Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on September 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

I started off my morning with some Ubuntu 7.10 action since the first Beta had just been released. I downloaded the 688MB ISO image, burned it to CD, and got started immediately with the Live CD.  It took a few minutes for it to boot up, but that’s expected since I’m running the operating system off of the CD I burned. I contemplated upgrading my current Ubuntu 7.04 installation with this version, but I didn’t want to risk the instability.

As soon as Ubuntu started up I was able to select my wireless network. Occasionally in the past it has had issues recognizing my wireless card, but this time it did a great job. It managed to pull in all of the networks in the vicinity:

UPDATE:We have put together guides on enabling restricted drivers in Ubuntu and how to enable Compiz Fusion in Ubuntu 7.10! We also wrote a complete Kubuntu 7.10 review.

There are several new features in Ubuntu 7.10, and here’s an overview of them:

• Compiz Fusion – I tried this on my laptop but couldn’t get it to work for the life of me. Every time I tried to enable the “Extra” option the configuration screen would freeze up. This could be because I was running the Live CD, but I’m not ready to give up my stable Ubuntu installation yet to see if that was the root of the cause. To try and enable it yourself just go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects -> Extra.
  
• Desktop Search – The desktop search is a nice addition to Ubuntu, and makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for.
• Fast user switching – I didn’t have multiple users on the computer to test this out with, but I’m guessing that it will be nice in those instances.
• GUI for Screen Configuration – I was really excited about this because Ubuntu has always had a hard time recognizing my native widescreen monitor resolution. My native resolution is 1680×1050, and the closest I could get is 1600×1200. I tried switching the drivers for my ATI graphics card, changing screen models, and just about everything, but it had its heart set on not giving in to the widescreen resolution. 🙁
  
• Automatic printer installation and non-free device drivers – Printers are now automatically setup when they are plugged in, and restricted drivers can now be installed in just a few clicks. This is great news for anyone with a wireless card from Broadcom!
• NTFS writing – Users can now read and write to NTFS partitions. I tried to do this, but again, I was running the Live CD which wouldn’t let me mount the Windows drive. So for right now I will assume that it works. 🙂
• And more…

It’s still a bit early for me to give an official thumbs up, but I would say things are looking pretty good. The final release is due out in October, and at that time I’ll go ahead and upgrade my current installation. Hopefully that will solve any of the issues that I was having with the Live CD version.

Ubuntu 7.10 Homepage

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Could you imagine using a computer without having shortcuts? Probably not, and that’s why shortcuts play an important part in how we use our computers. Now what if there was a way to manage your shortcuts in a way that gives you the fastest access possible to all of the apps you use the most? 8Start is exactly that and more…

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of application launchers before, but I promise that this one is different. Its goal is to put all of your favorite shortcuts at your fingertips.

–Using 8Start (Windows only)–

It took me about 15-minutes to get used to how 8Start works, and so I thought it would be important to explain a few things first. The three most frequently used terms are categories, groups, and buttons. Here are definitions for each (using the picture to the right as an example).

• A button is an icon, which is what you would expect. You can customize the size of the buttons just about any way that you want.
• A group is a collection of several buttons. In my example screenshot, “Browser” and “Games” are considered to be two groups.
• A category is a collection of groups, and they almost feel like tabs to me. In my example screenshot “General” is the selected category which contains the groups “Browser” and “Games”. Then “CyberNet” is another category that I could switch to, and therefore expose more shortcuts.

After I had that figured out, it took no time at all to setup 8Start the way that I wanted it. One of the best things is that you can configure a keyboard hotkey or mouse shortcut that launches your 8Start. Anytime that you bring up the program, it is displayed underneath the mouse, and that is the reason why this is so great. It minimizes the distance that you have to move your mouse to open your favorite applications.

Here are a few more screenshots of different categories that I created with smaller buttons:

–Adding Buttons–

Creating and arranging buttons in 8Start isn’t quite as easy as dragging and dropping stuff around, but it is still pretty convenient. The configuration screen has all of the tools that you need to create categories, groups, and buttons:

It’s also easy to add some of your Internet Explorer favorites to 8Start. I wish they offered the option to use Firefox bookmarks as well, but I’m not one to complain. 🙂

Once you get familiar with how the organizer works, you’ll probably be able to step up to the file explorer view. This is where you can drag and drop shortcuts from anywhere onto your computer and organize them yourself into the proper structure. If you have a ton of shortcuts that you want to organize, this method will be a lot easier:

When using the file explorer view, don’t get confused by the numbering scheme that 8Start uses, because all you have to do is drag-and-drop shortcuts into the proper folder. Then when you’re all done just hit the “Apply” button back on the Organizer. 8Start will automatically name the files in the correct format, and you don’t have to do a thing.

–Customizing Buttons–

You can customize just one button, a group of buttons, or all the buttons in an entire category. 8Start offers a great interface for picking the size and layout of the button(s), so that if you want the text to go along with the icon that is a piece of cake:

–Configuring Settings–

There aren’t many settings to configure, but there are enough to satisfy most power users. You can do things like create a keyboard hotkey to use the middle mouse button for launching 8Start. Perhaps the best thing, however, is that you can choose which of your drives you want to show the remaining hard drive space for.

–Change Skins–

Lastly, there are a variety of skins available for 8Start so that you can make it fit well with the look of Windows. I went through most of the skins, but I found myself going back to the default because of its simplicity and classy look.

–Overall–

I haven’t been using 8Start very long, but I’m already getting it worked into my routine. It’s one of those apps that you have to remember to use, and after a little while it will become second nature.

If it becomes hard to use computers that don’t have 8Start installed, don’t worry, you can have it installed to a Flash drive and it will use relative paths to point to all of the shortcuts. So you can even use this as an application launcher for all of your portable apps!

8Start Homepage

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on October 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

Way back in July we introduced a new Firefox 3 feature that focused on making users safer from phishing attacks. This is done using URL highlighting which puts more emphasis on the domain name, kind of like what the Locationbar² extension is used for.

Unfortunately this feature was backed out of the nightly builds shortly after it was put in. Apparently there were some problems getting it to work the way they expected it to, but it has finally made a reappearance in the latest Firefox 3 nightly builds!

Below you’ll find an animated image that show the current state of the Firefox 3 URL highlighting, and also one that demonstrates a tweak that I’m about to show you.

As it stands right now the URL highlighting is a bit basic, and I wanted to make it stand out even more than it already does. Using the Stylish Firefox extension we were able to make the domain name both bold and black, while the remaining portions of the URL were a lighter gray. To do this you just have to create a new style (pictured above) and insert the following CSS code:

#urlbar .formatted-url-domain{
   color: black !important;
   font-weight: bold !important;
}

#urlbar .formatted-url-contents{
   color: #777777 !important;
}

And finally here are two animated images that show the before and after:

How the URL appears before styling:

How the URL appears after styling:

I think that the styled appearance is much better, and those of you familiar with CSS will find a lot of different customization options that you can apply to the different portions of the URL. You can even go crazy and underline, add a background, or put borders around the domain name!

Kudos to WildcatRay over in the Firefox forum for pointing this out!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on September 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

It seems as though there are some big fans of the Mac OS Leopard Dock that will be launching later this year with the new operating system. Well, they might be Leopard fans, but they’re running Windows. 🙂

I’m talking about a developer who took the latest Beta version of the free RK Launcher application, and bundled skins, icons, and plugins together in a single package that give this Dock clone a true Leopard feel to it. Here’s the result of the hard work:

• 7 different languages: English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Turkish
• Integrated KKMenu simulates the Stacks feature on the Leopard Dock (pictured above). Here’s what the configuration of the Stacks looks like:
  
• Over 175 wonderfully reflective icons are included for the most popular apps
• Screen capture utility that’s actually pretty useful for taking fast screenshots
• Mac-like calendar docklet
• Shutdown manager so that you don’t have to go to the Start Menu to turn your computer off or restart it
• Address book

I tried this out, and I have to say that I’m really impressed with all the eye candy it has to offer. If you’ve been itching to get your hands on a free Mac-like dock for Windows then I don’t think it could be any easier than this!

You can download the Leopard Inspired RK Launcher (for Windows XP/Vista) in this forum (no registration required), and here is a list of what’s included with the 50MB download.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on December 01, 2006 by CyberNet.

Beta 1 of Paint.NET 3 is now available for download and I highly recommend this amazing image editing tool. At this point Paint.NET 3 is feature complete and over the next two months they will be working solely on bug fixes. Here is what’s new in this version:

• New effect: Clouds
• New menu command: Edit->Fill Selection (shortcut key: Backspace). This will fill any selected area with the primary color.
• New toolbar item / hotkey: The brush size may be manipulated with +/- buttons in the toolbar. Hotkeys for this are [ and ], and you may hold Ctrl to increment or decrement by 5.
• New translations: They are not complete yet, and in fact some have just been started. They are mostly in place right now in order to get the code correct: Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portugese, and Spanish. You will have the ability to choose one of these languages during installation, and from the Help->Language menu, but the text will still be either mostly or completely English. Complete translations will be finished by February.
• Added left-handed shortcut keys for Cut (Shift+Del), Copy (Ctrl+Ins), Paste (Shift+Ins)
• Upper-left coordinate of selection is now displayed in the status bar
• When moving text with the Text tool, the anchor point coordinate is now displayed in the status bar

One thing I can’t get over is that Microsoft doesn’t include this program with Windows. They definitely shouldn’t replace the original version of Paint because I know some people that use it simply because there isn’t a lot of buttons to confuse them, but power users would love to see Paint.NET integrated with Windows. Maybe they could just offer a menu command to switch between “advanced” and “basic” modes?

I have been using this program for several months now and would hate not having it. I am also an avid Photoshop user but I find myself using Paint.NET more than Photoshop because it loads so quickly and lets me get my stuff done fast. They obviously don’t have as many features as Photoshop nor a comparable number of filters but I hardly use them anyway. Congrats to the Paint.NET team because they have done an amazing job on this product!

Note: This version does expire December 31 but that is because a newer version will be out before then.

News Source: Paint.NET Blog

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com