Free.FR and My ADSL

Just got my ASDL connection set up in France this weekend after a few months of work to get it sorted. (Mostly because the provider Free.FR required proof that I am the rightful owner of the phone line I registered with - something which is not that easy when the... [Read article]

Off-the-Record Messaging

The Register reports from Codecon about the new Off-the-Record Messaging protocol. In short OTR gives paranoid instant messagers authenticated secrecy and repudiation. According to the authors this is perfect for the paranoid chatter that wants to engage in casual conversations online, wants to keep them secret, but wants to be... [Read article]

Napster To Go - Here We Go Again

The new Napster To Go service seems to be a hot potato these days. After posting their initial attack the Register received a load of letters both for and against the service. Wierd thing; most people either love it or hate it. And especially the haters have a tendency to... [Read article]

Radio Playlists Online

Ever listened to the radio and wondered "who is playing that catchy tune, I am sure I've heard it before..."? No more... Now a few creative radio channels have published their playlists, searchable by date and time. So next time you ask yourself "which song is this", just take note... [Read article]

Upgrading to a Zen Micro / Napster To Go

I have been thinking of upgrading my old and trustworthy Creative Nomad Zen 20GB for quite a while now. It's battery has seen better days, it is no longer very beautiful (compared to e.g. the iPod mini), and even more, since I started using Napster I kind of stopped buying... [Read article]

Napster

A week ago I installed the new version of Napster. As I am enough of a UK resident to be able to register and pay for it with a British address the install and configuration went smoothly. The time it took from one chose to download from the website until... [Read article]

Surviving with Babel Fish

About a month ago I moved to France. As I don't know 'any' French it is not always easy to survive, as most websites are exclusively it French. So are most documents that are sent to me from all the different companies... Today I tried to register for a web-account... [Read article]

Airborne Screen Saver

Like to travel? Like to keep up-to-date on what is happening in the air? Just surfed by Star Alliance today and found their Star Alliance Screen Saver quite amusing. It will display all scheduled Star Alliance flights all over the world in either real or accelerated time. Together with it... [Read article]

Why Open Source Does Not Always Work

I am a student (for some more weeks), and I am working at my study programme's computer department, since the beginning working on our Windows setup. We take pride in having as much software as possible available on our computers (which are situated in half-a-dozen computer labs). In the browser... [Read article]

Tax by SMS

The Norwegian Tax Administration this year allowed for the confirmation of the annual tax report by the use of an SMS message! The Administration has used internet as a delivery method since they started using pre-filled out reports some years back, replacing the old fill-out-by-hand-and-calculate-yourself forms!... [Read article]

Migrating to Windows XP

So it was time. Time to move from Windows 2000 to Windows XP on my portable (a Dell Latitude C510). My main motivation is to get the Remote Desktop option. I do not always care to move my portable with me (especially into areas where I already have a computer... [Read article]

Windows Update and the NSA Security Template

Today, just after installing Windows XP I applied the US National Security Agency's security template to the workstation, after which Windows Update promptly stopped to work. It seemed not to be able to get in touch with the server. To resolve the situation I had to roll back to some... [Read article]

Harddrive Upgrade of Nomad Zen

Just saw this message on www.nomadness.net describing how to replace the 20GB harddrive that is shipped with the Creative Jukebox Nomad Zen with any other 2.5" harddrive (possibly only the 9mm drives... I have not tried... no need for that just yet). Now one will just have to wait until... [Read article]

MoodLogic

Sometimes a software product comes around that really is useful. MoodLogic is an MP3 profiling agent. It fixes your ID3 tags, organizes your files and corrects strange looking filenames. But that is not the best part. Using some nifty proprietary technology it identifies your MP3s and matches it to a... [Read article]

New Adventures in WiFi

When I bought my Dell Latitude 510c some 6 months ago I got it fitted with a IEEE 802.11b WiFi LAN adapter. Neat thing, totally integrated, no antennas or anything. Now having a WiFi adapter one would typically want to use it. My university has done quite an OK job... [Read article]

Linux on the Desktop

In an inspired moment late Friday I decided to install RedHat Linux 8.0 on my desktop computer. The computer, a slightly more than 4 year old PII-333 with 192MB of RAM, had a spare SCSI disk which I believed could do good with a new OS. Installation of RedHat goes... [Read article]

Trillian for Free (?!)

Since I posted my recommendation of Trillian 1.0 Pro I have received *many* hits on my page looking for free downloads of Trillian. (Check out www.ludvig.no/stats.) Sorry folks. Trillian 1.0 Pro is not for free, and if you want free Trillian you should stick to the 0.74 version. If you... [Read article]

Trillian Pro 1.0

It is not very often that I 'fall in love' with any computer application, but Trillian has always been close to my heart! The idea of combining the four major instant messenger clients - ICQ, MSN, AIM and Y! (an IRC client is also included), must be an old idea,... [Read article]

Spam Filtering - To Do or Not To Do

Spam has become an increasing problem. There are many ways of fighting spam. Relay blacklists and filtering out e-mail without the correct To: header was the first generation of spam filtering. Seldom was it very successfull, atleast not for me. The blacklists took some, and some very naïve filtering rules... [Read article]

Internet Telephony - part I

Internet Telephony, either as IP-to-IP (NetMeeting) or IP-to-Phone (Net2Phone), emerged sometime in the mid 90's. I was not very attracted in the beginning. Voice quality was poor and my Internet connection was merely a 28.8kbps modem line. Since then I have moved to a flat with a 10Mbps connection directly... [Read article]

Aggie

Anders, on his everlasting search through the internet has found another neat little application. The 100KB[*] app Aggie searches for news from all defined newsfeeds. It uses XML to properly define contents. First try was very promising. It managed to grab the feed from MT without any problems at all.... [Read article]