Jane Talks Tech!

This post was inspired by the current (it’s dying down) kerfuffle generated over FeedDemon’s latest Release Candidate containing adverts. Now, I haven’t installed it or tried it out yet. However, I left a comment on Nick Bradbury’s blog about the issue that I’ll repost here:...

<rant>Or give me a get-out-of-jail-free card. I’m serious. I don’t really care about integrating my account with Facebook, Flixster or Wixster. I don’t care for the fancy visual changes. How about giving us POP or IMAP access for free? If that’s too much to take, offer POP/IMAP access for less than the current rip-off price of $19.95 per year. I mean, all I use my Yahoo! email for is just that – mail and because Yahoo’s been apparently resistant to freeing up the email pipes, I’ve slowly and surely made other services (Hotmail & Gmail) my primary means of contact. ...

Well, well, Whaddaya know! FeedDemon 2.8 Release Candidate 1 is out and it now contains ads. Wow. I feel like I've dodged a bullet with switching to RSS Bandit. Seriously, none of the applications on my laptop contains ads simply because: (a) they're free or (b) I paid for them. FeedDemon used to be shareware i.e. free for 30 days and about $30 to register. I paid for FeedDemon back then and was ecstatic when they made it a free program because it freed me from having to pay for upgrades. Now, the author of FeedDemon, Nick Bradbury, feels the need to insert ads into this product because they need a source of revenue. That's his prerogative. I'll install FeedDemon on my Windows XP Pro SP3 virtual machine and see what the hubbub is about. In any case, I don't think I'm going back to FeedDemon till I read about serious improvements in the stability & handling all sorts of feeds. So far, beyond some minor User Interface gripes, I'm liking my switch to RSS Bandit. Whenever I click "mark all feeds read", it happens without locking up and forcing me to use Windows Task Manager to kill the process unlike *cough* FeedDemon *cough* :D On a serious note, it's not all roses with RSS Bandit though. Here's one of  my pet peeves in the picture on the right. Read More >>

So, the weirdest thing happened to me a couple of days ago: My entire user folder stopped being indexed by Windows Search Indexing service. I visited C:\Users and I couldn't find my user folder at all! The panic didn't start yet. Then, I calmly proceeded to look at my "Folder Options" and on a hunch, I allowed protected system files to be viewable. To my horror, I found out that my User Profile/Folder had somehow become: (a)hidden and (b) a protected system folder.

I don't recall doing anything to make it change from a regular user folder ...

Ever since I purchased an HP dv9700t CTO notebook PC, I've had to reformat this computer over 3 times now. The reason is simple: I like to try out new things on the computer and that more often than not, include alpha, beta and even gamma software. I'd like to say that I've learned and reformatting my PC (as a last solution) is a thing of the past. Alas! I cannot guarantee that. So, here's what I've learned from owning a computer that I deliberately introduce chaos into:...