The Webmaster will provide links to files or sites of potential interest to SPAUG members, which are suggested by other members. Just connect to the web and click on the hyperlinks. If that does not work, copy the links into your browser URL address field and press enter.
If any of you members have suggestions, they would be more than welcome - . Share your favorite sites with other SPAUG members.
Briefly, The U.S. Chocolate Industry, through its Chocolate Manufacturers of America (CMA), and in collaboration with the Grocery Manufacturers Association, have petitioned the Food and Drug Association (FDA) to change the current requirements for chocolate. Their plan is to change the basic formula of chocolate in order to use vegetable fat substitutes in place of cocoa butter, and to use milk substitutes in the place of nutritionally superior milk. The FDA absolutely must hear from those consumers who love the current gold standard of chocolate so that the FDA can have a more balanced viewpoint to counter the proposed changes. Here's where to go for more information and how to help:
Don't Mess with Our Chocolate web site forum - dontmesswithourchocolate.guittard.com
How to let the FDA know your views - dontmesswithourchocolate.guittard.com/howtohelp.asp
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
Click the link or links that interest you:
The Google Blog offers frequent updates and insights about our technology and products, and the company at large.
Share Google Friends with a friend through Google Groups (includes subscribe/unsubscribe information).
Google Friends archive
Google Friends archive prior to May 2005
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
Microsoft's SnipIT can be used to e-mail selected text in Internet Explorer using your e-mail client of choice. It currently supports Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and default installed MailTo client in Internet Explorer as e-mail client options. Yahoo Mail Beta is not currently supported. Microsoft's SnipIT
For more about SnipIT
For info about other MS add-ons
Submitted by John Buck
Do you know the #1 song the day you were born? Or some other significant date? Do you want to know? If so, click on website www.joshhosler.biz/NumberOneInHistory/SelectMonth.htm (your Webmaster's birth date song was "White Christmas" by Bing Crosby).
Submitted by John Buck
See the latest TRACNotes Newsletter for 04/20/07 TRACNotes Vol. 5 #16 for three free services that they like to save you time and money. There's also an article, Protect Your Data When Turning In An Old Cell Phone that can save you from being a victim of identity theft. There's more at their website www.trac.org.
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
You don't have to spend hundreds of dollars to get Adobe Acrobat to create PDF files, Cute PDF Writer is great; I use it to generate the Newsletter from Microsoft's FrontPage. And, while you're in a PDF mood, check out -- www.snapfiles.com/get/pdfxchangeviewer.html, and more at -- www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/productivity/fwpdftools.html
Submitted by John Buck
This may be a site of interest to SPAUG members.
"Welcome to Spyware Warrior! Here you'll find a wealth of resources to help you fight spyware and adware."
www.spywarewarrior.com
Submitted by John Buck
Need to transfer a large file, or an "excluded" type file? If you can't use email, YouSendIt simplifies the transfer of large files, as well as files with executable attachments. The link has details of how to use it, and if you're interested, here's a link to YouSendIt.com
Submitted by Stan Hutchings, from an article by John Joyce, Ph.D.
April First simply would not have been complete without a trip down memory lane to see some best technology "news" pranks of the last decade. [N.B.—To apply for a free subscription to eWEEK, please go to
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-6010-49-642-842036-671928-0-0-0-1
Submitted by Stan Hutchings (from a newsletter from eWEEK.com)
You might want to use Auslogics Disk Defrag instead of Windows Defrag. File Size: 1511 KB; Windows Version: Windows XP/Vista/2000/2003. There's also a good explanation of what fragmentation is, and why you should defrag. How often depends on how many files you delete and add, and how often. Monthly is probably sufficient for most of us, whatever defrag application we use.
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
Last month K. Eric Drexler published an updated version of Engines of Creation, the seminal introduction to nanotechnology first published in 1986. The text is available online from either
the online publisher Wowio
or through Ray Kurzweil's site
Another interesting talk on the concept of nanotechnology was Richard Feynman's “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, given on 29 December 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). This seems to be the inspiration for nanotechnology.
Submitted by Stan Hutchings
An extremely interesting (awesome and beautiful) video animation was made of "The Inner Life Of A Cell" , which gives an intuitive
(non-intellectual) experience of life inside the cell. It's to music, is artistic, and has almost a mystic quality. It reminds me of the old movie "incredible journey", where the crew of a submarine gets shrunk and injected into a person's blood stream, except here you get injected into an even smaller domain, to the inside of a cell.
I view these and am awestruck, seeing how this video presents the mechanisms nature has invented to make life are just physical things
interacting almost like tinker toys. Sure they're smaller and they are bound together with different rules, but one could almost imagine making a cell out of tinker toys!
So if you are curious about the science of what's represented, then the full version is for you. It shows many of the relevant cellular mechanisms of how white blood cells slowly roll down blood vessels, and wind up at places needed for healing. It shows skeletons of actin giving the cell shape, motor proteins dragging packages along them between the nucleus, cell wall, and mitochondria, DNA transcription of protein, cell wall proteins, and more. Also on youtube are very interesting micro-movies of just cell motion and shape changed by actin tubules inside cells. Check out:
1. Crawling Amoeba
2. cell migration (of the mold)
3. Chemotaxis (attraction of cells to chemicals released at the end of a needle) (zoomed out) (zoomed in)
Submitted by Stan Hutchings (from a posting on the Nanotechnology Study Group NSG)