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.

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.

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.

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

I’m now the proud owner of a MacBook Pro and a new iPod (since Apple is practically giving them away when you buy a computer if you’re in education – on the downside, I’m just betting that solid-state iPods are on the horizon, but I sure couldn’t beat that price.)

On the software front, I still refuse to move away from Firefox, no matter how many people say they prefer Safari (or Camino). But I am running NetNewsWire and MarsEdit.

No worries about me completely dropping Windows, though. I’m working on installing it on some leftover hard-drive space. :) There is finally a new TopStyle beta in the works, after all, and there’s no way I’m not getting my .02 in on that.

A big reason it’s taken so long to get this set up is that I’ve been hunting for a gallery blog solution for quite awhile. I finally settled on zenphoto. It’s lightweight and, most important, supports publishing straight from Windows.

Not to mention that it’s got a great, very responsive community behind it.

Three thumbs up.

I challenge everyone to take back their applications – even if you have to quit your job! It’s totally worth it.

So today was the first day I really got a look at the much praised new feature that allows you to choose a default RSS application for handling feed links. This is a real boon to folks who use dedicated readers such as FeedDemon. I’ve been using Koz’ Feed Your Reader extension for Firefox 1.x so I’ve never actually missed this functionality.

But it looks like they fell short in supporting web-based aggregators. Bloglines, My Yahoo! and Google Reader are included by default, but no mention of my mothership – NewsGator. I’m sure it’s just an oversight.

No matter, one of our intrepid tech support folks – Jonathon McDougall – has whipped up a KB article that includes a JavaScript you can click on to assign NewsGator Online as your default RSS reader. If you’re not hip to letting JavaScript do these kinds of things on your behalf, I found this blog post from Amit Agarwal that shows how to manually edit your Firefox config to point to other non-default readers.

Default Technorati tags:
firefox newsgator rss reader feeddemon koziarski

In Windows, you can copy the text of many OS or program error messages using the standard Windows copy keyboard shortcut; Ctrl+C.

The nice thing about this is that it copies all the text from the dialog in plain text, so it’s easy to paste into an email or forum when asking for tech support. Much cleaner than mucking about with screenshots and saves the person helping you from having to type (or more likely mistype) any critical information from the error while trying to reproduce or troubleshoot the problem.