from Gaping Void.
Archive for the 'Software' Category
How to tell…
April 21, 2007Living Without Microsoft Wiki
April 21, 2007Following the makeover that Living Without Microsoft has recently been given – and the upturn in activity that the site has seen as a result – I’ve been beavering away on WikiSpaces putting together a wiki for resources on how people can get away from using Microsoft’s products.
You can find it at http://lwm.wikispaces.com. If you’ve got anything to add, then go for it!
Free as in Beer
April 21, 2007Since I started Free as in Beer, I’ve come across a few of apps which have become essential:
If anyone who reads this blog has some favourite freebies, let me know!
BlogJet: why, oh why…
March 28, 2007
Now, I love BlogJet. But why is it that whenever I load it up, it’s always in a small window, no matter what size it was when I closed it last?
And then, when I click to maximise the window, why ON EARTH does it shoot across the screen, and remain small?
It always takes a second click to get the window to a half decent size…
FeedDemon/Newsgator Problem
March 4, 2007
Hmmm. FeedDemon has starting playing up all of a sudden. It claimed not to be able to connect to my NewsGator account a couple of times, despite the credentials being correct, and refused to do anything.
So, I removed the sync between the two and gave it another go. Now all sorts of old feeds and posts are popping up from nowhere. Most annoying.
Screencasting
March 4, 2007Thanks to Steve Dale for pointing me in the direction of Blueberry Software and their BB Flashback range of screencasting tools. Steve has just finished a screencast of the IDeA’s Communities of Practice platform using the full blown version of BB Flashback.
At £99, that’s too steep for me. But I am trialling the ‘Express’ version, which will cost £20, and it seems to do everything I want it to. I’m putting together some videos showing how the various bits of LGSearch work. My only issues at the moment is how to display and host the video. Am experimenting with self-hosted .swf files and uploading AVIs to YouTube.
BlogJet 2.0
March 3, 2007BlogJet was always my favourite blog editor when I used Windows regularly. I was pretty annoyed when version 2 was released not long ago, as by then I had made the transition to Ubuntu. I’ve so far failed to find anything even remotely as good in Linux, and have been blogging using the inbuilt WordPress editor and the Performancing for Firefox plugin since.
I still have Windows available on a dual boot, and on popping in today I downloaded the trial of BlogJet 2, and it’s great. It retains the simplicity of the original, but packs in loads of new features. I like it a lot.
I’ve also always liked FeedDemon as an RSS aggregator. Google Reader is the best online newsreader, but I still prefer FeedDemon overall.
So, for the tools I use most on my PC, I prefer the Windows variants by quite some distance. The advantages of Ubuntu are that is has never crashed on me, and is lightening fast.
So what do I do? I could reinstall Windows and see if it makes any difference speed-wise… but would going back to XP be a retrograde step?
Ubuntu packages
December 6, 2006Still not online at home, which makes my installation of Ubuntu a week or so quite frustrating: there really isn’t much I can do with it. Still, Pipex will be providing me with 6mb/s broadband in a week or so, which is something to look forward to!
Was having a poke about on Ubuntu though last night. I browsed through the repository of applications I can download and install, and was surprised to see that the majority of them state that they are unavailable for my system. This includes standard apps like Gnumeric and Abiword.
Could this have anything to do with the fact that I wasn’t online at the time, or is there something I should know about being able to install packages on Ubuntu?
[tags]ubuntu[/tags]
FeedDemon Release Candidate 1
November 7, 2006Nick Bradbury has announced the new release candidate of FeedDemon 2.1. It certainly feels more robust than the previous beta version.
One of the more noticable changes is that the little bank of button that let you do stuff with a post, like email it to a pal, or bookmark the post in del.icio.us, now appears at the bottom of the post in question. All of this means that when you have read a post you don’t need to scroll to the top again to perform an action on it. Nice one!
FeedDemon thoughts
October 31, 2006Been using the FeedDemon 2.1 Beta3 for a while now. Here’s a couple of thoughts:
- Each blog post has a link to post it to del.icio.us, it’s been there for a couple of versions now. But if I click a link to another post, or to expand a summary feed, the link disappears. Can we have a link on the main toolbar to send the current page to del.icio.us, or our blogs please?
- If I clip a post in NewsGator for later viewing, can it be automatically sync’d to a News Bin in FD please?
