I’ve been limping along with Lookout because it beats the pants off of Outlook’s built-in search (or, more appropriately, “blind grope in the dark”). But I’ve run into some conflicts with Lookout because you have to hack a bit to get it to work.

Fortunately, I just found out about a couple of modified .dlls you can load which do away with the need for “major” hacking and seem to work just fine.

If I can spare some time, I’ll probably take a look at Xobni, though Lookout has pretty much taken care of my needs up until now.

Been fighting network interference for weeks because of this.

This is a pretty sweet looking service. I’m still not ga-ga over the social web, but I wouldn’t mind following a few friends, so give a shout out if you’re on it (already found you, Nick) or heck, just subscribe to my feed and I’ll figure it out.

If I’d done that first, I’d have found the rubber snake that was mashing down multiple keys and preventing the computer from booting. And I would have saved myself a good 45 minutes.

Still, not bad for a Monday.

Some Add-ons are provided by the developers from their own sites so you can install from there (after allowing the domain as an install source). To get the Mozilla hosted ones, just visit the FTP site: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/addons/. Their folders are arranged by the Add-on ID. Visit the Add-ons site and find the one you need, get its ID from it’s URL, then open the FTP site inside of Firefox. Find the folder and click on the latest version .xpi file you find to start the install.

I’ve been using Logitech mice for years and though I don’t necessarily love their drivers, I’ve got these extra buttons on my current one that I don’t use, since I hate the supposed “features” they add, which led to Eureka Moment #2 (here’s #1) – why not map those buttons to keystrokes?

In Logitech’s current driver (and probably several versions back for all I know) not only can you map buttons to keystrokes, but you can set the actions to specific programs. So I added FeedDemon to the list of programs and set the “Document Flip” button on my MX Revolution to the newspaper shortcut for “Next Item (automatically move to next feed)” and, because I like to control read state on posts at the individual level, I also set the Middle Button (scroll wheel button) to “Toggle read.” So now I don’t have to touch the keyboard to while reading feeds and Nick doesn’t have to listen to me whine about wanting to do more with less keyboarding.

One thing I’ve been bugging Nick about for quite awhile about is providing a means to mark posts as read automatically, what I like to call and “anti-watch”:

I would love love love it if I could configure an “anti-watch” that would automatically mark any post that contained a specific word or phrase as read. Case in point – iPhone.

I could see this being per-feed/folder/all, though I’d be happy with applying it to all if that was the only choice.

This came to mind again due to all the new iPhone SDK news coming out today. The Eureka moment arrived when I recalled a recent exchange with Nick about how I’d discovered that if you mark something read in a Watch, it gets marked read in the source feed. (I’m not sure when that snuck in – yeah, even I miss a few features – and Nick couldn’t recall which specific build it was, but I think he said it was new in 2.6.) I just realized that I could create a Watch of Things I Don’t Care About, add the keywords I want to filter, and mark it as read before I start reading. It helps to use the Unread Folders view and Unread filter, too (Does anyone not use those?!)

Yeah, it’s a kludge – automatically marking things would be better – but it works for me and I figured there may be a couple of others out there who could make use of it.

That, and I figured I should post something before everyone unsubscribes due to seeing me in their Dinosaurs reports. :)

Update – This same trick seems to work pretty well using NetNewsWire’s Smart Lists, too.

This is awesome news. By releasing their best of breed applications (okay, maybe I’m a little biased, but probably not) into the free-as-in-beer wild, RSS uptake should increase because the cost of entry has just dropped to near-zero (still have to pay for that net connection, though).

No morel lame built-into-the-browser-or-mail-client RSS for you. Do yourself a favor and grab a great RSS reader right now.

My condolences to the NewsGator tech support team. :)

Sysinternals PsTools is a command line tool to remotely manage Windows computers.