This week: Space, the final frontier, can be explored from your PC. Clif defeats spyware websites, you can too. More free alternatives to MS Office payware. Lots of cool websites to look over.
I hope you enjoy this week's letter. Be sure to write me for advice or yell at me for messing up.
This website was given to me free, no money, just a little work helping out here and there. Now I'm going to return the favor and let you have a chance at a free wiki website like this one for an entire year.
Why would you want a free website that has the following features?
1 Gb image and file space
Unlimited number of pages
no need to learn HTML
no advertisements on your pages
can be kept private or made public
is password protected on secure https servers
your friends can edit it if you give them a password
Tell me why you want it in a short email. I'll read the emails and decide who gets this $50 dollar value.
I'll announce the winner on Feb 19th.
Why would I want to do this? I'm a nice guy, ask anyone. Seriously though, I was offered a free premium wiki in addition to the one I have. I really don't need it and I want to share this great service with everyone.
Don't forget, a premium wiki at pbwiki is not your only option.
Anyone can sign up for a free wiki website with lots of cool features. It only takes a minute or two and you have your own website.
If you want to find out more about pbwiki websites, take the tour.
After installing the Virtual Moon Atlas (VMA), you can forget any fairy tales about Swiss cheese. VMA is a fun and easy way to learn the features of our moon. You can easily see what phase the moon is currently in, find special features, zoom in for a closer view, and more. Now when you go out at night with a telescope or binoculars, you will already know what to look for.
VMA comes in several sizes that allow you to choose how much detail and how many features you want. It runs on all Windows systems and all versions are free.
This software is the result of a collaboration between Christian Legrand, a passioned lunar observer, co-author of the guide "Discover the Moon" published in English by Cambridge University Press and also published in French, German and Spanish, and Patrick Chevalley, author of the worlwide known freeware "Cartes du Ciel / Sky Charts".
The authors make this free for amateur astronomers, lunar observers and students who wish to practice selenography. They hope to promote Moon observation and knowledge because our satellite will become one of the next human spatial exploration steps.
Distant Suns 6.0-Special Edition-Free Version is a great way to see the stars and the constellations just as if it was a clear, dark night at your desk. Distant Suns SE allows you to view the night sky as it currently appears outside your house, or any time in the past or future. You can choose which direction to look and whether you wish to see the outlines of the constellations displayed. Other features allow you to zoom in on some of the planets for a closer look, or hover above the earth for a look at our home.
Distant Suns is one of the premier desktop astronomy packages of all time. For both casual skywatchers to seasoned amateur astronomers, Distant Suns will take you from your home to the outer reaches of the Universe and back. Distant Suns is compatible with Windows 95,98, ME, NT, 2000, and XP.
This free software simulates the Solar System's bodies in 3D on your Windows or Linux PC. The difference to quite a few other programs it does so in realtime. Meaning you can view all the planets, moons and spaceships moving along their paths, trace them, follow them, orbit them and even control them (time and contol). Information on the planets, moons and galaxy clusters can be brought up online by right clicking target and choose info. And you won't have to fight your way through vast multitude of one-eyed green aliens for that. Celestia was formerly known as Solar System Simulator. It was initially released in 1997 with the intention to create a rotating Earth display on a main stream PC. A continuing development and expansion has taken place. Version 1.0 was only aware of the major bodies, version 1.2 added a whole bunch of moons. Solar System v1.6 then added more ways of movement for the user's eye (camera) within Solar System's virtual universe and last but not least better textures for a lot of bodies. This version, Celestia 1.4.0, has been renamed to OpenUniverse to underline the concept behind the further development of the program. Open for the whole Universe, not just the solar system. Open to use, extend and change. Open for all users, programmers. Great educational experience for the youngsters and the grownups, too. I give this program two thumbs up. No malware / spyware detected.
Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.
Ragtime Solo - Desktop Publishing Software
Website - liteware (free for non-commercial use only)
Ragtime is a truely worthy alternative to MSWord and Excel. It weighs in at only 49mb installed but packs quite a punch. When I had MS office software loaded it lagged and chugged. This program just zips. It does everything a desktop publishing program needs to do, all inside one interface. Ragtime Solo can import and export Word 97 and can also export to html.
Sample output from Ragtime
Quote
Up to now, you haven't used layout programs, because you couldn't afford to do without spreadsheet calculations or text processing. Now you can give your work that final polish. With Ragtime, you have a single convenient layout environment in which you can process text, tables, drawings, pictures and graphs. The intuitive user interface simplifies your quick access to all of Ragtime's functions.
This application is called Budgie, (for budget office suite). It’s small enough, at 5.9 MB, to download in about 20 minutes on an average dialup connection, and to carry around on a flash (USB, thumb) drive. It will definitely get most office jobs done.
Budgie is a perfectly viable application that the developer, Nick Spurrier of MoDESoft Limited, decided wouldn’t be commercially profitable. After debugging, writing an excellent help file, and watching more than 17,000 downloads on Tucows and Download.com with only one registration, he decided to drop support for the product. (read more at Backwash)
I saw the short description of this game and thought "Why not?". So I tried it. I liked it! It's not real fancy but it's a real challenge. The game can be played from the keyboard or a game controller and is small enough it can be installed on a floppy disk. The install is quick and clean, no registry files are changed. It's fast and furious action from the start.
A shooting game with vertical scroll. In this game, there are only you and the boss ship. The more you beat a boss, the more next boss becomes strong. You have 180 seconds in first time, and it decreases. Time will increase, if a boss is beaten, and if you die, it will more decrease. Beat more bosses, before time is lost
One of the most over-looked ways of protecting your computer is by controlling where it can go on the internet. One of the easiest ways of doing this is by using a filter. You already have a filter on your Windows PC, and it's called the HOSTS file.
Whilst not trying to be too technical, the HOSTS file works by acting as an intermediate between your computer and the outside world. So for example, if Joe's administrator added the following entry into the HOSTS file,
127.0.0.1 snapfiles.com
NOTHING on Joe's computer could access snapfiles.com, be it a browser, an instant messaging program or a malicious application.
How do you know what websites to add to the HOSTS file? You can download a ready made HOSTS file from several places. hpHosts is one of them.
hpHosts is a community managed and maintained HOSTS file for Windows that allows protection against access to spammer, scammer, pornographic, spoofed and malicious websites.
What does "community managed" mean?, this means YOU have a part to play in what websites are added to, or removed from, the hosts file - effectively allowing you to play a part in protecting others from accessing content that could potentially damage their computers.
Once installed on your computer, Windows performs a query against the websites within it, prior to allowing your computer access to the site/server in question. If found, requests are re-directed to your computers internal IP (Internet Protocol) address.
For detailed information on how hosts file's work, please see the following article.
Extract the contents of hosts.zip to a folder on your hard disk. Locate the file named HOSTS.TXT which you just extracted and rename it to HOSTS with no .TXT extension. Copy the renamed HOSTS file to one of the following locations depending on your version of Windows.
Notes from Clif, Hoster v3.0 final release (Feb 2006)
Tom at TeMerc reviewed this HOSTS file manager in September of last year, he still likes it and has this to say about the new version.
Clif it has basically gotten a couple of extras much the way several other host file managers have gotten, giving users more control of how the use the tool.
What I liked most about it, was it's simplicity. I hope it does not continue to get too 'advanced' for lack of a better word. There are already a few other advanced managers out there for 'power users' so to speak. And most users are not, based on what I have seen around the forums.
Review by Tom (Sept 2005)
This past week, I decided to try a few of the latest host file manager applications available. I see recommendations for several, via the many security forums I routinely visit thru the day.
Hosts files, whose original intention was to resolve DNS and IP addresses, have developed into more of a security and privacy tool. They are an excellent way to block ads from appearing on your browser too.
As more and more servers began to host sites which were of a malicious intent, they have evolved to the security feature they are now. And with this newly emerging security feature, it has become almost a requirement to have some sort of a hosts file manager.
You can find a great bit of reading about hosts files here on Wikipedia.
After trying four of these managers, I have come to the conclusion that Hoster seems to fit all of the things I thought would be handy for most users.
Firstly, of course, its free. Secondly, its an app created by someone in the security community, with a close ear to the ground for timely updates to add the most recently found nasty sites, or to add new advert sites which popup regularly.
Tho most have very similar options, Hoster is setup the easiest to use. Everything in one tidy GUI. It gives you a count of however many hosts entries there are. You can make the file writable or lock it. You can delete any selected line, and add line simply. Backing up your hosts file is another option.
Its especially nice if you do any amount of host file testing for compatibility. And what I think is the neatest option, is that you can revert your hosts file to what it came with from MS. If you do any amount of malware testing, this is a very nice feature. Say you're looking to get yourself infected. Well, you can't do it rightly if you're protected by a hosts file. So, first click the 'backup hosts file' button, then click the 'restore original hosts' button and you're ready.
About the only option that I'd like to see, and a couple of others have it, is an option to DL the latest hosts file from a number of selected host file sites.
And while some of the others have some more advanced options, for the everyday user, this app suffices quite nicely.
These were also very good apps, and in some cases, a bit more advanced. Depending on your level of involvement with host files and editing and so forth, you will need to find which best suits your needs.
Quote from the author of Hoster - Hoster is an ultra-groovy Hosts file Manager, Editor and Helper-outter.
There are 2 things which I love in this site...The design is very simple yet attractive. Secondly, I was pleasantly surprised to see other subjects too, supposedly taken from the Wikipedia site but in a more user-friendly format. As a matter of fact, I bumped into AbsoluteAstronomy while searching for a timeline on Marvel's X-men...Funny old internet, you never know where you will end up!
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Google Moon - is the moon made of green cheese?
If you want to see what Google thinks about this theory, go to Google Moon and zoom all the way in.
Last week I wrote about SiteAdvisor, an easy way to tell if you are at bad websites. I was concerned that SA might turn into a pay only service. That concern has been allayed by a good friend with inside contacts at SA. Here's what they told him.
... there will continue to be a free version for IE and FF substantially similar to the current version. There will also be a premium for-pay version that adds additional features.
I'm excited to see they are doing this for all of us and I look forward to seeing the final product. Kudos to all the SiteAdvisor team. You rock!
The Groundhog is right
Just days after the groundhog in Pennsylvania predicted 6 more weeks of Winter, we got our first good snow in a month. The kids will have fun building snowmen. My wife took a picture of me getting ready to throw a snowball. She wasn't in serious danger until I got inside to warm my hands up on her neck! LOL
So, thanks to a friend, I got an invite to the Live Messenger 8.0 beta. After a quick download, I immediately logged in. The first thing I noticed about the new Messenger is that seeing all of my online contacts was difficult due to the reduced size of the buddy list window. There are so many features that actually seeing your buddies was obviously given a reduced priority, an odd choice for an IM program. A good 1/4 of the interface was given to displaying my name, my picture, and a link that lets me customize my online message. Another 1/4 is given to the "MSN Video" feature, which, by the way, doesn't work if Firefox is your default browser -- read the rest at Sarah's blog
FEEDBACK AND OTHER STUFF
Frapper - you people live all over the world!
I invite all of you to record your locations on this map. You can include as little or as much information as you wish. I think you'll enjoy seeing yourself there.
Here's a small look at the frapper map. Click and drag to see the rest of the world.
Write your own review
I get many of the reviews in the newsletter from the readers. You don't have to be a genius or computer guru. Just answer a few questions and send me a review. I'll probably put you in the newsletter.
