IE + Onfolio spanks Firefox, Google, and Windows RSS clients

This is not good news. I've been using the new beta MSN live "toolbar", based on Onfolio's products. Microsoft acquired them recently. The "toolbar" is really a large set of extensions to IE and Windows, including Microsoft's full text search engine.

It's good. The Onfolio - Read RSS reader beats every other Windows client I've looked at - and it's free. The toolbar gives IE tabs. The rest of the Onfolio suite is enticing.

It's good, so it's also bad. IE 7 is extremely unimpressive, but IE 6 with Onfolio will displace Firefox and Google's IE toolbar from a lot of machines. In particular few other RSS clients will work with Microsoft's sharepoint RSS solution (uses another acquisition) -- thanks to Microsoft's control of user authentication.

If you have to do RSS on Windows, this is probably the solution to use. It also incorporates a posting ability which I've yet to test ....

Hard drives: sometimes there really is a difference

Presumably these findings are related to differing optimizations made by hard drive vendors ...

Macworld: Editors' Notes: Black and white differences:

... With the systems shipping with identical processors, RAM and graphics, we focused our testing attention on the hard drive. Thankfully, switching hard drives between the MacBooks is fairly painless, because we did a lot of it and found that the results in question followed the drive to whatever system it was installed in. We bought and installed a 100GB, 7,200RPM Seagate drive in the black MacBook and saw its performance benefit immediately, reducing the gap between white and black on many of our tests, like Compressor, iMovie and iTunes, while whipping the white in the more drive-intensive tasks like zipping, unzipping, and duplicating files.

The weirdest results came from our iPhoto import test, which appears to be very hard drive sensitive. Surprisingly, the winner wasn’t the Seagate 7200RPM drive, but the Fujitsu 5,400-rpm drives found in the black MacBook and 17-inch MacBook Pro. The white MacBook had a Seagate 5,400-rpm drive, which edged out the Fujitsu in zipping and unzipping large folders, but lagged far behind in the iPhoto test. The top-level specs of these drives don’t offer any explanation—both have 8MB caches and both run at 5,400-rpm. We installed, wiped, reinstalled, and moved the drives around trying to figure this one out, but the results always followed the drives.

Fascinating. We think of hard drives as commodities ... (though some are more or less reliable!)

Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000

I loathe Microsoft software. I love Microsoft hardware. They really know how to do hardware.

So I'm very interested in the Amazon.com: Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000. I zoomed the Amazon images and I was able to imagine that the damn thing might even have a focus ring.

I experimented years ago with various PC webcams as a videoconferencing aide. I wanted to image a whiteboard and send readable snaps every 5-10 seconds. The devices ran into bandwidth issues (too much data for a USB 1 cable) and the resolution was inadequate. I think these guys might work. Very neat.

I wonder how they compare to Apple's excellent webcam (though the built-in ones aren't as good). Alas, the Apple cam only works on a Mac. I wonder if this one might do Mac as well ...

Upgrading a Mac drive: nice tip

I like the procedure outlined here ...

Macintouch - MacBook

The specific screwdriver needed to remove the factory-installed HDD from its metal cover is a T-8 torx. Home Depot and Lowe's have these in multi-size Torx driver sets for less than $6...

Apricorn (www.apricorn.com) has a USB enclosure for a SATA drive (model EZ UP - S).

What I did was:

1. bought a replacement HDD
2. installed it into the above described USB enclosure
3. used Super Duper! to copy factory HDD to the new one in the USB enclosure and make it bootable (although you can not boot from a USB drive, it's still important to make the cloned HDD bootable).
4. Swapped the internal and external drives. This is easy if you have the above T-8 Torx screwdriver.
5. put the factory HDD into the USB enclosure.

Mactracker: a reference source for Mac hardware.

Mactracker - Get info on any Mac

Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple, Motorola, PowerComputing, and UMAX Mac OS computer ever made, including items such as processor speed, memory, optical drives, graphic cards, supported Mac OS versions, and expansion options. Also included is information on Apple mice, keyboards, displays, printers, scanners, digital cameras, iPod, AirPort Base Stations, Newtons, and Mac OS versions.

via Macintouch. Excessive certainly. Valued, yes.

Allow Safari to handle Google Earth links

This worked for me. I created the file "com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist" in my personal Library: Google Earth Community: Tip: Auto-open Safari links in Google Earth.

TEAC SR-L200i-W clock radio with iPod integration

After the iH5 debacle this TEAC SR-L200i-W Hi-Fi Radio with iPod Dock is appealing. Alas, I can't find any reviews anywhere. It might be too new a product. I'll need some reviews before I take a chance on in ...