Category: open source
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$100 laptop prototype demo
The creative, dynamical future marches on, despite frequent attempts by statist conservatives to halt history and block the Internet from influencing our children in schools. The following video is less than 5 minutes, and shows the first working prototype of the $100 laptop being developed by the MIT Media Lab and many commercial partners. This…
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3D tours with NASA
NASA World Wind is a free, open source software program (for Windows-based computers only at present) similar to Google Earth but with all 3D imagery. According to the website: World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets…
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H.323 on a Mac to the world
Had a chance to play with XMeeting today for awhile and I am VERY impressed. As you may or may not know, H.323 is the standard protocol for most room-based videoconferencing over the Internet. There are many other standards, and this gets to be like an alphabet soup at times, but H.323 is the basic…
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The moon the night Titanic sank
I was excited to learn about the amazing, free and powerful planetarium software program Stellarium this week, and have taken some time to play with it a bit since. This morning with one of our science professors, we used it to discover exactly where the moon was the morning of April 15, 1912 when the…
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Thinkfree challenges MS Office dominance
When many older people think of computer use today, they think of Microsoft Office. Obviously the folks in Redmond must love that, but this phenomenon may be challenged by the website thinkfree.com and its free webservices. According to the April 23, 2006 article in PC World, “First Look: ThinkFree Web App Outshines Microsoft Office –…
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Legally run Windows applications without a Windows license?
Well, here is an interesting possibility for those who are following developments with Macintosh Intel-based computer hardware now able to run WindowsXP natively. Robert Cringely wrote the following on April 20, 2005 in his post, “There May Be an End-run for Apple Around Windows After All”: Now for the interesting part: I believe that Apple…
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Thinking and communicating visually
Cheryl Oakes commented about the SmartTech software program SmartIdeas recently. Here is an example of a product made with SmartIdeas. SmartIdeas looks very similar to Inspiration and the free, open source graphic organizer software CMapTools. My main question about these tools is, what differentiates them from similar graphic organizer software programs? I posted about concept…
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Repairing Permissions
I learned recently that every time you install an update to Mac OS X, like a free downloadable security update, it is always a good idea to repair your disk permissions. (I think I read this in a recent issue of MacAddict.) After installing an update today, I did this, and sure enough– a bunch…
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WinXP on Macs
Dreams come true. Yesterday Apple announced Apple Boot Camp, software that lets you dual boot a new intel-chip based Macintosh computer to NATIVELY run Windows XP and even Linux, including Ubuntu. This Flickr photoset shows images of the install process, which reportedly takes about an hour. Mac game developers have mixed responses to the news,…
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Spam Karma updated
If you are using WordPress as your server-based blogging software, you need to be running the free Spam Karma plugin. A new version is out (2.2) and works better than ever.