Automated Addressbook/Calendar

For those of you with large lists of email contacts that you never manage to keep updated

Plaxo might be of interest. It's an online Address Book/calender that will automatically update peoples contact details when they make changes.

How it works is you import your email address books into the program tell it your email addresses and then fill out the standard address book profile for your self. Then if people you know sign up and there email is in your address book and yours in theres it will update the contact information associated with that email address. So if you change address or phone number every one who has your email address gets the updates in there address book.

The updated details also apparently can be pushed out to the various programs you use, ie Thunderbird, MacOSX, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo email, cellphone and others.

Any way it works better the more people join up so please people solve my address book problems and yours and add your selves.

Thunderbird Sync Tool

Scary thing

Something you should never really do in linux but especially not when you've nearly finished writing your thesis on the machine in question is to accidentally move /usr into the root trash can. Thus leaving you with a computer with no applications and in a state that won't load, thankfully a recovery CD allows the moment of the folder back to the correct location!

Well at least it wasn't "rm -rf /" this time.

Dangerous Ideas

Edge 214

Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men? Were the events in the Bible fictitious — not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires? Has the state of the environment improved in the last fifty years? Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage? Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape? Do men have an innate tendency to rape? Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence? Are suicide terrorists well educated, mentally healthy, and morally driven? Are Ashkenazi Jews, on average, smarter than gentiles because their ancestors were selected for the shrewdness needed in money lending? Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized? Do African American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men? Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality? Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized? Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease? Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability? Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children? Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism? Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances? Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste? Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people? Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder? Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation? Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?

Perhaps you can feel your blood pressure rise as you read these questions. Perhaps you are appalled that people can so much as think such things...

Looks kind of interesting I might have to keep an eye out for a copy of the book, any way if you want to see a bit more about it scroll down a bit on the linked page to read the foreword and afterword.

Free Backup

Any one looking for a place to backup up to 2GB of files for free?
Might be worth having a look at Mozy they offer 2GBs of free automated (encrypted) backup through there little app which is available for Windows and MacOSX.

Might be worth looking at if you've got a 2GB or less of files that you want backed up regularly with out having to do anything.
Now if only I can get it working in linux some how.
You can find a very short review here.

If your doing your masters or some other form of study it may be worth having a look. An extra layer of protection/backup against hard drive crashes is always a good idea!

Best Scfi of the 00's

blog.pmarca.com: Top 10 science fiction novelists of the '00s -- so far

Top 10 science fiction novelists of the '00s -- so far

This ones right on the money, if your looking for a few new authors. I highly recommend most of these having read a bit by most of them (Charles Stross, Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton, John Scalzi, Neal Asher). These guys are all part of my list of reasons why leaving uni and get a job are good. Though I'm definitely going to need a bigger bookcase as well! Unfortunately the public library only tends to have a few of the various books by them they're so new, still a good place to start!

For those of you who don't mind reading ebooks Charles Stross has one of his more recent works available for free download from here. http://www.accelerando.org/book/

An Update

For those of you who may be starting to thinking I've fallen off the face of the earth recently I'm afraid to tell you it's not true, better luck next time.
Instead I'm a little bit busy with the painful thing that silly universities tack onto the end of your 2.5-3 years of doing nothing much, that gets called a Masters degree. The attached images should give you some idea of the sort of things that involves.

And yes I am using all three screens and two computers, haven't quite needed to turn on the third computer yet. Also on another note emails rather bad for shuttling back and forth 15MB documents, university needs to work out a better system!

Fallout 3 Official Teaser Trailer

Fallout: Welcome to the Official Site

Well worth a look, if your interested in computer games or RPGs in general.

30 Days Of Night

30 Days Of Night - Official Site A potentially interesting movie, horror/Vampires. Due out later this year, the trailer at least looks interesting, as is usually the case.

Apparently part done in NZ.

Product loyalty: consumers mistake familiarity with superiority

Product loyalty: consumers mistake familiarity with superiority


Worth a read, especially for those who insist that their OS is so superior, or those who dislike new software/interfaces.