Category: Technology

It’s true. Anyone who has played guitar for some extended period of time, who cut their teeth on the tablature found in “Guitar for the Practicing Musician”, or the later “Guitar One” will note the amazingly huge gap between the quality of those (usually flawless) transcriptions and the ones you find online for free. My…

Imagine an operating system that does away with the whole notion of a desktop. Why do we need this whole metaphoric thing applied to our computers, anyway? Sure, I can see why it existed before: we needed a metaphor so that we could teach the world, by analogy, how to think about computing. But now,…

I can see it playing out like a movie. The head muckety-muck over at Google emails the big cheese over at mapquest. The mail says, simply “Good morning. I believe I’ve just put you out of business. No hard feelings.” The big cheese at mapquest runs home, only to be found by his wife later…

For my non-tech friends: Opera is a web browser, and it runs under Windows, Mac and Linux, and some other stuff, I think. It’s a pretty good browser — certainly better than internet exploder. Some time ago they added a mail client that really rocks, but I tend to really want more out of it…

I should say up front that I am *not* a slave to eye candy. I’m a system/network admin, so if there’s any eye candy around, it’s likely to be various monitors that alert me, visually, to trouble of one sort or another. However, I’ve found a really useful piece of eye candy in KDE 3.4,…

A recent BBC article reports that network security researchers have discovered that over 1,000,000 home user PCs have been hijacked by viruses/worms/trojans to collaborate, forcibly, on bringing down websites, spread spam, and propagate viruses. Networks of collaborating “zombie” computers called “botnets” are formed from these machines, the largest of which was 50,000 computers working in…

First, for the non-technical: AMD is a company. Explaining the “64” opens a whole bucket of technical jargon, and it’s a source of confusion even (er, especially) for those who think they’re technically savvy (I don’t totally exclude myself from that group). Anyway, AMD makes a CPU (just like Intel makes CPUs), and the ones…

I have a beef with free internet mail accounts in general. I have one at mail.com and another at Yahoo.com. Both say they do all they can to make my experience wonderful and eliminate spam, but meanwhile, the only part of those services that works flawlessly are the ads. Enter gmail.Yesterday and today, I couldn’t…

Well, they didn’t really *lose* my site. What happened is this: I run a site called LinuxLaboratory. Recently, it went through a major overhaul. So major, that I didn’t bother even trying to ensure that old links would work. It’s been about 6 weeks now, and I’m noticing that I’m not getting very much traffic….

So I heard about this thing called Skype. It’s a program that you download, for free, and run on Windows, Linux, or Mac, and it lets you make phone calls over the internet, or talk to any other Skype user for free. My brother-in-law and I tested it out. He downloaded it to a windows…