Nine Baud Tech News

A handy tool from Snapfiles.

Ultimate Boot CD allows you to run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. It consolidates a wide array of popular diagnostic tools in to a bootable CD interface. The applications (from other companies) included are: MemTest86 Ver 3.0, Data Lifeguard Ver 10.0 for Western Digital HDD, PowerMax Ver 3.04 for Maxtor/Quantum HDD, Drive Fitness Test Ver 3.40 for IBM/Hitachi HDD, SeaTools Desktop Edition for Seagate HDD, Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, Ranish Partition Manager, AIDA16 - Worldwide Sysinfo Tool, F-Prot Antivirus for DOS (Note: for personal use only), Autoclave - Hard Drive Sterilization, SavePart - Partition Saving. Ultimate Boot CD provides a text-based menu after you boot your PC with the CD inserted, that lets you select the tools that you want to run. The download comes as an ISO image. You should be comfortable with commandline utilities to use the software.

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Tags: Tools, How to, Computer Diagnostics

Well, as part of my house cleaning I added some scripts to help me harvest all of the subscribers into a Feedbuner feed. Let’s just say I was blown away when I realized just how many people read this site. My apologies for the half assed approach I have taken lately as I’ve been focused on my other sites. Now that I know how many people are reading Nine Baud I will make a concerted attempt to start updating this site daily. For those of you who have been good enough to last this long, THANKS!

Tags: Feedburner, RSS, Subscribers

Want to know just how much caffeine is coursing through your brain?

Fun and games…unless you spike way over. I’m calling the ER right now.

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Tags: Energy Drinks, Caffeine

Google has added themes to their personalized home pages. At first I thought this was a little silly but, now, running the “beach” theme I find it easier on the eyes than the usual stark white.

It changes the layout depending on your local time of day.

Tags: Google, Google Themes, Google Home Page

Mmmmm, tasty. Adobe is apparently set to release a beta for CS3 shortly according to Think Secret.

Sources say that satiating owners of Intel-based Macs was one of the primary reasons driving Adobe to release the public beta. Photoshop CS2 is a PowerPC-native application that must run under Rosetta on Intel-based Macs, significantly curtailing performance. Apple has previously cited the lack of Universal Binary applications from Adobe, optimized both for Intel and PowerPC chips, as a contributing factor to lower Mac Pro system sales.

The missus will be happy.

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Tags: Adobe CS3, Photoshop, Adobe Beta Release

Here’s a cool time waster that will allow you to map out the countries that you have visited in the world. Sadly, this is the best I have done so far.

Where as my wife…

Slighty more worldly.

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Tags: Cool Stuff, Online Tools, World Travel, Time Waster

Dear Santa,

Gimmie gimmie gimmie!

“Flat-panel HDTV sales will drive the consumer electronics market as a whole this holiday season,” Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD, said in a statement. “Lower prices and improving picture quality are rapidly sidelining the bulky tube television.”

Shipments of HDTVs increased 52% from January through September this year compared with the same period a year ago. In terms of sales, revenue from the sets increased 39% over a year ago.

What? Santa doesn’t work like that? Ah, nuts.

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Tags: Flat Panel, HDTV, Consumer Electronics

The good folks at Lifehacker have a posting about these furniture sliders called “Moving Men”.

furniture sliders, those little plastic disks that make moving that won’t-budge entertainment center across the room a breeze.

I have these at home and have been using them for years now. These things are freakin fantastic for moving heavy furniture when your buddies are “busy”.

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Tags: Furniture Moving, Cool Tools, Great Gadgets, Household Tools

Knoppix 5.0 is available.

Just because your computer can’t boot up Windows from your hard drive doesn’t mean you can’t boot it up with another operating system on another disk just long enough to rescue your important files. Today we’ll use the completely free Knoppix Linux Live disk to safely move your files on a failing hard drive to a healthy USB drive - no Windows required.

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Tags: Hard Drive Recovery, Knoppix, Data Loss

Here are a series of pics that resemble a first person shooter more than what they actually are. These are pictures of the Tokyo flood management system. Wild pics.

Thanks to Axel for this link!

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Tags: Tokyo, Flood Tunnels, Unreal Tournament, Wild