Hasta La Gadget!

The state of California made October 16th “Steve Jobs Day,” and on October 19th, the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak celebrated his life on campus in Cupertino. The photo here, provided by Apple, shows CEO Tim Cook addressing throngs of people who came to the memorial.

Visualized: Apple’s celebration of Steve Jobs’ life in Cupertino originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on November 11, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows; Mac
As you may recall sLife is a free application that you can use to monitor which applications you use on a regular basis, and then graph the usage on a pretty chart. Previously sLife 2.0 application was only available for Mac users, but after four months the Windows version has also been released.

Most of the features available in the Mac version are also available for the Windows version. This includes things like setting goals, managing activities, viewing computer usage according to application/document/website, and more. Here’s a quick overview of the primary features:

• 5 visualizations to help you understand and manage your computer time and productivity: Day View, Applications View, Web & Documents View, Activities View and Goals View.
• Activities let you group computer interactions according to a criteria that you define. You can call an activity anything that you want such as ‘Checking email’ or ‘Consulting for client A’. As an example, imagine that you create an activity called ‘Reading news’ and associate it with the web page titles ‘New York Times’ and ‘Google News’. Every time that you visit the web page of the New York Times or Google News, Slife will associate the visit with the ‘Reading news’ activity and track time against it.
• Create a goal to help you spend less time performing an activity (i.e. ‘Watching YouTube videos’), or to motivate you to make more efficient use of your time.
• You can easily disable all activity logging in Slife without quitting the app by going into “Private Mode”. To do so, look for the Slife menu icon in the system tray, right-click on it and select the “Private Mode” item.

If you’ve been looking for a good way to track your computer usage I’d say sLife is about as good as it gets for the price… free! It’s like having your own personal stalker.

Get sLife for Windows or Mac

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on June 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Win; Mac; Linux
A common question that I get asked in emails is whether I know of any free accounting software that is any good. Some people don’t want to purchase applications like Quicken because it is way more advanced than what they are looking to do. All they want is a simple way to manage their finances, but at the same time something that offers more features than a basic spreadsheet.

GnuCash is a great solution, and it’s not only free but also open source. To make trying out the program even easier it’s available in a portable form, and switching from a different financial application is a breeze since GnuCash can import QIF and OFX files. Plus it’s available in 21 different languages, and supports using multiple currencies throughout your accounts. Now how cool is that!

Here’s a more complete list of features:

• Checkbook-Style Register – The checkbook-style register provides a custom, convenient and familiar interface to entering financial transactions. The register supports common checking and credit-card transactions, as well as income, stock and currency transactions.
• Double Entry – Every transaction must debit one account and credit others by an equal amount. This ensures that the “books balance”: that the difference between income and outflow exactly equals the sum of all assets and equity.
• Reports, Graphs – GnuCash has an integrated reporting and graphing module, and comes complete with a full suite of standard and customizeable reports, such as Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss, Portfolio Valuation, and many others.
• Income/Expense Account Types – Income/Expense Account Types (Categories) allow you to categorize your cash flow. When used properly with the double-entry feature and equity accounts, these enable you to generate reports, such as Profit & Loss, that plain-vanilla systems cannot handle.
• Multiple Currencies – Different accounts can be denominated in different currencies. Currency movements between accounts are fully balanced when double-entry is enabled.
• Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios – Track stocks individually (one per account) or in portfolio of accounts (a group of accounts that can be displayed together).
• Small Business Accounting Features – Simplify managing a small business with Customer and Vendor tracking, Invoicing and Bill Payment, and Tax and Billing Terms.
• QIF & OFX Import – Intuit Quicken QIF files can be imported, and are automatically merged to eliminate duplicate transactions. GnuCash is the first free software application to support the Open Financial Exchange protocol that many banks and financial services are starting to use.
• Transaction Finder – A powerful transaction query dialogue can help you quickly locate a needle in a haystack.
• General Ledger – Multiple accounts can be displayed in one register window at the same time. This can ease the trouble of tracking down typing/entry errors. It also provides a convenient way of viewing a portfolio of many stocks, by showing all transactions in that portfolio.
• Online Stock & Mutual Fund Quotes – Get Stock & Mutual Fund quotes from various web sites, update portfolio automatically. Additional pricing sources are added regularly.
• Check Printing – Checks may be printed in standard formats on common check stocks. A customization GUI allows custom check layouts to be developed.
• Scheduled Transactions – You can now create recurring transactions, including automatic reminders when a transaction is due, the ability to postpone a scheduled transaction without canceling it, and the ability to specify only a limited number of transactions.

Get GnuCash (Portable Version)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows; Mac
I’m one of those stat geeks that love to know everything I can about what my computer is doing. It’s not that I use the information to do much, but a quick glance at the CPU or memory usage has, at times, helped me figure out why my computer is going so darn slow. For example, a spike in memory usage is typically the result of an app that likely needs to be restarted.

There are dozens of different applications and widgets out there that will monitor these things for you, and today we’re going to show you some of our favorites. We’ve got a mixture of programs and widgets for both Windows and Mac, and hopefully one of them will do exactly what you’re looking for.

–Performance Monitor (Homepage)–

Windows only
Performance Monitor is a compact application that can show disk, memory, CPU, and network usage in a couple different ways. It’s not only a free program, but there is also a portable version available that you can carry along on a USB drive.

The most appealing way to monitor the various sensors on your computer is through the live graphs that will appear on your desktop after you run the application. There are four graphs by default, and you can customize their positioning simply by dragging and dropping them. If you hover over one of the graphs with your mouse it will give you the actual numbers that correspond to it:

You can enable a “click-through” option for the graphs so that you are able to click any buttons or menus that might appear behind them. That way you can leave them on top of other window and still have access to anything appearing underneath.

If the graphs occupy too much space you can always turn to a System Tray icon for each of the sensors. Although the icons are a little small in the System Tray they are still able to show live graphs for the various stats, and you can hover over the icons to see the current state of the sensor.

Worried about wasting system resources on a monitoring tool like this? When I was using Performance Monitor it consumed just 7MB of memory, which is less than most other tools that serve the same purpose.

–iStat (Homepage)–

Windows; Mac
Most Mac owners are probably aware of iStat because it comes in two powerful forms: an application and a widget. What you might not know is that there are also iStat widgets available for the Vista gadget system, and also for the Yahoo! Widget Engine. They aren’t quite as powerful as the Mac alternatives, but they are still useful.

For Mac:

On the Mac side there are three notable iStat offerings. The iStat Menu is an application that is constantly monitoring the data on your computer, and it displays the results in the Menu bar. The layout can be completely customized, and clicking on any of the results will expand a menu with more details.

When it comes to Dashboard widgets there are two different solutions: iStat Pro and iStat Nano. The names of the two pretty much giveaway the differences, and they are that iStat Pro offers a more complete set of statistics while iStat Nano shows only the basic information. Here’s what iStat Pro looks like:

(Click to Enlarge)

For Windows:

What’s interesting with iStat for Windows is that there really isn’t an all-in-one package available like there is for the Mac. Instead there are different widgets for monitoring CPU, memory, battery, and wireless information. If you’re a Vista user these things are available as Vista Sidebar Gadgets, otherwise you can use the Yahoo! Widget Engine.

An example of what the widgets look like are pictured to the right, and all of them come in two different forms. You can get the classic “bar graph” design, or a more stylish gauge. If you grab the Yahoo! widgets both designs are included in one package.

–Overview–

There are so many different ways to monitor your memory usage, disk space, and CPU utilization that there’s no way they could all be covered here. That’s what we have the comments for though! Let us know in the comments what you use to keep track of your precious resources on your computer.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Need RAID? Fusion F2QR packs two 1TB drives into a portable shell originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 03:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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