Consumer Reports' September 2008 issue (on the stands now) is kind of a back-to-school issue with lists of notebooks, desktops, and security suites (all for Windows, of course). They have 11 security suites listed (#1 is BitDefender) - see page 34. However, number 9 on the list is a home-made freeware bundle consisting of Avira AntiVir Personal Edition, Microsoft Windows Defender, and SPAMfighter Standard. However, on the very next page (p.

I've been playing with the Opera 9.5.x browser for the past few weeks after having ignored it for the last couple of years. I received a notice that a version 9.5.2 update was available when I fired up Opera this morning. Unfortunately, a lot of other people must be using Opera again too this summer, because I got the Service Temporarily Unavailable message instead of an update download from their opera.releasenotes.org server.

Secunia PSI is an interesting free utility that checks for out of date or insecure software. Unfortunately, on my old Windows XP PC, it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to check my system everytime I boot up. It along with the usual gaggle of required Windows security software (anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc.), that I can't use it for many minutes after firing the PC up. So, I removed PSI from the startup group today. I'll see if I can run in manually once a month or so.

I wanted to take Microsoft Live Writer (the freeware blog writer client) for a spin. However, I'm working on a Mac at the moment. So, I fired up Parallels Desktop for Mac which lets you run other operating systems while still running Mac OS X. Although Windows XP's network connectivity as a Guest OS under Parallels looked fine to me, Live Writer's installer insisted that it was offline. This was a silly notion since I had just downloaded the installer from within the Windows Guest OS.

liveusb-creator is an Open Source utility that lets you create live (run-able) operating systems on a USB flash drive. It runs on Microsoft Windows and Linux and has what looks like a nice GUI (no command line magic needed). It looks like it is tuned (will auto-download) for installing Fedora Linux. I'm sitting on an old Fedora 7 box right now (9 is the current release). But, ironically, the PyQt4 Python binding needed won't install from binary on this version of Fedora (haven't tried to install it from source yet).

Security researcher Dan Kaminsky made a simple web-based DNS Checker for you to use to check if your Internet Service Provider (ISP) has patched the DNS server flaw you've probably been reading about on various news sites. You can it on his website/blog at:

DoxPara Research

You can learn more about the DNS flaw and DNS in general on one of my must-listen-to podcasts: Security Now episode 155.

There's only so much TV time for the Olympics and many many simultaneous events for broadcasters to choose from. So, naturally, they choose either the popular events or events with an athlete with a special audience drawing power. So, what do you do if the sport you are interested in is not popular this Olympics? If you are in the US (not sure it is available outside the US), head over to...

NBCOlympics.com

I am pretty happy with iTunes on my Mac. However, I am not nearly as satisfied with Windows Media Player or the Zune Player when I am using a PC running Windows. I noticed that the first release candidate for the Mozilla Songbird project was released a few days ago...

Songbird 0.7 Release Candidate 1 is Available for Testing

Despite the Master Plan's statement that the online videos would be shut down on July 20...

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

...Acts 1, 2, and 3 are still viewable (and extremely entertaining) online. My only caveat is that it is sort-a-kind-a PG-13, but just barely. If you are a Joss Whedon fan who missed his latest production and first web-production, wander over to the site linked above.

Google's satellite partners were able to get images of Beijing through its haze and smog (or clouds as they call it). Here's the blog entry and a link to their map of what appears to be the main stadium.

Olympic imagery update

Google Map of Beijing Olympic stadium

Yahoo! finally got around to redesigning and renaming del.icio.us after buying it way back in December 2005. The new name is the much easier to remember...

delicious.com

Yahoo also redesigned the site to be faster and added a few features (like sorting book marks alphabetically). You can read more about the redesign on the Delicious blog.

Went over to FeedBurner to get a sense if Google still hates this site (not referring to it in search queries). The message above is what I get after I login and try to look at my feed stats. Looks like FeedBurner is broken.

The new Microsoft Live Search has a couple of interesting new tweaks when search for pictures of video. If you hover over an image's thumbnail, it expands slightly and provides text information about its size and location. Hovering over a video thumbnail actually plays the video in the thumbnail area.

Generally speaking, this site has a small but steadily growing number of people who visit. If you believe sites like Compete.com (and I'm not sure I do), unique vistors are up about 700% over the past 12 months. I'm guessing this means that 14 people visited compared to 2 last year :-)

The Internet Archive hosts the...

NASA Images

...images site. There's some spectacular images with text descriptions there. Great time waster (but educational :-).

Smashing Magazine, a web design focused magazine, has a bunch of free stuff at...

Smashing Freebies

The free items includes RSS icons, typefaces, Wordpress themes, wall papers and more. Very cool stuff.