In any case, the end of the year brings with it certain things that need done, and the changing of the calendar is a good time as any. Maybe these will help remind you of a few things you need to do.

• Change the batteries in your home’s smoke detectors and test them.
• Clean out the inside of your computer(s). This is something that should be done at least annually and probably 2–3 times a year if you keep your computer on the floor, have a dusty home, or have pets who shed.
• Change the passwords of all my sensitive accounts, such as e-mail, banking, credit cards, and any online bill-pay accounts. You should be doing this at least once a year to help combat password hacking. MakeUseOf has an excellent guide on creating strong, but easy-to-remember passwords.
• Take a personal inventory. This will include things I’ve accomplished, things I meant to accomplish but didn’t, and goals for the next year. I prefer “goals” to “resolutions” as it sounds more imperative and definite. Plus, there isn’t that triteness associated with New Year’s resolutions, which most people break by February anyway. If you are the resolution type, however, Leo Babauta has a great article on sticking to your resolutions over on Zen Habits.

If I don’t post anything between now and then, have a happy, fun, and safe New Year’s Eve.

Allow me to introduce Startpage:

Startpage claims no retention of user search data, and you have the option to use HTTPS (secure/encrypted) connections to further protect yourself. Startpage uses an aggregate search from various engines, kind of like Dogpile, and gives pretty good results.

You’ll probably want to click the “my settings” link on the front page to customize the output a bit, most notably to enable the “Secure Socket Layer (SSL) / HTTPS” setting. If you choose to “add startpage to your browser”, also make sure to check the “Use HTTPS” box.

If you’re using an unsupported browser, you can manually set up Startpage with the following URL string:

https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?cat=web&query=%s

Note that some browsers want a different variable for the search string, so you might have to replace the “%s” with another string of text.

Give it a try, and let me know what you think.

From the album Merry Axemas – A Guitar Christmas.

Of course, back in those days, you had 9600 baud modems, unless you were a bleeding-edge person with a whopping 28.8 kbps one. However, even in today’s world of widely-available and affordable broadband connections, I still carry the flame for Lynx’s simplicity.

Google home page

Sure, because it doesn’t support graphics, JavaScript, Flash, and all the other fancy stuff, a lot of today’s popular sites don’t work at all with it. But if you’re just reading primarily text-only articles, it’s quite nice to be able to read without flashing banners, pop-up ads, and all those other things distracting you from the information you’re trying to digest.

Apropos mnmlist.com article

Obviously, Lynx isn’t for everyone, but if you’re a heavy article reader, maybe you should consider using this classic program again.

My house had a standard thermostat installed when I moved in, and I just set it on 70°F and left it. My utility bill on my 1,100-square foot home was between $200–250 per month. While that’s not hateful, I figured I could do better.

The following year, I purchased a programmable thermostat for around $35 and installed it. The process took about an hour total time. The shape of the new thermostat was different from the old one, so I had to spackle the old screw holes and paint over the area, so it was around thirty minutes of work over a two-day period. If you can find a thermostat the same size as your current one, it’ll save you even more time.

I programmed it using the following schedule:

Monday–Friday:
06:45 — 70°F
I get up at 7am, so I want it warm (or at least warming) when I arise.

08:15 — 65°F
I go to work around this time, so there’s no need for the house to be at full temperature. Other people might suggest dropping it further, but then the furnace has to spend a lot of time "catching up" at the next time break, and you lose some of the money you saved. Additionally, the walls and floors of the house cool down to this level, creating additional load on the furnace. Five degrees seems to be the sweet spot.

18:00 — 70°F
This is typically when I get home, so it’s time to get the house back up to a comfortable room temperature.

23:45 — 67°F
I go to bed around midnight and sleep under a heavy comforter, so I stay plenty warm in bed. I also find it easier to sleep in somewhat cooler air, so there’s no need to keep the house at full temperature overnight.

Saturday–Sunday:
08:30 — 70°F
This is when I typically get up. I’ll then keep this temperature the rest of the day. If I’m going out for the night, I might manually turn the heat back down to 65–67°F, but this isn’t regular enough to set up a program for.

23:45 — 67°F
Same as above.

The final result? Gas bills of $175–225 per month, saving around $25–50 a month, meaning the thing paid for itself almost right away.

Now, if you or another family member is home during the day, you’ll probably only be able to set the temperature drop at night, so your savings won’t be as dramatic, but even if you only save $5–10 a month, it’ll pay for itself in a year, and if you use similar scheduling for your air conditioning, that’s a minimum of $60–120 extra in your pocket each year.

Mozilla Firefox — People have been gushing over Chrome lately, but its lack of extension support (mainly AdBlock Plus) keeps Firefox as my default browser.

Crimson Editor — This is still my default code editor. The built-in FTP support is great since I currently work in text-based Unix development.

CLCL — This keeps a history of the last X number of items you copied into your clipboard (the number is configurable), so you can reuse them later. I don’t know how developers can work without using this or a similar utility. I wouldn’t be able to count the number of hours this has probably saved me in development time.

FreeCommander — Windows Explorer is fine for basic tasks, but this dual-paned, feature-filled replacement keeps a lot of useful functions at a single button click or a single menu level.

FileZilla — This open-source FTP client gets better with each new version. Everything you could possibly want to do with FTP is supported, as is SFTP, and the multi-thread transfer mode makes uploading entire web sites a breeze.

CCleaner — Help keep your PC in tip-top shape by cleaning the Registry and unused temporary files left over from your applications. It’s amazing how much stuff accumulates over time. This is especially good to run before defragmenting your hard drive, which brings us to…

Defraggler — While it uses a lot of the same libraries as the built-in Windows Defragmenter, Defraggler puts it in a much friendlier interface, and it gives a few extra run options for advanced users.

PDF X-Change Viewer — Adobe Reader has turned into a bloated security risk waiting to happen. PXCV gives you all the features you really need, plus additional options for annotating and saving PDF files. Foxit isn’t a bad choice either, but it doesn’t have as many features as PXCV.

7-Zip — This has been my default archiving tool for a while now. It gets great compression ratios without sacrificing speed. People who need a more user-friendly interface might want to give jZip a look since it repackages 7-Zip to make it work more like WinZip.

Panda Cloud Antivirus — Because I’m on broadband, have firewalls built into both my DSL modem and my router, keep Windows and other software updated, and practice safe surfing, Panda is more than sufficient for my needs. People on dial-up or those who do a lot of P2P transfers may want something like AVG or Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE is not recommended for computers with single-core processors) for the extra protection they offer.

VLC — Sure, it’s not as flashy as some of the other media players, but this program opens every media format I’ve thrown at it without having to install additional codec packs.

CutePDF — This is a simple print-to-PDF driver, which is handy when you want to print off invoices and receipts, but don’t want to waste paper unless it’s absolutely necessary. There are tons of these out there, but what I like about CutePDF is that it doesn’t open the document after you print it out.

KeePass — Because, really, who can remember all of their passwords?

IrfanView — An image viewer on steroids. View and do low-level editing of pictures. This has been a great piece of software for well over a decade now.

jStrip — You’d be surprised on how much wasted space is eaten up by your pictures. If you don’t need the internal EXIF data (which lists time the picture was taken and other info), just run this against a directory of photos and be amazed at how much space you get back.

Launchy — This is a program launcher, which may not sound overly useful, but just typing the first few characters of a program name is for me a lot quicker than trying to find it in the Start Menu.

ImgBurn — While it’s not quite ready for the general populace yet due to a somewhat non-intuitive user interface (especially if you’re used to Nero or Roxio), this free disc authoring and burning software has an impressive list of features and capabilities.

AutoIt — Whenever I need a quick program to do something or I just want to automate a few tasks, this comes in real handy. If you’re not a programmer or have no interest in programming, this won’t be of any real use to you, but I can’t imagine life without it.

SharpDevelop — Speaking of programming, I’ve just started using this as a replacement for Visual Studio .NET. So far, it’s done everything I needed it to do, and you can’t beat the price.

Those should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy!

From this pop-up, you can have it open your browser to read the message, or just ignore it if it isn’t important.

While this doesn’t offer as many features as the similar application GMail Notifier, it uses a small fraction of the memory, and is perfectly suited to my needs.

Note that Spiffy only runs on Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7 with the .NET Framework 2.0 or later installed.

This is a rather well-done parody by a Russian actors’ group called “Big Difference”. Enjoy.

I had the pleasure of seeing them live this past summer, and they were amazing. I’m often disappointed in live performances, but Nightwish was more or less dead-on with the album sound, which gives credit to their talent as musicians. If they ever come to your area, it’s definitely worth your time and money to check them out.