I just came accross (Via Twitter) this new service provided by Google: Google cloud print. I will test soon for sure.

Connect a printer to Google Cloud Print via kwout

I stumble upon ReadtheWords.com service this week. And it’s really a cool service to create podcast as summarized below:

Read The Words via kwout

I tested the service submitting a ReadWriteWeb blog post via an URL. The result is quite good. Once created the podcast can be downloaded, embedded in a web page or listened directly from the ReadtheWords.com site. Actually English, Spanish and French are supported.

The popularity dialer is a web service designed to simulate phone call:

With "The Popularity Dialer", you can plan ahead. Via a web interface, you can choose to have your phone called at a particular time (or several times). At the elected time, your phone will be dialed and you will hear a prerecorded message that’s one half of a conversation. Thus, you will be prompted to have a fake conversation and will easily fool those around you.

This is very useful to avoid or delay a meeting for instance. Of course this service will not improve communication. Here is a video demo:

On windows XP, the process SVCHOST.EXE is a mystery for most people. If you check your task manager, you may have several instances of this process running. On my XP home edition I have actually 7 of this processes. Microsoft describes SVCHOST.EXE on this document by the following sentences:

“At startup, Svchost.exe checks the services part of the registry to construct a list of services that it must load. Multiple instances of Svchost.exe can run at the same time. Each Svchost.exe session can contain a grouping of services. Therefore, separate services can run, depending on how and where Svchost.exe is started. This grouping of services permits better control and easier debugging. ”

In the document referenced above Microsoft show how to use the command TASKLIST /SVC in a command box to print information regarding the running SVCHOST.EXE. Fortunately, there are some other way to get information regarding SVCHOST.EXE. Langa Blog shows in this article, that we can use Windows Defender or process Explorer from sysinternals to displays information about SVCHOST.EXE. But the most complete software to display SVCHOST information is SVCHOST Informations. This freeware may be downloaded here. The author is called Pierre Torris. Actually only a French version is available. This application display each svchost process running then with a tree all the services attached to the process. You also have all the informations regarding the services: Library, account, start mode, etc. A screenshot is shown below: