.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

Title says it all. I found a couple of useful extensions here…

iPhone will be out in a few days at 6pm locally. I am not impressed with it nor with what I am reading in reviews. I love my iPod, so don’t get me wrong but Apple is an expert in not telling the full story on their products. Examples:

Joel writes (and I agree): “Apple is and always has been severely dishonest in all their advertising when it comes to performance. This is the company that spent years telling us that the PowerPC was faster than Intel, only, suddenly, to change their claims midsentence without an explanation when reality caught up with them, in a scene almost exactly like the scene in 1984: “Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.”

This is the company that’s about to release the iPhone on a slow, last-generation data network but is running TV ads that have edited out all downloads and waiting time that network entails.”

Further, iPhone will require an iTunes account before you can use it (I understand it for the iPod part of the phone but for the entire phone I don’t understand) but you will only find this piece of info left out and only found in the fine print of things. And while we are at it, here is another piece of info that might be interesting that I read about Apple’s control tactics.

Anyways, with increasing demand on my current phone (which I love) and the fact that 2.5 years have passed and it is starting to show clear signs of usage (including dents after many drops and some buttons not working), it finally died on me a couple of days ago, so i was forced to quickly get a new phone. The result became the HTC Hermes/AT&T 8525 (yep AT&T bought Cingular back) and I absolutely love it. It is a little on the bulky side but the advantages by far outweigh the the bulkiness. I also found a list of good apps to put on it, (and I also got the phone free which was a bonus). This purchase was not really planned and I had my eye on another phone that is coming later this year as well as a couple of other unannounced phones that I am excited about, but I am very happy with my new phone and would highly recommend it to anyone who wants something in between a laptop and a phone.

Cropper is a screen capture utility. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. The files are saved straight to a folder of your choice in the format you specify or to the clipboard or printer. No more ‘Print Screen’… open image editor… paste from clipboard… crop… export. Just double-click the form or press enter, and whatever is visible below the form is captured. Download it on Brian Scott’s Blog]

This one is for all my peops outside of US, since I have been blogging about different services that you can only get here. You can see live (american) TV channels using this tool (TVU Networks). Enjoy!

Today’s cool tool award goes to Hamachi. As they describe their own tool:

“Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking application. In other words Hamachi is a program that allows you to arrange multiple computers into their own secure network just as if they were connected by a physical network cable.”

I have tried it and I am pretty impressed by how easy and smooth it is to use it.

It’s about time!

These days the big boys of software, e.g. Microsoft or Google keep releasing small application in a silent mode. Some of these are very useful, but unfortunately because they are so small and get released here and there, you don’t always hear about them. Today I came across Windows Live Toolbar and so far I have discovered a couple of really useful features with it. To demo something I have been wishing for a long time is highlighting an address and getting a map rather than cut and pasting it into one of the map sites. Here is an example:

There are other useful things you can do but I will leave that for your own exploring. You would need Internet Explorer 6 or higher.

When buying or getting a new computer (from work), most people have that one or few tools that they immediately install on their computer. Well, here is three apps I can’t be without by now:

Babylon - This is a very simple and small tool, yet ingenious. After installing, by right clicking (in combination with a key e.g. Ctrl) on anything (i.e. any text or number), anywhere (i.e. within any application window, title bar, menus, icons with text etc) it will recognize and look it up (either locally against your offline dictionaries or if none of them have the answer against all bablyon online ones). Apart from being able to look up translation and/or definitions in one or more dictionaries and encyclopedias, it will recognize and convert units such temperature, currency, measurements as well (currency are updated daily). And the fact that you can add your own dictionaries/glossaries the way I would like to with what I asked, it makes it a very powerful tool that makes life a lot more efficient. As and example, at work we have some 50,000 acronyms and expressions, so it is impossible to learn them all and on a daily basis I run into new ones. By creating my own glossary, now it is not problem and instead of going to the intranet and lookup the word or acronym, I simply right click on it. Colibri - For you Mac users, QuickSilver is probably a familiar application. This is an application that “combines the raw power of the command line with the intuitive nature of a modern graphical user interface to define a revolutionary new way of managing your computer.” I have been looking for something similar for a long while and although I found SlickRun which by the way is an awesome tool by itself, it was not as close as I wanted to be to QuickSilver. The other day though Colibri came my and so far I really like it.

PureText - “Have you ever copied some text from a web page, a word document, help, etc., and wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple. Just copy/cut whatever you want to the clipboard, click on the PureText tray icon, and then paste to any application.  Better yet, you can configure a Hot-Key to convert and paste the text for you.  The pasted text will be pure and free from all formatting.” I use this tool at least 10 times a day.

Free tool called Unlocker that helps detect and actually unlock “locked” files in Windows. You know, those ones that seem to be held by some unknown entity on your machine. [via ISerializable]

http://www.google.com/ig/usgov - You can search all goverment sites and actually find the forms you ae looking for.

UPDATE:

Based on the comment of SamZeb, I tried http://www.callwave.com/ och if you live in North America, this service is a lot better than GotVoice.com that blogged about below. Thanks Sam!

It’s a been a while since I got a chance to keep up with the latest and greatest when it comes to cool stuff as work has kept me really busy. One of the things I really enjoy at work is the unified messaging system we have. For those who don’t know what that means, here is a definition:

“The use of computers and data communication equipment to provide a single mailbox for email, fax, and voice messages accessible by PC, Web browser, and telephone.”

As you can see this makes life a lot easier to work from anywhere. I was wishing to have something similar for my personal cell phone, i.e. receive my voice mails over email (you could ask why that would be useful; I promise you it is, for me at least). And seems there is a company that provides this service for free (for retrieviing 3 msgs/day). So if you are comfortable with the fact that this company can listen to your voicemails, you might find http://farshid.sedghi.org/wp-admin/www.GotVoice.com useful.

The other day, I came across this script for Grease Monkey in FireFox, a script that makes it a lot easier to view a picture link and I thought I would share it as I have found it to be very useful. And in case you just wanted the .js file.

Ever wanted to open a word or excel document but the computer you are on doesn’t have it installed? Or worse, you need to create one and the same problem? Well, reading my RSS feeds, I saw these two links

Online Word on Writely.com Online Excel on iRows.com

FoxIt is a fast one file program that allows you to view PDF files. Personally I am so tired of the slow performance of Adobe Acrobat reader that I am more than happy to use this.

WhyReboot tell you what pending file operations are asking for reboot.

And finally, here is a link to a scientific and very cool calculator, called Calcoolate.

These days, anything Google releases, I have to at least try and see it in action. And today was another day for that, namely Google Talk was released and so I installed it and tried it quickly. simple interface, nothing fancy, but I like it, since it does its job and behaves as you expect it. I tried the audio conversation feature as well with my east coast friend Nafisto and he is sitting behind a corp. firewall. The quality was fantastic. Try it for yourself…

A while back I wrote about what I am looking for in a cell phone. Being in States now have made me realize that the choices are not anywhere close to what it was in Europe. Nevertheless I found a phone that I am very happy with. This phone I read about many months back when it came to the US market from a few RSS feeds. It’s the audiovox 5600 smart phone that runs on windows mobile and it really is awesome. I am still trying to figure some things out, but generally the phone is awesome, and the service, Cingular, is not quite as awesome. It regularly cuts, the SMSes sent to me don’t always make their way to me. Hopefully it will get better over time though.

Digital images have taken over a lot of peoples’ lives and I am included in that gang. So the next step is how do you share and view all these images since they add up over the years to be quite a large number.

The first awesome tool that came along in my humble opinion was really Picasa and since Google bought them up, I guess they agree with me on that point. But the problem still remained and there was something missing that I wanted. To make it easy for my family to browse through my pictures just as I do when I use Picasa.

Well, today my wish came true when I read about Orb on GeekDojo. So I installed it to see how good it is and you can imagine my surprise when this thing worked through tripple firewalls (including our Corp. one). Basically, now provided that I share a user name and password, anyone can access my image library that I have shared on my laptop and browse through it at a fairly good speed. Wow is the word really…

[Update: 10 minutes after my orb was running, it could no longer connect to the server, so I guess our network admin didn’t like the traffic. I guess I will have to wait until I am no longer behind a corp. firewall.]

I have been out of touch with gadgets for over two years now. I considered myeslf a bit of a maven according to Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in the department of buying cell phones as friends would usually consult me before buying one. Well none of that for over 2 years since we use TDMA phones here (though we are about to enter the GSM world, even though a little late for me).

But as I am prepering to depart from Haifa, having a cell phone once again is going to be important, mostly because I find them very useful for different puposes and it is probably my most appreciated and used gadget. Having said that I find myself to be in a bit of unknown terrirtory with cellphones these days as things have moved forward and I have no idea who and what the best brands, players and features are in the market so its back to basics to learn what has happened since I got disconnected and what my choices are. Reading gadget blogs helps a lot actually. For instance this entry by Endgadget is very helpful. For now, this is my list of features I want to see in my (dream) future phone:

• Networking: GSM (triple band), GPRS, WAP
• Good battery time
• Bluetooth and infrared
• Sync with PC (I guess having windows CE or Mobile makes this easier)
• Small and light (< 100 grams and < palm size)
• GPS
• MP3 and Radio
• Storage capabilities like SD card
• Megapixel camera (> 1)
• Email and surfing (surfing for only really important situations)
• Running skype on it (I am pushing it now, huh?)

I know, its a long list but you know what? I already have found such a phone! Almost anyways and it has made me seriuosly want to commit to it and that months ahead of me even leaving. The phone in question is the Neonode N1m. Basically it has everything but what makes it only almost my dream cell phone is lack of bluetooth, GPS and Skype. I remember when I was planing to come to Haifa the Neonode N1 was being planned for release and it took them another 1.5 years before it actually happened, but the result is pretty nice. So unless I find a better option than this I will buy this one. Do you have a better option to suggest?

I finally bit the bullet and re-imaged my laptop after some 5 months. Anyways, last round I tried Google and Microsoft’s desktop search engines and although Googles was good I never really trusted it as it didn’t seem to index everthing I asked it. Also it doesn’t give you much options in terms of where to store your index etc. Microsoft has a better integration with windows and was very good but I constantly had to snooze it as it would try and index things instantly and using FileMon from sysinternals I realized that it is constantly writing to the disk.

So this round I am trying Yahoo’s which is powered by the fast X1 and so far I must say I am impressed and prefer it over the two I mentioned.

Also, in case you haven’t seen this, here is a list of killer apps (by Scott Hanselman) that I would say most of them are must have, especially if you are a little on the geek side.

For those of you who use Firefox as default browser, a while back I came across StumbleUpon extension which is a great one. Basically, the way it works is that by pressing the button in the toolbar, it open a new website, one that has been suggested/voted by a number of people that also use this.

If you think about it, these days you don’t randomly surf the net, and I would barely know where to start even, but with this you are presented websites that other people have come across, found interesting and suggested it and as a site gets more votes the chances of it being presented to you is higher when you. Another great thing is that all the websites that you come across and like, gets saved so you an revisit them later on and they even offer a RSS feed for the ones you have voted for. Here is the list of websites I ‘saved’ by voting for them.

I thought my right side of the brain was pretty good. But then when trying out twinoo I got all the math problems solved but kept losing out on the color questions. It boosted my geek side though.

I found a few cool flash movies on the finalist of Flash Forward conference in San Fran. And finally this is how a model can be made. Most of it is in Swedish but I am sure you wont have that big of a problem to understand what to do.

I came across Beaterator that you can potentially waste a lot of time on. Basically it lets you create your own beat. Very cool design. [via Geekdojo]

Also, I learned that Microsoft is offering a 2nd free shot if you take an exam with them and happen to fail and since I already was planning on taking one of the MCSD .NET exams this works out perfectly. Details on 2nd free shot.

I just love how easy to use and good this album creating application is and is the one I use to put up pictures online. To give you a sample, have a look at the sample album I created for a friend’s wedding using this tool.

When waking up this morning I thought to myself, I am tired of waking up either to the annoying ring of the alarm clock or the music on the radio that I can’t control. Why can’t there be a alarm clock with mp3 functionality. Well I guess Philips must have heard me. They have one now so you know what I want for my birthday.

Also, I came over these two sites that are handy to have bookmarked www.connectionstrings.com and free dev tools

Checked my Ad sense account today for stats of yesterday since it was my first day. 28 visits (# of times the Google script in the page was loaded), 7 clicks on the ads and $0.00 in income. Maybe I am too optimistic about getting a dollar in 6 months.

As the geek in the family I am also the private computer support for my sisters and parents and from time to time it ends up in frustration as it takes too long to explain over Skype and I can’t do remote desktop these days due to their ISP limitations. On one of the blogs (can’t find it now since I deleted it seems) I found out that you can record actions on the computer along with voice on a regular wmv file and all this using the free to download and use Windows Media Encoder 9.

So now I can have my family download instruction videos on how to install firewall or mail merge in outlook. I guess other areas of use would be for demo to customers or peer developers…you set the limit. And if you want to do it programmatically, I found this sample article on Codeproject.com

WinDirStat (via daily Grind) saved me a few gigs on my HD and there is something to be said about data that is presented visually in a nice and useful way and this one does it for sure.

Came across PureText which as a developer seems very useful. When copying/cutting text from an application into another, where you want only the text and not the formatting…this tool can be configured to do the job.

And here is a cool addin to Outlook. A calendar addin that give you fish-eye view as well as other useful features when looking at your outlook calendar. It’s called DataLens and you can view a demo video so you understand what it does and it works with outlook 2003 as well. Both of them are free.

Here is a good link that I have been looking for. MSDN’s own search is not good enough (unfortunately) and I tried this with a few articles that I looked for using MSDN’s own search without finding it and I found it using this search engine. I came across this link reading this free book called .NET in Samples . This is still in draft version and final one will be release on the end of 2004 focusing on Whidbey features (pdf or doc) [via Iserializable].