To make creating weblog entries simple, fast and easy, I use a tool called BlogJet. Dmitri (the author) has just released v1.5 of the program:

BlogJet 1.5 Final Release

Great news – BlogJet 1.5 is available now. It’s a huge improvement over previous versions – it has slightly better user interface, more features, support for more blog services and CMS and it’s more stable.

BlogJet 1.5 is the free update for registered users.

Download it now!

Full release notes are here.

My gnome friend Brandon Watts jumped on the proverbial horse and rode straight out the barn on his first PodCast earlier today. And all in all, he did a fine job.

If you have not heard about Brandon before, here's a little info:

• He wrote his own programming language for beginners, called Leopard, a couple years ago.
• He's 18 years old now.
• He's wicked smart.
• He writes for Lockergnome and has had his writing featured in a variety of print and online media.
• He has a pretty darn good radio voice.
• He has a blog.

Check out his podacst (for the uninitiated, podcasting's this new thing that all the kids are doing with MP3 files and easy-to-use-and-distribute audio shows). Let him know what you think.

Chris Pirillo is a well-known geek and all around goofy (and smart and good) guy. He founded Lockergnome and did a show for TechTV back before that network went straight to crap.

He’s starting his new weekly audio broadcast today, two-and-a-half hours of live talk from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). His show’s new website is online and the live broadcast starts at 11:30am Pacific Time, but the stream is already running so jump in now. Replays available if you miss(ed) the live show, and RSS feeds are on the site for subscribing – I did.

http://www.thechrispirilloshow.com/

I am working form home today, and so I will be listening to it in the background whilst editing papers and organizing stuff. Good to see you back on the air, friend!

The other day I was discussing the differences between geeks and nerds with someone. I said that I thought I was probably more of a geek than a nerd, and had to try to explain why there’s a difference and what those differences are.

I started to wonder if I was wrong, that maybe they’re the same, but today I think I can safely say that’s simply not true.

Hypothesis: I am a fairly prolific geek. I am not much of a nerd.

I just took this online test because Mark Orchant (theofficeweblog) was surprised at his results. He’s obviously a smart person, and came out with a pretty darn nerdy score and I was wondering what mine would be.

This test is very nerd specific – meaning it addresses things like Star Trek, graphing calculators, the periodic table, pictures of really old guys nerds would know about, and stuff like that. On a scale of 1–100, I scored 31. Click the graphic to find your score…

So there you have it – Greg is not nerdy.

What about the Geek Factor? Exactly one year ago today (hmmmm that’s kinda weird, isn’t it?), I took another online test – the “Digital IQ” test at MSNBC. I scored way off the top of the scale on that one. I also took it again this morning to refresh my memory of the questions and to see if my score had changed – it was exactly the same. In this one they use the word “nerd” in their description of “digital ace,” but I think it’s misplaced based on the questions they ask. Geek would be a better term, IMO. It’s still available online – click the image below to find out your score there.

“Meet Your Computer’s New Bodyguards” is one of the taglines you’ll see when installing the new Microsoft AntiSpyware beta software. Microsoft today launched its public beta of the software, which is available to download from the company’s web site.

A lot has been said recently about Microsoft’s acquisition of Giant, a company that makes anti-spyware software used to protect computers from prying eyes and privacy leaches.

After installing it and running it, it’s interesting that its flagging things that AdAware and SpyBot S&D don’t alert on. That’s good. In my case, it didn’t hit on anything I wanted to change or remove (I have a few tools on my computer that it sees as potentially problematic, if someone else had put them there, for example.

The UI is nice and clean, and I like the automatic updates (already working). It’s pretty darn IO intensive, so don’t plan to do any disk-related work while it’s performing a check. By default it schedules a scan to happen at 2am each day (you can change this) and it sets up a real-time protection service that works a lot like an anti-virus program does, watching for known spyware and prompting the user for certain types of system changes as they happen.

I really have only one complaint. If I am running a scan and click on any menu item or button in the user interface to to go to another page, my current scan aborts without warning. This is really very frustrating and will likely cause many people to skip completing a full scan because they’d just killed a scan after 10 minutes and would have to start over again.

Overall, great start and I already like the interface and approach better than the other options out there today. Look out, here comes Microsoft – again. This is one area they’ll have to get right, for sure.

(found via NeoWin)