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Half of the world's human population is infected with Toxoplasma, parasites in the body—and the brain. Remember that.
[...]
Toxoplasma gondii is a common parasite found in the guts of cats; it sheds eggs that are picked up by rats and other animals that are eaten by cats. Toxoplasma forms cysts in the bodies of the intermediate rat hosts, including in the brain. [...]
Oxford scientists discovered that the minds of the infected rats have been subtly altered. [...]
In fact, some of the infected rats actually seek out the cat urine-marked areas again and again. [...]
Dr. E. Fuller Torrey (Associate Director for Laboratory Research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute) noticed links between Toxoplasma and schizophrenia in human beings, approximately three billion of whom are infected with T. gondii:
Toxoplasma infection is associated with damage to astrocytes, glial cells which surround and support neurons. Schizophrenia is also associated with damage to astrocytes.
Pregnant women with high levels of antibodies to Toxoplasma are more likely to give birth to children who will develop schizophrenia.
Human cells raised in petri dishes, and infected with Toxoplasma, will respond to drugs like haloperidol; the growth of the parasite stops. Haloperidol is an antipsychotic, used to treat schizophrenia.
[...]
Still not sure that parasites can manipulate the behavior of host organisms? Consider these other cases:
The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum forces its ant host to attach to the tips of grass blades, the easier to be eaten. The fluke needs to get into the gut of a grazing animal to complete its life cycle.
The fluke Euhaplorchis californiensis causes fish to shimmy and jump so wading birds will grab them and eat them, for the same reason.
Hairworms, which live inside grasshoppers, sabotage the grasshopper's central nervous system, forcing them to jump into pools of water, drowning themselves. Hairworms then swim away from their hapless hosts to continue their life cycle.
PlayWave.exe by Jim Chevalier - jimbug.org
Version 2.0 - Now plays long wave files.
Description: Plays a wave file directly.
Syntax: PlayWave.exe sound.wav
Platform: Windows 95?, 98 and up.
TimedSS.exe - by Jim Chevalier - jimbug.org
Description: Runs a program or a screensaver for a set number of seconds.
Optional - low or idle priority.
Run from a batch file or a shortcut.
Syntax: TimedSS.exe seconds [low] a_screensaver.scr
Example: TimedSS.exe 60 low "C:\WINDOWS\system32\ssstars.scr /s"
Note: Use quotation marks around the program's path.
Platform: Windows 98 and up.
Me too - but I don't miss snapping windowsI knew you'd love it, Allen, since you're a non-maximized windows loverExactly -- I'm always manually placing everything.-jgpaiva (February 13, 2006, 07:37 AM)-allen (February 13, 2006, 08:10 AM)
The freebies are ok but for serious searching you need a more sophisiticated program.Oh? I'm very happy with Locate and GDS (see above) and can find everything I search for. GDS optionally allows you to search your Google Mails too, which is very helpful.-jdd (February 12, 2006, 03:54 PM)
According to a Yahoo News story, half of the world's human population is infected with Toxoplasma, a parasite shown to alter the brain function of rats, inducing them into behavior that benefits the parasite but is suicidal for the rat. So what affect does it have on humans? Article comes complete with Heinlein 'Puppet Masters' reference.
For some pretyy artistic screensavers, check out theseThanks, those are looking pretty cool!
http://www.reallyslick.com/-NigelH (February 11, 2006, 10:59 AM)
well it's certainly FAR from a "low-resource" screensaver, but far and away my all time favorite (and current) screensaver is electric sheep. Simply beautiful, and never gets boring or repetitive. And I feel that my computer is keeping herself entertained while I'm away.Wow, that's not only a great-looking screensaver, I also like the idea behind it!-LuckMan212 (February 11, 2006, 12:35 AM)
But, if simplicity and minimalism is what you're after, might I suggest PowerDimmer from WhitSoft development. It's Donationware, and quite system-friendly. It uses alphachannel to dim the screen so you can still see what's happening "underneath" even when its dimmed. Quite pleasing.Looks perfect, will install it right now! Thanks!
Oh, and it's only 3kb !
Just use an old but good stereo amp. The quality of these old amps far surpasses the new hifi crap imho.I recently was able to listen to a new BOSE 2.1 system that was supposed to be some "virtual 4.1" or something... really small and really, really great sound!
I have an old Technics amp (100w/channel) hooked up to my pc which works great. I used to have 2 homemade rack mounted mono amps of 500W connect to it but that was kinda overkill. I've tried many surround systems but I still like old quadrophony or even stereo better.-Gothi[c] (February 10, 2006, 02:24 PM)
Oh, sorry, I confused Diskeeper with PerfectDisk, where that is possible. I used to use Diskeeper too, but find PerfectDisk to be much better.Just schedule Diskeeper to defrag your HD daily for a limited period when you are sleeping or not at the PC. Would that work for you?-brotherS (February 09, 2006, 12:55 PM)
Ideally that would be the case, but the way Diskeeper was designed is to get the defrag job done - it does not have an option to defrag for a limited period.-patteo (February 09, 2006, 10:39 PM)
I've got one of these drives, it's a pretty cool idea, but I haven't put any additional software on it yet. A couple pieces of software you can put onto the drive is a self-contained Firefox (versionHmm, I got all that (excluding the start-like-menu) with my regular USB stick too... I hope we see some real U3 improvements soon~1.01.5.0.1) andFirebirdThunderbird.
When you insert the drive into the computer, it'll add 2 drive letters (1 for the U3 stuff, 1 for the files), it also adds an icon to the system tray. Clicking the system tray icon opens a start-like-menu that has the various programs that you have. It could be very useful, but so far I've only used the menu to open the drive in explorer.-Hirudin (February 08, 2006, 03:08 PM)
How many times have you installed something and deeply regretted it, you deleted the important spreadsheet and only realised your mistake a few days later when your boss asked you for it and of course you just cleared your recycled bin and the os has also overwritten the area where it was last stored.I happen to run into that kind of problems only very, very rarely, so I personally don't see the need to use something - even if only a bit, it *will* decrease the performance of your PC. A program that keeps track of all my opened IE windows, logging the URLs might come in more handy for me...
How you wished you could "Goback".
Well, I've been doing that for years with Goback which maintains a large history file of all activity on your PC and once the file is full, it drops off the oldest history and depending on how large this file is (goback.bin) your history can run into many days, ie you can goback several days.
I was kind of surprised that there's only one other mention of Goback in this forum at
https://www.donation...index.php?topic=84.0
Some mentioned was made in that post about strain to the system.
But frankly, even when I was using it years ago, the strain if any wasn't visible and certainly not in today's speedy system.
But I can say that it certainly has save my "life" countless times, whether due to a virus, a malware when I installed something a new download or messed up some settings etc or even a dreaded BSOD.-patteo (February 09, 2006, 12:43 PM)
[...]Just schedule Diskeeper to defrag your HD daily for a limited period when you are sleeping or not at the PC. Would that work for you?
So my strategy to overcome this is to initially fully defragment the disk and then use the "Set it and forget it scheduler" in diskeeper for it to do bits and pieces of defragmenting every now and then.
So this kind of keeps Diskeeper and Goback working together happily.
Unfortunately, periodically when I'm doing a lot more work deleting and doing file maintenance, Diskeeper tend to work harder at too long a stretch creating too much activity at one go - resulting in "Goback Suspended because of massive file activity"
Ideally Diskeeper should have a setting that limits it to 10 minutes, wait say 30 minutes before it restarts.
The problem is, that i don't think you'd like it to close every window, possibilly it should leave some windows open.
And i still don't know how to handle a small thing that was forgotten in this post: how about when you go away, and leave the pc? When you return, it'd have closed all the programs you have. Maybe the concept should be redefined.-jgpaiva (February 09, 2006, 07:13 AM)
