Recently in Reviews Category
For starters, I have to stay that the 6 or 7 episodes I've watched so far show great promise. I don't see any giant mechas piloted by 14-year-olds yet (the intro does show what appears to be a giant mecha, though). Nor have I seen any other anime cliches. Well, some (I think) but not the painful ones.
In fact, I can't wait to watch the next episode right now. I think you should too.
Since I've been using my latest main Mac incarnation, I've longed for a wireless mouse that would make the process of routing the mouse cable to reduce pull on it, obsolete. As of today, I've finally reached that point.
This mouse just so happens to be a cheap-ass BenQ M306 wireless optical mouse I bought at one of my usual stomping grounds for cheaply-priced computer goods.
I have to say that after only half a day, I'm quite impressed with it over my previous mouse. The tracking is nice and smooth and it also has an extra two buttons for user-programmable tasks (I have to find something to use them in OS X without costing me money). Plus, even with the two AA batteries that power it, it is quite light in the hand.
With that all in mind, I have to give this mousey a 5 out of 5 (I'll get some graphics soon for this soon).
This time around, I think I'll review some Windows software. Unusual, I know.
The software in question is one I use strangely often on my "Gaming PC". GhostIt does basically one thing and does it well. Its function is to turn windows transparent. When they are transparent, they remain on top but will not react to anything but a special hot-key combination or via the GhostIt taskbar icon, of course.
This is rather useful, as I've found. For instance, you could find something useful browsing the web and wish the interact with another app in some manner. Thus, you could simply make the browser window transparent and then work in the application you want, without losing sight of your browser. Kinda handy, eh?
There was a Mac OS X equivelant for this, but I've forgotten it at the moment. I'll remember it later...
I'm reviewing what I consider to be a rather useful product today. Lets begin with how I came upon this item.
It all started around the time I went on my trip to Ireland. It seems that I left a CD in the CD player in my Mustang. While you wouldn't think this would cause a problem, it apparently did. The CD in there did not want to eject. I eventually gave up after several furious attempts to forcibly extract it. I decided that until I got back to this problem I would need some other source of music besides the radio.
So, I looked upon the great wilderness that is the shopping side of the internet. I happened to venture to one of my favorite shopping sites, Other World Computing, and see the RoadTrip! for the modest price of $14.99. I was somewhat unconfortable with the prospect of going completely round-about to get some external sound source into my car's stereo system, but I decided it was worth it. Plus, I located some reviews of it that said that its sound quality was quite good. Thus, I ordered it with EXPRESS OVERNIGHT SHIPPING, ha.
When it arrived the next day, I was already quite anxious to hook my MP3 player up. The installation was obviously easy; hook it up and tune in your radio. I thought it was broken because my radio seeked out and found the appropriate station but there was no sound. So, I booste the volume and found that all was indeed well. Even though the volume is at max on my MP3 player and pretty high on my stereo, the music doesn't sound distorted at all. In fact, it sounds quite good. I have to say that I'm quite happy with this little workaround.
I'll soon have the volume problem solved when I get a in-line amplifier that helps boost the volume. I've seen one before that was powered by a single AAA. I suppose that I'll have to go searching for it too.
Firefox in itself didn't offer this nice feature, but an extension to it did. This extension was cleverly named AdBlock. For this reason alone, I even prepared to start using Firefox as my main means of viewing the internet. A quick search, though, found that someone else liked this ability to block ads and prefered to use Safari.
This is when I came upon the wonderful piece of hack-work that is SafariBlock. The author of this great creation was inspired by Firefox's AdBlock extension and wished to give Safari the same power.
After installing it and restarting Safari, I was now able block images by their url. In many ways this is quite similar to iCab's ability to block ads; of course, it comes no where near the full abilities of iCab's filter manager. But the usage of the (*) character made the trasition of my settings from iCab very easy. I already had a long list of ad servers ready.
The change was immediatly noticeable. I visited a few sites to check out its effect and there was nothing where ads used to reside. Nothing. Nada. Ha ha. I'm not finished though. These ADs are a wiley bunch. You can never let your guard down. Hell, they've started to find ways through many a browser's anti-pop-up defences.
When you use this, feel no guilt. There will be people who say that poor websites need their ads to make money. Boo hoo. I don't click on 'em and they only hurt my eyes. How are they making money off of that? Do they enjoy hurting me or something? If you are looking for software like this, then the advertisers aren't making money off of you anyway. Go for it. Enjoy a partially more ad free internet then ever before...
