Rants
A Directory on Bloatware
I hate it when I download something and it tries to install more stuff than what I asked for. Thus I composed this Directory of Bloatware comprised of software that I’ve encountered recently that try to install more than what was listed.
I know a lot of companies use these additional installations as their revenue stream in order to provide free software, but the ‘bloat’ label is still accurate. It unnecessarily increases the size of the installer I’m downloading and the amount of software installed on my computer if I just go through the default install. A bigger installed software footprint means there are more applications that need to be kept up-to-date or could potentially have system-compromising vulnerabilities. I would like to see an industry standard where tag-along software must be listed along with the download link.
Is Mozilla Shooting Itself in the Foot with Its "Smart" Web Pages?
After Firefox updates, it will launch with a new tab for its What’s New page and recently they’ve added a version check to the page to warn you if you have an outdated version of Adobe Flash. If you update Firefox and have an out of date version of Adobe Flash installed, you’ll likely be greeted with this message when Firefox restarts:
Happy Net Loss Day – One Year Later with the Comcast Bandwidth Cap
This October 1st, 2009 marks one year since Comcast started enforcing their monthly bandwidth cap limit at 250GB. If a user were to go over the limit in one month, they would receive a warning by some means of communication. A second occurrence of going over the limit would result in a termination of services for a year. October 1st, 2008 I declared to be the first Net Loss Day as a result of Comcast’s move and so today, I bid you another Happy Net Loss Day.
Google Gadgets, For Adult Eyes Only?
I went to install the translation Google Gadget on my site this morning and was accosted, or at the very least, very surprised by the number of Adult (porn) images and gadgets that were on the Google Gadget homepage. I simply went to the Google Gadget homepage and clicked on the Find Gadgets for your Webpage link. The next page lists a number of gadgets that you could add to your website, but the sheer number of adult-themed gadgets with pornographic thumbnails was alarming.
Gadgets typically include little segments of code you could add to your site to include: a clock, a Google Calendar, the weather, and more. It seems Google should tag the offending gadgets as Adult-only or R-rated and implement something along the lines of their SafeSearch to filter these things out by default. They could be included with a few more clicks, but I was disturbed to see such things come up so easily and readily on a Google page.
Happy Earth Day! – A Green Compilation
Happy Earth Day!
Here’s an article for all of you green thumbs on home row. I’ve compiled a lot of the articles previously features here at 404 Tech Support that are related to environmentally-conscious behavior and we’ll revisit them to see how we can reduce our effects on the environment. Also, at the end of the article, I’ll dig into some exciting alternative means to reducing our electricity demands that I’ve been looking into.
It seems there is a trend, that I can’t quite figure out, between IT Professionals being generally interested in alternative energy more so than other occupations; perhaps this is just a biased view since this is my industry. It might also be a generation thing; I did grow up in the age of Captain Planet. I’m no Al Gore or tree hugging hippie (not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong with that, well maybe Al Gore, but I digress…), but here are some low-hanging fruits that we can reach as ordinary folks in our day-to-day lives.
Clean up your Context Menu
The context menu (what pops up when you right-click) is one of the most popular items to clutter; a lot of programs will add their shortcuts or filetypes to the menu when they get installed. It’s also a very under-used, convenient location that you could put your frequently used functions and shortcuts. This post should show you how to tame the context menu and make it work for you.
One of the things that I use the context menu for the most frequently is for creating new folders or new text documents. Unfortunately, a lot of other clutter gets added to the context menu as programs are installed. As the list grows larger, it can sometimes take longer for the context menu or the New sub-menu to appear. In order to speed it up and make it more convenient, we just need to clean it up and get those unused entries out of our way.
Below you can see my context menu when I just right-click on my desktop. The New menu is cluttered with things I will never use and the reason I began investigating this was that the Text Document disappeared from the menu. This post will show how to retrieve the Text Document entry, remove any unwanted entries, and add any other file types.
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