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The Book Seer is a very straight-forward web app that would be useful to anybody looking for recommendations as to what they should read next. When you visit the site, you see a gentleman in the background with a speech bubble over his head. The speech bubble has two blanks where you put the title and author of the last book you read as if the guy is saying it. Both title and author are required but once you’ve filled out the fields simply hit the arrow to get your recommendations.

For an example, I’ll put in The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. (A book I’d recommend for any fan of fantasy fiction or willing to try one out.)

After the next page loads, you’ll get your list of recommendations. Pulling from Amazon and LibraryThing, a site I’ve recommended before, you end up getting a lot of compiled data in one fell swoop and in one convenient place. Both Amazon and LibraryThing’s recommendations come from synthesizing a lot of individual recommendations and purchasing data.

If you see a recommendation you like, you can click the link and it will take you to the respective page on either service. Unfortunately for those of us States-side, it links to amazon.co.uk and the easiest way to get to the Amazon.com version seems to be to go to Amazon.com and search for the title. An easier way is to click-through LibraryThing, if the title is listed, and then take their link to Amazon.com.

I’d like to take Amazon’s top recommendation and read the second book in the trilogy, but The Wise Man’s Fear isn’t out yet! (*grumble, grumble*)

So after you finish the book you’re reading currently, head on over to BookSeer to get some recommendations for your next great read.

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After cleaning up a virus today for one of my users, I noticed an odd remaining side effect: No executables would successfully launch. This included Explorer.exe under the user’s account that got infected, so after they would login it would just sit there at a blank screen. You could press Ctrl+Alt+Del to launch the Task Manager, but trying to run any executable would result in a message like this:

Windows cannot open this file: File: notepad.exe

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Early Tuesday morning, Google announced the launching of a revamped Google Voice mobile site. This web app allows Google to circumvent restrictive factors like Apple’s App Store. It also makes the app relatively device agnostic. Though it is only currently supported by the Palm Pre and iPhones with OS 3.0 or higher, the app would work for any phone supporting HTML 5 in its browser app.

This web app has most of the functionality of native app you would download and install on your phone except it doesn’t have access to your contacts, though you can easily store your contacts inside Google Contacts. Being web-based, this also means you won’t take up any space on your phone with the app’s installation footprint.

Google Reader, a popular RSS Feed Reader, has gotten a bit better with the addition of a new feature that will allow you to create “feeds” even on a page that doesn’t have an RSS feed. This feature works alongside the Google crawlers, it compares the cached version of the page to the version it’s looking at currently as it crawls the site and then generates a feed based on any changes it finds and creates an entry in your Google Reader.