Category: open source

08/23/05 08:35 - 70ºF - ID#21523

Curious about Open Source?

Yahoo News's Tech Tuesday has a couple or three articles about Open Source this week that are targeted at the general PC user and not just computer geeks.

Open Source for All a good explanation of what Open Source is.

Is Open Source for you which is a fairly reasonable discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Open Source.

The Open Source PC
discusses some of the most useful applications for people wanting to use Open Source applications on the Windows platorm.

--uncutsaniflush

Permalink: Curious_about_Open_Source_.html
Words: 134

08/22/05 08:29 - 67ºF - ID#21522

Google Desktop 2 Beta released

Google has released a beta of the Google Desktop 2. It requires Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP 3+

Google claims that "Google Desktop gives you easy access to information on your computer and from the web. It's a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, computer files, music, photos, chats and web pages that you've viewed. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails and bookmarks. It makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google."

This is what it looks like:


More information can be found here and here It can be downloaded from here The file size is 1.3 megs.

--uncutsaniflush

Permalink: Google_Desktop_2_Beta_released.html
Words: 145

Category: osx

08/22/05 09:04 - 62ºF - ID#21521

Apple Security Update

Apple has released an update to it's 2005-007 security update to fix several flaws that affected 64-bit applications and rendered them unusable.

The update can be downloaded from or Software Update in Mac OS X.

Apple's Security Advisory:
Delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users.

Security Update 2005-007 v1.1 replaces Security Update 2005-007 v1.0 for Tiger systems Mac OS X v10.4.2. Users who have already installed v1.0 on Tiger systems should install v1.1.

Security Update 2005-007 v1.1 provides a combined 32- and 64-bit version of LibSystem to replace the 32-bit version that was delivered in v1.0. No other changes have been made in version 1.1.

This update includes the following components:

AppKit
BlueTooth
CoreFoundation
cups
Directory Services
HIToolBox
Kerberos
loginwindow
Mail
OpenSSL
QuartzComposerScreenSaver
Security Interface
Safari
X11
zlib

--uncutsaniflush

Permalink: Apple_Security_Update.html
Words: 140

Category: linux

08/16/05 08:15 - 79ºF - ID#21520

Linux music player - amarok

One of (e:terry) and (e:matthew)'s gripes with linux when we had it on the main home computer two years ago was that we didn't have a music player that rivaled the power of itunes.

In comes amarok It is a full featured music player with an included library search and best of all, it looks up the lyrics and cover art for each song on a lyric database.

I think this is the first ime I have seen a music player that fetches lyrics and I love that. You can also contribute lyrics to songs that arn't found in the database.


You can totally customize the way it looks. I fyou had tried this player before the latest version uses an sql database to store mp3 data makign it much faster. I love it.

Permalink: Linux_music_player_amarok.html
Words: 147

Category: xp tips

08/15/05 02:35 - 77ºF - ID#21519

Burning Cd Images Free - iso recorder v2

So maybe you took my tip [inlink]computer,3[/inlink] and started downloading files really fast using the azureus bittorrent client and now you have all these CD .iso files that you don't know how to burn into CDs. One easy and freeware solution is to use ISO Recorder v2 Beta

With this software you can simply right click on any iso and burn them using windows XP explorer by choosing "Copy Image to CD" from the context menu. Then just insert a burnable CD and click next. I requires window XP service pack 2 I am pretty sure, although they have an odler version somewhere on the site for older versions.

--paul

Permalink: Burning_Cd_Images_Free_iso_recorder_v2.html
Words: 115

Category: linux

08/15/05 12:42 - 76ºF - ID#21518

SuSE 10.0 Public Beta released.

(e:paul) mentioned that he is going to install SuSE 9.3 on his "supercomputer"[inlink]paul,3759[/inlink] which reminded me of some open source news:

Just this month, Novell who owns SuSE open-sourced the distro and a public beta of SuSE 10.0 as well as previous releases of SuSE are available for download

This is the first public beta for SuSE in the history of the distribution.

SuSE calls itself the "world's most usable Linux distribution" but, of course, usability is in the eye of the beholder. One of the best features of the distro is YaST which makes the distro easy to install and configure.

p.s. in case anyone is confused this journal entry was written by (e:uncutsaniflush). (e:paul) graciously has allowed me the priviledge of co-writing the computer journal with him.

Permalink: SuSE_10_0_Public_Beta_released_.html
Words: 157

Category: filesharing

08/14/05 09:34 - 66ºF - ID#21517

Filesharing with Bittorrent

Interested in finding out more about bittorrent but you don't know where to start? This tip comes passed along to me from (e:shawnr). Gettign started with bittorrent is east with the azureus client which is pretty easy to use and comes in wndows, linux, and mac os x flavors. However, it does require java which you most likely already have, if not you can get it from the azureus link.

[size=m]How do I get started?[/size]
1. Download java JRE and install it if you don't have it. You can get it at the Azureus site

2. Download the azureus client for your operating system. Same above

3. Go to the web and type whatever you want to download plus the word torrent into your search engine. Links to torrent sites will come up. WHen you find what you are looking for download the .torrent file and open it with azureus. It will start downloading to your hardrive.

4. You can also share your own video, art, whatever using bitorrent. Maybe (e:shawnr) can do a tutorial on that.

Here are some sites where you can search for torrent files.
Pirate Bay -
Bogaa -
Seedler -

[size=m]How does it work?[/size]

With BitTorrent, files are broken into smaller fragments, typically a quarter of a megabyte each. As the fragments are distributed to the peers in a random order, they can be reassembled on a requesting machine. Each peer takes advantage of the best connections to the missing pieces while providing an upload connection to the pieces it already has. This scheme has proven particularly adept in trading large files such as videos and software source code. Quoted from: BitTorrent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Talk about swiftness. I am getting sometimes upwards of 700k per sec downloading suse 9.3, same with many other programs and files

Permalink: Filesharing_with_Bittorrent.html
Words: 338

Category: osx

08/13/05 02:09 - 81ºF - ID#21516

OS X on PC

In case anyone missed this news, OS X is being ported to PC hardware by apple. A bunch of you wrote about this a whiole back. It turns out that people have alread hacked the OS to run on non-apple PCs now. In fact there is a whole wiki with directions and information about getting this up and running . There are a bunch of mehtods for install including one for dual boot.

I know that this is gogin to make (e:uncutsaniflush) crazy unless he has already done it!!

Here is a blog with more instructions, some imagery and video of it running on vaio laptop.

Permalink: OS_X_on_PC.html
Words: 123

08/13/05 01:59 - 81ºF - ID#21515

New Computer Journal

Permalink: New_Computer_Journal.html
Words: 48