CCS-PK

Keep up with Dilbert at dilbert.com

Keep up with Dilbert at dilbert.com

Only a few more days to go - perhaps a link to the next host city - Beijing in 2008.

There's a link on the official Olympic site to the pictures of the day which can be submitted by almost anyone it seems.

Click here to go there directly to the first picture in the sequence.

While the Olympics are on why not find out how fast you can read.

Try here at 'How Many Words Per Minute Do You Read?'

No cheating ... and no chemical aids either.

Athens 2004 is underway and security is a major concern with an estimated $1.5 billion being spent on this alone.

This article from 'New Scientist' has some details of things like the biometric ID cards and other measures. They also mention that there are SEVEN security personnel for every athlete taking part.

Today is officially THE day.

One place to get it is via the Gameplay site.

If your machine isn't up to the latest incarnation then why not try the Doom Collector's Edition a bargain at £9.99 - with three earlier versions of the game - Ultimate Doom, Doom II and Final Doom. If you were too young for these before you could try them out now.

Perhaps while you wait for the Xbox version of Doom-3 to be released in September.

Note:
I have no affiliation with Gameplay, I had to choose a retailer for the links today and I chose them because I've ordered from them in the past.

Extra:
Readers of Beeb News remember playing early versions of Doom - BBC NEWS | Technology | Remembering the first Doom

Two days to go - while you wait you can pay a visit to this UK Doom-3 site. Then, why not pop over to the id software site before taking a peek at the Wikipedia entry for John Carmack. (He's the daddy)

So - it came out last week in the States and is due out here on Friday.

Have you upgraded your computer ready to play it? (I should ask why as it is rated 18 and most of you should not be playing such things.)

If you haven't seen much about Doom 3 take a look at this trailer ...

- WARNING -> the link leads to a very big file <- WARNING -

... jump to the 40+ MB file here.

NOTE:
This trailer (and some others) is available at the Doom site but I have made a copy of it in case it gets removed once the game has settled in.

No - this post isn't about spam - although there is a connection.

If - like me - you have quite a few email addresses then checking them regularly can be a pain especially if you use different email programs. On desktop machines I use Pegasus Mail, Turnpike, Outlook and Outlook Express, webmail via Freeserve/Wanadoo, Hotmail/MSN and Gmail. I also access mail via laptop, handheld and mobile phone.

PopTray - which is FREE - is a superb little program which sits in the System Tray and can monitor at regular intervals an unlimited number of addresses. It handles POP3, IMAP and several webmail systems. You can preview mail items directly from it and delete the pointless rubbish as well as using rules and lists to automate some tasks. Excellent.

It does not actually handle Gmail accounts yet - perhaps they will be added - but this can be partly overcome with one of the extensions that are available for Firefox. (See my previous post about this here.)

Note for less-experienced users - there are very good reasons for using a lot of different email addresses and email programs.

With all the recent security problems with Internet Explorer I decided to follow in the footsteps of many other people and take a look at Firefox, the free browser from the Mozilla stable. You can see its many features by visiting the website yourself, perhaps read the FAQ for a start.

As well as being secure (at least for the time being) what features do I like? I've labelled them on the screendump, which you can click on to see at full-size.

1. extensions - there's loads of them for all sorts of things, this one lets Firefox keep a watch on a Gmail account
2. extensions - yes, they're great, here you can see the effect of the one that previews websites when you do a Google search, here looking for 'bbc'
3. themes - customise the look with one of the many themes you can download, from my preferred grey look to some really colourful ones eg. Doodle
4. did I mention extensions? - this one shows the Google toolbar, I was concerned that I'd lose the Google toolbar that is great with IE, no fear, this version is pretty good
5. context-based menus - just what you expect nowadays, except this one gets added to by the extensions, as well as the Google sub-menu you can see the proxy-switcher too
6. oh yes, extensions - this one lets you control Winamp from the status bar, wonderful for playing all those MP3s
7. OK - I know there's no number 7 - another feature I like (from Mozilla too) is being able to change text size of a site up (CTRL+) or down (CTRL-) despite their own style sheets, IE can't always handle that properly

I'd also note that the 'tabbed' interface of Mozilla is still there which I like and they've fixed images so that you can simply right-click and copy. One useful extension I've installed makes zooming on any image in a page quite easy too.

Enough, and try it for yourself. It's free. It's easy to install.