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There are few things that bother me more than cables and cords, especially Wall Warts. Why does my camera charger need a 6ft cable?

Well, I’ve been searching the intertubes for almost a year to find “short power cords” to use with my many chargers, dc adapters and so on. This was made difficult by the fact that I had no idea what to search for.

A few months ago my quest was complete. Behold the C7 Figure Eight Plug from Cyberguys.com. At $1.79 each get a bunch of them!

I ordered a dozen 1 ft power cords. These are suitable to replace any 2 prong AC plug (NEMA 1-15 ungrounded plug) with a C7 figure 8 ungrounded plug. I went around my house cleaning up cable disasters everywhere.

Here you can see the diversity of my long cables that I no longer use:

and this is what I replaced them all with:

I’ve written in the past about how badly behaved applications pollute user space with clutter.

Well it seems that a number of apps are never going to “do the right thing” so I’ve devised an effective solution.

I make the folder/files hidden.

This has the effect of reducing the annoyance, and making me feel better .

I’ve done this for a number of folders, some annoying and some useful that I just don’t need access to (but still like in my Documents folder since FolderShare syncs it to all my computers)

I tried using my USB Wireless Lock again the other day, but it's just too dammed flaky. My PC would lock it self randomly even when my FOB was close by.

Then I came across this post on lifehacker about a program called Blue Lock that will use your Bluetooth phone and Lock once the phone is outside of the visibility of your PC.

I've been running it for a few days and it works flawlessly. So well in fact that sometimes it won't lock if I am around the corner because the range of bluetooth can be pretty substantial.

The program works best when your machine is using the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack. I have a Microsoft Laser Mouse 8000, which of course uses the MS Stack. But my Lenovo Thinkpad uses the Broadcomm stack (you can still use the MS one if you uninstall the Lenovo software).

Quick note. If you want your machine to automatically lock again after you unlock your PC (it doesn't do this) you need to go into the configuration file in the bluelock folder and change:

clearLockDeviceFieldOnLock=true

to false:

clearLockDeviceFieldOnLock=false

and definitely pay attention to the warning. I set my timeout to 30 seconds.

One of the "Experimental" Services offered on the Amazon Kindle is called NowNow. The way NowNow works is you send it  question you want researched and you get back 3 answers within a few minutes. These are answers that human beings research using Amazon's own Mechanical Turk.

I've not had much use for the service but today I had a question I could not get an answer to.

"how can I find out about new Amazon Kindle book releases?"

Trying to search the world wide web using Google and Live Search netted nuthin.

So I asked NowNow. Within 10 minutes I got the following answers:

Answer #1: It's a little complicated...

Go here
Sort by Publication Date
Then you'll see the latest items added.
Currently this is the only way to see new releases, and there is no notification tool.

Answer #2: Check the Amazon website

But if you own a kindle chance are you will get emails from amazon telling you about new kindle release.

Answer #3: On Amazon's website, there is a Kindle store, where all the Kindle books are listed for purchse.

At the Kindle store, there are other listings like Kindle Magazines, Newspapers, and Blogs. There is also a support menu for your Kindle

Answer #1 was the best, and Answer #3 clearly the worst. But at least it worked .

I can't say this enough, Tripit is going to change my world. Tripit is basically a travel organizing/planning site that you forward all those pesky emails that you get when booking air, hotel or car rental. It parses them and extracts relevant meta data. This is a productivity site for managing travel, the least fun part of actually traveling.

I am the designated family travel planner and spend hours and hours a year doing this stuff online. I just took 12 emails for 4 different trips coming up in the next 6 months and Tripit parsed them all and created amazing web pages for each one. This includes, hotel, cars, flights for 3 people with multiple destinations and non round-trip flights.

These guys are geniuses.

Just when I think the net can't do anything substantially new for me, something like this comes a long and I just go WOW.

Prior to tripit I (mostly) manually copied and pasted this stuff into Outlook, and then sent my wife meeting requests so she would have the info on her calendar. What a giant waste of time. No more...

Not to mention they integrate with sites like SeatGuru.com so you can get a good seat on your flight.

If this is the future, I love it.