors. NoteTab, created by Eric G.V. Fookes of Switzerland, is entirely FREE (no ads, no nags) in its multi-featured Light version. The Standard version (FREE to try; $10 to buy) adds, principally, a multilingual spell-checker and thesaurus, and configurable toolbar access to a variety of handy macros. The Pro version (FREE to try; $20 to buy) is faster, and includes multiple levels of undo/redo, URL and HTML highlighting, and bookmarks, among other features. For the web developer just getting started, NoteTab Light is the perfect choice. It's fast and easy enough to use as a Notepad replacement, but has tabbed selection of open documents, search and replace tools for altering many files at once, and a handy library of macros, including two clipbooks for building and inserting HTML tags. To learn what those tags do and how to use them, we suggest you download a FREE copy of the HTML Reference Library. Novices and pros alike will benefit from this easy-to-use guide packed with clearcut explanations and lots of straightforward examples. Uniquely programmed in HTML, it includes information about Java, Javascript, Server Side Includes, etc., and an interactive color wizard for setting webpage background, text, and link colors. TextPad from Helios Software NoteTab from Fookes Software HTML Reference Library 8.0 WANT A WEBSITE OF YOUR OWN? LOOK HERE!For websites that work -- the WebShop at SERVENET.COM Ready to join the Internet explosion? Let our experts build a website for your business, school, club, or group. Call or write today for a quote. Want to see a sample of our work? Check out the site we built recently for Property Watchers, an innovative real estate company in Westchester that helps sellers market their home, buyers select the right home, and owners manage their property. Property Watchers The WebShop at SERVENET.COM 9.0 WANT TO TALK? WE'VE GOT A FORUM FOR YOU!As a public service, SERVENET.COM hosts and moderates four online forums. You are welcome to participate in any or all of them. • The PC FORUM for help with computer problems. • The REAL ESTATE FORUM for buyers, sellers. • The OYSTER BAY HISTORICAL SOCIETY FORUM. • The SHOP-TALK FORUM for things automotive. 10.0 HUMOR: WATCH OUT FOR THESE NEW VIRUSESARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER VIRUS JOEY BUTTAFUOCO VIRUS LORENA BOBBIT VIRUS MARTHA STEWART VIRUS MIKE TYSON VIRUS MONICA LEWINSKY VIRUS PROZAC VIRUS SHARON STONE VIRUS SPICE GIRL VIRUS TIM ALLEN VIRUS TONYA HARDING VIRUS VIAGRA VIRUS X-FILES VIRUS 11.0 SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE/SUGGEST/ETC.PAST ISSUES.09/19/2000 09/26/2000 10/03/2000 10/10/2000 10/17/2000 10/24/2000 SUGGESTIONS. Your thoughts about our newsletter and our website are always welcome. Tell us. We're listening! RECOMMEND US. Tell a friend about our website and newsletter. LINK TO US. All rights reserved. Produced in the WebShop at SERVENET.COM. Please report bad or changed links to the WebMaster. Last update: 10/31/2000. |
