Gadgetopia

LinuxCommand.org: Learn the Linux command line. Write shell scripts.: This appears to be a great site to learn the Linux command shell. You have Linux installed and running. The GUI is working fine, but you are getting tired of changing your desktop themes. You keep seeing this "terminal" thing. The ...

SHELL EXTENSION CITY: This is a great site, full of links to the most useful little apps. Every week I find something handy in their RSS feed. I'm posting this because I have about 10 things there bookmarked to post about -- I figured it was more efficient just to ...

A beginner's guide to customization, skinning and shell replacements: A long article with a look at some fairly stunning Windows skins and desktop mods. You can make your Windows machine look like a tricked-out Linux distro without too much work. Lots of screencaps I must be new at this, because ...

Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia: An interesting few paragraphs on the history of the IMDb. The database started out in 1990 as a collection of shell scripts created by Col Needham which could be used to search the FAQs posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies. In 1993, a centralized e-mail ...

GMail Drive shell extension: GMailFS has been around for Linux for a few months, but this is the first Windows port I've seen. Holy Cow, this works well. Double-click installer, very professionally done. I installed it at the office, dragged a few files into the drive, then installed it at ...

Web Development Bookmarklets: Thanks for Simon Willison for pointing us at this amazing page of bookmarklets that let you play with the CSS and JavaScript of any page. These bookmarklets let you see how a web page is coded without digging through the source, debug problems in web pages quickly, ...

Eggfusion has developed a great gadget for egg producers; a laser engraver that will etch a line or two of text into the shell of an egg. Only the outer 5 percent of the shell is affected by the etching process, and doesn't mess with the stuff inside at all. ...

I want a Freeware Utility to ... 450 common problems solved: A handy page in a good format. Say out loud, "I want a freeware utility to [insert need here]," then go to the page. Via Shell Extension City.

My company just bought Small Business Server 2003, and a copy of FrontPage 2003 was included, so I've been playing around with it for the last week. Overall, a huge improvement over previous versions of FrontPage (it no longer messes with your stuff...). It includes something that DreamWeaver has had ...

Bunker Busters: Here's a great video of a bunker buster bomb. This appears to be a training demo or something, because they penetrate a cutaway "bunker" so you can set the bomb punch through the shell and detonate inside. (Sidebar content on this site can be NSFW-ish. Depends on what ...

try ruby! (in your browser): An interactive Ruby shell in your browser. I tried it and it seems like it uses Ajax to round trip to a server, where it must run the commands. How does it maintain state between requests? You can type "help" for a short tutorial. This ...

Liquid Web Project Streamer - r0t0r00t3r: For the record, this hack works exactly as they display here. Anyone can effectively open a Windows shell (explorer.exe) as the SYSTEM account. I don't know the specifics of what this allows you to do, but it sure looks scary. This could probably come ...

The War on Terror, as viewed from the Bourne shell.: The war on terror, depicted as a Unix command line. $ cd /middle_east $ ls Afghanistan Iraq Libya Saudi_Arabia UAE Algeria Israel Morrocco Sudan Yemen Bahrain Jordan Oman Syria Egypt Kuwait Palestine Tunisia Iran Lebanon Qatar Turkey $ cd Afghanistan ...

There are a lot of free services on the Web -- we all use one. But which ones would you pay for? Of the free services you use, let's say they all decided to charge $30 per year. Which ones would you go without and which would you shell out ...

BlueProximity - GNOME Bluetooth device distance detection and automatic locking tool :-): What a great idea. Of course, I keep my cell phone on my desk or in my coat pocket half the time, so I m still screwed. This software helps you add a little more security to your desktop. ...

I like UNIX. I like Javascript. But for some reason, JS/UIX scares the bejeesus out of me. JS/UIX is an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers, written entirely in JavaScript (no plug-ins used). It comprises a vir- tual machine, shell, virtual file-system, process-management, and brings its own terminal with screen- and ...

Is Windows 95 still about 5 years too new for your tastes? Calmira brings new-age flashy eye-candy (like the Start Menu) to your Windows 3.11 installation. Calmira is a complete 16-bit shell that lets you manage files, launch applications and control tasks. It brings Windows 3.1 up to date with ...

I maintain a web site that runs off of a content management system. The whole deal is database driven, and the content is identified by numeric ID's. I wanted to know which items of content are actually being used on the site so I could get rid of the ones ...

Elias Fotinis TaskArrange :: Arrange the Windows taskbar buttons: Okay, this sounds stupid, but I'm wicked guilty of it. From left to right, it has to be Outlook, Thunderbird, Firefox. If it's not, I get a little...anxious. Sometimes we open our programs in a specific sequence, to keep their taskbar ...

Apple - Mighty Mouse: Apple announces a multi-button mouse. Gosh, what an advance. In the beginning, there was one button. Then there were two. Then there were clickable scroll wheels and programmable toggles and solid-state slides. But nobody made a mouse as easy to use as your Mac. Until now. ...

I was just looking at a Gadgetopia post, and smack in the middle of it was a promo banner from Lenovo shilling their spiffed up ThinkPad Z60. The promo asks "Which Side Are You On?" and includes an online poll to see whether the black or titanium-skinned ThinkPad is more ...

Is anyone else watching this show? We've talked before about how Alias was a big geek tech show, and this one is the same, but less with the tech and more with the geek. Don is an FBI agent. His brother Charlie is a world-class mathmetician who can apply numbers ...

onfocus.com : snapGallery: This little gem was written by Paul Bausch author of Amazon Hacks and it demonstrates two things I've believed in for a long time: (1) the underestimated power of Windows scripting (the only people fully exploiting this are virus writers), and (2) the publishing model ...

JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank: I don't know what's more odd -- that this exists at all, or that you can buy it on Amazon for $20,000 (I actually stumbled across it while browsing -- don't ask). The JL421 Badonkadonk is a completely unique, extremely rare land vehicle and battle tank. ...

I stumbled across something on SpeedTV today that has to be seen to be believed: figure-eight train racing. Not real trains three cars lashed together to act like a train. The first car is the only powered car. Usually something big, old, and American mid seventies Monte Carlos ...

An InfoWorld article by Chad Dickerson tells of his accidental conversion from Windows and Linux to Mac OS X. "On a recent Friday, weary from shopping for a new PC, I grabbed the 3-year-old G4 at my desk and took it home to see what all the Mac and OS ...

Ars Technica has an interesting blog roundup article this morning with quotes from a number of MS employees who are questioning the wisdom of keeping IE around without improving it. The saga of Internet Explorer, the piece of software that once brought the Department of Justice to the brink of ...

I have the need for a new office router. We only have a couple of people, so a normal home router would be fine, except that we're geeks, so we need more than one external IP. Most home routers don't handle that. You can snag yourself a fancy Cisco PIX, ...

I got to wondering the other day how the Windows Add/Remove Programs control panel applet works. It turns out that it's not that complicated. The list of programs you can uninstall is stored in the registry under: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / Software / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion / Uninstall If there's ...

Someone (I don't know who), said "Half of intelligence is knowing the answer. The other half is knowing where to find the answer." In today's world, we all know how to find the answer. But has that made us less inclined to know the answer from memory? Google has just ...