Today I got a message from (e:twisted) saying she was on googletalk. I fear that she is going to leave me now for this new chat client. So I decided to check it out. Wow was it hard to find. Try searching for googletalk on google. There are about a hundred other links that have nothing to do with the new service. I am sure this will change quickly. What's even crazier is checkl out the link for googletalk.com . Currently it is a link to the Ronald McDonald House. Here is the actual for the chat client.



Unfortunately/fortunately I had to sign up for a free google email to get it going. Luckily, this meant that I would get a chance to squash the gmail signup bug on the site. It was easy to fix once I saw the email, so now people with gmail can sign up in droves.

You can simply talk with googletalk too. It has the same mic capaibilty as you get with other online chat clients only the interface is very simple and clean.

What freaks me out is that google so into searching through personal information int he name of advertising. The gmail acount gives you targeted advertisments by reading your email to see what you are into. (e:shawnr) said that it is really accurate at pleasing him. But imagine this. You came home and the mailman had opened all you mail and was like, "oh I saw you got a bill from the doctor, you might be interested in these vitamins that one of my partner companies was selling." Or, "I saw that you got on D on your report card and was thinking you might like these tutorial lessions I am selling."

I like to think that the sytem is really only for advertsing too, but call me a conspiracy tehroist, I think it is one step away rom big brother when you start to accept that most of your communications are not private for the sake of advertisment. Where does it stop. People owuld have never accepted this in the past but now that this privacy wall is crumbling, do you think that people will stop accepting privacy invasion for other means.

Their desktop search freaks me out so bad I would rather have a virus than install it and the toolbar which I feel the same about. Whyw oudl you ever want to allow other poeple to search your computer and browsing patternst o make money off it. I believ that is precisly why people hate spyware and viri. So back to googletalk. Maybe the chat client is different but I see a pattern. They offer you a free service and in return they want to read all of your information and target advertise you and make money off of you communication. Some people are really into that.

I think it just feeds further into this system where every surface and communication becomes an advertisement. That is precisely why I don't use the aim client to chat and use gaim or trillian instead.

We are beginning to accept that every form of communication can be a conduit to an advertisement. This was not always the case with communication. Imagine if books had advertsiements on every page that went with the subject matter. We had books for thousands of years without them. I think 20 years ago people would have seen that as ludicris but now it would be more and more accepted. Just look at magazines. I had some old computers magazines I was looking at the other day and compared it to some new ones. Wow, what a difference the new ones are like 97% advertisments, even when they are disguised as articles.

For now I am perfectly content using a free client such as gaim where no one is making money off my chatting.

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

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

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

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.

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

(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.

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

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.

I am sick of having computer info on the news and my own journal so I am starting a computer info journal. If anyone wants to cowrite this with me ((e:uncutsaniflush)) I would be more than happy. It can be the start of a topic journal.
--paul