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What’s crapware or craplets? Ars Technica says: Just what are craplets? It’s a cute nickname for all of the software an OEM installs on your new Windows PC before it arrives on your doorstep. In $60 to keep crapware off of a Windows PC? Ken Fisher talks about how much it OEMs - Original Equipment Manufacturers, like Dell or Hewlett-Packard - might want to sell you a machine that’s not loaded with limited and trial versions of software. Because people aren’t likely willing to pay anything extra, Microsoft can fume but not do anything about it. ...

Ars Technica has a write-up of some of the features available in yet-to-be-released Windows Vista Ultimate. There’s 3 features and none of them sound very appealing. In reverse order: a Texas hold ’em game. Yeah, we know, this is extremely popular. We have it featured in the latest James Bond movie. But “Hold ‘Em may cost you time, but your money is safe because the chips are not real?” Pass. BitLocker is kind of interesting. It encrypts your hard drive so it can’t be stolen. It also can’t be read by hacking tools or another operating system. Seems a lot more useful on laptops than desktop systems. Also makes it impossible for people to dual-boot with Linux and use their Vista files as they can now with XP. DreamScene sounds distracting, to say the least. Instead of a still image, you’re able to set a video file as your background. A few people think that ice melting or wheat blowing would be interesting but most people think it would be annoying beyond belief. I’m in the latter camp: isn’t that the reason we hate the “punch the monkey” ads, because they’re on the edge of our vision but moving? We’re hard-wired to treat movement on the edge of our vision as threatening - it might be a tiger about to leap on us. Or just another person with a club. Windows Vista Ultimate combines all the various features of Tablet Edition, Windows Media Center, etc. Hard to believe that it’s going to be needed on one machine. So I think sales will be tiny. ...

On my work accounts, we’re using SpamAssassin. For personal mail, I’ve switched from Hotmail to gmail in part because Hotmail does a poor job of detecting spam. Lately, I’ve been getting frustrated by the amount of spam that makes it past the spam detecting routines on the mail servers. I don’t really want to do something involved on my own system. So what to do? Junk Mail Controls gives instructions on how to adjust the spam filter in Thunderbird so it’s more sensitive to spam. I’m hoping that this helps reduce spam while still avoiding false positives. I have to say that gmail and Thunderbird have been stellar on this, which is a good thing. I’d much rather get a few annoying spam messages than lose real mail into the spam hopper. ...

I’ve (mostly) switched from Outlook to Thunderbird for mail. If you, like me, subscribe to a few mailing lists, you know it’s a pain dealing with them. If I don’t have time to read the issue from 6 months ago, it’s nice to have it just disappear. No stress trying to decide whether to do a quick scan or just do a bulk delete. Just delete them. One of the features I’ve missed with Thunderbird was that ability to delete messages automatically. No stress. Well, unless you delete the wrong messages. But Thunderbird has good filters and so it’s easy to avoid that. ...

Snippy is a neat tool for capturing parts of images. From the description: How often have you carefully selected some text from a Web page and copied it to an email message? Snippy makes this a snap! Simply click on the little Snippy icon in the taskbar notification area, and mark out the region of the screen that you want to copy — that’s it, you’re done! The cut-out image will now be in your clipboard, and you can paste it in another application." ...

This is an easy way to convert images (photos or pictures) in Windows XP using the paint.exe program from Microsoft itself. It takes 3 steps per picture, so it’s not the fastest way to do this. But they’re really easy steps. But it also means that you don’t have to download any additional tools. That’s good if you’re concerned about viruses. Or maybe you’re using somebody else’s computer and you don’t want to download something onto their machine. ...

Get Organized With Google Notebook is a nice article that talks about working with Google’s fairly new notebook. I like the notebook more than I do Google’s calendar or Gmail. However, the problem for me is that Google is mixing together different types of services and trying to use one Google login for all of them. I don’t want to use one login for AdSense, AdWords, Gmail, etc., etc. so I’m faced with having to logout and log back in just to check stats or to make a note. Or run two browsers, one for personal use and another for business. ...

Found a reference to Mozy in PC Magazine. If you are looking to backup a small amount of files - 2GB or less - it’s absolutely free. Even at 20GB, it’s only $40/year. That’s much cheaper than the competition. They do require you to get a weekly newsletter that I bet is full of ads. Don’t know, since I haven’t gotten one yet. But that seems less obtrusive than having ads every time you read mail. ...

Not quite sure how I ran across Fitness Hacks for Geeks but it’s a very nice article about some of the options for making it easier to exercise. I’m lucky enough to live a few blocks away from Mt. Tabor Park. It’s notable for being the only extinct volcano within city limits in the US. It’s a bit silly to call it a mountain, given that the mountain blew up many thousands of years ago. But the little (I assume) that’s left still makes for a challenging walk or run. ...

TechCrunch has a nice summary of online music services. I’ve been pretty happy with the Yahoo Music service. I’ve got boxes of CDs that I need to rip some day so I often find myself using the Yahoo service to listen to songs that I have already … somewhere in a box in the attic. Using a streaming service is perfect for me, since I have no intention of buying those songs at $.99/each.