Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on September 25, 2009 by CyberNet.

SiteAdvisor started out as a really good idea. Whenever you went to a site, the SiteAdvisor label would turn green (safe), yellow (shady) or red (dangerous) to indicate the safety of that site. But then McAfee got involved and bundled SiteAdvisor with a search bar, a resident Windows service and other common signs of bloatware. Fortunately, the Web of Trust (WOT) extension stepped up to fill the gap that SiteAdvisor left.

Setup

When installing Web of Trust for the first time, the extension asks you how it should behave. Depending on your needs, you can go with the full package (Basic), a less intrusive version (Light) or a child-safe version. The latter will first check whether or not the site your kid wants to navigate to is safe. If no ratings are available, the site will be blocked. Interestingly, an accessibility setting for color blind people is also available. After choosing which version you want to go with, WOT will prompt you to create an account with them to unlock the full potential of the extension.

How it works

After installing WOT, a color indicator will be placed in the navigation toolbar. Much like SiteAdvisor, a quick glance at this icon lets you know whether you’re safe or not. Additionally, you can click the indicator to reveal more information about the site. WOT keeps track of trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. It is also possible to read user reviews by clicking ‘View scorecard for rating details’.

WOT also protects you when you’re searching with Google, Yahoo and Bing. Depending on your settings, you can choose to have WOT always display a rating next to every search result, only display the rating if it’s not green or not display ratings at all. Similarly, if you’re a Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo Mail user, WOT will display these icons in your incoming e-mails too.

Blocking features

Depending on how cautious you are, you might want to set up WOT like a passive advisor or rather like a mom who is always on your side to keep you out of bad neighborhoods. Either way, you can pull up the settings panel and configure the lowest permissible safety level for each category. Depending on your choice, WOT will either alert you or block you from visiting sites that do not meet your customized safety criteria.

WOT Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

For the audio, graphics, and video lovers out there…Ubuntu Studio 7.04 is here! One of the developers, “joejaxx,” posted about the new release to give some insight as to what you can expect after getting Ubuntu Studio up and running:

The Ubuntu Studio team is proud to announce its first release: 7.04 for Intel i386-compatible processors. With this release, which you can download for DVD in little over 860 MiB, we offer a feature that is somewhat reminiscent of Ubuntu Server: on installation, you can choose between the Audio, Graphics or Video tasks; and choose also to install a number of plugins, which for this release is mainly aimed at audio production.

To test out Ubuntu Studio you have to install it on your PC because there is no LiveCD/DVD to use. After you get it up and running you’ll find some of these great applications there for you to use:

• Video:
  • PiTiVi – Video editor
  • dvgrab – Grab digital video data via IEEE1394 links
• Graphics:
  • Blender – A very fast and versatile 3D suite for modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback.
  • Gimp – Powerful photo editing application often compared to Adobe Photoshop.
  • Inkscape – A vector-based drawing program similar to Adobe Illustrator.
• Audio:
  • Audacity – Swiss army audio editor
  • Ardour – Digital audio workstation
• And much much more…

Ubuntu Studio also brings a sexy black theme to your computer, but I think it might be a little too dark for my own liking. Here are three screenshots to give you an overview of what it looks like:

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

The demand for this release is so great that the site seems to be suffering from the same troubles that Ubuntu had when they released 7.04 a few weeks ago. Their site is currently unavailable so we have taken the liberty of posting links to several mirrors that are hosting Ubuntu Studio 7.04, and I put them in the order of the fastest first. I was receiving 500KBps+ on the first mirror which nearly maxed out my download speed.

http://aehunter.net/Files/UbuntuStudio/
http://proyectos.pixelamigo.com/software/Ubuntu/ubuntustudio/7.04/
http://intelligentdancemusic.com/ubuntustudio
http://mirror.imbrandon.com/ubuntustudio/7.04
http://download.linuxaudio.org/ubuntustudio
http://mir.zyrianes.net/ubuntustudio/7.04

Note: The ISO image is 860MB which is just slightly larger than what a CD can hold, so you’ll have to burn this to a DVD.

Source: Download Squad

Thanks for the tip Mohan!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Now that we’ve seen Sony’s new VAIO Z in its luscious press shots, it’s time to face reality and lay our itchy hands on this 13-inch ultraportable laptop, along with its eccentric expansion dock that packs both a Blu-ray drive and an AMD Radeon HD 6650M graphics chip (with 1GB of video RAM). Just as we were told by our little birdie, said dock is connected to the notebook via Light Peak — a first for Sony — but there’s a catch: Sony’s only implementing the architecture and not the connector, so for the time being, this sweet high speed connection is only compatible with the docking unit and nothing else.

Anyhow, here’s a quick recap: what we have here is a 1.18kg feather-light machine packing a 256GB SSD and 1.3 megapixel webcam, plus a matte LCD display with resolution at 1600 x 900 or an optional 1920 x 1080. Oh yes, for an extra cost, you get some sweet full HD action at just 13 inches. This upgraded display performed well in the relatively dark confines of the press event, but how it fares under direct sunlight remains to be seen. Read on for more hands-on impression.

Gallery: Sony Vaio Z detailed hands-on

Gallery: Sony VAIO Z hands-on

Gallery: Sony VAIO Z components

Continue reading Sony’s new VAIO Z ultraportable laptop with Power Media Dock hands-on (video)

Sony’s new VAIO Z ultraportable laptop with Power Media Dock hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Jun 2011 07:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on May 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mac only
Interestingly enough Microsoft has released Office 2008 Service Pack 1 today for Macs. What’s interesting about that? Well, it is one of the fastest turnarounds for a Service Pack that I’ve ever seen. The suite of applications was just released back in January 2008, and here we are four months later with a Service Pack. Office 2007 for Windows didn’t see it’s first Service Pack for nearly a year after the consumer launch.

The press release issued by Microsoft said that the “velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what [they] saw after the launch of Office 2004.” To help celebrate they decided to give us a glimpse of what the future holds for the next version of Mac Office. Drumroll please… VBA support! That’s right, but you’ll likely be waiting a few years before we see a new Mac Office pop out of the Microsoft bat cave.

What’s really interesting is the timing of the VBA announcement. It was just last week that OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta was released with some early stages of VBA support, and it’s almost as if Microsoft was afraid that users might start looking to OpenOffice.org to pick up where Microsoft left off. That might not be the case, but that was the first thing that popped into my mind.

At any rate Office 2008 SP1 is out, and ready for you to download. The list of features and improvements can be found below, but the 180MB download doesn’t bring anything too earth shattering.

Get Office 2008 SP1 for Mac (180MB)

Microsoft Office Excel

• Compatibility. Improved compatibility with files exchanged between Excel 2008 for Mac and Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows
• Custom Error Bars. Restored formatting option on the Error Bars panel for data series
• Printing. More reliable printing for elements on Excel 2008 workbooks

Microsoft Entourage

• Calendar. Significant enhancements to improve calendar view and all-day reminders with reoccurrence
• Exchange Server support. Overall improvement to synchronization support, including removing attachments from Exchange Server messages and synchronizing to the server, as well as support for editing the contents of Exchange Server messages via AppleScript and synchronizing the changes to the server
• E-mail images. Ability to send and view images in Entourage from third-party tools

Microsoft Office Word

• Printing. Improved accuracy when orienting tables with cell shading
• Document map. Improved reliability and responsiveness to select items
• Notebook layout. Updated formatting, recording status and a variety of display options

Microsoft Office PowerPoint

• Printing. Improvements to eliminate crashing when printing documents to high-dpi printers and increased overall printing speed by 10 times on some large presentations
• Mobile viewing. Ability to view Mac .PPTX files on Windows Mobile phones
• AppleScript. Ability to use the PowerPoint selection object in AppleScript to implement custom scripts that operate on the current selection in PowerPoint

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows; Mac
Finding a good alarm clock to help get you up in the wee hours of the morning can be tough. I have a tendency of placing the clock out of arms reach so that I have to get out of bed in order to turn it off. What I use as an alarm varies from things like my cellphone or TV all the way to my computer.

For some odd reason it seems as though free alarm clocks for computers are tough to come by these days. A few years ago we covered a decent alarm clock called Citrus that offered a lot of the functionality people would expect, and the best part was that it was free. Unfortunately the freeware stage didn’t last long, and it’s now a $13 program. Similarly Aurora for Mac used to be free, but it now bears a $22 price tag.

So today we’re showing our appreciation to the developers who’ve taken the time to build powerful alarm clock applications, and are currently offering them for free!

–College Alarm Clock (Homepage)–

Windows only
This alarm clock is particularly useful for people that have different schedules each day of the week, and as the name implies the target audience is college students. Using it is simple: download and run the program… there’s nothing to install. After that you can start tinkering around with the different configuration options.

You’ll quickly notice that there are 7 tabs spread out across the top for each day of the week. For each day you can designate a different time that coincides with your schedule, which for college students works out perfectly. It doesn’t exactly have a fancy interface, but it can be rather handy if your schedule varies throughout the week.

–Alarm Clock 2 (Homepage)–

Mac only
This is a powerful alarm application that is not only capable of handling alarms, but can also serve as a stopwatch or timer. I’d have to say that the best part is the fact that it’s able to wake your computer from sleep to sound your alarm. That’s great for anyone who doesn’t like to leave their computer running overnight.

Here are some of the other features that really make it stand out from the crowd:

• Set as many alarms as you want
• Set repeating alarms or one-time alarms
• Wake up to any song, playlist or podcast in your iTunes library
• Wake up peacefully with “easy wake” – a configurable option that slowly increases the volume of your alarm over time

–TinyAlarm (Homepage)–

Mac only
The name of this program gives the impression that this is a basic run-of-the-mill alarm clock, but that’s not the case at all. It doesn’t integrate with your iTunes library like the previous application does, but it’s capable of doing most things people would want from an alarm clock:

• Choose from System sounds or sounds in your personal library
• Choose how many chimes sound when the alarm goes off
• Add a text reminder to alarms that get displayed in a Growl notification
• Fuzzy timers: Timers that are “Exact” will simply add the minutes or hours to the current time. Timers that are “About” (for example, “About 15 minutes”), are rounded off.

–Overview–

If you use an alarm clock on your computer we’d love to hear which one. The selection of free solutions seems to be dwindling, but hopefully that won’t be a growing trend.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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