LKL's Blog

For years now, I have been annoyed and exasperated by tooltips in Windows XP. They pop up unexpectedly, obscuring what I’m trying to read (in Internet Explorer, on my desktop, in the Control Panel) or type (in FrontPage – why must it tell me to use ctrl+click every time I hover over a link? After 7 years of web design, I know, believe me). Most of the time, tooltips are worthless. For years I have been trying to find a way to disable them, with little success. Tweak UI (a Windows configuration utility that I highly recommend) helps some, and there are various registry hacks that get rid of a few of more, but nothing that disables all of them. Today, I discovered a brilliant piece of software called AlphaXP. While it doesn’t disable tooltips, it does the next best thing: it makes them invisible.

AlphaXP actually has a whole bunch of features related to transparency, but the only one I care about is the one that lets you set the transparency of tooltips. Putting it at 100% makes them invisible. It’s not free, but the $15 price tag is well worth the disappearance of my number 1 Windows pet peeve. Note that the “lite” (free) version of the software doesn’t offer this feature, though I’m sure it’s a fine program for other transparency needs.

Are you as sick of spam as I am? It’s not just in email anymore… in addition to the hundreds of spam emails I receive at my 7 email addresses, this blog gets over 100 spam posts per day. Fortunately they are filtered out, but I still have to clean out the filter periodically. In any case, the best program I’ve found for dealing with email spam is Spamihilator, a freeware program with all kinds of options and a fairly decent learning filter. Check it out.

I really like the Google personalized homepage, which offers the ability to customize a page with all kinds of cool gadgets, both practical (weather, lunar phases, calculator) and fun (I am totally addicted to the game Flood it). I don’t have it set as my homepage – that honor goes to Learn French at About – but I have my Google page bookmarked and visit it several times a day.

This week marks Google’s eighth birthday, and it is commemorated by yet another very clever doodle – take a close look at how many candles there are and what they spell out.

Google Blog: How long is 8 years in Internet time?

Check out this amazing creature – it looks like something you’d find in the jungle, but apparently it’s a harmless giant caterpillar, known as a hickory horned devil, that is looking for a place to burrow so that it can re-emerge as a royal moth. Be sure to click on the photo to see the full-size image.

Incredibly, it only took me about 10 minutes to find out what it was called on the internet, using such search terms as light green, spikes, and giant insect. How did people ever find out stuff like this before? I guess I would have had to go to the library and look through reference books – it would have taken days!

I’ve been looking for decent back up software forever. They always seem to want to compress all of my files into a single huge file that can only be used to restore the hard drive, or keep dozens of revisions, or other nonsense. All I want is a program that automatically, quietly, three times a day, updates a mirror of my documents and settings on my external hard drive, and I finally found it earlier this week: Backup4all. It has all of those “advanced” features that I don’t want, but it also does just what I do want. I highly recommend it. (And I didn’t find it a moment too soon – I had a computer scare on Wednesday. It turned out to just be a loose component in the CPU, but for a while there I thought the motherboard was shot.)

Definition: A sort of pseudo-reality that exists when you make something up and enough people agree with you. Coined by Stephen Colbert, reporter for Comedy Central’s Colbert Report.
Source: Can Wikipedia Handle Stephen Colbert’s Truthiness? (MTV News)

Of course, that begs the question of what to call the ever-changing “reality” that is found on Wikipedia, since popular terms may be edited nearly constantly throughout the day and an entry is almost never definitive. Instabiliality?

I love being able to read the news online. When our power was out last week, I actually bought a newspaper for the first time in years, and it seemed very odd. I particularly like Google News, which aggregates headlines from papers all over the world. I have it customized an emphasis on world news, including headlines from French papers; an extra section with articles that mention “French language”; and no sports section. I visit my personalized news page at least three or four times a day – it’s great.

If you run across a website written in another language, it’s great to be able to plug the site into an online translator and find out what it says. But that’s about all they are good for. By definition, online translators can only give you an idea of what is said – they should never be used to actually write something in another language. This article explains the shortcomings of online translators.

Have you ever noticed that when you bookmark sites or add them to your favorites, they sometimes come with a little image next to their name? This is called a favorite icon (favicon for short), and I just discovered a site that will make them for you. If you have a website, you can upload an image and click generate favicon. Then just upload it to your site, add a single line of code to your homepage, and when someone bookmarks your site, your little logo will be right there too. Apparently it can also make animated icons, but I haven’t tried that yet: FavIcon from Pics