Published on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 .
Ok, so neither of them have been officially released, thus putting me REALLY on the bleeding edge, but holy shit I’m in love. Suse 11 has run amazingly well; every bit as well as my previous Ubuntu 8.04 installation. Suse seems to have better administration tools and more up-to-date packages. Plus I love how easy it is to add new repositories to the software management tool. Hell, the repo management tool even has a listing of third party repositories you can add from the app itself. Makes it super-easy to add new software to your system without going around the web hunting for it to install. Suse’s package management tool (Yast2) even makes instaling new software incredibly easy! It works as well as Ubuntu’s Synaptic tool from my experience so far. I don’t see any major showstopping problems so far with the 11.0 beta of Suse. I haven’t had any unexpected crashes that are specific to Suse. Everything for the most part “just works”. Suse apparently also does some of their own customizations to both Gnome & KDE along with installing their own bootsplash and login screen. All of which lend to a very “clean” look that most other distributions just can’t match up to. Also for what it’s worth, the binary fglrx driver from ATI’s site worked great, installed without a hitch. Compiz and desktop effects in KDE4 work without issue. Suspend and resume work great as well. This is on a Lenovo T60 with a Radeon X1300. Very nice!
As far as KDE 4.1 beta 1 goes, I’m actually quite impressed. The 4.0.x series seems to be lacking a bit of functionality from the 3.5.x series, but even the KDE group admits that. 4.1 seems to be a bit more polished overall. Installing new desktop themes and wallpapers is as easy as right clicking on the desktop and choosing “desktop settings” and then either clicking “New Wallpaper” to download and install new wallpapers from kde-look.org or “New Theme” to do the same for themes. The nice part is that instead of launching a browser and making you download a file and then importing it into the application or extracting it to a directory (and having to know WHICH directory to use), you just pick the one you like and click “install” and it’s immediately available. Sweet! The panel can now be transparent, which has very little functional use but sure does look beautiful. Kopete (the IM client) looks really nice now and actually supports flie transfers on AIM (this was introduced with 4.0, actually). Works as well as Pidgin and looks a ton better. It also *seems* to support video on Yahoo, though I haven’t tested it yet. Konqueror seems to work pretty well for most everything I throw at it. I’ve even managed to get it working with gmail’s full view by changing the user agent in the options to Mozilla 1.7.3. At any rate, I’m still exploring but I can’t help but be very impressed with it so far. I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back to Gnome at this point. 
Published on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 .
Finally, UTStarcom has released the new ROM update for the Verizon XV6700! Sprint, Alltel and Telus already had it for a good little while, but Verizon’s slow ass still was showing no signs of release. Well, now that it’s available on the UTstarcom site I’ve downloaded it and I’m installing it now. Looks like it adds a few new features and fixes a couple of bugs… here’s a quote from the release notes:
This software update makes available some new features and corrects some issues. Some of the primary enhancements are:
Microsoft Messaging and Security Feature Pack- The Messaging & Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5.0 enables business users to easily stay connected to their email while on the go and helps businesses to better protect device data. Benefits of this feature pack include:
- Direct Push Technology- Keep your Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Inbox up-to-date using Direct Push Technology. Plus, you can now browse your corporate address book over-the-air with Exchange 2003 SP2. Faster transfer and synchronization of data- Outlook data sent between Exchange Server and a Windows Mobile-based device is significantly compressed, enabling faster transfer and synchronization of data.
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Better protection of device data and management of devices
- Remotely enforced IT policy
- Local and remote device wipe
- Certificate-based authentication
- Enhanced security using Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME)
- Added a Voice Dialing application to allow you to leverage the handsfree capability already on the device.
- Main Today Screen provides you the capability to lock the device and prevent inadvertently activity.
- Corrected an issue where unknowingly, to the user, the device would enter into “Flight Mode”
- Added the capability to enable Wi-Fi and CDMA simultaneously.
Let’s hope this all goes well and I don’t brick my phone. Thank god I have insurance if I do. 
Technorati Tags: xv6700, verizon, cellphone, geek, tech
Published on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 .
Well, apparently Skype has decided to make phone calls to the US and Canada completely free. Previously, you were charged about $0.02 per call from the skype client to any of like 9 or 10 countries. Now calls to the US and Canada are completely free. Calls outside the US and Canada are still charged at the global skype rate (currently about $0.02/min), however. If you add on the “SkypeIN” service for about $36 a year, you basically have a phone line for a whopping $3 a month with unlimited incoming and outgoing calls to any number you might wish to call. Sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me! All you need is to download the Skype client and have a broadband internet connection and you’re set to go. The SkypeIN service isn’t mandatory but it IS kind of cool in that you can get a local phone number for people to call you free of charge. Even cooler, the phone number doesn’t have to be local to where you live. That means if you live in one city but you have a bunch of friends in another city you can get a phone number local to them so they don’t have to spend money on long distance in order to call you. Granted, most people have cellphones so they don’t have to worry about long distance charges, but very few people have unlimited daytime minutes so being able to make and recieve phone calls free of charge is kinda cool. Not only that, there are a few cordless phones coming out that will actually work with Skype so you don’t even have to be tied to your computer all the time just to make and receive phone calls. Not only that, some of the handsets being released will actually work on wi-fi so in theory you could use your skype account anywhere you can find a wi-fi hotspot, not just on your home wi-fi network. So at this point, why even bother with a landline? I’m sure between Vonage, Skype and the other VOIP providers the bells are getting pretty annoyed with their landline business being cannibalized. It was bad enough when cellphones became a cheap commodity, now VOIP service is making landlines even less attractive.
Technorati Tags: software, skype, free stuff, geek
Published on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 .
PC Magazine Special Report: Inside Windows Vista, Build 5308
Looks like Microsoft is calling the newest Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Vista "feature complete", which means they have all the features set that they’re going to include in the OS and thus are just going to spend the rest of the time refining them to the point where they actually work correctly (let’s hope). Looking at the screenshots it looks really nice and seems to have quite a bit of promise. I’ll be curious to see how it compares to the latest version of Mac OSX, which is quite possibly the most well thought-out OS I’ve ever laid my hands on. Should be interesting to see how Vista turns out. Perhaps it might actually be worth paying for? That’d be a first for a MS operating system!
Published on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 .
Wordpress 2.0 has been released and apparently makes an absolute TON of changes under the hood. Granted most of the changes we won’t see but it’ll apparently make it a lot easier on plugin developers to create new and better plugins for wordpress. Hmm… does this mean more must-have plugins? Needless to say I installed it and I’m VERY impressed. It now includes a really nice WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor for your posts (it’s even resizable!!) along with a nice box for uploading files and inserting them in posts. Previously inserting pictures in posts was a major major pain in the ass. So much so that I never even bothered to do it via wordpress; I just uploaded them myself and copy/pasted the URL into my post. You can also add a new post category right from the post screen, which is really nice if you make a post that doesn’t really fit into your existing categories. Previously, you had to assign it to some category, go create the category you REALLY wanted it in then come back and edit the post in order to change the category. Way too many steps, all of which have been eliminated now. Seeing as how I just installed it, I haven’t really gotten a chance to check everything out but it looks like a huge upgrade from 1.5. It’s definitely worth the upgrade (mine went smoothly as usual, but your mileage may vary).
Here’s a decent roundup of the new features
Published on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 .
I’d heard about this a couple of times before but it wasn’t free so I never really bothered to mess with it much… Now that it’s free, it’s worth talking about. It’s called Pandora and it’s based off the Music Genome Project database. Basically you put in an aritst’s name and it sifts through the MGP database for music with similar qualities and plays them for you. Undoubtedly one of the most insanely cool things I’ve ever seen in my years of using the internet. I’m quite the music geek and always looking for new and interesting things to listen to and this seems to really fit the bill. For those of you that don’t know, the MGP is a project where people (volunteers?) went through and listened to all different kinds of music and “tagged” it with various relevant properties. Basically Pandora just finds your chosen artist or song in the database and looks at its tagged information.. Then it searches the database for music with similar qualities and plays it for you. It’s completely free, though I’d suggest having a high-speed connection to really enjoy it. Also, you can create more than one “station” and even add different kinds of music to a given station if you so choose. Definitely worth checking out.
Published on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 .
There’s a new version of Firefox in the works as we speak… Version 1.5 has been through a couple of developer previews (named “Deer Park”) a couple of betas and has now reached its first release candidate (RC1). I must say I REALLY like 1.5 better than the current 1.0.7 release for quite a few reasons. Version 1.5 now automatically checks for updates to your extensions, themes and to the browser itself. It doesn’t auto-upgrade your extensions or themes; instead it leaves you to periodically sift through your extensions manager or your theme manager and click the “update now” button next to any extensions that require an update. Browser updates are now incremental instead of having to download a whole new 5MB installer file just to update a few files. VERY nice touch if you ask me as that was always a pet peeve of mine. Granted, on 8mbps cable it’s really not so bad but it was still the annoyance of having to go through the entire installer yet again just to upgrade minor versions (eg. 1.0.6 to 1.0.7, which had very small changes). Now, you get a notification that there is a new version out, an option to download or decline to do so and should you decide to download, it’s only between 500K and 1MB (600K seems to be about the norm for the two I’ve done). RC1 also adds the ability to drag tabs to new spots on the tab bar to re-order them. Not something I use too much at the moment but a neat feature that previously required an extension to do. Other features they’ve added include more descriptive error pages (better than the ones IE offers, even… and light years ahead of the old stupid dialog box that popped up and told you pretty much nothing), better popup blocking (I’ve noticed small improvements myself), better performance of the forward/back buttons (to compete with Opera), a wizard to report broken websites (haven’t used it yet), and some unmentioned security fixes. Even though it’s only a release candidate and not the final product yet, it’s still worth the download in my personal opinion. Plus, when the final is released it will be a small upgrade from the current RC1 release so it’s not like you’ll have to go download another 5MB installer when RC2 then the final come out. Extensions for the most part have all been updated to work with the new version so that’s not an issue either. I’ve run across a few in the addons database that don’t state they’re compatible with the new version, but most of the major extensions have been updated to work. So far only the google toolbar doesn’t work with RC1 (though it worked with beta 2). All in all, it looks as though Firefox has just gotten even better than it already was. As far as I know, there won’t be any new features between RC1 and final, just bug and security fixes. I like it a lot and it most certainly will continue to be my primary browser. Give it a whirl, you’ll probably like it too.
Published on Thursday, July 28th, 2005 .
So it looks like the PSP has just become a little more enticing… Apparently they’ve released a new software version that adds a web browser…. really neato because it already had wi-fi capability but no browser. To me, that didn’t make any sense. Why make an internet-enabled device only to not let it browse the web? I understand that the initial purpose of adding wi-fi to the device was so you could play games over the internet against other people, BUT the fact that it had several nice multimedia features (mp3’s, movie files off memory cards, movies on UMD discs, etc.) put it more in the category of a convergence device. Sony obviously realized that leaving out at least a basic functionality web browser was a faux pas since they’ve just released the new software update. As of now, it seems to be a pretty sweet device. Throw it in your backpack, run down to your local starbucks, sit around sipping coffee and playing games against other people via wifi.. then surf the web a little. Head over to a friend’s house and play some games and surf the web some too… Pretty neat if you ask me. The PSP also works fairly nicely as an mp3 player and movie viewer (you can buy movie discs at Target and other places from what I’ve seen), plus you can encode movies yourself and copy them to your MemoryStick ProDuo and watch them on your PSP as well. All this for about half the price of a really nice PDA. Admittedly the PDA has more functionality, but it’s all about what you actually need and use. Anyway, here’s a couple of pics courtesy of Kyle over at HardOCP
Published on Friday, January 28th, 2005 .
Well, I just downloaded the MSN Desktop search beta the other day and I must say I’m very impressed. I don’t search my computer very often, but when I do I like for it to be quick… and this definitely fits the bill! It doesn’t integrate into your browser like google’s desktop search does. It integrates with the existing indexing service and gives you a nice little deskbar with which to search. You can also dock it as its own standalone toolbar or integrate it into your windows taskbar. It makes a great replacement for the address bar since you can also make aliases to launch programs with a few keystrokes. For example, I type “fx” and it launches firefox. I type “weather” and I have it set to go to the weather.com page for my zip code. Adding aliases is incredibly simple. All you do is type the @ symbol, then what you want to be able to type to make the alias (like “fx”) then a comma, then an equals sign, then the path to the program you want to launch. My firefox alias looked like this: @fx,=”c:\program files\mozilla firefox\firefox.exe”. Pretty simple if you ask me. I have aliases setup for quite a few things and I love it. I have the deskbar floating, but not always on top so it doesn’t get in the way. I hit CTRL+ALT+M and it pops to the top so I can type in it. You can also search the web with it along with your own desktop. It comes with an IE toolbar, but I don’t care about that since I never use IE. I’d recommend checking it out. I’m not a big fan of MSN-branded stuff, but it seems to work pretty well so far.
Published on Tuesday, January 18th, 2005 .
So yeah, I really like the way OSX looks… so I themed Metacity to look like the brushed OSX theme. It’s sleek as hell. The only thing I don’t like is that you can’t really theme the gnome panel. Outside of that, it’s a pretty nice reproduction of OSX. Here’s a screenshot of how it looks. I managed to find a GTK 2.0 theme that themed the buttons just right, a window theme that made the window borders look the way I want them and then an icon theme that’s a pretty nice representation of OSX icons. My GTK2 theme is called “GNOMetal2″, the window border theme is called “RPanther Classic” and my icon set is “Gnometal”. I also managed to find a mod for GAIM that changes all the pixmaps to clones of the iChat icons. The GTK theme, icon set and GAIM mod are available here. You’ll also need the Metacity theme to round out the OSX look. Unfortunately there’s no way to completely mimic the finder interface with the toolbar at the top of the screen and the dock at the bottom, so it’s far from perfect… Still not too shabby though.
