The 30 Products and Services We Miss Most - Oct 20, 2006

15 Great, Free Privacy Downloads - Aug 6, 2008

Steve Bass - Smart Phishing Threat, Nifty DVD Player - Oct 18, 2006

Spybot Search & Destroy - Though its name sounds like bad
dialog from a 60's sci-fi flick, Spybot Search & Destroy is a good program to have around for those trying times when you think someone is lurking behind the browser curtain tracking your every Web move. Fire it up and it'll spot all sorts of tracking cookies and the like, then remove them if you choose to do so. Spybot offers an immunization feature which supposedly protects against the kinds of spyware that the program will remove. Not having used this feature for more than a few days, I can't say how effective it is, but it didn't seem to interfere with browsing and supported both Internet Explorer and Firefox. My scan inside a fairly new virtual machine didn't turn up much, but it turned up more than I thought it would. I've only used a browser a few times in the VM and there were already a
bunch of tracking cookies. Some tracking cookies are actually useful while others are simple marketing spies and Spybot seemed to recognize the difference in most cases. The program also offers a restore function in case you delete one of the good kind by accident, and there's what seems to be an effective resident shield (TeaTimer) which will warn you of suspicious behavior like registry entries being
changed or removed. Though Spybot is free, if you find it useful you might consider
donating a couple of bucks to the author who dedicated this program to "the most wonderful girl on earth" in the license agreement. How can you say no to a worthy program and sentiments like that?--Jon L. Jacobi

DVD Shrink

Here's one for anyone who wants to make backup copies of their DVDs on their hard disk. That way, you can use Windows Media Center or another DVD media player to play the DVDs on your PC. The program lets you rip the DVD to your hard disk in a variety of formats, including a lossless one that keeps the image and audio quality intact. You can choose from other formats if you want to save hard disk space. And you can also customize the quality on any DVD you rip. DVD Shrink will preserve all your DVD content, including menus, trailers, subtitles, and so on. If you'd like, though, you can eliminate any of that content as well. Maybe best of all, it's free.--Preston Gralla

ISO Recorder - Windows XP knows how to write files to CDs, but it doesn't know what to do with the .iso CD disc-image files that have become a handy way to distribute software. ISO Recorder is a shell extension that adds a new CD recording option to Windows XP's context menus.
When you right-click a .iso file in Windows Explorer, the command 'Copy Image to CD' appears. Selecting the command launches a series of dialog boxes in which you can select the destination drive and start
recording. ISO Recorder also knows how to create .iso files from data CDs, but it doesn't read or write .iso files of audio or video discs.

Halloween Icons

Halloween Desktop Theme - Polehammer

The Shadowlands: Ghost and Hauntings

Celebrities doing Japanese commercials

Sound Effects - The Wilhelm Scream

Repeated use of "the Wilhelm scream" over the years in movies

Urbanchillers, the original home of fear, chills, and horror

The Science Fiction and Telefantasy Databanks

A Brief History of Computers, As Seen in Old TV Ads - Oct 14, 2006

Brrrn - Burns audio files onto CDs - Oct 6, 2006
This Week's Fav Freebies - Miranda, Cryptainer LE, IrfanView, ISO Recorder - Oct 17, 2006

The 15 Freakiest Web Sites - Oct 17, 2006

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101 Fabulous Freebies - Mar 28, 2006