Download YouTube Videos - higher quality and better sound than the FLV versions (via

I used to pimp the hell out of Lookout, a free outlook plug-in that makes search easy. Microsoft bought it, never used it and disabled it in Outlook 2007. Well the fix is out and I highly suggest anyone using Outlook as any sort of knowledge base (which means everyone) get this up and running. Found via Joel Spolsky, whose site you have probably read this on already.

Password Safe - I love to pimp open source projects, especially when they are very useful. We use this at work to manage application account passwords, etc. Great for personal use too!

Well I got my new computer in. Aside from the computer I built for storing media, my old computer is 7 1/2 years old and when I moved into the new house, something just gave out so it would would hard crash during boot process or in the first 5 min of usage. I thought about getting a Mac but they are still seem pricey and I don’t necessarily like Apple’s business practices any more than Microsoft’s. Plus I would like the option of gaming; the fact that my sister (and soon to be mother of my nephew/niece) works at Dell had a lot to do with my purchasing choice.

I went from a 1 Ghz Micron to a dual core 3 Ghz Dell XPS 420. I like the hardware a lot (22 in wide monitor roXXorz). I got it with Vista Home Premium and consider me jumping on the anti-Vista bandwagon. It seemed to work fine on my machine at the old job (Dell 280) but last night I noticed some weird glitches. I had to move the mouse to the top half of any button before it would highlight and I could click. Also I deleted a very small install exe and the deleting graphic ran forever. On a fresh box with a fresh install I shouldn’t see glitches like these. I think this weekend, I’ll partition and rebuild as a dual boot with Ubuntu Studio.

I have not really gotten to play with Vista media center too much. Comcast did not connect my back room like I paid them too. But what I’ve seen looks like a nice improvement over XP MCE.

LastGraph - I love Last.fm and stats so imagine the wood I sport over this. Graphs the artists you listen to!

When Hardware is Free, Power is Expensive - I am not a hardware person, it bores the shit out of me. But I am an environmentalist and believe conservation is sexy. This is a fairly easy to understand post about power consumption in the personal computing environment and in Google HQ.

Pipes for Your Tubes - 10 pretty good web mash-ups.

Theory of Fun - Good read for coders, gamers, people in general

Geek Dad - A Wired blog for geeks with kids. Does not affect me yet but probably about 80% of my readership may be interested. I think this and some Make projects would be a damn cool way to spend a day.

So in the past couple of weeks, I have been jumping head first into the technology of 2002. 3 weeks ago I got text messaging on my phone. I had it blocked so I would never receive messages but Cingular the new at&t gave no indication to the sender I would not receive the message. So I decided to bite the bullet despite my hatred of typing with my thumbs. Now that I have txt msg, I think I should block all voice calls. Text eliminates all the small talk and gets right to the point. Awesome.
And then 2 days ago, with a $100 gift certificate from my employer, I bought a Archos 404 PMP. It is pretty bad-ass. I have been uploading music and pics and using keepvid to download YouTube, Google Video, etc that I like to the player. The downside is I really have not figured out how I am going to run with it - no armband accessory and I really don’t want to buy a fanny pack. Archos also has a podcatcher on their site I am using but you can use sites like podcast ready or hopefully an upcoming version of Democracy Player to autodownload podcasts and sync them on your player.