Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Online Office Programs

Online Office Suites seem to be the next big thing these days. I hadn't actually tried one until today, but there have been a couple available for awhile now. The one I tried was linked by LifeHacker and is put out by a company called ThinkFree. It is written completely in Java, and loads fine in all the browsers I tried it with (even though I'm using Linux). Since I use Linux, I was presented with a small window saying that it had been tested on Windows XP and that better support for Linux and OSX is in the works, but it still works very well. The service gives you 30M to store your files in, and offers a pdf export feature. The interface is kind of a cross between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, and includes word processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs, using mostly Microsoft's formats, which are pretty much the standard these days.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft also has a similar suite in beta, which I haven't bothered to try, because it is not quite as cross platform as the ThinkFree product. It is associated with "Live" beta. The server is really slow right now, so I don't have too much more information at the moment, but last time I checked, they had some video conferencing/collaboration software with it as well, in a closed public beta. I haven't seen anything about price, but I expect there will be one, eventually.

As for some others:

gOFFICE is another complete suite, which looks very promising. I don't have too many details because I haven't tried it, but feel free to leave some feedback on how it is if you use it.

Writely offers a web based word processor, similar to the ThinkFree one. While I haven't bothered to try it, it looks pretty good. Both Writely and the ThinkFree suite offer options to post documents to blogs and share them.

NumSum is offering a web based spreadsheet program.
 
FCKeditor is a web based  text/html editor with some word processing features (the interface looks similar to MS Word 97 from the screenshots)


If you are interested in the technology behind these apps, many of them are using a fairly new web standard called AJAX (made popular by Google, among others). Forbes has an article about some of the services mentioned above and AJAX. Read it Here.

With any luck the filters at school don't block these, as they all have the potential for being very convenient for those of us who work on documents on a variety of computers at home and school/work. ;-)

Monday, February 27, 2006

ATI Video Card Trade-in program

If you are into upgrading frequently, and need that new video card ATI has a good program for you. They are giving a $50 (USD) credit if you send them your old video card when you upgrade to one of a couple of their modern cards. It appears that they even take competing video cards for the credit. They don't give you too big of a selection though.
While I'm a NVidia person, I figure some people might be interested, so the link is here.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

US National Archives on Google Video

As you may have seen on one of the various online news sites the other day, Google is digitizing  all the video from the National Archives and posting it on Google Video. It turns out, they have already started, and quite a few clips are already available here. Archive.org has also had a bunch of historical videos for quite awhile now. The Prelinger Archives contain most of the historical video, but if you explore archive.org you will find lots of other old media, as well.

If you are into video clips of a less educational nature, I recommend
GVOD (Google Video of the Day)
or
The Official Google Video Blog
or
Fosfor Video

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Google Web Hosting?

It looks like google is entering the free web hosting market, which if it is as good as the rest of their products, is Great news. I am into this blogging thing, only because it is a better deal than ordinary web hosting, but it seems google is trying to change that. Unfortunately, the site has been slashdotted, and they are accepting new accounts by invite only right now. I wonder if this is the reason gmail was down for awhile yesterday? It looks like it comes with a WYSIWYG Editor, but html source editing is also allowed.

Anyway, here are some links if you want to check it out:

The Google Page Creator main page.
Slashdot Story
Discussion Group
PC World Review

I don't know about anyone else, but I am very interested to get a closer look at this service.

Age of Empires 3 Deal

I don't know what I have mentioned before, but I (and a group of friends) enjoy playing Age of Empires 2, on a fairly large scale. We have been considering going on to AOE3, but it is slightly expensive, and requires very fast computers. The other main flaw is the home city "feature" which makes multiplayer games grossly unfair, based on how much time you have spent playing, not skill. Anyway, the main point of this post is to point out that Circuit City has the collector edition for only $35 ( link, thanks Techbargains.).

On another note, AOE3 does have an interesting feature. The configuration and savegame files are based on xml, and are done  in such a way that it is fairly obvious what each line does. This makes hacking fairly easy, with only a text editor.  HeavenGames even has a utility which can generate fully unlocked homecities, which should make multiplayer much more fair.  HeavenGames is a great site, strongly recommended, if you are into RTS games.  ESO and Microsoft also have a couple sites, with demos,forums, patches, etc. If you are really dedicated, you might even want to try your hand at random map creation. One useful tidbit of information that is hard to find, is that savegames are now found in a sub directory of "My Documents" (under Microsoft Games/Age of Empires 3 if I remember right, I'm using Linux right now), so you want to put any adjusted home cities there.

For those less interested in games, I should have something else for the weekend. This blog has been a little game centric lately.

Monday, February 20, 2006

Windows Installer "cleanup"

Here is a good tip for those of you running Windows XP (and maybe some other versions):

Sometimes, Windows Installer requires files such as patches that have been installed and removed by disk cleanup, or becomes corrupted. This causes you to have problems uninstaling or even doing repair installs on the program in question. In my case Office XP broke during a hard drive upgrade, and required the service pack installers to  uninstall or do a repair install, which were deleted at some point. Microsoft has a tool which removes the listing, essentially marking programs uninstalled so you can reinstall over top of them, getting you a clean install which you can remove or use as needed. I found this to be a little hard to find, so here is a l ink to the knowledge base article and download.

Note that while this utility doesn't actually remove the program files, it may very well cause programs to stop working if you haphazardly play with it. It isn't officially supported so you can't blame me (as always) or Microsoft if something goes wrong.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Ground Control (RTS) for Free

File Planent is giving away copies of a RTS from Sierra called Ground Control. I gave it a try this afternoon, playing though the tutorials and it has some promise. The graphics, while not too complex look good. Not bad for free, and defiantly worth a look if you can handle the slightly less than 500M download.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Ebooks

For those of us who still read something other than blogs, There are a lot of free sources of books on the Internet, though they are mostly older because of copyright law.

The biggest and most well known collection of free books is Project Gutenberg (named after the European inventor of the printing press). Right now they have 17,000 freely downloadable ebooks. Lately, they have also been adding sheet music and both human and computer read audio books. There are also CD and DVD collections available for download, over a variety of protocols. Depending on the book, Project Gutenberg has a number formats available, but all books are available as plain text, which is easier to read if you convert it to some other format.

Manybooks.net has a similar collection, although most are available in a wider variety of formats for different handheld devices. They also have a chapter a day type blog, which is read by talkr.com  (I haven't had a chance to try this yet, so I don't know how the quality is)

AudioBooksForFree.com has free, decent quality audio books. You can also get them on various devices for a fee. They require to register and limit you to a low bit rate unless you give them money. This being said, the quality is still good enough.

The Internet Archive also has a limited collection of books, as well as a huge collection of other media for free. Their WayBackMachine is handy for websites that have disappeared.

You can also find more sources on google, but these sites cover most of the available texts. Many free Ebook sites just reformat the Project Gutenberg texts.

Happy Reading (yes some classics are good)

Rant

As usual, I have other things I should be doing (I'm obviously not), so I am going to try and keep this short, but I'm slightly (more than slightly?) bothered:

Background: Today, I had to do a PowerPoint presentation for a Spanish class I'm taking (stupid projects). Anyway, I spent an hour and made 20 slides on a country. As usual I used boring, but visible, black and white, with a few pictures. No transitions, sounds, animation or other annoying distractions. So far, So good.

The Presentation: When I went to actually present the PowerPoint, I set up the projector (for the teacher ;-) and got started. I had a map, so I went into the PowerPoint menu (found in the bottom, left corner of the screen while presenting) and started using the pen tool to point things out, at which point chaos started. I couldn't believe it, but no one had seen either that menu, or the pen tool before. It had never occurred to anyone to want to draw or do anything while presenting. This wouldn't seem so bad, except that in a mandatory class (8th grade "shop", and possibly some others) PowerPoint is taught as part of the class, requiring you to use all the irritating, distracting features and colors that result in an unreadable mess. Apparently they don't teach how to actually present your slide show (I wouldn't know as I missed a lot of that year due to illness).

Now that my rant is done, A few PowerPoint tips:

First off, If you don't have PowerPoint, and want it, try OpenOffice.org Impress which runs on most modern computers and operating systems.

Number 2: don't use any transitions that make noise, take a long time, or are otherwise distracting.

3.) Don't use weird colors, backgrounds or gradients that make the presentation unreadable (you are trying to get information out, not be artistic)
4.) Practice before hand, if you haven't done this before. Look through the menu on the left (Slideshow menu -> View Show, to display full screen and make the presentation tools available). It seems to help grab people's attention if you are actively drawing/pointing things out, etc.
5.) Don't just read the slides, Present them. Talk about them, etc. People can (mostly, I hope) read for them selves, try and keep them occupied.


Enough for now, Back to my homework (Java Programming right now, which brings me to another comment:)

Java:
Check the java homepage, they are giving out free copies of their commercial IDE and have a beta of the next version out. Check the right side of the page for the IDE (its marked free in red), not sure how long this will last, but for now all you need is a valid sun website account (free)

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Free SkypeOut Credit

I can't verify that this is the same for everyone but, Skype seems to be giving out free SkypeOut credit to existing users (which allows you to call normal phones). All you have to do is to view the "my account" page and click the "skype gift of the day" button. You can get to the my account page by opening up skype and clicking the option in the tools menu (on the Linux version at least). If someone trys this, it might be useful for you to post in the comments if it works for you.

Happy talking ;-)

Technorati Tags: Skype, Skypeout, VoIP, landline, phone

Monday, February 13, 2006

Free Wiki Hosting

Stikipad has free, hosted private wikis. It is fairly restricted unless you pay the $5 fee, which allows you to modify pages more often, gives you more bandwith and allows you to have attachments. It is still worth a look, if you want to try that sort of thing. For those who don't know a wiki is a webpage which allows its users to edit it, with no external software. Wikipedia is a prime example. Many open source software groups also use wikis for documentation and conversation, such as the Gentoo wiki.

Link

Face Morpher

This site has a neat java applet which takes an uploaded photo an changes the age/race/gender and a few other odd things. All you have to do is upload a picture of your face, crop it, and circle the eyes and mouth. It works amazingly well, so give it a try here.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

More Linux Tips

Similar to my last post, The author of a blog called FlackOS has also noticed how user unfriendly Linux can be, and has compiled a list of tutorials which show how to do various common setup type tasks on a Ubuntu Linux Machine. Check it out here (thanks to Make Magazine for linking)

UNIX Shell Basics

Well, I was bored in the car this afternoon, and got a chance to write my article on the Linux command line. It got a little long for this site, so I posted it over on my freewebs website . It should be enough to get you started with bash (a common shell used by UNIX/Linux,etc systems) and applies to a number of common operating systems such as Linux, BSD, MacOSX, Solaris, etc. It can be difficult for a new user too learn the command line, and since it is still hard to avoid (though not impossible) it is a very useful skill. The Slackware book is also helpful on this topic, and other basic topics.

My article can be found here .
With any luck I don't have too many errors, but If you find some, please tell me.

Enjoy

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Animated Gifs

I did have other blogging plans tonight, but it is getting late, so I think I only have time for a quick post. In the future, maybe you should expect interesting topics on the weekends, and quick tips like this one on the week days.

Anyway, one of my friends was asking me about animated gifs today. Animated gifs are usually used for simple, sort animations on websites. For some reason, the friend in question wanted to convert a mpeg video into an animated gif. The mplayer media player/encoder has a handy way of doing this. (Mplayer is normally used on linux machines but also runs under windows, check out the website for more info). To really harness the power of mplayer, you need either a frontend or to use the command line. Anyway, to make an animated gif out of a mpeg (or any other supported file type) you can use a command like this:

mplayer -vo gif89a -ao none file.mpg

the -vo switch sets the video output driver, the -ao switch does the same for audio. You can replace either with help to see some other choices. In the example above, you will get a file out.gif, with your animated gif. Mplayer also comes with a very powerful video encoder, mencoder which works pretty much the same way (with -ovc and -oac). for more information on mencoder, read the documentation on the mplayer website.

Never wanting to be restricted to only one way of doing things, you can go about this a different way (if you have lots of ram/hard drive space), and convert the mpeg into a lot of png image files (one for each frame). **If you are smart, you will only run the following command in an empty directory (folder)**

mplayer -vo png -ao none file.mpg


Then you can use the ImageMagick image processing toolkit to change those pngs into an animated gif.

covert *.png file.gif

Fun to play with, but I don't know why you would want to use it.

to go the other way, from image files to another movie format you can use mencoders -mf option

mencoder mf://*.png  -mf type=png:fps=30 -ovc lavac -o out.avi

Changing options as needed. You can replace png with a number of other image formats, like jpeg (useful when you get a huge number of seperate frames from blender)

Some versions of mplayer can also output a video as ascii art, so run mplayer -vo help to see if you have that plugin installed (I don't so I can't remember what its called)

Happy animating!

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Gmail Talk Integration

Gmail users today will notice that gmail talk logs have been integrated into gmail. This is an interesting addition to an already nice (simple!!!) instant messenger. According to gmail help, they are planning to add full instant messaging capabilities to gmail in the near future. This will be handy on trips, etc and I am looking forward to it. The gmail help information on the subject is here.
Another news article on the topic is here.

Hopefully I will be able to post some more interesting info later, I am working on a basic command line linux tutorial at the moment, so you have something to look forward to.

Monday, February 06, 2006

Mozilla Updates

Firefox and Thunderbird have security updates out today (actually yesterday, I think). Be sure to do the updates (it should be possible to do them automatically, from the preferences). The firefox update's release notes are here.


FYI: If anything weird happens with this post, I am trying out a firefox extension to handle blog posts.

Advertisments

Every year, the only part of the Super Bowl I manage to care about is the advertising. Companies put huge amounts of money into Super Bowl ads, so there are always at least a few good ones. This year both Google Video and Ifilm have the ads available for viewing online. (ifilm has some other years' too)

Enjoy!

Thursday, February 02, 2006

LCD Dead Pixels

Fairly often, LCD monitors/tvs, etc have a couple dead pixels, as a result of the manufacturing process. According to Dell, the industry standard is that you need to have at least 5 dead pixels for the display to be considered defective. Depending on where the 4 dead pixels you are likely to have are, this can be very annoying.

To find out if you have any dead pixels, the best thing to do is to take a good look at your display with a white background (empty PowerPoint slide in slide show mode?). Look for small off color dots (often red). If you have dead pixels that are black, they are probably not fixable, but if you have colored ones Ehow has an article on how to bring them back to life (I haven't tried it). They also have a video file which changes colors 30 times/second which, claims to help eliminate damaged pixels. Its worth a look for those with slightly defective lcds (I'm sticking with my crt).

If you are getting a new device with a color lcd, you should look for dead pixels, to see if you have enough to send it back and try for a perfect display. I have read that CCD image sensors also sometimes show a similar effect, so watch your new digital camera closely as well.

Enjoy your evening.

Custom Live-Cds

This is the first, really useful post I have had time to make in awhile. For the last couple days I have been working on building a live-cd, to deal with a poorly setup computer at school, so I can get something done in class. For those who don't already know, a live-cd is a term for a cd or dvd that has an entire, ready to use, operating system on it. Usually linux is used by live-cds but specialized Windows installs can also boot from a cd. There are a number of premade live-cds available for download on the web (if you have a fast connection, or way too much time) such as knoppix, which will run on just about any computer with no (or almost no) configuration.  Knoppix and many others use a technology called unionfs which allows the operating system's files from the cd to be merged with a ram disk, allowing the user to add programs or save things, up to the amount of ram they have. Any changes made, are of course gone on the next reboot. There is one live-cd, called puppy linux, which can save these changes back to the cd, however this only works if you have a cd burner, so is not an ideal solutions for me. This leaves me with three options, make a live-cd from scratch, "remaster" an existing live-cd, or install to a removable hard drive or flash drive (if the target computer can boot off usb). If you want to find more info about making live-cds from scratch, I suggest the gentoo wiki, or google.
The best choice is to "remaster" an existing disc. Most of the work is already done, all you have to do is add what you need and recreate the iso.  There are two live-cds which are intended to be remastered, and make it very easy to do so:

Slax is slackware based, and is modular. What this means is that you can download modules from the slax website and add them to the cd. In Linux this is done by mounting the iso using a loopback drive (ie, mount -o loop slax-xxx.iso /mnt/tmp) and copying the contents to a temporary directory. In windows it is best to just burn the cd and copy the contents to a folder, unless you have a tool you like. From here you can add any modules to the modules directory of the cd, and use the tools on the cd or from the website to make your own modules. You can also put files in the "rootcopy" directory which will be copied into the main file system at boot time. Then you use the included script and mkisofs to rebuild the iso, which you can test in an emulator and/or burn. (take a look at the documentation for more info)

Morphix is similar to slax, and is debian based.  Morphix is a little harder to remaster, but has better hardware auto detection, and the result is more user friendly. If you want to try putting together your own morphix cd, I suggest you  take a look at the extensive documentation. You can do some simple changes, if you have a FAT/ext2/ext3/ other linux writable partition with some free space, using the " morphing morphix" cd, which includes an interactive tutorial with some automated steps.

If you just want a live-cd to play with, you can find a bunch on google, distrowatch or any of the other linux distribution tracking sites. If you have any favorites, feel free to post them in the comments.

New Worm

Cnn has an article on a new worm which is programmed to start deleting files from infected computers tomorrow. Apparently, it is an email, which tries to entice the user to click something, installing the worm (makes for easy programming, after all). According to the article it deletes many common document formats (ie word/pdf , etc), which would be very bad for those without a backup. As I have mentioned a couple times before: be careful what you click! (virus scanners/firewalls, etc also help some, but not much in this case). Read the whole thing here.