For bloggers and podcasters, a feed-to-email subscription service means you can expand your “push-delivery audience” to readers and listeners who aren’t familiar with RSS feeds.

For readers and listeners, an email subscription service such as FeedBurner Email means that you can sign up to receive emails every day that let you know about new blog posts or podcast episodes. (Of course, if there’s nothing new for a given day, you won’t get an email.) For many people, email subscription services remove the need to remember to visit a blog or podcast site for updates.

My take on FeedBurner Email? In short: it’s awesome.

I had tried three email subscription services before FeedBurner Email. All of them had something that I didn’t like.

First I had tried FeedBlitz. I didn’t like it because it required subscribers to create a FeedBlitz account (and think up of a username and password) before they started receiving update notifications. [I have been corrected! See comments below]

Next I tried a WordPress plugin called, appropriately, “WordPress Email Notification Plugin.” I eventually stopped using it because whenever I set a post to auto-publish at a future date, the plugin would go ahead and send out notification emails. When people would click through to read the post before the date when it was supposed to publish, they would get a “post not found” error.

After the WordPress plugin, I tried Squeet. Unlike FeedBlitz, account creation for email subscribers was not required. However, the Squeet emails weren’t exactly nice-looking, and the fine-print on the Squeet site noted that Squeet reserves the right to insert ads into notification emails in the future.

But now, I’m using FeedBurner Email. And it is the first email subscription service that I am really excited about. Setup on the part of the publisher is a snap, and subscription on the part of the reader is very easy. The email address entry form fit perfectly into my WordPress theme. The notification emails look great and include a link to the RSS feed, in case any email subscribers decide they want to use a feedreader instead.

If you are a publisher who uses FeedBurner, I would highly recommend that you check this out.

You can see FeedBurner Email in action (and can use it to subscribe to this blog) on the sidebar on the blog homepage.

At first I put the FeedFlares at the bottom of my post and got all excited. “Wow, that’s awesome.” Then I wanted to tinker with it. I didn’t like those bullet points between the links and wanted to replace them with pipes, ala WordPress style.

However, the FeedFlare code that I’m supposed to put in my blog template is JavaScript, so I can’t customize the HTML directly. Hmm… that means “some CSS modification required.” Well, that’s okey-dokey with me, but this looks like CSS3 modification required, which I am quite certain will not work with Internet Explorer. Though Mozilla Firefox is superior in my opinion, Internet Explorer is what most people use. In addition, the FeedFlares are wrapped around a <p> tag, which will not be ideal for some cases in which I want to use the FeedFlares.

I finally got fed up with FeedFlare and made my own links. Things like “email this post” or “add to del.icio.us” are easy to do. Check my links out at the bottom of this post (assuming you’re reading this post directly at the site). And I recommend you also avoid FeedFlare unless you’re happy with how it looks, you’re willing to use some CSS3, or if HTML to you stands for “Hard To Me, it Looks.”

Probably few of you know that Windows 95 came with an entertaining 3D hovercar “capture-the-flag” game. It was called, appropriately, “Hover!” In the game you drive your hovercraft around (named, not surprisingly, the “Hover 950″) and try to capture the AI’s flags while guarding your own flags from the AI.

Hover was not installed with Windows 95 by default, but rather was buried on the Windows 95 CD-ROM. Much like Microsoft’s Backup program is buried in the Windows XP Home Edition CD-ROM.

Thankfully, at the time when our family had our Windows 95 computer, I had enough computer knowledge to take the program off of the CD-ROM and save it. I don’t even remember how, when, or why; so long ago it was (5+ years ago). I’m just glad I did, considering our Windows 95 CD has long since been lost.

Hover has been passed down our lineage of computers and I still have a playable copy today (Figure). It appears I’m really lucky to have a copy; I did a Google search and it looks like there are a lot of people that want one. (No, I’m not going to give a copy to anyone that wants one. The game was included with Windows 95, so I don’t think that it would be legal for me to distribute a game that was included with a commercial operating system. If you own a Windows 95 CD, do a search for “hover.exe” to find it. If you don’t, you can buy a CD on eBay for under $10; make sure it’s not an upgrade CD.)

I find it very amazing that this game works on both Windows 95 and XP, and probably all operating systems in between. So that means I can still play it!

Anyway, enough with the fond memories. Let’s play the game!

When I first start the game, it gives me a nice warning — complete with a Windows XP exclamation icon — that my 16-million-color display just won’t cut it. I need 256 colors (Figure). Yawn. Couldn’t those Microsoft people just have used the >= operator instead of == when they were programming?

The splash screen, shown at the top of the post, looks pretty cool, although the image quality isn’t the best (Figure).

After the splash screen is finished splashing — that is, after it goes away — the Quick Help dialog appears (Figure). After that, I’m ready to start (Figure).

Naturally, I start out at level 1, with mountains rising above a maze that looks as if it were set in the Medieval period (Figure). Although the mountains look quite pretty, to tell you the truth I didn’t even notice the mountains until I started taking screenshots for this post.

Level 1 is complete with stairs (Figure) and platforms (Figure). There are special squares that you can run over (Figure), some of them good and some of them bad. There are also floating bubbles (don’t know what else to call them) (Figure), that when run into, can do one of several different things: temporarily speed up or slow down your hovercraft, temporarily remove any effects that special squares have on you, or give you a special tool: a wall (a temporarily-existing wall that can be used to block enemies), a spring (used for bouncing, of course), or a cloak (makes your hovercraft temporarily invisible).

Soon I spot one of my automatically-positioned red flags (Figure), but an enemy hovercraft (Figure) hones in and swoops it away. Darn.

I moved on to level 2. Though I didn’t take the time to finish level 1. I used Hover’s “Start At” dialog box (Figure) to jump ahead.

Level 2 is set in a busy-city setting (Figure). After that comes level 3, set in an enclosed aquatic-themed environment (Figure).

When you get to level 4, it’s the same medieval-themed maze from level 1 (Figure). And the levels keep cycling through the environments, unless you set the “maze type” setting to “random” instead of “sequential” in the “Customize Game” dialog box (Figure).

I checked the default high scores list (Figure) to see if there were any special names in the list. Nope, no “Bill Gates” entry in sight.

However, I found something else that was very interesting and rather amusing. The “About Hover!” dialog, accessed by clicking “About Hover!” on the Help menu, says that Hover is part of Windows XP! (Figure) Hover obviously utilizes the same “About” dialogs that other Windows utilities did (in 95) and still do (in XP).

Still on the topic of “About Hover,” I also took a screenshot of the “Version” tab in the Properties dialog for the hover.exe file (Figure) .

The Help menu (Figure) gives a slew of options. However, the Help Topics dialog doesn’t have a lot of documentation, though it has a fair amount (Figure). And the “How to Use Help” (read: “Help on Using Help”), which I would assume would help me to use the help system, opens help documentation in the help system! (Figure) Not very helpful. No sir.

Hover is a cool game, with graphics that were certainly exceptional for its time, but I’ve been thinking: Why did Microsoft hide Hover on the Windows 95 disk? And why did Microsoft not include Hover in any future Windows versions?

Hmm… the unsolved mysteries in the Legend of Microsoft Hover.

Menus and toolbars in Firefox 1.5:

And in Firefox 1.0.7:

In addition, after some browsing I realized that the Live Bookmarks icon has moved. Firefox 1.0.7 featured it in the status bar:

… While Firefox 1.5 puts it in the Location Bar (i.e. the address bar):

On a different note, several of my extensions that did work in Firefox 1.0.7 didn’t work with Firefox 1.5, but thankfully none of the incompatible extensions were used by myself very often anyway. One of them that didn’t work was a tab-reorganization extension, obviously due to the fact that tab-reorganization is now native to Firefox in version 1.5.

I’ve also noticed on a site that I made that Firefox now displays it slightly better than version 1.0.7 did. Of course, probably only I would notice this detail, since I made the site. But this is a visible sign to me that the rendering engine has undergone improvement.

If I find anything else worth noting, I’ll let you know. You can download Firefox 1.5 here.

Rating: 8.0 Stars (Excellent)
[How I Rate]

Awards: John’s Choice

Pros:

• Auto-Update – Firefox has a built-in automatic update system that can find updates to both Firefox and installed extensions and themes.
• Customization – If you want more features, extensions provide a great way to add more functionality to Firefox. You can also download themes to change the way Firefox looks. I’ll be discussing Firefox extensions in a later review.
• Documentation – Firefox has lots of documentation, plus a “For Internet Explorer Users” section under the Help menu.
• Download Manager – Firefox has a download manager that can easily manage multiple downloads and can pause, cancel, and restart downloads.
• Frequent Updating – Whereas Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 will have been their “latest browser” for about six years, Firefox has been updated very frequently in the past.
• Interface – Despite all of the features and settings, Mozilla manages to make the Firefox interface very uncluttered and easy to use.
• Platform Support – Firefox works on Windows, Linux, and the Macintosh. Internet Explorer is only available for Windows and Macintosh, and Microsoft’s latest version (which has no version number change) only comes with Windows XP SP2.
• RSS Support – Firefox can save RSS feeds as “live bookmarks.”
• Security – Firefox does not support ActiveX and VBScript, which are two common methods of virus propagation.
• Settings – Firefox has many settings, and a whole gob of them can be found by typing “about:config” in the address bar.
• Speed – When running Firefox on my computer, the alternate browser loaded faster than Internet Explorer. I clicked on the Internet Explorer icon in my Quick Launch toolbar, and then clicked on Firefox’s icon. Firefox loaded first. When I first started using Firefox, the speed improvements weren’t that noticeable. But when I recently had to use Internet Explorer to view a webpage, it was painfully slow.
• Standards Support – Firefox supports the latest W3C standards, and can even display some pages correctly that Internet Explorer can’t (gasp!). Having a browser that supports universal, rather than proprietary, standards makes it a lot easier for webmasters like yours truly.

Cons:

• Bugs – On rare occasions, Firefox will start to hog up processor cycles, slowing the computer to a crawl (though not to an unusable state). Also, occasionally when I open Firefox, the program will run in the background but not start up any window. These bugs probably happen to only a handful of users, since I haven’t seen these bugs reported. However it goes to show that, like almost all programs, Firefox does have bugs.
• Security – Just because Firefox doesn’t support ActiveX and VBScript doesn’t mean it’s secure. Firefox has its own set of security flaws, some as severe as those found in IE.
• Website Display – Because of Firefox’s lack of ActiveX support, it cannot display some pages, the most common of which can be found at, of course, Microsoft.com.