I was a little suspicious after looking at the project entity name (Fenrir). But, I decided to take a look at...

Sleipnir 2.7

The New York Times app for the iPhone 3G and iPod touch looks interesting at first. However, it seems to take a while to update (compared to web pages or other apps) and some sections never update and display news (e.g, the Technology section ironically enough). Considering how well other apps work and the fact that the NYT is a major media organization, it gets just 2 out a possible 5 Walrus rating.

I'm taking a look at Gmail's new My Contacts feature that should bring some much needed order to contacts lists that have grown with each new email that arrived in my Gmail inbox. I wonder if this is more of a preparation for Android phones vs. fixing Gmail though. I fiddled around with adding contact information and it looks like it is really prepping to be phone-ready.

I posted my second podcast to Blogr. I have commentaries on 10 items as well as the podcast and app of the week. You can find and listen to the podcast at:

OgasaWalrus Podcast #2

Here's the show notes:

Podcast #2 (11min 44sec)
NEWS
1. iPhone 3G/iPod touch 2.0.
Freeware for...

2. TechOnABudget.com/blog

MAIN
1. Adobe Buzzword imports Word 2007/Word 2008 file formats

2. MOST VIEWED blog entry for the past two weeks (425)
Alternative to LifeHacker's 5 best windows maintenance tools
- CCleaner (same)

Twitter (the web service we have a love-hate relationship with) bought Summize and renamed it...

Twitter Search (makes sense)

Twitter has become its own information eco-system and it makes sense to integrate Summize as it search tool.

I wrote a blog item over on the O'Reilly Inside Port 25 site titled: Do We Need an Open Source Friendly Visual Studio Express? I had not tried the latest free Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition(s). So, I went over to...

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

Twitterurly or twitt(url)y takes web links from the Twitter public stream and counts the number of active tweets referring to links. The display page shows the high count URL related tweets in a Digg like fashion. It's kind of interesting to see what web items people are tweeting about. But, the counts seems a bit low to me for the 24 time frame used to sample and count tweeted URLs.

It looks like one of the patches from the July Microsoft Patch Tuesday is stopping Secunia PSI from starting after Windows Vista boots. I've been manually starting it from the Vista provided error prompt.
I just changed it to Run As Administrator to see if that resolves the issue.

I downloaded and installed the free...

Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP

To the left you see the Windows Vista thumbnail for a Canon RAW image before I installed the Canon 1.2 CODEC for RAW images. To the right is the same image thumbnail after installing the CODEC. There is such an, um, nothing much, huh? I also downloaded the free Microsoft Pro Photo Tools from the...

Microsoft Pro Photo downloads area

I read about the bit.ly URL shortener on TechMeme. I'm pretty happy with TinyURL and even happier with is.gd (since it is, well, tinier and therefore better for Twitter use). But, bit.ly has a couple of interesting features described in their blog...

Introducing bit.ly — the incredible professional’s URL-shortener

I downloaded Google's Lively virtual worlds installer (for Windows XP/Vista only) and tried it out by logging in with my existing Google account. You can see the giant mess it created on my PC running Windows XP SP3 with IE7. It looked and felt more like a malware attack than a new cool Google service. Yuck.

TrueCrypt 6.0a was just released with a couple of bug fixes on the heels of the 6.0 release on July 4. TrueCrypt is an Open Source multiplatform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) encryption tool that can create either encrypted container files (which can contain multiple files within it like a virtual disk) or whole-drive encryption.

I'm putting together a Freeware/Open Source security tools for Windows list and TrueCrypt will definitely be on that list.

Just read about the new Gmail login IP info and remote signout feature in the Official Gmail blog...

Remote sign out and info to help you protect your Gmail account

Took a quick look at it in my Gmail account. Nice to get this new feature.

Secunia Personal Software Inspector RC3 0.9.0.4 scans a Microsoft Windows PC for software with security issues and recommends ways to fix it including direct links to updates for the software. I heard about it a while back but didn't take a close look at it. Then, while catching up on listing to podcasts, I learned more about it on the Security Now podcast #145.

Google Precipitate is a personal Open Source contributions from a member of the Google Mac team. It lets you search through your Google Bookmarks or Google Docs from the Mac OS X (Tiger or Leopard) Spotlight. You can find the blog item announcing it here...

Precipitate: search your local and online docs