If you use Microsoft Word for your sermon or Bible study preparation it’s likely you know the frustration of trying to spell-check and having all those Bible names pop up as misspelled. traviscarden.com has Bible language spell-check dictionaries available to solve that problem. (from Tim Challies)

I’ve been using the social bookmark manager del.icio.us for a long time now and don’t know how I’d keep track of my bookmarks as efficiently without it. If you aren’t using del.icio.us yet or aren’t using it much, slackermanager.com has a good piece today on “The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users“.

Google helps hackers turn up medical records. Not so cool.

One of these could make a PC guy want to switch–come on, OS X is based on FreeBSD.

One might get the impression from this article that Microsoft is just a wee bit concerned about the pressure being put on them by Linux and other free software.

Want to know when your favorite web site has been updated - like this one? I found a handy site that meets my needs for tracking when a site has changed, so I don’t have to remember to go check it out or be concerned that I’ll forget about that site I once thought was so great. I’ve been using changedetection.com for a few weeks now and I’m pleased with what it does. Getting started is simple - start by copying the URL of the site you want to track, go to the monitor page at changedetection.com, paste the URL, add your e-mail address and click next. Note that you’ll be sent to the next page that will let you sign up for junk e-mail — just hit the skip button here and you are done. Now the next time that site you wanted to track changes you’ll get an e-mail notifying you of the change. You can also turn monitoring off for that site from a link in the e-mail you get notifying you of a recent change. Webmasters can also add the change detection feature to their web pages for visitors to track their site for changes. Hey - you could test it by trying it out this site.

Imagine my surprise this morning when I pull up a browser window to do a search with my favorite search engine and I find something new - an added tab on the Google home page labeled News. Google has built very nice news page that not only lists the latest news items but shows how old they are and lets you search “4,000 continuously updated news sources”. Something else I find nice is that you can leave the Google News page open and it will refresh/reload every 15 minutes to show you what’s changed.

According to Google…

“The headlines that appear on Google news are selected entirely by computer algorithms, based on how and where the stories appear elsewhere on the web. There are no human editors at Google selecting or grouping the headlines and no individual decides which stories get top placement.”

Find out all about the Google News page here.

Now this is my kind of switch. If I had to use a Mac this is the way I’d want to do it. Like the Apple switch campaign Edd Dumbill bought a Mac. Unlike the Apple switch campaign he installed Debian GNU/Linux.

Today’s LangaList newsletter brings to my attention an XP security flaw that I think is important enough to repeat here. First of all you need to know that if you’ve already applied Windows XP Service Pack 1 you’re system is not at risk for this particular vulnerability and it would be a good idea for you to apply XP Service Pack 1 to your system. In the mean time Fred Langa points out a great, free utility to secure your system easily from this particular threat. That utility is made available by Steve Gibson and his site has all the gory details. Here’s just part of what Steve Gibson has to say about the XP security flaw;

“Ever since its release, Windows XP has contained a critical flaw that could be trivially exploited at any time by any malicious hacker. By causing any Windows XP system to process a specially-formed URL (web-style link), the XP system would obediently delete all or most of the files within any specified directory. (That’s not good.)”

“This flaw is considered critical because these malicious URLs could be delivered to any XP user through any means: via an eMail solicitation, a chat room, a newsgroup posting, a malicious web page, or even processed automatically without the user clicking anything by merely visiting a malicious web page. (That’s bad.)”

“Curiously, Microsoft was informed of this easily-demonstrated, quite significant, and trivial-to-fix, Windows XP defect back in June of 2002, but chose not to proactively address the significant vulnerability created for their users until the September 9th, 2002, release of Windows XP’s first service pack.”

OK - this one is for technogeeks. It’s a combination of wireless and voice technology that make the voice OS and “Isaac” sound pretty cool. I can’t wait till someone creates it and it’s cheap.

If you spend any time on the web - and you must if you are reading this - you owe it to yourself to use a decent browser. Mozilla is shaping up to be a decent browser and I’m impressed with the latest release, Mozilla 1.1. Mozilla beats any version of Netscape all to pieces is giving Internet Explorer a serious run for it’s money. It is well worth the download. Link via WorldTimZone

OpenOffice.org, hits version 1.0.1. OpenOffice.org is the free Microsoft Office replacement and a nice one at that. If you aren’t familiar with this free office suite you may want to check out my previous article, How Does Free Sound?.

What would you pay for a word processor, a spreadsheet program, an HTML editor, a presentation program, and a drawing program? I’m talking about a complete office suite that rivals the power of Microsoft Office. You got it–how does free sound?

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The Klez.E worm has been around for a while but you may not have known about it. I’m still receiving this worm in my e-mail and I’ve had folks ask me about it, so I thought it might be fitting to point you to a few resources.

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