Apr 28

Sabayon Linux 3.4 Review – Almost Perfect

Posted in: Freeware, Linux, Reviews, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili

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

Sabayon Apps
Click to Enlarge

I managed to find a lot of time over the weekend to play with the new Ubuntu 7.10 that was released on Thursday. It took a little bit of extra work to get the restricted drivers installed, and then to enable Compiz Fusion, but it was well worth it.

One anonymous commenter pointed out a Linux distribution called Sabayon Linux 3.4f that “just works.” I was skeptical at first with how good this might be, but I quickly became impressed. It includes the restricted/proprietary drivers out-of-the-box, and automatically enables Compiz Fusion for you if it’s supported by your graphics card! What’s even better is that all of this works on the Live DVD that they offer, so you can play with Compiz Fusion before you even install a thing.

Much like OpenSUSE this distribution includes the KDE Kickoff Menu which you can see in my screenshot above. I love this type of menu structure because it seems a lot more organized, and the search box located at the top makes finding your programs extremely easy.

One of the first things that you’ll probably notice on the Live DVD is the abundant amount of applications that are available for you to use. There are several advanced 3D games including TORCS, Battle for Wesnoth, Warsow, and FlightGear sitting on your desktop. I like a good game every now and then, but I don’t play them enough to make it worth installing. Luckily if you choose to setup Sabayon on your computer you can decide whether you want the games installed:

Sabayon Installation

Sabayon also comes with an array of other applications, such as Picasa and Google Earth, that you won’t find built-in to other Linux distributions. This is pretty smart because it creates even less work for the user.

So how is this not perfect? There are still some graphics cards that it does not support, such as my laptop’s ATI Mobility Radeon X1400. When running Sabayon with the 3D graphics my Taskbars were un-clickable. I had no problem with my desktop’s graphics card, so your mileage may vary. There is a post in the Sabayon forum where users have specified whether their graphics card works or not.

As it stands right now I would say that this is my favorite Linux distribution because of how many things it is able to include out-of-the-box. I had the problem with my graphics card on my laptop, but things went so incredibly smooth on my desktop that it compensated for those issues. If they are able to extend their graphics card support a little more I would definitely say this is the best version of Linux available. Oh, and did I mention that it is extremely well updated?

The two things I’m not a huge fan about are the bright red theme and slightly disturbing sound scheme. Luckily these things can easily be changed. ;)

Sabayon Linux Homepage

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Apr 25

Spicebird: Email, Calendar, IM, RSS, and More

Posted in: Freeware, Mozilla, Pre-Release, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili, videos

This article was written on January 05, 2008 by CyberNet.

There’s a new app on the block, and it looks as though it may have a very promising future. The open source Spicebird project has its first Alpha release coming up soon, and to tease us they’ve posted a video of what to expect. We’ve outlined all of the features demonstrated in the video below, and provided screenshots from each important aspect of the program.

They haven’t released Spicebird 0.3 Alpha yet, but you can plan on it having a customizable homepage, email, calendar, contacts, and instant messaging all rolled into the application. As time goes on they would like to integrate a way to blog from Spicebird as well as a task manager.

The great thing about Spicebird is that it seems really intuitive. They’ve laid out the various services (email, calendar, etc…) into an already familiar tabbed interface. Take a look for yourself at what Spicebird 0.3 Alpha will have to offer when it is released:

–Homepage–

This is one of the really unique aspects of the program. It’s a customizable homepage that has a handful of modules by default. There’s a module for your inbox, calendar, clocks, feeds, and agenda. You can add multiple copies of each module to your homepage if you would like, such as one for each inbox, and they can be arranged by dragging them around.

Spicebird Homepage
(Click to Enlarge)

–Email–

Email works just like it does in Mozilla Thunderbird. The nice thing is that it will detect when an event is mentioned in an email, and offer to schedule it for you.  That’s a lot like what Gmail does with Google Calendar.

Spicebird Email
(Click to Enlarge)

–Calendar–

As expected the calendar will completely support the drag & drop creation/management of events. If you’ve used Mozilla Sunbird before you’ll already be pretty familiar with how this works.

Spicebird Calendar
(Click to Enlarge)

–Contacts–

There’s not a whole lot you can do with a contact list, but this one looks pretty nice.

Spicebird Contacts
(Click to Enlarge)

–Instant Messenger–

Chatting is rather straight forward, and it looks like for right now it will only work with Jabber accounts. I’m guessing that would mean Google Talk can easily be setup.

Spicebird Instant Messenger
(Click to Enlarge)

Spicebird [via Lifehacker]

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Apr 23

CyberNotes: Create Free iPhone Ringtones Using iTunes in Windows

Posted in: CyberNotes, Freeware, General, Google, itunes, Music, Newly Released, Software, Today's Chili, Windows, Windows Vista, Windows XP

This article was written on August 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Tutorial Thursday

arrow Windows Windows; Mac Mac arrow
One of the things that Apple hasn’t made easy for iPhone owners is providing a way to create custom ringtones in Windows. If you’re a Mac owner you can use GarageBand, but Apple doesn’t provide that application on Windows. Instead what they expect you to do is purchase a song for $0.99, and then convert it to a ringtone for another $0.99.

As it turns out in a few steps you can actually convert a DRM-free song into a ringtone using only iTunes in Windows. The trick also works for Mac users, but using GarageBand is a lot simpler so we’re focusing primarily on the Windows side.

Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Start iTunes and find the [DRM-free] song you want to convert to a ringtone. Right-click on it and select the Get Info option.
    itunes ringtone get info.png
  2. On the Options tab locate the Start Time and End Time options. This is where you want to specify the portion of the song you wanted converted into a ringtone. Check both of the boxes, and make sure your ringtone is under 30-seconds. Press OK when finished.
    itunes ringtone time.png
  3. Right-click on the song you just modified, and choose the Convert to AAC option. If you don’t see this in the context menu navigate to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Importing, and make sure the AAC Encoder is selected in the Import Using menu.
    itunes ringtone aac.png
  4. Once the song has finished being converted to the new format it will appear in your music list, and the “Time” should reflect the correct duration of the ringtone (which should be less than 30-seconds). Now navigate to your iTunes music folder to find the converted song. Here’s an example of where my Green Day ringtone was located:
    itunes ringtone folder.png
  5. Make sure you’re able to see the file’s extension (.M4A) like in the screenshot above. If you don’t see the extension go to Tools -> Folder Options -> View (Organize -> Folder and Search Options on Vista), and uncheck the Hide extensions for known file types box. Then click OK.
  6. Copy the music file (with the .M4A extension) to your desktop. Once you’ve done that rename the file’s extension to .M4R which will make iTunes recognize it as a ringtone. Make sure there are no symbols (underscores, hyphens, etc…) in the file name.
    itunes ringtone m4r.png
  7. In iTunes go to File -> Add File to Library, and then browse for the file from step 6. Once you’ve selected it press the Open button. iTunes will place the ringtone in the respective section in your library:
    itunes ringtone library.png
  8. Sync your iPhone with iTunes and your newly created ringtone should get transferred over. If it doesn’t be sure to check the Ringtones tab in the iPhone configuration section of iTunes to verify that it is setup to sync your ringtones.

–What is DRM?–

I’ve been getting all kinds of questions and emails from people asking what DRM is. An anonymous commenter below did a great job answering the question. Here is his response:

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. In a nutshell, a song with DRM is meant to keep you from giving it to someone else. If you’re using Windows XP (and I’m sure there’s some equivalent for Vista), you can right-click on a song file, and choose Properties. Under the Summary tab, click the Advanced >> button if it’s there. Under the Origin heading, you will see an entry named ‘Protected’. If it says No, then the song does not have a DRM. If it says Yes, well, you may be able to pay Apple money to convert the song to an iTunes Plus track, which will be DRM-free. Hope this helps, best of luck!

That’s all there is to it. Now you can save yourself a bunch of money on ringtones. A big thanks to the Apple Blog who assembled the original instructions on how to do this for the Mac!

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Apr 21

Free BurnAware is Available, Again

Posted in: Freeware, Newly Released, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on August 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

burnaware free.png

arrow Windows Windows only arrow
In March we covered two free CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning applications that pretty much amounted to everything you’d need. One of the programs, called BurnAware, was sold off a few months later to a company who scrapped the idea of offering a free version of the program. I had uploaded a mirror for the last free version, and over the last two months it’s been downloaded almost 1,500 times. That’s a good indication that peopled like the app, but not the price tag.

It’s not often that you see a program go from being free to paid, and then back to free, but that’s the path BurnAware has taken. The company offering the program still has a paid version available, but they have unveiled the no-cost BurnAware Free which supports all the basic operations most people need:

  • Create data and multisession CD/DVD/Blu-ray Discs
  • Create Audio CDs and jukebox CD/DVD/Blu-ray Discs
  • Create DVDs-Video
  • Create and burn disc images
  • Supports all current hardware interfaces (IDE/SCSI/USB/1394/SATA)
  • Supports UDF/ISO9660/Joliet Bridged file systems (any combination)
  • On-the-fly writing for all image types (no staging to hard drive first)
  • Auto-verification of written files
  • Supports CD-Text
  • Supports Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista (32 and 64 Bit), no drivers required

Go ahead and grab the free version before they change their minds, again! ;)

Download BurnAware Free for Windows

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Apr 19

Split Your Monitor into Virtual Regions

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on March 06, 2009 by CyberNet.

maxto-2.jpg

arrow Windows Windows only arrow
It seems like I am always finding myself being overloaded with a dozen or two different windows open at any given time, and it can become a bit tedious to manage them. This is where applications like GridMove or WinSplit Revolution have come in handy, and today we’ve got another great alternative called MaxTo.

With MaxTo you’ll be able to define regions on your monitor(s) that can serve as constraints when maximizing windows. Setting up your regions is pretty straightforward: just select a region and choose whether you want to split in half horizontally or vertically. From what I can tell you can split all of your monitors into as many sections as you’d like.

Here are some of the features for MaxTo:

  • Easily change regions
  • Easily disabled by holding Shift
  • Move windows using shortcut keys
  • Multi-monitor support
  • Light-weight (less than 200kB to download)

Programs like this take a little getting used to because you’ll have to analyze your workflow if you want to get things just right. With a little bit of effort you can see some amazing benefits though. Once I started using a program like this to help manage my windows (particularly for Windows Explorer) I found that I was way more productive than I was without it.

Get MaxTo for Windows 32-bit and 64-bit [via Lifehacker]

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Apr 18

New Features I’ve Found in Firefox 3 so far

Posted in: Firefox 3, Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on February 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

For the last few weeks I’ve made Firefox 3 nightly releases my primary browser because my extensions all work well with it. I always like to get a sneak peek at what is coming, and there are always so many things that change that it can be hard to keep track of them all. I find that the people who see the new features gradually appear will notice them the most, which is why I want to jump on the Firefox 3 bandwagon early on. I did the same thing with Firefox 2 pre-release versions, and each time a new feature worth noting appeared in the nightly releases I made sure to relay the information onto our readers.

So far I have noticed two new things in Firefox 3 that will probably be overlooked by anyone who just tinkers around with it. Even though these features aren’t anything to die over I thought it might please some people who were afraid that Mozilla has not begun to implement new things in the browser. Actually, Mozilla has been working very hard on implementing Firefox’s graphics engine, called Cairo, that will not only load pages faster but it will also do things like scale images much better. I’m sure this is something a lot of Firefox users will probably take for granted when Firefox 3 is released later this year.

So what are the two new features that I found? Like I said, these aren’t exactly ground-breaking but I like them. First off I noticed a new setting in the Options that will let a user choose whether or not they are notified when a site tries to automatically reload or redirect the user. By default this is disabled, but I’ve now had it enabled for well over a week and I really like it.

Redirect FF3 Option

Then when a site tries to redirect or reload the page Firefox will notify you with a little bar at the top similar to what’s seen when a popup window is blocked:

Redirect FF3

So it is just something small right now, but it does make you notice when you’re being redirected. However, I’m hoping that they will implement a feature similar to the popup blocker where you can permanently allow certain sites. I still have this feature enabled, but it can get annoying if you constantly click on links in emails you receive at a Gmail address…which redirects you each time you click on a link. I’m sure there is a large list of sites this would get annoying at, which is why they need to let users choose which sites to permanently allow.

The other feature that I noticed is when you click in a textbox to enter the path to a file on your computer it will automatically popup with the Open dialog box. Here is an example of how it works when composing a message in Gmail:

Gmail FF3

It kinda sounds like a stupid feature and really simple since you can just click the Browse button, but I like this. Well, I’m not even sure if this is a feature because I couldn’t find any info on it, so for all I know it could be some kind of bug. The reason I’m questioning whether it is a bug or not is because some fields let you enter in either a file on your computer or a URL to an existing file. With this you can’t actually paste in a URL since the Open dialog box opens immediately.

That’s all I’ve found since my last updates on the Firefox 3 graphics engine. I’ll continue to keep you posted as new things get included in the nightly builds. Oh yeah, and according the latest meeting notes for Firefox 3 it looks as though Places will be back in by the next Alpha release planned for the middle of March. It hasn’t made its way back into the nightlies yet, but I expect that it will within the next week or two.

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Apr 17

Wine 1.0 Release Date… After 15 Years in the Making

Posted in: Freeware, Linux, Release Date, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on March 24, 2008 by CyberNet.

wine birthday In 1993 a project called Wine was started as a way to run Windows applications on Linux without using an emulator. Instead Wine serves as a compatibility layer that includes their own implementation of the Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL’s) that make the Windows applications tick, and there has been a lot of reverse engineering done to get it to the current state.

It took over 12 years for the first Beta version of Wine to be released, and after a whopping 15 years Wine 1.0 will be shipping on June 6th, 2008. This has got to be one of the longest development cycles to reach version 1.0!

One of their big goals for Wine 1.0 is to get Adobe Photoshop CS2 fully functional, which is something Google is sponsoring. With over 1,200 compatible Windows applications adding Photoshop CS2 to the list will definitely be a huge success for the team and the software as a whole.

I’m definitely excited about Wine 1.0, but you can bet the bank that Microsoft isn’t jumping up and down in their seats. Sure it means that they might sell more copies of Office, but as far as I know Microsoft has never exactly gone out of their way to help out Wine.

Wine 1.0 Schedule [via Desktop Linux]

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Apr 15

Sleipnir Browser Successful in Japan, Targets English Users Now

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on July 23, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows XP Professional-1.png
(Click to Enlarge)

Just when you thought we had enough web browsers available another goes and pops up right under our noses. That’s exactly what the Japanese browser called Sleipnir did, and it’s managed to scrounge up 9% of the browser market share in Japan.

What’s so special about Sleipnir? It reminds me a lot of Maxthon and Avant Browser in what it has set out to accomplish. Basically it uses Internet Explorer’s rendering engine (called Trident) to display sites, but the browser itself is customizable with the use of plug-ins and skins. One of the biggest benefits of using this over the other IE-based browsers is that it can also use Firefox’s rendering engine (called Gecko) to display sites. This is something that Maxthon used to offer, but it was abandoned when Maxthon 2 was released.

The best thing Sleipnir has going for it is how efficiently it manages its memory. When running it the memory usage starts at about 34MB, and will gradually increase as you open more tabs. No matter how many tabs I opened and closed the memory usage would always fall back to 34MB when I had no websites open. If I let it sit there idle for a few minutes it would even fall as low as 28MB. That’s among the best memory usage I’ve seen for any graphical web browser.

I don’t think I’ll be switching to Sleipnir anytime soon, but it’s nice to see alternatives like this. The browser arena is getting a little crowded though.

Note: A portable version of Sleipnir is available.

Sleipnir Homepage [via InfoWorld]

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Apr 09

Foxmarks Beta for Firefox 3

Posted in: Firefox 3, Firefox Extensions, Freeware, Pre-Release, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on March 12, 2008 by CyberNet.

foxmarks beta With the release of Firefox 3 Beta 4 the other day it is good to see how many extension developers have been providing updates to prepare the launch of the Firefox 3 browser. The extensions that need the most love and care are those that deal with bookmarks, and that’s because the backend of the bookmarking system in Firefox 3 has been significantly changed.

One of the extensions that I’ve been waiting the longest for is Foxmarks (review). It’s useful because it runs in the background of Firefox, and it will synchronize your bookmarks with a remote server. That way you can access your bookmarks from any computer, or sync them with other Firefox installations. And they have a mobile interface for quick access even on your cellphone or PDA.

Foxmarks is currently testing a version of the extension that is compatible with the pre-release versions of the Firefox 3 browser, but there’s a catch. You have to sign up to be part of the Beta program (must be a registered user), and according to them there is a list of people waiting to get in. If you do sign up to be part of the Beta program be prepared to submit any bugs that you find.

And as their blog points out testers may find that there are issues while using the extension:

There hasn’t been a single report of Foxmarks crashing Firefox beta 4 yet; that version was only released yesterday, but we’ve been impressed by how the quality of Firefox keeps marching forward with each release. Beta 4 may well be stable enough for general use with Foxmarks. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

There are also reports of occasional performance problems — sometimes sync under Firefox 3 is really fast, and sometimes it’s quite slow. Surprisingly, this variability occurs on the same computer with the same bookmarks within the same session. We’re not sure what might account for the difference yet, but we’re looking into it.

So if you feel like living on the bleeding edge there’s no better combination than downloading Firefox 3 Beta 4, and then signing up to be part of the Foxmarks Beta program. :)

Foxmarks Beta
Kudos to Leland for the heads up!

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Apr 05

CyberNotes: The Ultimate Sidebar

Posted in: CyberNotes, Features, Freeware, Reviews, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on November 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Time Saving Tuesday

I’m always looking for ways to get things done a bit faster, and today we bring you what could very well be the ultimate sidebar. It’s actually more like a personalized homepage, a sidebar, and an application launcher all rolled up into one. That sounds pretty interesting, doesn’t it?

SideSlide is a free application for Windows that is sure to impress. You can tuck it away to any edge of the screen, and it will pop out at a moment’s notice. In your SideSlide workspace you’ll be able to add RSS feeds, program shortcuts, hyperlinks to websites, notes, images, reminders, and more!

SideSlide Main 

–Features–

SideSlide is loaded up with a bunch of great features, but before I dive into the specifics I thought there were a few worth highlighting:

  • Dock to any screen edge
  • Read RSS news feeds
  • Create shortcuts to files, folders and URLs
  • Add notes
  • Schedule reminders
  • Drag and drop text from your browser to have it saved
  • Shrink and fold containers
  • Launch multiple programs at once
  • Advanced keyboard navigation
  • Customizable skins
  • Find-as-you-type shortcut searching

–Program and Website Shortcuts–

SideSlide above all else is an application launcher. You can add shortcuts to websites you visit, programs you use, or folders you open. There are several different ways that you can organize the shortcuts you add to the workspace, but we’ll get into that in a little bit.

SideSlide Shortcuts

One thing you’ll want to know is that you can zoom in and out of the shortcuts, which means you can make some shortcuts bigger than others. This can be seen in the screenshot above, and it is nice being able to emphasize the programs you use the most.

–Containers–

Containers are like virtual folders for shortcuts to websites, folders, and files. The most common reason that you’ll want to place things in containers is because you can expand and contract them as needed, thereby conserving the screen space that is so precious to you. You can see an animation demonstrating this in the RSS feeds section below.

There is another benefit to placing shortcuts in containers that I absolutely love. When you right-click on a container you can launch all of the shortcuts that reside within it, which is great for both websites and programs you use often:

SideSlide Start All Shortcuts

There’s also an experimental feature that lets you nest containers. This would be like placing a folder inside of a folder. To enable this right-click anywhere in SideSlide and go to Settings -> Containers -> Capture/Nested Containers.

–RSS Feeds–

SideSlide has some nice built-in feed reading capabilities if you only have a handful of RSS feeds that you want to keep up on. With it you can create a mashup of feeds (a.k.a. combine multiple feeds into one), and the feeds can be expanded or contracted to conserve space in SideSlide:

SideSlide Feed

You can force all of your feeds to update at anytime (press F11), or you can update an individual feed by pressing the update button in the container’s title bar. The last time a particular feed was checked for updates will be shown in the container’s status bar.

I would say that you can easily keep up with 15 or 20 feeds with this program, but more than that may start to become a chore. I highly recommend taking advantage of the mashup feature so that you’ll just have one container for each different type of news. For example, you can create one container that includes all of your technology news, another for gadgets, and so on.

Here are some more features the feed reader offers:

  • Instant find-as-you-type searching of your news (press Ctrl+S). You can choose to search descriptions and/or headlines.
  • You can make SideSlide open the article’s website when links are clicked instead of opening the preview window.

–Settings–

There are all kinds of different settings that you can configure with SideSlide. Here is a brief list of the different options:

  • Make the workspace transparent
  • Auto expand containers on mouse-over
  • Enable nested containers
  • Add a shadow to the workspace
  • Display the date and time in the title bar of SideSlide

I also mentioned earlier that you can customize the SideSlide skin. Here is what the configuration screen look like for doing that:

SideSlide Display Properties
Click to Enlarge

–Overview–

When I first saw this program I thought it wouldn’t really do anything useful, but that was because it was hard to realize just how powerful the program was from their simplistic description page. Later I discovered the Quick Start Guide that they put together, and they did an amazing job of outlining all of the different features. After flipping through that and getting accustomed to the keyboard shortcuts I realized that this was definitely a keeper.

I would, however, like to see a tabbed interface for multiple workspaces. Then you would be able to create different workspaces for leisure, feed reading, and more. I guess being able to nest containers kind of makes that possible, but I would still like to see tabs make their way into SideSlide.

SideSlide Homepage

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