Yes, I know, some people will tell you there is no point in defragging a modern Windows/NTFS disk. Some will tell you it is even dangerous to do so. And if you absolutely feel you want to use defragmentation, why would you use a beta program? Well, I don't know. I do know that Defraggler sounded very interesting to me, so I gave it a try.

Defraggler is a defragging program that will examine the files on your hard drive and make sure they are no longer fragmented. Fragmentation in files means (in my own terms) your hard drive has to search all across its storage surface to find all bytes necessary to run a program. Compare it to a library in which the pages of one book are spread out over all the shelves. It takes a while to put the book together and read it. It would be much quicker to read the book if all pages were already in order (after all, that's what a book is). So basically, defragging takes all your scattered books and puts them back together, speeding up file access times.

Most defragmentation software, like the one that is part of Windows itself, will examine an entire drive or partition and defragment it. Defraggler goes one step further, and lets you defragment individual files. I'm not sure why you would want to just defragment one file and not all files, but perhaps there is some use for it. In my case, I just liked to see which files were the worst ones, and then used the program to defrag them. Fun stuff, basically. Perhaps in some cases it can help because it is quicker than defragging your entire drive. For instance, I noticed my Thunderbird folders will become very fragmented after a while. With defraggler, I can defrag individual folders/storage containers for my mail. (yes, crazy to even consider doing something dangerous like defragging to something as important as mail, but hey, sometimes I like to take a risk)

If you want to give this software a try, don't forget it's beta and defragging in general might mess things up. Consider yourself warned Oh yeah, but at least it won't cost you any money to get the program, since it's free.

Should something go wrong, perhaps another Piriform program can help you. Recuva lets you, eh, recover deleted files. Even after you emptied the trashcan. Oddly enough, the main site seems to point people towards an installable version of the software. If you really care about your files, install the portable version on a usb drive and use it to access the drive with the deleted info. If you were to first install Recuva, you might end up overwriting the very file you want to recover. The portable version can be found on the builds page.

It seems gathering people's data is the latest fad in customs land. Two different-yet-the-same news items today. First, several sites mention how the US Ninth Circuit says US customs is allowed to search traveler's laptops, something I wrote about before.

The second news item is about Dutch customs secretly conducting a pilot (in Dutch) in which the contents of storage media (such as cd's and mobile phones) was searched. Apparently this was aimed at catching child porn smugglers, who may resort to physical smuggling instead of online or mail exchange, because of the risks involved. Child porn and terrorism are the magic words to make people give up their rights. Because if you object, surely you must be involved with one (or both) of these. The exact criteria for deciding which people to search have not been made public, but it was clear the focus was on people coming in from countries that are infamous for the manufacturing of child porn or a certain type of sex industry.
[Source]

The pilot is currently under evaluation. It'll be interesting to see what the legal issues involved are. It may seem simple, using the usual “if you got nothing to hide ...” kind of reasoning, but are you really comfortable with strangers having access to your pictures and private documents? Without any real reassurance that nothing will happen to these?

Privacy is hard to find these days, you can't even go in for surgery without ending up on YouTube.

Google Maps is one of those Google applications I have written about before. Sometimes scary, with its satellite view, but mostly helpful when it comes to its regular mapping options. The only disadvantage: the actual size of the map that is displayed can be small. A full screen map display would be helpful, but we have to resort to third party sites for this.

One of the ways I use Google Maps, is to plan visits to places I have never been to before. I like to print the map of the surrounding area of my destination, just in case I get lost. There's not much worse than wasting three hours trying to find some location, only to find out I missed it by just two blocks. The larger a map I can print, the better. Like I said, Google Maps only shows a smaller map, but Bret Taylor comes to the rescue. The former product manager at Google who worked on Google Maps, offers a Full Screen Google Maps application on his site. Very useful to me. One drawback though: it doesn't let me print the map. So I make a screenshot of the map and print it that way.

If you ever tried to find a specific movie scene you liked and had trouble locating it on the dvd, you may appreciate the idea behind MovieStamper. At MovieStamper, users can upload screenshots from movies and add them to a timeline. By adding tags and comments to both movies and screenshots, users work together to basically index a movie. An interesting step towards describing entire mainstream movies.

Finding the answer to a question or some general textual information is pretty easy nowadays, with powerful search engines. Finding movie scenes based on descriptions is much harder. A site like MovieStamper might change this, if it would ever get a large enough user base. It will be interesting to see how this works out. And how long it will take for the movie industry to complain about people uploading screenshots. I'm already waiting for the first movie with a frame-by-frame timeline and someone coming up with a way to sequentially play all fragments at proper speed.
[Source]

Most of the time I have at least half a dozen different applications open while I am at work. Each has its own Windows taskbar icon and I have them all in a specific order. This may seem weird, but it makes switching between applications much easier if they are all in a set location. Unfortunately, they don't always stay in said location so I need something to rearrange the icons.

Taskbar Shuffle lets you rearrange Windows Taskbar items and tray icons. You can install it and have it run continuously in the background, or start it manually whenever you need it. The program does not require a lot of resources, but why run a program you don't need all the time? Most of the time I simply open applications in the correct order, but whenever my browser crashes or I have to restart an application because of an update, the order gets messed up. That is when I run Taskbar Shuffle. Once it is started, you can pick up any taskbar item and simply drag it to a different spot on the taskbar. That's it. To move tray icons, hold down the ctrl key while you select the icon. That's all there is to it. Small, but so helpful, it makes you wonder why Windows doesn't simply come with this by default.

For the past few weeks, I have been trying out Digg, the social bookmarking site. I'm not sure yet what I think of it. It's certainly a fun way to discover some weird or interesting articles, but it's also very time-consuming. My girlfriend told me she was unable to digg me my articles.

At first, I figured digg simply didn't appreciate the URL's of my blog posts, since those contain a question mark. But no, the problem is different. The error message “This link does not appear to be a working link. Please check the URL and try again.” is caused by digg being unable to process the URL. Why not? Well, because the anti-spam plugin BadBehavior was blocking the crawler from accessing my site. Oops. Thankfully, someone figured out how to fix this, by whitelisting the digg.com crawler, as explained on the WordPress support forum: add the IP of the crawler (64.191.203.34) to the part of the whitelist following "$bb2_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(".

So that's it. Now you should be able to digg my most interesting stories (ahem) using the Digg this link below. Yes, it is text, so it blends in with the rest of the blog's layout. No, I'm not begging for diggs, I am actually slightly worried any digg traffic would ruin my bandwidth. So if things get out of hand, I'll have to remove this option again.

I wasn't going to post anything today, but this news is something that just belongs on this blog. Gary Gygax, the man I associate most with D&D and my first experiences with Roleplaying Games (well, besides my gamer friends of course) passed away. In the end, even the creator dies.

Please excuse me while I go off and fondly remember all those times my characters cheated (or flirted with) death, in the world and gaming system created by E. Gary Gygax.

One development in air travel security (well, actually most new security measures seem to be put in place to prevent planes from killing people who are not traveling, not necessarily to protect those on the plane) is to install video cameras and microphones inside planes to record all passenger motion and conversation. Kind of. Perhaps it won't record everything, but I know I would not feel very comfortable being on a plane for 4+ hours while someone is recording my moves and noises.

I wonder who is going to watch all this recorded material. Pilots during slow moments? Flight attendants interested in checking out that cute guy/girl? Air marshalls with their own type of video console because after two flights they know all movies by heart? Of course recordings of the inside of planes would come in handy after a real terrorist attack. Much easier to reconstruct it for another Discovery documentary or Hollywood movie that way.

On a more serious note, I already have to deal with security cameras recording my moves to some extend on many streets or in public areas, inside “private” or government buildings, at work, public transport (bus, train may soon follow). I guess I am lucky none of my friends have a web cam running 24/7 (to the best of my knowledge) or I wouldn't even be safe there. It makes me nervous, no matter what I am doing. If I wanted to be a movie star, I think I would've taken acting lessons.

Privacy, what's that?

[Source]

If you found this blog, you are probably the kind of person relatives turn to when they have a computer problem. Too bad mom or granddad lives many miles away and it's snowing outside every time they need your help with something. Why not take over their computer from your home and fix their problem without getting out of your favorite chair? This is possible, as long as they can still connect to the Internet and access web sites.

There are plenty of solutions to gain remote access to someone else's computer. There are some illegal ways of course, but that is not what I'm talking about. Windows (XP and up) comes with Remote Desktop and there is software like VNC. Many solutions require installing software before you can use it. This is not a convenient solution, because how likely is it you will instruct your relative to install a full program if they just called you because they couldn't figure out how to change the font size in Word?

TeamViewer makes remote control easy. If you download the software, your “client” (i.e. your relative) only has to go to the TeamViewer website and click on the customer module. They then get a passcode, which they will tell you over the phone. Using this passcode, you can connect to their desktop. All this is browser based and works even when you're both using a firewall.

Once you gain access to your client's computer, you see their desktop in a separate window on your own computer screen. Your mouse and keyboard function as input devices for the remote computer. The person on the other side will actually see their computer act as if it has a will of its own. This is great to demonstrate what someone should do, and you can then watch along as they repeat the action. A big difference from using Windows' remote desktop, which takes over completely and shows the client a blank screen. Once either the client disconnects, you lose your access to the computer. While connected, communication is encrypted.

TeamViewer is free for non-commercial use. I haven't used it in a serious way yet (so far I could fix the problems over the phone), but from the test run I could tell it would be easy to use. Definitely worth a shot for those relatives living too far away. Of course there is one drawback to using TeamViewer as opposed to visiting: you'll miss out on the cake or cookies as payment

Edit: Oops, here I am, talking about relatives, and I forget to thank the source of this great tip: my brother. Thanks man!

News item of today: the European Commission is upset about the US trying to negotiate with individual EU members. The US is trying to convince those, mostly Eastern European, members to allow the US to register more passenger data about citizens traveling to the US. Meanwhile, in the news yesterday, the European Commission wants to register biometric data such as fingerprints or iris scans of non-European citizens entering the EU.

Hm, what's wrong with this picture? We don't like how the US treats our citizens, so let's start copying them. But we'll get upset if they try to go one step further. Of course the EU could've made a stand when all this crazy stuff started, but no. Of course not, legislators and law enforcement types are way too happy they finally have an excuse to register as much identifiable information as possible. Nevermind they still can't find the real criminals even when they know their names and faces ...

[Edit: added some English language news links in addition to the Dutch ones. Oh yeah, and I forgot about those armed guards on flights.]