With the death of Google Browser Sync upon the release of Firefox 3, I went on a quest to find a replacement. I’d tried Foxmarks, but all it does is bookmarks, and I really didn’t like it. Browser Sync had let me coordinate not only bookmarks between multiple machines, but also cookies, saved passwords, and even open tabs. Enter Mozilla Weave.

Weave is a product of Mozilla Labs and is strictly experimental stuff. Even so, it’s exactly what I was looking for, and is in active development. Each release brings with it exciting new features.

However, since it, by default, relies on Mozilla servers to save browser information, the load on those servers determines how well it works, or if it even works at all. The program uses basic DAV to access the servers, and there is a configuration setting where the server address can be changed, so you can actually use any server that supports DAV access. There is a nice post in the Mozilla support forums that describes how to set up your own server, and there is more information in the Weave FAQ. I already had DAV working on my own server, so switching Weave to use it instead was a piece of cake. Now, syncs work every single time and are lightning fast, plus I don’t have to worry about the security of my information.

Since Mozilla is worried about stressing their servers too much, they’ve closed registration to new Weave users. However, if you use a different server, you can still get in on the fun. Set up your own server, or check out the forums for some free alternatives. Download the extension directly from here.

If you use any of the dynamic DNS services such as DynDNS or No-IP, or you use OpenDNS for your DNS server, you must check out DNS-O-Matic. Rather than having to run separate daemons for each of these services, you point DNS-O-Matic at all of them, then run a single daemon that updates DNS-O-Matic. It then takes care of updating all of the others for you. It works like a charm.

Ever since I started taking digital photos seven years ago, I’ve been absolutely paranoid about losing them. As the old adage goes when dealing with a hard disk drive, it’s not if it will fail but when it will fail. I started making backups to CDs, then to DVDs, but there is always that time between backups that has me nervous. I’m also bad about remembering to make new discs.

I started making continuous backups to my server machine in the basement, but that drive was getting full. Besides, there is also the threat of a fire taking out all the physical copies stored in the house. With bandwidth to spare and on-line storage costs coming down, I started looking around at on-line backup solutions.

Most of the services have free trials and make perhaps 1 or 2 gig available at no cost, but the cheapest plans that included at least 10 gig run $15 or more per month. When you start adding up the costs, you’ll find that you can buy a lot of large hard drives for that kind of money. That’s when I came across Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk uses Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), which is an API that developers can use to create applications that use storage on Amazon’s servers. The best part is the Jungle Disk program that lives on your PC costs $20 and the monthly cost of Amazon’s storage is dirt cheap. I’m able to back up 10 gig of photos, financial, and genealogy data for about $1.50 per month, and the backup store is updated automatically and continuously in the background. It took a few days to upload everything initially, but now it takes just a few minutes a day for the changes to be sent.

If you’re looking for good, reliable, cheap on-line backups, Jungle Disk is it.

This has to be one of the most exciting developments in electronics since the creation of the transistor back in the ’60s. The memristor was first conceived in theory back in 1971 to sit alongside the other mainstay passive components: the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor. It took until now for scientists at HP to figure out how to build one. This opens the door for even smaller and higher-density nonvolatile memory, but even more importantly, analog computing that works much the same way the brain operates. Check out this article for more details.

I continue to be blown away by the free software available from Microsoft as part of their Windows Live suite. One of the things I like to do when I’m somewhere that offers a stunning view is to take a series of photos that, when stitched together, makes a very nice panorama. It results in a photo that is much more striking than you could take with a single exposure.

After I took several such photo series at the Atlanta FRC championship a few weeks ago, I started looking around for current photo stitching software. "Free" was my goal, and after looking at a few hosted on SourceForge, I was starting to get disappointed. That’s when I saw someone mention a feature of Windows Live Photo Gallery that does photo stitching.

I quickly downloaded and installed it and started poking around. With most stitching software, you have to manually assign some common points in two adjacent photos to give the software something to work with. With Photo Gallery, all you do is give it a list of photos and, bam, out pops a nearly perfect panorama. If you know where the edges are, you can find a few artifacts, but the results are better than I’ve ever seen, especially for software that requires no user tweaking. I haven’t even looked at the other features of the program. Go download it and take a took. You may also find my photo set from the championship here.

As most people with busy families, I rely on my calendar to try to make sense of all of our daily activities. I used to keep everything in a single Outlook calendar on my work laptop, but if I wanted to quickly check a date while at home and the computer was off, it was most inconvenient, to say the least.

Then I changed jobs and the laptop went away. That’s when I started using Google Calendar in a big way. Now I use it for everything, and create separate calendars for different types of activities. For example, I’ve created public calendars for the UConn men’s and women’s basketball schedules, the upcoming Stafford Motor Speedway racing season, and even my son’s Boy Scout troop and daughter’s Venturing crew. Since they are public, others can benefit by including them in their own calendar display.

So it was with mixed feelings that I saw the announcement that Google Calendar could finally be synced with Outlook. It’s something I would have killed for about six months ago, but now that I’ve weaned off Outlook, it’s something I’m not particularly excited about. I toyed around with using Plaxo to sync Google Calendar, Outlook, and Thunderbird, but as the various pieces have evolved over the past few months, Plaxo has been getting more and more broken.

I’ll probably give it a shot, because I’m now using Outlook 2007 on my new laptop, but I’m not straying far from the basic Google Calendar interface. What I really want is two-way syncing between Thunderbird and Gmail contacts. Oh well…

You have to check out this video. Lots of fun when you have nothing better to do. Down the program (it’s free) from here.

I love finding free tools that work better than commercial versions. I have always tried to keep a pair of file archiving utilities on all my PCs: WinZip and WinRAR. However, I was reading some comments where people were talking about WinRAR, and someone mentioned 7-Zip. I quickly discovered that it’s a SourceForge-hosted open-source project that handles more file formats than WinZip and WinRAR put together, integrates into the Explorer shell, and is just as easy to use. I’ve already deleted WinRAR and plan to use this one almost exclusively.

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. The device bounces infrared light off the human body and records the light reflected back. Different tissues absorb and reflect different amounts of IR light. The computer then uses a DLP projector to display a real-time image on the surface of the skin that gives the illusion of peering under the skin. Another video gives a brief explanation of how it works. Excellent for aiding in starting IVs or checking for broken bones.

Here’s a post about some nice tools for geotagging photos and for linking Google Earth to geotagged photos. A geotagged photo has latitude and longitude coordinates of exactly where it was taken attached to it. Until we have digital cameras with built-in GPS receivers, we have to take a few extra steps to do the tagging, but the latest round of tools is making that process a bit easier.