August 10, 2008 Launchy, our favorite application launcher which we’ve reviewed before has now been made to work with Linux!
The list of plug-ins has increased a lot since our last review making Launchy an even cooler application.
Download the application for Windows or Linux here.
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Posted in Utilities 
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August 10, 2008 For those who are a bit lost with the word “partitions”, they are sectors in which your hard disk is divided.
You can divide your HD to have one OS in one partition and data on another, or add a partition just for back up data, and if you’ll be installing more than one OS in your system each one of them will have to sit in its own partition.
GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) is a wonderful open source application that will allow you to easily work with the partitions of your HD. You can add, delete, resize, copy, and move partitions all with an easy interface.
Run GParted on a live CD, USB, or inside your favorite Linux distro. If you’re running from an installed OS make sure though that the partitions you’ll be working with are not mounted.
Added bonus, GParted works with several file systems such as: ext, fat, linux-swap, ntfs, and more.
A very handy app to have, highly recommended.
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Posted in Utilities 1 Comment »
August 7, 2008 I’m starting my baby steps into web coding, really starting out with the basics of the basics. But, I didn’t want to start with a WYSIWYG editor, those are too simple and will not teach much of coding per se. So, I went searching for a nice editor for my Linux box and found Bluefish Editor.
From their site, “Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code.” You can use its syntax highlighting for Python, HTML, PHP, C, Java, JavaScript, XML, CSS, Perl, and languages.
It also gives the user some coding help with completion for HTML tags, attributes, and some PHP functions.
Bluefish editor runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS.
So far I’m enjoying using it, it is simple to use, fast, has a nice preview option with several browsers, and the toolbar is helping a newbie like me.
Later on I’ll try other editors and surely report here my findings.
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Posted in Programming No Comments »
August 6, 2008 The Mozilla team has announced that Fiirefox 3.1 will come with native support for Theora and Vorbis media. So, this means that:
The code is already out, available in Firefox’s nightly builds releases for large scale testing.
We have a bunch of Theora and Vorbis files and the quality is pretty good (some say ogg audio is even better than mp3). If you’d like to see/hear for your for yourself, go to Jamendo.org, they have tons of music files you can download in ogg, and you can check out the Wikimedia page to watch some ogg videos.
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Posted in Audio and Video, Industry News, Office No Comments »
August 5, 2008 
First, my truest apologies for the disappearance. Due to health reasons, work, then more health reasons my tech life was drastically minimized. But, now all is well and coming back on track.
And, we’re coming back with a sweet web service called identi.ca. Once Twitter got all crazy and full of never-ending glitches, many web services jumped in the opportunity to win the hearts of frustrated users, identi.ca being one of them.
But, what is so special about identi.ca? First and foremost, the software that powers it, called Laconica, is completely open source!! (released under the GNU Affero General Public License) Which means that the community can jump in and produce a much better service in a shorter amount of time. For example, translation to several languages are already in the works.
Secondly, anyone can download the source code (Laconica) to make their own branded identi.ca, creating a de-centralized micro-blogging platform. This is possible because Laconica uses the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, allowing the user to post a message in his own Laconica-based microblog hosted in his/her own server which will then connect directly with other microblogs using the platform.
Other features I love: API (same codes pretty much that Twitter uses), GTalk integration, and OpenID login.
So far, the folks at identi.ca are doing an awesome job, kudos to them! If you’d like, add my identi.ca account here.
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Posted in Web services 2 Comments »
July 4, 2008 Microsoft being smart again saw that Vista wasn’t being very accepted, decided to force people to have no other option. After July 1st, computers can no longer be sold with Windows XP (there are exceptions to the rules such as computer with low specs).
If you bought a computer today would you get it with Windows Vista like Bill wants you to? By the way, Microsoft is planning to release a new OS next year.
Or, will you go with another OS?
IMHO the operating system has lost its critical importance. Users in general need an Office Suite, a web browser, image, video, and audio managers. At this day and age, most known operating systems will work just fine for everyday needs. MacOS will work very well, so will Linux, and even BSD.
Since the operating system itself isn’t that much important anymore, why keep paying for a new one every couple of years? Do you really need a new operating system or do you need one that works well?
For us, Linux is surely the way to go. It is safe, free, easy to use, with Wine many Windows-only programs can be used, and another huge benefit is that a computer will not age quickly over the years. Check out Vista’s minimum requirements and see if you can run it with a computer that is 3-4 years old.
So, dear readers, where will you go without XP?
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Posted in OS, Uncategorized 1 Comment »
June 24, 2008 The Firefox add-on Gears, formerly known as Google Gears, allows you to use web applications as if they were installed on your computer. Consider it as a fancier offline browsing.
So, basically the data instead of being completely stored on the web is actually stored in your computer. You’ll have access whenever you want. The number of websites compatible with Gears isn’t that huge at the moment but there are some very good ones already adopting it such as RememberTheMilk, Google Docs, Zoho, Google Reader, and most recently MySpace.
Gears has been extra handy on my laptop, in places with no wi-fi I can still browse through the day’s headline news and continue to work on some documents with Google Docs. I just wish for the day to come when GMail comes out with Gears support.
Dear readers, any other websites you would like to use Gears with?
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Posted in Utilities No Comments »
June 22, 2008 Our favorite IM client has just gotten a really cool plug-in, Facebook chat for Pidgin. So now we can connect to 16 different IM protocols with Pidgin. Pretty cool, right?!
The plug-in itself comes in a pretty easy installer for Windows and Linux. Tested and works very well.
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June 21, 2008 Battle for Wesnoth is a pretty cool game RPG style where you’ll build up and lead an army to conquer the entire map / world. The game has over 200 units in 16 different races so there you’ll not get bored easily.
Being open source any one has the freedom to build other maps and scenarios. You can also do the social gaming thing through its multi-player interaction. I actually enjoyed this while in college, a nice way to kill time and while interacting with other people across the globe.
One of the most active opensource games, it is available in more then 30 different languages and will run on Windows, Max OSX and several Linux distros
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Posted in Games No Comments »
June 19, 2008 
Reddit is trying to strengthen its web presence, as a competitor to Digg, by releasing their code to the open source community.
Being released under Common Public Attribution License, reddit is now allowing users to download the full code that powers its website. The real intent is to have developers provide improvements for reddit itself, making it a bigger and more powerful platform that only their small team of 5 can not possibly manage.
There are more Digg-like open sourced platforms for you to choose, such as Pligg. So, the real threat of someone building a strong competitor for them is weak. The community is what powers these sites, not technology. So, by opening their code they are trying to engage the community more and allow the possibility for faster development time.
In summon, by no means an altruistic approach but an action that is nevertheless applauded since now they at least reassure users that their algorithm is clean and fair.
You can download the full code here. For more info, read the official blog post annoucement or watch their video announcement:
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Posted in Web services 1 Comment »
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Using computers since the early 90s. Old timer with windows, more recently converted to Linux.
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