Watch as a modern PC gets Windows 1.0 installed, and upgraded through every major version up to Windows 7. Not sure what's more amazing; that this screencast is possible today in a VMware virtual machine, or that applications installed in Windows 3.1 still worked through every upgrade to Windows 7, representing nearly 20 years of compatibility. (via kottke)

Instant use case: Add echo "Next 24 hours:";google calendar today title to your ~/.bash_profile file to see what you've got scheduled for the day when you launch a new Terminal window. Some more GoogleCL fun inside.

If you just type google at the command line, you launch an interactive terminal that lets you try all the various commands. In the interactive terminal, type command-name help to see its options, like help calendar.

Each command has several parameters that aren't immediately apparent. For example, in calendar, you can omit the long and hairy event URL by using the title parameter. You can list events for a particular day using the data parameter (--date 2010-06-16), and you can get events from a particular calendar and by keyword search term.

For example, to see all my trips to NYC on my TripIt calendar, I'd use the command:

$ google calendar list --cal TripIt --query NYC

Remember the beauty of the command line: you can easily chain commands together with the pipe, so you can sed, awk, and grep output to your heart's content, and then write it to a file if needed, using >. Before I discovered the title parameter on the calendar command, I was planning to use sed to filter out the calendar URLs from the output. (Thanks to lightening-fast sed and awk experts on Twitter, I was prepared to do just that.)

What I'd love to do is create a Todo.txt CLI add-on that inserts an event on your Google Calendar when you add a task with a due date. Here's the discussion about that going on now on the Todo.txt CLI mailing list. It's pretty much a no-brainer.

While I've mostly only played with calendar, the Docs access is pretty useful, too. With it, you could easily schedule cron'ed backups of your Google Docs, or push data into a new doc on a regular basis. Same deal with Picasa and YouTube. I like the idea of cron'ing a job that backs up my Google contacts to a CSV file on my local computer weekly, too. I don't see myself ever blogging from the command line, but it's neat that you can.

How are you using GoogleCL? Post your favorite command combos in the comments.

Since then, Todo.txt CLI has grown into a legitimate open source project with dozens of contributors, hundreds of people on the mailing list, regression tests, custom add-ons, and a Python fork. This script has literally run my life since 2006, but using it hasn't been its greatest value--the collaborative development experience has.

Because the project attracted Unix geeks with skills way beyond mine, through mailing list discussions, I learned much more about Unix software design than I could have ever expected. Last year, when I left Lifehacker and had more time to pay attention to the project, thanks to a suggestion on the mailing list, I moved it over to GitHub and absolutely fell in love. (All of my active software projects live on GitHub now, including my full-time job project, ThinkTank.) GitHub's commit history doesn't include all the early contributors, but I'm still getting pull requests for the project, as recently as this week. Check out a screenshot of the fork network graph:

At this point the todo.sh code is stable; I just released version 2.6 with some fixes and tweaks. I use it plus some key add-ons (like projectview) every single day. Four years after I hacked together todo.sh's first pathetic iteration, my done.txt file is a delightfully grep-able 1,000+ line archive of completed tasks. I'm still using GeekTool to pin my high-priority tasks to my desktop in a heads-up display; and I store my todo.txt and done.txt files in Dropbox so I can access it from all of my computers and my phone.

Call for Android Developers

Todo.sh's biggest problem right now is mobile access. While a contributor did put together an awesome web-based mobile interface to todo.sh, I'm gearing up to create an Android application that displays and updates your todo.txt file using Dropbox's APIs. Let me know in the comments or on the mailing list if you're interested in helping out with that.

If you haven't seen todo.txt in action, here's a quick screencast.

Happy birthday, todo.sh and the community that surrounds it. Thanks for everything.

So, armed with a thumbdrive loaded with Firefox and AdAware installation files, I headed over there to take a look. Here's what I found:

• The Norton AV trial subscription that came with Windows XP had expired and stopped protecting the machine, which was connected directly to my friend's broadband ISP with Windows Firewall turned off.
• Windows XP hadn't been updated since before SP2 had come out, because a friend of my friend told him not to trust any automatic updates. Because they might be spyware.
• Rogue software called XP AntiSpyware had taken over the machine.

AntiSpyware XP was the problem that prompted my friend to call, and it was the most hostile, insidious, and difficult-to-kill malware I've ever seen. It looked completely authentic and felt impossible to stop. Masquerading as a spyware killer itself, in the system tray, its icon was an almost perfect replica of the Windows Security Center icon. When you tried to visit a web site in Internet Explorer or do much of anything, XP AntiSpyware launched, and its window looked just like Windows Security Center. Once launched, it would start scanning your PC automatically, and tell you, in alarming red pop-ups, that dozens of files were infected and that you should delete them. There was no quit, there was no uninstallation available in Add/Remove Programs, and all the program's options in its Settings area were grayed out/disabled. If you tried to run the real Windows Security Center or a program like AdAware, AntiSpyware would show up instead and start scanning again. If you tried to launch the Windows Task Manager (with Ctrl+Alt+Del), a message came up saying your computer administrator had disabled it--even though I was logged on as an administrator. There was no way to tell what startup entry the program was in msconfig, and when I restarted Windows in Safe Mode (F8 during boot) and tried to launch AdAware, this software started instead.

What a mess.

To fix it, I installed Chrome (which came bundled with AdAware). While AdAware itself wouldn't launch, Chrome thankfully would, and after some Googling, I found this lifesaving article, which describes what "XP AntiSpyware" really is:

During installation, XP AntiSpyware 2010 (XP Antivirus Pro 2010) will configure itself to run automatically every time when you run any program that have “exe” extension (99% of Windows applications). The rogue also uses this method of running to block the ability to run any programs, including antivirus and antispyware applications.

When XP AntiSpyware 2010 (XP Antivirus Pro 2010) is started, it will perform a system scan and detect a large amount of infections. All of these infections are fake, so you can safely ignore them. What is more, while the rogue is running, it will display various fake security warning and notifications from Windows task bar that have “Spyware infection has been found” or “Tracking software found” header. However, all of these alerts are fake and like false scan results should be ignored.

Last but not least, XP AntiSpyware 2010 (XP Antivirus Pro 2010) will hijack Internet Explorer and Firefox and display fake warnings when you opening a web site.

The solution was two-fold: first, you had to do a manual registry edit that stopped the program from starting in place of AdAware or any other spyware scanner. The lifesaving article had the registry fix-it entries, which I will reprint here for posterity.

Here's what I did: I backed up the Windows registry, copied this text into Notepad, saved the file as fixme.reg, double-clicked it to apply the changes, and restarted Windows. Only then did I get the first sign of progress: once the registry was fixed, Internet Explorer was actually able to load web pages. Sweet.

Second, you had install a real spyware killer to kill XP AntiSpyware. (Imagine me trying to explain this to my computer illiterate friend. By now his eyes were glazed over.) Microsoft Security Essentials didn't detect it. At the article's suggestion, I installed Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and scanned away, cleaning off everything it found, including AntiSpyware.

From there the machine was usable, but still not ready for primetime. I ran Windows Update and got the machine Service Pack 3 and all the updates beyond that. (That alone was an hour and a half of progress bars and restarts. Did I mention this was a slow, year-and-a-half old HP PC from Costco?) I turned on Windows Firewall, and set up Microsoft Security Essentials. I uninstalled Norton AV to get rid of its nagging pop-ups, and because my friend said that Windows was slow to start up, I ran msconfig and unchecked the stuff he didn't need to start up automatically (Java, Quicktime, and some other annoying "helper" apps). When I was done, the machine was speedier, usable, and not littered with both legit and malicious system tray pop-ups about infected files and software updates.

If I had more time, I would have formatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows from scratch, and then installed a hardware router with a firewall on it between the computer and his cable modem. At any rate, I advised my friend to change all of his passwords before he did anything else on the machine.

Then, I tried to explain to him that some notifications and updates (like Windows Updates) are good and needed and he should get them, and others are malware trying to get his money (like Antispyware XP). But how does someone like him know the difference?

If you're dealing with a malware situation and simply installing a spyware cleaner like AdAware ain't working, you may have to Google the specific problem you're having, like I did. Otherwise, check out my published-in-2006-but-still-holds-up article on cleaning your computer illiterate relatives' and friends' PCs, How to fix Mom and Dad's computer.

UPDATE: I should point out that the screenshot included in this post is NOT from the machine I cleaned, and it looks slightly different. My guy's PC must have had a different version of AntiSpyware, which seems to exist in many incarnations. However, if you click on the screenshot above you'll see a pretty funny typo--"Protect your Widows PC."

Projectview lists your todo.txt by project (which you notate with the +ProjectName format in each task). Here's what a regular listing of some of my current todo's looks like, and then what projectview outputs.

A standard todo.sh ls command (which I've aliased to t ls) outputs something like this:

There you can see I've got tasks prioritized and color-coded, with contexts listed with an @ sign (like @email and @github) and projects listed with a + sign (like +Smarterware and +ThinkTank). This is a fine view if you just want to tackle items based on priority alone, but not as well when you have a long list and want to make sure you're moving along individual projects. Here's where projectview comes in.

With it installed, running a todo.sh projectview command (to save keystrokes, I've aliased it to t pv), I get this:

There you can see each project gets its own sub-heading, and then lists tasks associated with it underneath. If a task applies to more than one project projects--like #4 in my screenshots--it gets listed in each. Tasks not associated with a project get listed last.

Of course, if you just want to look at a single project's task list, you can always do a t ls +ProjectName command, no add-on required.

Once you've got the Todo.txt CLI installed (version 1.5 just released last night!), download projectview into your ~/.todo/actions/ directory and make it executable to start using it. Thanks a million to Paul Mansfield for this useful add-on; here's a directory of more Todo.txt CLI add-ons for your command line pleasure.

For quick video primer on what life is like with todo.txt at the command line, check out a screencast.

Turns out that Firefox is blocking extensions with serious bugs from major companies beyond Microsoft, including Apple, Yahoo, and AVG. Here's the full list of blocked extensions and the bugs that are causing the blockage. (Ironically, the AVG extension is called "SafeSearch.") In a blog post, Mozilla security chief Mike Shaver says the .NET Framework Assistant has been unblocked, but as of writing it still shows up on the published list. Kudos to Firefox for taking a proactive stance and protecting its users against buggy extensions that could degrade the browsing experience. Did you have a buggy extension installed?