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