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?
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.
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
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.
If you’re afraid of the Linux transition because of your loved Windows-only app, your fears are greatly reduced with Wine.
Wine is a compatibility layer that will allow you to run and install Windows programs. A huge list of softwares has been tested to run with Wine pretty successfully. Specially now, that after 15 years in the making it has achieved its milestone 1.0 release. A large help was provided by the support received from Google to speed this development.
You can easily find Wine on your Linux distro repositories or download it here. One of the essential tools for a Linux convert.
Released yesterday, Firefox 3 has surely surpassed its objective of 1 million downloads in 24 hours. A new world record!! (No one actually knows if there was a record to be broken…)
Mozilla’s site went down but at the end of the day everything went well. On our office HQ, the Ubuntu install already has FF 3 installed and the same on our Windows install.
The count of downloads at the moment this article is being written registers at over 8.5 million copies. A pretty impressive number. The largest number of downloads are coming from the US, Germany, the UK, and Italy.
The folks at Mozilla will be giving us the full stable Firefox 3 in a bit more than 24 hours. A really really nice improvement from the 2.0 release which now seems pretty ancient for all of those already testing beta releases and release candidates.
Mozilla is even trying to set a new world record for most number of downloads of a single software in one day. Join in the campaign if you’d like as well.
Most importantly, download Firefox 3 on June 17th. Your computer will thank you with less resources consumed, your patience will thank you for not having to go through a bunch of frequent browser crashes, and even web developers will thank you for the switch (actually, web developers thank you using anything besides IE).
Songbird, our favorite open source music manager has just released their 0.6 version. According to the website, the new release is “harder, better, faster, stronger”.
Looking at the release notes, it shows that the team has been placing quite a bit of work to improve its performance and usability. This project created by Mozilla promises to be the next big thing in the way you discover, play, and manage your music. We actually agree.
Although it hasn’t reached its mature full 1.0 release yet, Songbird has been of quite good use for us since last year. I really like the add-ons built for it and its main strength, being able to browse the web and discover songs with it.
Workrave is a Windows and Linux only program that can help prevent dreaded repetitive strain injuries. Unfortunately techies are quite familiar with RSI.
Once installed, Workrave runs silently in the background monitoring how much time you’re using the computer. In pre-set times of activity, the program gives you alerts on when breaks are needed. You’ll see three types of alarms:
Micro-Pause of 30 seconds;
Rest break of 20 minutes;
Daily limit (to turn off the computer).
The times established for each alarm can be modified according to your preferences or, better yet, you can leave everything as standard.
In its standard settings, after 30 minutes of continuous activity you will see a notification that you need a Micro-Pause, a break of 30 seconds. When the warning is activated you can ignore it, delay it but it is recommended that you obey it. You will be able to see the 30 seconds countdown and in the meantime you can stand up, move a little or just stop typing to give your fingers some rest.
After about one hour and a half of activity its time for you to take a longer 30 minute break. The program takes so much care of you that it will even recommend some exercises for your arms, shoulders, neck and fingers.
And… after 6 or 8 hours Workrave will tell you to shut off the computer. Enough!! Your daily limit has expired. While the alarm windows are activated your keyboard and mouse will be locked, so you’re prevented from cheating.
You can also extract reports of your activities to measure how much work you’re doing per day. A neat feature that always scares me with the proof that I’m really a workaholic.
All of this to help take care of your health. A really nice program to have installed on your machine, but it is only worth it if you follow the advices and take the regularly scheduled breaks. Which is really hard to do when an alarm comes up in the middle of an important assignment you’re working on.
I have a 1GB mini SD card inside my cell phone that I barely use the space. So, I thought I’d add a Linux install inside it for those moments I have to use a computer at a cyber café (I’m cautious about security), or just do an emergency data recovery of a computer.
Puppy Linux was my distro of choice for this task. It is very small, the ISO is just 88MB. Also I felt this was the right moment for me with the release of Puppy Linux 4.0 aka Dingo, which seems to be much more user friendly.
So, to install Puppy to a USB drive the first step is to download, burn, and run the ISO file.
Next, once you see the desktop, the second step is to click on “Menu”, find “Setup” and choose “Puppy Universal installer”. In our case, choose “USB Flash Drive”;
Third, I just went the easy route and followed with a click on “Install Puppy to … (name of USB drive)”
Fourth, we’re prompted to enter the current location of the Puppy files, in our case CD (since we’re using a live CD)
Just confirm the next dialogue request and for the last important option, make sure to select the option to create the bootloader “mbr.bin” file. With this mbr file, the computer should be able to load Puppy on boot without a problem.
Click on the following OK buttons and in a few minutes a beautiful and highly functional tiny Linux distro was installed on the USB flash drive.
Puppy 4.0 is pretty stable, very easy to work with, and very fast. Best of all, extremely portable! Highly recommended distro to keep around.
Now, I must admit I read about Damn Small Linux but haven’t tested it yet. Any one willing to give their opinion on it?
June 24, 2008 
Posted in Utilities 
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If you’re afraid of the Linux transition because of your loved Windows-only app, your fears are greatly reduced with 
Using computers since the early 90s. Old timer with windows, more recently converted to Linux.
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