April 30, 2005

New (to me) search engines: Clusty and IceRocket

Found this in this post on digg. Clusty and IceRocket. I've just given them a light once-over but, so far, they're decent. Not Google killers as far as I can see but if you don't like Google or Yahoo! then give 'em a try.

Posted by tony at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2005

Showing Hidden Devices in XP's Device Manager

One of the Lockergnome properties has this article on displaying hidden devices in Device Manager. Displaying non-plug-and-play devices is fairly easy: right click My Computer -> Properties. Click on the Hardware tab and select Device Manager. In the View menu, select Show Hidden Devices and there they are.

Devices that are defined but not currently present (e.g. MP3 players or USB drives) is harder. You must create an environment variable that has a particular value in order to force them to show up. Again, My Computer -> Properties and go to the Advanced tab. Select Environment Variables and create a new System variable called devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices. Set its value to 1 and click OK to save it and OK to exit the System Properties dialog. Now you can open Device Manager and see everything, You'll have to select View -> Hidden Devices but, once you've done that, both ghosted and hidden devices will show up.

Posted by tony at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2005

Yahoo web beacons

A friend of mine, came across some info about web beacons on Yahoo, used to track your movements through Yahoo! properties. I don't think this is new ... I seem to recall something about this cropping up a year ago or so. Still, it's good to be reminded of it every now and then. Chad's weblog entry is here and it includes links to the Yahoo! Privacy Center with information about their use of beacons and also this link that you can use to opt out.

Posted by tony at 08:34 AM | Comments (0)