Internet/Web tips
  • Live365.com - it will insist on using Real Player as long as it installed. I nuked Real Player, so now I can use Winamp to play stations.
  • When Netscape 4.x fails to load, pull up the task list and kill the "netscape.exe" you see there. Then load Netscape again.
  • I have a special email address that I give to websites when I am not sure about their privacy policies. It's real address, but I never read it, so all the spam just sits there. What's even better, I have a filter set up - it automatically moves *all* email sent to that account into the Trash. This way the mailbox never overflows, mail doesn't bounce and the accoutn appears to be valid to the websites!
  • Tricking Spamcop.net into accepting an old spam message report - just change the date in the headers!
  • Remarq.com - in addition to newsgroups they now offer mailing list archives
  • If you have several versions of Netscape installed, you can only have one of them open at any time.
  • Skipping commercials in Media Player - even though you cannot press PgDn like in RealPlayer, you can drag the 'progress bar' to the end of the clip.

  • POP3 server is located at port 110, SMTP - at port 23

  • ICQ - best way to stop spam is to check option ICQ/Security&Privacy/ Ignore List/Do not accept Multi-recipient messages from users not on my contact list.

  • When you get a page of FTP Search results, it's quite likely that most servers on the list are dead. You can check all the links by hand till you find the working one or try a more elegant solution: save result page in HTM file and run it thru Linkbot. To speeds things up, you can load HTM file into editor and delete all lines that don't contain "ftp://" - this way Linkbot won't try to check irrelevant links.

    Once you run Linkbot, it will tell you what servers don't respond, which don't accept anonymous users, which don't have the right file and which work OK!

    In case none of the servers is ok, the ones which say "too many users" are probably your best chance - at this point you can pas URL to a "try downloading till you succeed" program, like BulletProof FTP.

  • Netsape 4 - to override website's color (Opera-style), go to Edit/Preferences/Colors and check box 'Always use my colors'.

  • To improve the quality of your Internet connection, make sure you use good DNS servers. Some providers have slow nameservers, occasionally, nameserver is down for months and they don't bother to fix it! So, make sure you know what your DNSs are (don't rely on "assigned automatically" setting) and that they respond fast.

  • When online form stands in a way of download, it won't hurt to try hitting submit without filling anything - some scripts let you right thru!

  • WHOIS is a great way to find contact info for your ISP, or any other host for that matter. Example: provider is down, can't get to their webpage... but WHOIS records are intact.

  • Teleport Pro - to prevent it from jumping to external sites, goto Project/Starting page properties and force the setting that stays within starting domain.

  • Hotmail - it is now possible to find message containing specified keyword.

  • RealAudio 3.0 - some clips wil refuse to play if your bandwidth setting in View/Preferences is lower than expected. Increase it - you've got nothing to lose.

  • Altavista:
    łNEW - If the page is no longer valid (error 404 or the like), it will be removed from the index. You should feel free to use this feature to remove old pages that Scooter has not yet revisited. Simply submitting the URL of an invalid page will cause it to be removed."

  • DejaNews
    1. When search server (like xp8) is bogged down, try repeating search - results will then point to different server (say, xp5) which could work better.

    2. To force search in subject only, put ~s in front of keyword.

  • Altavista can be used to search for filenames referenced within page source. Though, the search may be incomplete - I've heard that Alta does not read in complete page when building its index.

  • When adding links to page, keep in mind that personal pages and especially once from .EDU domain may disappear soon - student graduates and all the stuff is gone. Not much chance for forwarding address either - sysadmin may just kill all accounts at the end of semester and that's that.

  • Frame hacking can result in href opening new window.

  • When old bookmark isn't working, see it uses numeric IP - it could have changed, while mnemonic name remained the same.

  • Altavista '+' search is seriously deficient, especially with rare keyword. Could be related to the fact that Alta only scans top part of the page.

  • Excite 'more like this' returnd slightly different results already on the next day

  • Altavista handles keyword with '-' in them - Excite doesn't.

  • To access frame-ridden page normally, look at the source code and see, which of the framesets refers to the main page. Then use that as URL.

  • Looking by desc at shareware.com - if no hits, try 'All categories', sometimes it's hard to guess what category file would be in.

  • When search.shareware.com gives only one download site, you could paste filename to FTP Search and get more hits