Steve's Ravin' Reviews
~~Steve Mills
I see the double nickel coming next week and
I'm not happy about it, but, as they say, it beats eating a sod sandwich.
Summer, for me is a revival time - a time to get ready for the things that
lie ahead. For me it is a new business - anxious to get started, but proper
planning takes time - boring but necessary.
Grab any of these programs - not a weak one in the bunch.
Your suggestions are welcome and encouraged.
Take Care…..
Steve
steve@inil.com
Weather Watcher
Version: 3.61
Date: 6/12/2003
Author: Mike Singer
Web Site:
http://207.218.206.9/~singerscreations.com/Index.html
Freeware
Rating: 5 Geezers
I guess the success of Weather Bug has created a lot of interest in weather
programs. Unfortunately, many of them tend to follow WB into the land of
heavy advertising, subscriptions and Spyware. This is an exception.
Mike Singer is a reader, so he, obviously, has good taste. He also writes
good software. He describes his program as Ad-free, spyware-free,
hassle-free... Your weather, your way. View current conditions, hourly
forecast, daily forecast, detailed forecast, severe weather alerts, and
weather maps for almost any city world-wide! That's actually pretty fair.
It's proven trouble free on my computer and as he implements some cool
planned features it will be terrific. I do miss the localized weather maps
which Weather Bug offers, but I don't miss the other crap. Give this a try,
it could become your program of choice.
AIDA32
Version: 3.61
Date: 5/29/2003
Author: Tamas Miklos
Web Site: http://www.aida32.hu/aida32.php
Freeware
Rating: 5 Geezers
I was recently repairing a computer and had some questions about the
motherboard version and other integrated components. I hadn't used this in a
while and was surprised how far it had come. The quantity and quality of the
output is staggering. What a great way to make an inventory of your hardware
or for answering questions on a tech support call.
AIDA32 is a professional system information, diagnostics and benchmarking
program running on Win32 platforms. It extracts details of all components of
the PC. It can display information on the screen, print it, or save it to
file in various formats like HTML, CSV or XML. The program is freeware, but
comes in 3 versions for various types of users. Even corporate and business
users get free usage, but must register.
AIDA32 should certainly be in your toolbox. Some features are:
* full hardware & software information on 85 pages
* built-in hardware database: detailed information about 25000 components
* physical information for CPU, motherboard, hard disk, optical drive
* motherboard chipset, buses, sensor information
* installed programs, event logs list
* diagnostics module to reveal possible problems
* memory benchmark
* automatic audit via command-line switches
* SQL database support (ADO/ODBC)
* remote control through TCP/IP network
* 32-bit low-level hardware detection
* multi-threaded program model
* full Windows XP compatibility
* full Windows Server 2003 compatibility
* Iomega Active Disk support
* English, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish,
French, Gallegan, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish,
Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish,
Oh yeah - One of the coolest features is you can have an effective analysis
tool on a single floppy disk by removing some unnecessary files. Really
handy.
ieSpell
Version: 2.00
Date: 6/12/2003
Author: Sidney Chong
Web Site: http://www.iespell.com/
Freeware for personal use
Rating: 6 Geezers
I don't award 6 Geezers too often, nor do I give a full review to updates
very often - this is an exception. I spend a lot of time online and my
typing stinks - this program keeps me looking reasonably well educated. It
just does what it's supposed to do and does it well. You forget it is an
add-on. This release offers a lot of new features:
* major code refactoring to facilitate upcoming features
* allow user to create/add/remove custom dictionaries
* allow user to edit contents of custom dictionaries easily thru' built-in
UI
* allow user to select more than one custom dictionaries
* custom dictionaries can be located anywhere in the file system hence you
may even share them over the network using UNC!
* share your custom dictionary with Microsoft Word!
* new spell check option added - ignore words with numbers (e.g. Win95)
* new spell check option added - ignore html markups and escape sequences
(e.g. <br>, &nsbp;)
* added online lookup of word feature (Useful if you have always wondered
what that strange looking word in the suggestion list means!)
* ieSpell now ignores html text boxes that are hidden on the page
* added a licensing module for users to register their licensed copy of
ieSpell.
ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text
input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who
do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries).
Even if your web application already includes spell checking functionality,
you might still want to install this utility because it is definitely much
faster than a server-side solution. Plus you get to store and use your
personal word list across all your applications, instead of maintaining
separate ones on each application.
The program installs as a new button in the IE toolbar (as well as a new
menu item under *Tools*) and as part of the context window when you right
click on a web page - after filling in a form, just hit the ieSpell button
and it pops up a dialog, similar to the MS Word spell check.
Commercial use requires a license, but it is only $15 and volume licensing
is very reasonable (e.g.$2 each for 500).
This won't help the seller on eBay that keeps asking for my patients in
solving a problem, but it should help the rest of us!
Final Thought:
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He
doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other man
pulls out his phone and calls emergency services.
He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The
operator in a calm, soothing voice replies: "Take it easy. I can help.
First, we have to be sure he's dead."
There is a silence, then a shot is heard.
Back on the phone, the hunter says, "Ok, now what?"
<<<back to contents
Steve
Mills has been reviewing software in different capacities for many years.
He
has recently left his job with a search engine consulting firm and is
looking for a new adventure.
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