Sunday, February 4th, 2007
at 4:25pm
Today I was doing a bunch of things with my brand-new SD card (which I use pretty much for my camera), namely transferring pictures to my computer and printing a photo.Stupidly, after I got all this done, I didn’t manage to get the card back in the camera’s slot, and now the card has gone AWOL (in other words, missing). Sure these cards may be able to fit into the smallest of electronic devices, but keeping track of them can be a chore.
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
at 11:21pm
Ever since its young ages – way before Firefox was even a speck in someone’s mind – Opera was leading the pack with some of today’s most common features, like tabbed browsing and many more. Today, Opera is probably the leader of browsers in terms of power and sophistication: it includes an integrated mail client, a feed reader, phishing filter, widgets, and many other major and minor features that make your browsing experience better.
Until a short while ago, Opera was ad-laden until you paid for it (although the text ads option produced neater Google-powered ads). Not too long ago, as of version eight-point-something (I don’t remember the exact number right now), released September 20 (see Opera’s Milestones page), Opera became totally free.
Customization is priority number one: Any toolbar and button can be positioned virtually anywhere. For example, I like to have a new tab button directly to the left of the tabs, like Netscape 7.2 had. In Firefox, the only choice I have is on the far left of the toolbar above the tab bar, while in Opera, it can go anywhere I could possibly want. In the later versions, there is a feature called Widgets, which are essentially the same as anybody else’s implementation, except that they are part of Opera, not the OS.
Opera sets new standards for speed – even Firefox comes second to Opera. The page rendering speeds are simply blazing. When I left Netscape for Opera, this was one of my first observations. Pages render in seconds, not days, as in the case of Internet Explorer 6.
The integrated feed reader and mail client are a bit different, but work pretty well. Upon viewing a feed’s URL, Opera will display the feeds contents all scrambled up, but will ask you in a polite dialog box whether you want to add it to your feeds. Reading feed messages is normal, but the message pane does not display images, like the readers in other apps do (I think).
The only way to really get a feel for Opera is to use it. It’s a bit different than other browsers, but once you get used to it, you will never want to use another browser, except for the times you visit a site nobody ever bothered to code properly. Go grab Opera now – it’s free!
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006
at 2:44am
Microsoft has expanded on their Live idea by developing various applications that connect with the Web in some way or another. One of their best ones is, in my opinion, the Windows Live Writer application, which lets you post to your blog from your desktop.
Upon the first launch of the program, you will be asked to configure Writer (which is currently in Beta) for you blog. Just enter you blog’s address, and your username and password, and the wizard will get to work figuring out all the specifics of your blog (type of blogging system, template formatting, and more). The whole process took only a few minutes to complete over my relatively slow (meaning 95 Kbps tops for downloads) DSL line.
Once it’s all set up, you are presented with the post editing screen, where you type the content of your posts. You can also view the post as it would appear on your blog, or edit the raw HTML of the post. In addition, the latest versions allow you to add tags from a variety of blog search and social networking sites (Technorati, del.icio.us, and few others).
I haven’t yet experimented with pictures, maps or third party plugins, but the potential of Writer’s feature set looks positive. Just for your info, I wrote this post in Writer, illustrating it’s usefulness.
More information at Live ideas
Sunday, January 1st, 2006
at 2:09am
It took two hours to install SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional, but the wait was worth it. Even from boot up, things are different. After POST (power on self test), I see the boot loader Grub (not sure of what it stands for), where I am presented with options for booting into Linux, from a floppy or my Windows partition; but after 7 seconds, it boots into Linux by default. Once Linux starts, the boot screen is way different from Windows. It has a blue background Continue reading »
