For those readers interested in bird watching, you no longer have to go outside to have an opportunity to see Dutch birds. Over at the site of the Dutch Bird Protection organisation, you can view live web cam streams of 7 (soon to be different types of birds, including owls and storks.

I could have sworn I posted about this site or a similar one previously, but I cannot find my own post about it. How odd.

[Source]

As you may know, I kind of hate the idea of walking around with a passport that has an RFID chip with all kinds of personal data on it. Back in '06, I created my own little shielding cover, made of tin foil (how appropriate). Of course that did not last too long. So I decided to give myself a Christmas present, in the form of an actual commercially made RFID blocking passport case. This one made by Travelon.

The Travelon case is not quite what I expected, as I thought it would be completely sealed. Instead, both covers seem to provide protection, but the middle part is still open. I haven't had a chance to test any signal blocking, but I do hope the covers are enough of a protection. If nothing else, at least it makes me feel a little more secure than carrying the passport uncovered. Which is what I had been doing lately, since my homebrew cover didn't last too long. And really, $20 for some peace of mind is not much. The Travelon has enough room for a passport and some (credit) cards and it is not too bulky at that. I have no doubts I will enjoy using it on any next trips. Or course it still means taking the passport out of the case every time officials need to handle it, but that means quite limited exposure, compared to carrying it unprotected for the entire trip.


Buy Travelon RFID Blocking Passport Case

Sooner or later it can happen to the most cautious of us: some file got accidentally deleted and you have no backup of the file. Or perhaps your hard drive crashed for some reason. Some tools can be of help in situations like these.

I had to provide some phone support to someone who ended up with a hard drive failure. For some reason, Windows no longer recognized a drive partition as an NTFS drive containing data, but thought it was a RAW drive. No way to just copy the files to a working drive. To recover the partition, we ended up using TestDisk (TestDisk download and step-by-step instructions). When you run TestDisk, it pretty much opens a DOS box running the program to analyze damaged drives. Following the step-by-step instructions, you should be able to recover at least some of the partition data and files, which can be copied off of the drive.

In situations where the drive itself is still working fine, but you just deleted the files, Recuva or FreeUndelete can be of help. Recuva is very straight-forward with a nice GUI. Simply select the drive that contains deleted files, and set it to recover. Recovered files should be stored on a different drive, so you won't overwrite any deleted data while recovering (which would make recovering that deleted data impossible). FreeUndelete has a more basic GUI, but works like a charm as well.

All three of these programs will undelete files you deleted, no matter whether those are movies, executables, or photos. Must-have software for people who value their photographs.

New Dutch legislation has led to a do-not-call registry. For the past few years, a voluntary registry already existed, but of course there were plenty of telemarketing companies that did not bother to exclude people who registered with that service. But last week, the registry went online at http://www.bel-me-niet.nl/. Quite a success, too. The first day the site stopped working due to high traffic.

Of course I registered right away, and calls should stop about four weeks from now. I wonder if they will. It would be quite a relief, that is for sure. I know there is a US national registry as well (https://www.donotcall.gov/) but I also know there are still plenty of unwanted calls in spite of that registry. Hopefully the Dutch telemarketers will actually stop now. Long overdue, if you ask me.

Sometimes you want an easy way to have a site forget who you are, without logging off. CookieSwap makes this a breeze.

Blogline has always been my feed reader of choice, but lately its service is less than enjoyable. When looking for an alternative, I want another online reader, because that gives me maximum flexibility. I may give FeedShow a go soon, but Google Reader is supposed to be really good as well. The problem with Google? Single Sign On that authenticates me for all their services. So once I sign in to Google Reader, it knows who I am in Gmail, and it tracks all my Google searches. This is not something I want.

The Firefox add-on CookieSwap is just what I need. With CookieSwap, you can create different profiles. This way, I can have a profile that has me logged in as user GolbA, from which I access Gmail. Profile two knows me as GolbB, to read RSS feeds. And profile three has me completely logged out of Google, so I can search in a slightly more anonymous way. Switching is easy. CookieSwap adds a button on the browser (status) bar and a click brings up a choice of profiles. Double-clicking cycles to the next profile.

The only drawback of sorts is that switching profiles switches profiles for all tabs and browser instances. In other words, if you are logged into Gmail (or Bloglines or anything else) and it automatically tries to reload after you switch profiles, it will find you logged out. When you switch again, it will log you in again and show your mail. Well, this is how it behaved when I tried it, I don't use Gmail too often. It seems every time you switch a profile, the open page(s) get reloaded. This may not always be what you want, so make sure you thoroughly test this add-on for your own situation before relying on it.

Over two years ago, Wizards of the Coast (subsidiary of Hasbro, publisher of D&D and Magic: the Gathering) announced plans to create a social community site for gamers, called Gleemax. Nothing ever came of that. For some reason, probably financial, it never happened. Instead, what we got was a slightly revamped forum. A community, sure, but not a new one. And certainly not the kind of site I had in mind when I first heard of it. But now something new is coming.

The Magic (Online) forum is down for ten days, while they upgrade to a new site that will include such innovative features as “friends lists, groups, an invite system and calendar, blogs and wiki.” (or so the status message at the forum site says. Ten days without the forum, what will I do? Well, just go on living and playing. The forum was of marginal interest to me, I never participated much, but it was good to read other people's experiences.

I wonder what the new community site will turn out to be like. Once again I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and see what they come up with. A true social community for gamers would be cool. Then again, a social community for Magic: the Gathering players may seem a little strange at first. The actual online games are usually devoid of any social interaction. Except for some exchanges of “gl, hf” and the occasional derogatory remark. Of course there are some exceptions, but to build a community around them seems like quite a challenge to me.

If your computer runs Windows, odds are you have probably seen the infamous Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) before. This is the (blue) screen with white text, telling you your computer crashed. Most of the time it contains all kinds of technical looking text. People usually ignore this and reboot. But this screen actually contains helpful information.

When your computer crashes and shows a BSOD, it also creates a small log file with the same information. This can be helpful if you or your friendly technician (grandchild, neighbor) want to try and fix the issue. There are several programs that let you recover the BSOD information so you can analyze it at a later time. Because of recent computer problems, I know of at least two of these programs: WhoCrashed and BlueScreenView. Note: some antivirus or spyware software will flag the BlueScreenView site and/or some of its products because they can be used to recover passwords or do other helpful things that can be used for bad reasons, see the SiteAdvisor page for the site for more information.

Both programs perform similar actions. WhoCrashed gives very basic information, while BlueScreenView gives more elaborate information. Run either program and it will check the Windows default location for the log files (called minidump files) to analyze. With BlueScreenView, you have the option of searching for those files in a different location. I don't think WhoCrashed has that option.

As you may have gathered, the success of both programs is dependent on minidump files actually being available. To make sure Windows creates these files, go to your Control Panel, then select System. Go to Advanced, and then select Startup and Recovery - Settings. You should also be able to see and change the location of the dump files at this point.

Over the course of several years, I managed to install quite a lot of (free) programs. Some of those I rarely use, but they are still helpful. Keeping them up to date is not something I am good at though. But with FileHippo's Update Checker, finding the newest versions of my programs is a breeze.

Download the little program and run it, and it will scan your entire computer. For every file it recognizes, it checks the FileHippo site to see if there is an update available. At the end of the process, a list of updates is presented in your browser. Download the updates you want and install them. Yes, that last part is still manual labor, but at least you won't have to find a dozen different sites to download the latest versions from. Be aware though, the process of checking your system for updates can be a lenghty one, especially when you have a lot of programs installed.

It seems FileHippo will check both free and commercial software, and it knows about many programs. Run it every couple of weeks or months and your system will be fairly up to date.

Every once in a while, I am surprised by the creativity and skill of people creating YouTube videos. The current interest is “literal videos”: people taking video clips of songs and replacing the singing with their own singing. They're not singing the actual lines though, but their own version. The “literal” aspect of it all, is that they're singing about what is happening in the video, at the same tempo as the original song. Below is a version of Total Eclipse of the Heart, which I like best.



Many more videos can be found as a YouTube playlist. Be warned though, some singers are more skilled than others.

Do you ever feel a homicidal rage after a day at the office? Are you annoyed by cute creatures getting all the attention? Want to have the ultimate power? Then Bloody Fun Day is the game for you.

Bloody Fun Day is a flash game in which you are Death himself, and it is your job to kill cute creatures. These creatures come in four different colors. Each cutie killed earns you a point in of that creature's color. Earn enough points to get some extra moves. Groups of cuties sharing the same color die whenever you kill one of them. And if you kill many cuties in one fell swoop, you'll find a golden egg, which increases your score by 5000 points.

It's simple, it's fun, and an average game can easily take 15-30 minutes. Long enough to keep your mind off of daily chores, not too long to forget about dinner or picking up your kids.