TheSwirl.org

I have a bunch of computer activities on going tonight. I bought a new Western Digital USB drive as my Lacie Drive I use for an off-site backup went on the fritz. I got a 150gb that I am currently copying all my music, digital photos, maps, and personal files onto. I started with my 70gb of music that is not backed up elsewhere. It took 2+ hours to copy those file; I expect the rest to be copied overnight.
After years of using free firewalls (ZoneAlarm), free anti-virus (Grisoft AVG), free ad-aware and spybot software I bought Norton 360 internet security suite. It allows installation on 3 computers, which is perfect for me. The 1st installation was relatively painless as was the 2nd.  I haven’t found any nasty viruses or malware yet.  Maybe the old freeware was doing just fine.
Kathryn’s computer is being upgraded from Windows 2000 to XP so I can run Norton 360 on it.

I upgraded my version of Wordpress, which runs this blog, to version 2.1.2.  It was easy and painless.

I have used Eudora for email since 1995, starting out on Macintosh and then over on PCs.  After reading the news of Eudora mail to be merged with Mozilla Thunderbird I purchased the last commercial release of Eudora thinking it would tide me over until the merge was complete and we would transition to Thunderbird.  I was further motivated by Eudora’s statement that by the end of March existing licenses were going to be down graded to Eudora lite.   In the past purchasing one licensed copy of Eudora permitted me to perform multiple installations; 3 PCs and 1 Mac.  The latest licensing arrangement allows multiple installations, the additional ones just don’t work (or tell you why).  I could access email via web mail I thought my Norton 360 was causing problems, until I used Thunderbird on one of the computers.

The latest version of Thunderbird looks a lot like Eudora, imports all Eudora settings and works like a dream.

I have been taking advantage of two great sources of free software:

The OpenCD Project and Software for Starving Students.  There is overlap in the tools offered, but you can’t beat the price and the functionality is remarkable.  In both cases it helps to be on a broadband connection.  I downloaded the CD image (ISO), burned a CD using the free IMGBURN program and installed from the CD.  Check them out!

I recently upgraded Wordpress, the software used to maintain TheSwirl, to the latest version.  I also decided to undergo a change in the theme of the blog, making it look more “Swirlish”.  Previously I was using the default theme which was nice, but looked like all the other generic blogs.  Let me know what you think.

Pandora - I have a lot of online music and listen constantly. Over the past year I have been listening to new music via Pandora, a music discovery service that utilizes the music genome project to recommend artists, bands and styles of music similar to an known artist. They’ve made the service more Web 2.0′ish. Now you can find shared stations within the Pandora community, see who is listening to what, and search for songs, stations and listener profiles by keyword.

SyncBack - a Freeware backup synchronization program that I use to backup our computers to a network drive as well as backup onto an FTP site.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets - Lately I have been roaming among multiple computers and I have been using Google Docs to draft documentation.

Bloglines is my favorite website for keeping track of blog posts. It’s an application that lives on the web. I like that since I can switch computers and still stay up to date on recently updated blog. I really like the improvements that let me see real time updates.

Dinosaur World - Eric is really into dinosaurs and BBC has one of the best set of educational games. The 3D virtual world offers exploration of three separate worlds discovering dinosaurs and plant life along the way.

As I have been flitting among computers more lately I have been using Google web applications, primarily for documents and calendar functions.  This post has a practical review of ten fully functional virtual operating systems (WebOs) that can run within a browser.  While I have some inertia due to my previous use of Google, I plan to check out the recommendations: YouOS, Goowy and DesktopTwo