Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on December 21, 2009 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Predator Drones Use Less Encryption Than Your TV
The military in Iraq and Afghanistan have been intercepting U.S. Predator drone communications because, well, the transmissions between the unit and ground control weren’t encrypted. They were able to grab transmissions using some laptops and a $30 Russian application.

Shuttleworth Steps Down as Ubuntu CEO
By March 1st, 2010 Mark Shuttleworth will have completely transitioned out of the CEO position of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system. His replacement is Jane Silber, who has been the COO of Canonical since 2004. Shuttleworth says that he isn’t leaving the company, and that the move will let him work closer on the design process.

New in Gmail Labs: Mark as Unread from Here
Google continues to amaze me as they roll out more and more Gmail labs features that greatly enhance the web email experience. The newest is a “mark unread from here” option that will let you flag parts of an email conversation as unread so that later on you can pick up where you left off. Individually these Gmail Labs aren’t earth-shattering features, but together they make web-based email more appealing to those who tend to lean towards desktop applications.

–News in Brief–

Google Confirms: 1 is Indeed the Loneliest Number
Not really news… more like a little bit of fun to start your holiday week!

Android 2.1 Hacked onto Droid
The iPhone isn’t the only one with a community to hacking the mobile OS every waking moment!

Dell Gets Pranked After Announcing Layoffs
Dell laid off 16% of its Malaysian workforce (about 700 people), and shortly thereafter some “price adjustments” were made to their site: a $4000 laser mouse and an $11 computer.

Microsoft’s Free Tinker Game
Tinker used to be a Windows Vista Ultimate Extra game, and now they’ve released it to all XP, Vista, and Windows 7 users.

Bing App Debuts on iPhone
Last week Microsoft released a Bing search app for the iPhone with a dazzling interface.

Reddit Users Band Together for Largest Secret Santa Ever
This year over 5,000 gifts were shipped for a Secret Santa program between Reddit users. In all over $160,000 in presents were exchanged.

Merge Duplicate Gmail Contacts
If you have a lot of clutter in your contacts you may want to try Google’s new contact merging tool that tries to combine records together for (what it believes) are the same contact.

McDonalds Offering Free WiFi Starting in mid-January
Now you’ll be able to surf the web and devour a Big Mac at the same time… without having to bring the food back home first!

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

Add a Little 3D to Your Desktop
This Windows app will let you view open programs in a 3D view that lets you flip windows, zoom, move, and much more. What’s nice is that on Windows 7 it works with features like Aero Peek to give you a more streamlined experience. I’m not too confident that I’ll use this all that often (I’m an Alt-Tab kind of guy), but it can be pretty cool to show off to people.

Mutlifox: Log into Multiple Online Accounts in Firefox
This is something that should absolutely be built-into all browsers. Mutlifox is a Firefox extension that will let you open a new tab with a clean set of cookies, and you can therefore log into multiple accounts for the same service (eg. Gmail). I mean really, how many people actually have just one Gmail account these days? I think I have like six… I just can’t remember what they all are.

Packagetrackr Aggregates Package Delivery Information
Got a lot of last-minute holiday packages being delivered this week? If so this will be the perfect time to start using this service. Once you enter in all your tracking numbers you can follow the status of your deliveries from your web browser, or through your mobile device (with the mobile-optimized version of the site). Windows 7/Vista users can also grab the gadget for some package tracking “fun” on your desktop. After all, it’s pretty hard to wait for those nifty little gadgets to arrive at your doorstep.

–Tips in Brief–

Desktop Blog Editors for Ubuntu
While these blog editors may not be as powerful as Windows Live Writer they do certainly offer the basics from the comfort of your open source operating system.

Visually Organize Your Tasks
Get a virtual corkboard to post up all of your tasks, movies you want to watch, and more. (Note: Spaaze says it’s free while in Beta… which means they may charge for it later on down the road).

Quickly Remove Backgrounds from Images
This tool doesn’t do the best job removing backgrounds, but it is possible to get decent results depending on how clear the separation is between you and the background.

Osmo: A Simple Personal Organizer
A calendar, task, contacts, and notes manager doesn’t get much cleaner than this.

Session Manager for Google Chrome
Save your tab sessions in Google Chrome with this add-on.

–Downloads–

• Avant Browser 11.7.43 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Dropbox 0.7.79 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Evernote 3.5.0.862 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Firefox 3.0.16 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Firefox 3.6 ^{Beta 5} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Flash Player 10.1.51.66 ^{Beta 2} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Foobar2000 1.0 ^{Beta 5} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Google Desktop 5.9.911.3589 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Miranda 0.8.11 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Notepad++ 5.6.3 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 ^RC1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Picasa 3.6.95.25 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• SeaMonkey 2.0.1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Songbird 1.4.1.1419 ^{Beta 2} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• VirtualBox 3.1.2.56127 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Winamp 5.57 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Wireshark 1.2.5 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Xbox Media Center 9.11 ^RC1 [Homepage] [Mirror]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

I was just browsing through some of the Digg articles and two Linux-related posts caught my attention. The first being that both the Ubuntu homepage and forum has received a very nice looking redesign. It not only looks classy but the layout is much better in my opinion.

For those of you who have short-term memories and can’t remember what it looked like, this archive of the Ubuntu homepage may get the gears turning in your head. Similarly you can pull up an archive of the Ubuntu Forums which used a lot more brown before. While the brownish color is the central scheme of Ubuntu, I think they were smart to use it a little more moderately throughout the entire site.

Now onto the next story I saw on Digg. I’ve used Linux in the past, but apparently I never knew how it worked. In order to use Linux you actually need to run Windows behind it, or so one commenter on a ZDNet blog thinks:

I dont see how this will happen at all.

Vista is far more powerful than windows XP, and runs twice as fast. It is also much harder to pirate, and this point more than anything else has the Linux crowd in a panic.

It wont be long until Windows XP is no longer supported, and when that happens, what is Linux going to do ?

Linux will have to find a way to work under Vista from here on, since it wont be able to rely on XP being readily available anymore.

Linux may seem like a good alternative to Office, but all that is happening in linux is that the windows interface is cleverly hidden away. It still needs the drivers and software services in order to run, and in most cases – that happens WITHOUT a valid windows licence.

This is just plain piracy.

Vista will finally put an end to this blatant abuse of intellectual property, and linux should decline, taking the pirates with it.

Anyone that supports the continuation of Windows XP in place of Vista surely has a hidden agenda .. and you will surely be caught out.

And he didn’t stop there, he then went on to say…

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

That sounds preposterous to me.

If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.

Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.

Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.

I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.

Now I normally don’t laugh about things other people are not knowledgeable about, because even I have a lot to learn. However, this person took it a little too far. Had he stopped after one sentence it wouldn’t have been as big of a deal, but he kept going on and on. About 5 minutes of research on Linux would have told him everything that he needs to know.

In the comments above I put a few things in bold that really sent me to the floor laughing, and the fact that he said Apple gave up and moved to “Intel and Microsoft”? Uh, they just switched processors and some hardware…but the last I heard they aren’t in any kind of agreement with Microsoft.

Of course, I don’t read the news very often so maybe I am just completely off the ball?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Sure, you can run Linux on robots and on desktops and, apparently, on small cats, and we’ve also seen it on plenty of tablets before, but this one is a little different. Max Lee over at Galaxy Tab Hacks created the video below to demonstrate a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 running Ubunbu, but doing it on top of Android such that the tablet’s native OS is running Linux in the background and then using a VM client to launch the UI. In other words: it’s running both operating systems at once, and despite that we think the results are quite usable, even loading up this very website with aplomb. It’s demonstrated after the break and if after watching you just gotta get a piece of that the full instructions are on the other end of the source link below.

Continue reading Ubuntu demonstrated running on Galaxy Tab 10.1, summarily dubbed ‘Tabuntu’ (video)

Ubuntu demonstrated running on Galaxy Tab 10.1, summarily dubbed ‘Tabuntu’ (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 08:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Galaxy Tab Hacks  | Email this | Comments

Think ASUS netbooks threw Linux out the window? Think again: the Eee PC 1001PXD, 1011PX and 1015PX are about to get Ubuntu configurations. Harking back to when the famous netbook line launched running Xandros, these Ubuntu loaded machines could help Linux reach a larger audience. Canonical representatives are pitting the new netbooks against Windows-powered machines, telling The Inquirer that Ubuntu is competing with Microsoft, not other Linux distributions. That’s quite a goliath you picked there, Ubuntu. Are a trio of Atom notebooks enough to win the war on Windows? Considering Dell abandoned their love of Linux over a year ago, we’re guessing no.

Ubuntu to hit Eee PCs, take on Microsoft originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jun 2011 05:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  The Inquirer  | Email this | Comments

This article was written on June 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

Have you been itching to get your hands on a Media Center computer that lets you record all of your shows? Both Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate include these capabilities, but you can download Mythbuntu if you’re looking for an open source alternative to put an extra PC to work.

As the name implies, Mythbuntu is based on the ever-popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. It makes it extremely easy to setup MythTV so that you can quickly begin recording your favorite shows. Here are some of the features you’ll get with Mythbuntu/MythTV:

• Basic ’live-tv’ functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
• Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
• Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
• Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
• Grabs program information using xmltv.
• Displays basic program information on channel change using a themeable semi-transparent on-screen display.
• Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select programs to record.
• Scheduled recordings of TV programs, and playback and deletion of those programs, all through a themeable UI.
• A nice web interface to let you select programs to record remotely.
• Rip, categorize, play, and visualize MP3/Ogg/FLAC/CD Audio files. (FLAC, Vorbis, and MP3 encoding). Create complex playlists (and playlists containing playlists) through a simple UI.
• An emulator frontend. (MAME, NES, SNES, generic PC games)
• An image viewer/slideshow application.
• A weather module.
• A generic video player module, with automatic metadata lookups
• A DVD player / ripper module. Make perfect backups, or transcode down to smaller file sizes.
• An RSS news feed reader module.

MythTV is also well known for the selection of plugins that are available, as well as some themes. With nearly 300,000 downloads it’s looking like the MythTV project is doing pretty well for itself.

Even though MythTV is stable for you to use, Mythbuntu is still in the Alpha stage so you have to be willing to cope with some bugs and known issues. I’m sure it will continue to get better as future versions are released, and I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful thing!

Although lazy people will probably buy a pre-configured MythTV computer.

If you want some screenshots of Mythbuntu you can visit this page, or screenshots of MythTV can be found here.

Source: Download Squad

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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