ctrl.altered.mind

After the beta release in December, the SeaMonkey Council has announced SeaMonkey 1.0, the first end-user release of their internet suite. This open source application features a state-of-the-art web browser and powerful email client, as well as a WYSIWYG web page composer and a feature-rich IRC chat client. For web developers, mozilla.org’s DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger tools are included as well. SeaMonkey 1.0 is claimed to be one of the most complete, powerful, and secure internet software packages available today. Do you need this if all you do is surf the web and check mail? Probably not, you’re better off with Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

SeaMonkey News

Download Seamonkey 1.0

There’s an update to the spicy rumor about Google’s next big thing. The story is that a new OS designed by Google (originally for internal use) will be hitting the marketplace soon, as a competitor to Microsoft Windows. While this is old news, the twist is that this unnamed OS now has a title - Goobuntu! As the name hints, this OS is supposedly developed by Google based on Ubuntu Linux (which is great) and the Gnome desktop.

Goobuntu: coming soon to a desktop near you? - Engadget

An interesting study by a research team at Syracuse University has found that in bat species where the females are promiscuous, the males boasting the largest testicles also had the smallest brains. Conversely, where the females were faithful, the males had smaller testes and larger brains.

In species with monogamous females, males had testes starting at 0.11 percent of their body weight and ranging up to 1.4 percent.

But in species where the females had a large number of mates, the study found testes ranged from 0.6 percent to 8.5 percent of the males’ mass (in the Rafinesque’s big-eared bat).

Large brains being metabolically costly to develop and maintain, have to be traded off in this evolutionary process that chooses balls over brains. In more monogamous bat species, the average male brain size was about 2.6 percent of body weight, while in promiscuous species, the average size dipped to 1.9 percent.

CNN.com - When it comes to bats, size matters - Jan 24, 2006

If Gmail is your primary mail client like it is for me, you probably need to have these two options (amongst others), to add valuable functionality. The first is a Greasemonkey user script that modifies all mailto: links within a webpage to open Gmail compose windows rather than firing up your default mail client. If you’d rather have the client, you can always disable Greasemonkey by clicking its icon in the Firefox status bar.

Another must-have, is the Gmail This! button. This is actually a bookmark, that loads a new Gmail Compose window, preloaded with RTF text and images that you select on a webpage, along with a referring link. You can add this to any browser by dragging the Gmail This! link below into your bookmarks toolbar on your browser.

Gmail This!

While catching up on my growing pile of unwatched Rocketboom video blog posts in iTunes, I was shocked and surprised to see the CD jacket insert on the new Coldplay album that has rather strict usage guidelines: “This CD is a copy protected CD”. There’s a long list of warnings stating that the CD cannot be burnt onto a CD-R or hard drive. Essentially, the disc wont play on some car stereos that have CDR/RW playing capabilities, or those with satellite ‘guidance’ systems. Even more surprising was the fact, clarified by Amanda in the Jan 10 vblog post, that this insert only applied to the discs sold in India! Does it apply only to CDs purchased in India, or can I take my Coldplay collection back home as mp3s? How are Indian music-listening styles different, Virgin Records?

CD-insert picture

Have you ever wondered who’s connected to your shared iTunes music library? I’ve would like to have a way to find out, and TCPview is a free Windows utility that allows you to do just that. TCPView (by SysInternals) is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On Windows NT, 2000 and XP TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. This is basically modeled on the lines of Netstat, a command-line utility that is included in Windows. The program also allows you to look at connections going out from your favorite P2P application.

Once you get TCPView running—assuming iTunes is also running and sharing music—you will see a list of connections with the iTunes icon next to the process name (iTunes.exe) and process number. Look for TCP connections where the Remote address is something other than yourself. This means that whatever machine is listed there is at least attached to your shared music - don’t use this to strike a conversation with the cute girl across the hall in the library and freak her out!

To find out which song is being played remotely is tricky and not convenient - you will need to perform a search for all mp3 files on your system, and sort by the Last Modified tag.

For the Mac, the RendezWho widget displays connected users and also the song they are playing at the moment.

TCPView by SysInternals

The RendezWho Widget for Mac

If you download and share (hopefully only non-commercial and redistributable) software using BitTorrent, you would definitely want a client that offers maximum functionality with the smallest possible memory footprint. µTorrent is exactly that, and is available for the Windows platform. µTorrent (current version 1.4 (stable), and 1.4.1 (beta)) is definitely the best Windows bittorrent client I have used, and scores a notch above others like ABC, Azureus, and Shareaza (all open-source and free). It supports UPnP port mapping (Windows XP and above). I only wish it were as nice as KTorrent on Linux.

µTorrent.com - Powerful, efficient and small BitTorrent client

While looking for ideas and widgets to add to my website, I found a really nice iTunes extension that renders a feed of the song currently playing in iTunes in XML, and also publishes this information to my website via FTP. I’m using a free Flash ‘gizmo’ that combines the XML file (track information) with album art pulled from Amazon.com. Brandon Fuller, the author of ‘Now Playing’, has detailed instructions on his website, if you are not familiar with XML and PHP. The iTunes extension (I believe there’s one for Windows Media Player as well) is shareware (5 uploads per session), but costs only $10. Now, little brother can watch me too The display shows up in the sidebar on my homepage.

My Now Playing Window

Brandon Fuller’s ‘Now Playing’ - An iTunes for Windows Plugin

With over 2.6GB of storage on Gmail, its likely that most people could afford to save even one-time-readable messages like reminders and such, and never run out of space. Not me though. I easily delete more messages than I archive, and still have used up over 25% of my Gmail space. Well, until now I was using this excellent Greasemonkey user script (Firefox only), which adds a Delete button with seamless interface integration. Greasemonkey, for those of you who don’t know, is an excellent Firefox extension that allows advanced Java-based scripts (that add or modify website features) to be incorporated into the browser. Sadly, there’s no use for this brilliant script anymore, as Google now provides a delete button that works exactly like the Gmail Delete user script. You can find awesome scripts at UserScripts.org. And for those of you who don’t use Firefox, well, Get Firefox!

New Gmail Delete feature

The OS X-only Tickr tool has been around for a while. Basically, a neat application that polls Flickr.com for posted pictures according to specified tags and adds a nice scrolling display to the desktop. Well, Windows users can rejoice now that the idea has been ported with the new Slickr tool. Its as simple as adding a few tags (get Flickr tag ideas) and letting the beauty happen. The application, although in beta, ran quite stably on my machine. However, some users behind firewalls have seen runtime errors. A couple of missing features though - the tray icon does not have a context menu, and the only way to quit the application is via the trusty Windows Task Manager ;-). Secondly, there’s no method to modify tags later, except by reinstalling the program (so make your choices wisely!). The program is available from the CCorpSoft website.

Also, there is a screensaver tool by the same name that has an advanced settings menu with all the right options in place, and runs a screensaver on your Windows machine by fetching tagged (or recently posted) pictures from Flickr. The Slickr screensaver is really neat, and creates an OS X styled Pictures screensaver with zoom effects, but with pictures taken by other people! You could also let the application fetch your own private pictures via authorization (makes great sense if all your pictures are saved on a different machine). Definitely a ‘must have’ for Windows users.