Hasta La Gadget!

This morning Microsoft founder Bill Gates answered questions from users from around the world in his second “AMA” session on Reddit. It was there that he confirmed oddities small and … Continue reading

This article was written on July 13, 2012 by CyberNet.

I’m not a huge fan of Adobe Air apps as I have stated countless times in the past, but it seems as though some of the best Twitter clients are all powered by it. The one I am talking about this time around is called DestroyTwitter, and while the interface looks extremely simplistic there are actually a fair number of options that you can customize. Even the theme selection that’s available is impressive given how well each of them were thought out (including ones made specifically for Reddit, Facebook, and Vimeo fans).

if you’re just going off my screenshot above you might be thinking that this is a single-column interface, but you’d only partially be right. You can get to the other columns (Mentions, Search, and Messages) by clicking the appropriate tabs, or you can make the window wider and as it expands those sections will each start to come into view. For most monitors if you made the app full screen you should have no problems viewing all four columns at the same time.

Here is a rundown of some of the other features as highlighted by the developer:

• Powerful and Lightweight
  DestroyTwitter packs in a ton of features while leaving an unbelievably small footprint. How does memory usage as low as 25mb sound? What about an installer under 1mb?
• Filter the Noise
  Tired of reading where your friends are? Filter Foursquare/Gowalla and you’re good to go. Someone on a tweeting spree at an event? Filter them or the event’s hashtag. 
• Auto-Complete Usernames
  Anyone who can remember all of their friends’ usernames deserves a trophy. Lucky for you, you only need to know the first few letters.
• Preferences Galore
  Font too small? Try medium or large. Don’t like icons? Get rid of them. Hate the notification sound? Choose from the five others. Need to read 200 tweets every 30 seconds? Done. 

DestroyTwitter Homepage (Windows/Mac/Linux; Freeware)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 08, 2011 by CyberNet.

Many of you have likely heard of Amarok which is a popular cross-platform music player, and Clementine is a cross platform player that is benefiting from its open source nature. To me it has a clean interface the features people are looking for, such as iPhone syncing. It also includes a slew of other features most people will never even use, such as controlling the player with a Wii Remote.

Here are some of the other features they highlight:

• Search and play your local music library.
• Listen to internet radio from Last.fm, SomaFM, Magnatune, Jamendo and Icecast.
• Create smart playlists and dynamic playlists.
• Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX.
• CUE sheet support.
• Visualisations from projectM.
• Lyrics and artist biographies and photos.
• Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC.
• Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music.
• Fetch missing tags from MusicBrainz.
• Download missing album cover art from Last.fm.
• Cross-platform – works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl).
• Remote control using a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line.
• Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player.
• Queue manager.

Clementine Music Player (Windows/Mac/Linux; Freeware)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on January 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

If this report is true from Mary Jo Foley of at ZDNet, it’s pretty good news! No official announcement has been made, but it is said that Microsoft will offer a “family pack” discount for people purchasing multiple copies of their new operating system, Windows Vista. It’s supposed to be announced within the next few days, and hopefully prices will also follow.

As it stands, the Family Pack promotion would require that a customer would first have to purchase a copy of Vista Ultimate for $399.  Then, additional copies would be offered at a discounted rate, and it’s been rumored that those prices would range from $49.99 to $99.95… quite the discount from the original price. This would be easy for them to do because multiple versions of Vista will already be on a single DVD.  This is part of the Windows Anytime Upgrade Marketing Plan (making it easy to upgrade from a lower edition, to a higher edition of Vista).  Users would be able to “unlock” additional licenses from their original DVD. After paying for the additional copies, a key would be provided.

The number of multiple computer households is growing, so upgrading an operating system or an anti-virus, for example, becomes a expensive endeavor. I think the Family Pack promotion would be enough to convince a family with multiple computers to make the upgrade, and certainly another way for Microsoft to generate revenue from Windows. People have been advocating for a family-licensing program for quite some time now, and so hopefully, Microsoft will respond as expected.

Back in November, there was talk about their License Changes that will allow users to transfer a retail license of Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate to another Machine. This provided that you uninstall the software from the original device before installing it on another device (and that it’s not an OEM version of Vista). It appears that slowly but surely, Microsoft is starting to budge with their licensing terms. The countdown for Vista is on….

News Source: ZDNet

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on October 23, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Ever since we wrote about Mint, the free finance management site, we have received a few requests from those looking for good software to manage personal finances. Sure there are popular alternatives like Quicken and Microsoft Money, but with those you have to fork out the same money that you’re trying to save. I just knew that there had to be something out there worth using that you didn’t have to pay for.

I spent a countless amount of time trying out feature-limited versions of software only to find that their restrictions rendered the software virtually useless for most people. Then I found exactly what I was looking for: Money Manager Ex. Not only is it free, but it is open source and available for both Windows and Linux!

–Setup/Importing–

I was able to get Money Manager up and running in no time at all. There’s a version available that requires no installation, and that’s what I chose to run. This is also great for throwing it on your USB drive and doing your finances wherever you are!

One of the first things that you’re going to do is create a database for Money Manager to store all of your information in. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be familiar with the workings of a database because it does it all for you. Just specify what default currency you want to use, and an optional username:

Then you’ll have to create an account that falls under one of two different types: checking/savings or investment. The checking/savings account can also be used for credit cards, or for that matter anything that you deposit and withdrawal money from. The investment accounts are for stocks which you’ll want updated daily.

Many of you probably already have some software that you use to manage your finances, but that’s okay. You can switch to Money Manager by exporting your current data in a variety of formats:

• Import information from Excel (Comma Separated Value -.CSV) format
• Import information from QIF format (Microsoft Money & Quicken)

–Homepage & Register View–

Money Manager has a homepage that gives you a quick account overview so that you can see financially where you stand. It tells you the balance of each account, and graphs the current month’s expenses against the income:

After you have created an account you’ll be able to manage the transactions in the register view. You can sort the transaction according to any of the columns, but you cannot reorder or remove ones that you don’t use:

Another interesting thing is that each of your accounts can have different currencies associated with them. That makes it a bit easier to manage accounts that are held in different countries.

–Adding Transactions–

As with most personal finance managers, adding new transactions is pretty cut and dry. When you go to add a new transaction you’ll have to pick from a list of payees, which are added by you, as well as categories. Money Manager comes with a pre-built list of categories that should suffice for most of your needs – there weren’t any categories that I had to add.

–Stock Portfolio–

I think the stock portfolio is one of Money Manager’s shining points. You can have it “Refresh” the price of stocks automatically each day, which are fetched from Yahoo! Finance. It will update the price of every stock in your list, and tell you what the respective gain/loss is according to the price you purchased it at. You can also specify an automatic refresh interval if you want it updating the prices, let’s say, every 30 minutes.

–Budgets–

With the budgets you’re able to keep track of your spending in each of the various categories, and you can provide estimated values for each one. That way you can see which categories you have spent more in than you had originally anticipated.

–Reports–

It’s always nice to know where your money goes so that you can try to find areas where you can cut back. Money Manager has several different types of reports that will tell you just that:

• Summary of Accounts
• Where the Money Goes
• Where the Money Comes From
• Categories
• To Whom the Money Goes
• Income vs. Expenses
• Transaction Report
• Budget Performance
• Cash Flow
• Transaction Statistics

If one of those reports doesn’t satisfy your needs you can always create your own, given that you have some knowledge of the SQL syntax. 🙂

–Making it Better–

I realize that this is a completely free program and therefore shouldn’t complain, but there are some things that I think would really make this an exceptional program:

• It seems like the program is popping up with too many windows to enter in information. I should be able to enter in a transaction from within the register view without a popup window being needed. Similarly, payees and categories should be autocompleted as you type instead of opening in a popup window.
• Even though you can use the checking/savings account type for credit cards there should actually be a separate account type for those. That way the columns can read “charge” and “credit” instead of “withdrawal” and “deposit”.
• If you want to accurately track the gain/loss of your stocks you’ll need to to create a new entry for each share purchase. There’s no way to enter in multiple purchase prices (nor dividends) into the stock portfolio. This would be a nice feature to have though.

Money Manager Ex Homepage

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