making it work for you

After Hamachi didn’t work for us to network a printer, we were disappointed and a bit downtrodden. Though we still have the network up at home, it doesn’t function like a regular network (least as far as we can tell). But regardless, we are still trying other things.

One thing that looks promising is Bonjour. Now, Bonjour is something that popped up under Processes in our Task Manager and ZoneAlarm a while ago, and we could never quite figure out what the heck it does or who put it there. We believe it is attached to iTunes in some way. And we did figure out that crippling it crippled our access to the Internets. Which saddened us greatly. And lifehacker says an actual download of Bonjour (different from say its embedded cousin in Itunes, perhaps?) can help us set up networked printers. Joy! Ask Metafilter also has some interesting lines on how to share information across computers in-house.

Edit: Yes, iTunes 5.0 and beyond installs Bonjour without your knowing it. Both Bonjour and iTunes talk to the Internets separately, as evidenced by their separate ZoneAlarm calls.

Also on the networking tip, lifehacker has a handy slice of info about how to set up subdomains on a server.

It would be passe to say now that GoogleMaps (Double True!) is a killer app. But we’d say it anyway. One of the things we love about it is being able to link it into our web pages. Exploration Age has a nice tutorial about how to add Google Maps to any web page.

It would also be passe to gush over Firefox. But we just came across yet another extension that makes us squeee like little girls. X-Ray for Firefox. With a simple right click you can see the markup of a page. Shazam. For little hackers like us who learn by watching, this is amazing. Kids these days have it so fucking easy. Back in my day we had to view source if we wanted to check markup!

And, if you can’t make it work, if you can’t get it done yourself, you can always ask a favor of someone. Favorville is a neat web community that allows people to ask and offer favors. Rock.

confident, connected… and blue and green

The Windows95 sound, the famous 15-second piece that began the Microsoft revolution, was composed by Brian Eno. It is said that it’s his most popular and most-played piece ever.

It was no Macintosh sound, granted, which was a diagnostic letting the user know at startup that everything was A-OK: each diagnostic, we were told by a friend, chorded its own sound, and the full and complete sound let you now all was well. Well, that and the Happy Mac.

The Win95 sound went away a few years later with the intro (and new sound, of course) of 98, 2000, and XP. Serious NT (“new technology”) had no startup sound.

And now Windows Vista is in the works. So we need a new sound, right? Enter Robert Fripp. Here is a 25 minutes video (yes, 25 minutes) of a darkened studio with Fripp working out a new sound. His guiding principle? Vista is “Clean, connected and confident.” “And green and blue,” Fripp adds. Yes, and green and blue. The future’s so bright, we have to put shades on our windows.

And while we are addressing media connection you cannot escape, we wonder how much TV the taquitos should watch. Our guts says none, of course, but is this just reactionarism or is there some factual evidence behind it? This is why we love Ask Metafilter. Should a baby watch TV?

How about this: should a baby Wi-Fi internet-connected bunny? We saw a news spot about this, the Nabaztag, over the end of the year break. While we might scoff — and have scoffed — at such things, Mama Taco wouldn’t mind us not running to the compy during “family time” to check if email’s come in. Which it usually hasn’t.

One of the distant salsas in the family will love this bit of connectivity: Hamachi is instant peer-to-peer networking. We wonder how far we can take it without opening doors to bad folks.

Edit: We tried this out and it did not work at all for us. The unique address Hamachi assigns turned out to not be findable when we used its “browse” function. So the only thing we could use it for was inter-computer messaging. Which we have plenty of apps for already, thanks.

And lastly today: we have talked about addall.com, which allows you to search and compare book prices. And while we love that, we some times do need to shop for other things, besides books (although a look around the Taco Compound might make you think otherwise). We have enjoyed MySimon in the past, but frequently it does not do what we need it to do. So we are looking forward to Clipfire, which promises us to be a good comparison checker.

our favorite gmail hacks

Hello, true believers. Today we post 2 gmail hacks (greasemonkey scripts, really) that we have been testing at Taco Labs, Inc. As you know, we aim to test everything we can before recommending (or not) a product to you.

Gmail has been our favorite email client for a while. Let’s face it, their come on with a free gig of space a year and a half back was irresistable. Anyway, there are, of course, some minor flaws with it.

One of the things we never liked about it was that there is no friggin delete button. You can do almost anything you need to do with a message from a handy drop-down menu, but there is no friggin delete button! We delete, damnit, with buttons. It’s just how we are wired. Lo and behold, we are not the only ones wired this way. Arantius to the resuce: this greasemonkey script (we employ the ‘user script’ and not the ‘full extension’) will add a delete button to gmail.

OUr second favorite hack is message preview. We get a kick out of Outlook’s message preview, and we hear that the new and fancy yahoo email (for which we signed up for a beta and yet never quite got onto the ‘must get’ list, harumph) has it as well. Well, gmail’s got ya covered, little soldier. With this greasemonkey script, right click on a message to preview and take action on it (except add labels, that doesn’t work from preview).

We found both of these links from lifehacker.com.