This is a PSA for those who have way too much junk on their hard drives. Background For several months, McAfee has been taking ever longer to run virus scans on my hard drive, getting to the point that it sometimes took a couple of days. When I investigated, it reported that it was scanning [...]

I just realized that my most recent post (GTD: Your 6 Most Important Things) was my six hundredth post on here. This site has come a long way since I started working on it in vi and Netscape on a Unix workstation. It has been edited in — and arguably abused by — vi, Netscape [...]

In my ongoing battle against comment spam, I have finally decided to write myself a WordPress plugin as an additional layer of defense. It’s called WRECK (WordPress Regular Expression Comment Killer). WRECK (WordPress Regular Expression Comment Killer) is an extremely simple plugin for marking comments as spam if they match certain regular expressions. DOWNLOAD: wreck.zip [...]

I recently found a major obstacle to going Microsoft-free. I could switch to Linux, if I had the time to fool with it, at the moment, but it appears I am stuck with Microsoft Word, still. While I really like OpenOffice.org 2.0 (OOo), it doesn’t have native support for creating tables of authorities (a.k.a., tables [...]

Caching up, again, on the FOSS OTD: 10/25: GNU Privacy Guard – GnuPG.org. GPG is a free version of PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, a suite of strong encryption tools. While GPG doesn’t have all of the same features, it does allow you to encrypt files or e-mails with extremely strong encryption. 10/26: WINE (“WINE [...]

Today’s FOSS OTD is oriented towards programmers who need a good way to test regular expressions. Check out The Regex Coach – interactive regular expressions. It updates in real time, as you edit a regex or its target text. Very, very cool. Not actually open source, but still very cool.

Okay, so I got behind on the FOSS OTD postings. Catching up: 10/19: PHP is a wonderful, fast, and flexible OSS scripting language for web programming and stand-alone applications. 10/20: FileZilla is a free FTP client. There is also a great FileZilla Server application. 10/21: PuTTY is a free telnet/SSH client. Very dependable and flexible. [...]

Defined as a “Windows GUI grep utility,” AstroGrep is a search tool, similar to the “grep” tool in Linux, but with a Graphical User Interface (GUI, i.e. a window, not a command line). It’s faster and more reliable, in my experience, than the built-in Windows file search features. It can show search results in context [...]

Today’s FOSS OTD is WordPress, Free Blog Tool and Weblog Platform. WordPress makes it amazingly easy to set up and maintain a blog, with tons of plugins and easy theme creation. It’s the software that powers this blog, and I give it my hearty endorsement.

Today’s FOSS OTD is Google Desktop. Google Desktop is not open source, but it is free, and it is very, very useful. I use it all the time to locate e-mails I can’t seem to find on my own, or to figure out what webpage it was that had some useful piece of information, or [...]