OS/2 e-Zine! - First Looks and Nifty Gadgets

First Looks and Nifty Gadgets - by OS/2 e-Zine! Staff

irst Looks and Nifty Gadgets brings you reviews of the new and novel. In each issue we take a look at what's just hitting the streets and some tiny, but tried and true products that are still helping people be as productive as possible.

In this issue we look at: Internet Junkbuster | InProTrack

Internet Junkbuster

We really shouldn't be telling you about this. It's one of those things that we're supposed to file along with stuff like where the moon landing was really filmed, who was on the grassy knoll, what was unofficially recovered at Roswell, and who really shot J.R. Because being an advertiser supported publication, it's not really in our best interests (nor our advertisers) to tell you that there is a program which can wipe away (.GIF, 16K) all of those bandwidth sucking banner advertisements that always take so long to load.

Internet Junkbuster, first released for Unix workstations, has been ported to OS/2. It's a utility that helps you not only cut down on the glitter and the blitz of Internet advertising, but also blocks cookies and header information that might compromise your privacy. Now, we'd love to get into a debate over the virtues and dangers of cookies, but the program really does give you control over what sites you do or do not want to give you a cookie (an Internet term for an identifying tag stored by the web site with your browser).

Internet Junkbuster is not easy to set up, it needs a set of libraries called EMX (easily found on most OS/2 download sites) as well as a loopback interface configured on your computer. But comprehensive instructions for setting up Junkbuster can be found in the Read-Me files. It works by setting itself up as a proxy, filtering the stream of HTML code before it reaches your browser. It won't work on all banner advertising (it won't block OS/2 e-Zine!'s banner ads, for example, so har har har!) but it will nail the typical suspects like Double-click -- one of the largest banner advertising networks on the Web.

Internet Junkbuster 2.0.1

by Junkbusters (OS/2 port by Gerd Flender)
download from the OS/2 Supersite (ZIP, 313k)
Registration: Freeware

InProTrack

Short for "Installed Product Tracker", this tiny gadget doesn't do much, but could be useful for anyone seeking to update a program they own and who need to know what level the currently installed version is at. It gathers this information for as many installed products as possible by scanning your syslevel files, then displays its results in a neat PM window and a Rolodex-like style of flipping through programs.

InProTrack in action

It has three different scanning modes; "All", "Fast" and "Turbo" which increase in speed but decrease in accuracy as you go up. Very quick and dirty, but it might just save you a big download if you discover you really do have the latest version of something after all.

InProTrack 1.08

by Kai Evers
download from Kai's home page (ZIP, 85k)
Registration: Freeware

That's it for this issue. Tune in next time for more reviews of neat gadgets and first looks at new OS/2 tools.