Geek with an Attitude

It struck me as I was browsing my iGoogle page just now exactly how much of a geek I am.  I was interested in all the slashdot stories — every single one!  Not only that, but I think you all might want to hear what me, the very definition of “some nerd,” thinks about them.  How geeky is that?

1) The New York Times is reporting that the Blackberry network is partially down for the second time in less than a year.  Potentially up to half of Blackberry users aren’t able to receive e-mail or surf the internets.  Hey!  I’m a Blackberry user!  What about me?  Sadly, my Blackberry appears to be functioning as normal.  It’s ironic that little old unimportant me can get his e-mail while million-dollar douches across America have their business deals put on hold.  Take that, white people.

2)  Remember Vista, the operating system that nobody liked because it didn’t go well with their old and/or cheap equipment?  Well, it’s finally being updated to Service Pack I.  This is news in and of itself, but the fun part is that Microsoft isn’t making SPI available to Technet subscribers until March (Technet being a paid service from Microsoft for approved software developers), even though pirated copies of the thing are all over the net.  Some technet subscribers, desperate to test their programs on the new Vista Service Pack, might turn to piracy.  As always, Microsoft stinks.

3) Are you familiar with the name Dongfan Chung?  Well, he’s a Boeing engineer who stole our valuable Space Shuttle secrets and gave them to his people, the Chinese.  Some of my best friends are Boeing engineers, and I wonder how they feel about this, and if they knew this dude, and if they feel sometimes like they’re working at SD-6.

4) Anti-virus software company Trend Micro is facing a huge nerd boycott over their patent suit against the open source software ClamAV.  Clam just happens to be the “it” antivirus among the Linux crowd, and Trend Micro suing them is just stupid and pointless. What do they hope to accomplish suing free software?  Well, we’re up in arms now.  Just try to take our free software from us, we dare you.

In other news, that sound you just heard was Trend Micro completing their crash from the world’s #1 Antivirus company (circa 2002) to a monster worse than even Norton (but still better than McAffee).  I can’t believe I ever recommended them to anyone.

I wish to register a complaint.

Remember IE 7?  The internet explorer that was going to revolutionize the way we surf the web?  The one they practically make you install via Windows Update?   The one that thought it was a good idea to replace the tried-and-true “menu” system with cryptic buttons?  The one that uses the terrible Windows Live Search by default, unless you explicitly tell it to use Google?  The one that forces you at gunpoint to configure the phishing filter the first time you run it?  Oh, and about that…

At least 10 times in the past two weeks I have come across a message like this after installing IE 7:

Can’t display the web page.

(some cryptic error code that just means the website is down)

Please try again later or somesuch.

So, did IE 7 break the internet?  Nope.  If you go to Google, or Yahoo, or Epthnation.com, you’ll find that you can surf the web just fine.  So what gives?  Well, if you look at the address bar, you’ll see it says:

http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx

Which is definitely not your home page, right?  So why did it go there first?  Because IE 7 makes you configure it on its first run, and won’t stop opening up to that “runonce” website until you do.  This is normally not a problem — you just click a couple of boxes and move on.  However, lately the server for that page has been “too busy,” which is causing it to throw up errors and make everyone call their local IT guy and say the internet’s busted.  That’s not cool.

Microsoft is one of the biggest companies on the planet, but they for some reason don’t seem to want to fix this.  The real problem is their design, which hijacks the browser’s start page like your average piece of spyware.  Since I believe Microsoft will never stop hijacking stuff, I had to find a workaround.  Thanks to Mr. Google, I did.

Method One

Just keep clicking “reload” until the page works.  This has gotten less and less effective over the past week, so that brings us to:

Method Two (be careful, and follow the instructions exactly)

Go to the start button

Go to “run”

type “gpedit.msc” in the box and click “ok” — this will bring up the Group Policy Editor

Under “Computer Configuration,” click on the little plus sign by “Administrative Templates.”  This will open the folder.

Open “Windows Components”

Click once on “Internet Explorer.”  You’ll see a bunch of things pop into the right pane.  In that right pane, scroll down to “Prevent performance of first run customize settings.”  Double-click on it.

Click the button next to “enabled.”  Then go to the drop box by “Select your choice” and pick “Go directly to home page.”

Click “Ok.”

Open Internet Explorer, and notice that you’ve won.

Adobe Reader has, in the course of a few years, become an indispensable part of any American’s computing experience.  This is because so many companies, both big and small, are now producing .pdf documents in lieu of things like printing manuals.  This saves paper, but also requires the end user to install a piece of software that has become, like everything Adobe produces these days, a bloated auto-updating piece of crap.

Left to its own devices, Adobe Reader will now run both itself and its updating program at startup.  This takes valuable memory from you, and if an update actually comes through, the program takes over your computer and bugs you until you install it.  This is for a free file reader, remember.  iTunes also displays this behavior, but at least you can say that’s a functional program with a number of fun uses.  All anyone uses Adobe Reader for is displaying the proprietary .pdf file format.  Ok so that begs the question: Are there any other free software programs that will read .pdf’s?

Well, there are, and chief among them is Foxit Reader.  Foxit Reader isn’t technically open source, since they don’t let people alter the program or its code.  But it is free.  And it’s better than Adobe Reader in several important ways:

1)  No update program of death.

2)  It’s a tiny (2mb) download that: doesn’t make you unclick a check box to avoid installing programs you don’t want; installs super-fast compared to the 22mb Adobe product; and, doesn’t run in the background for no reason.

3)  It keeps you from having to experience the heartbreak of Adobe software.

I’ve only been using it for acouple weeks, but so far it does everything Adobe Reader does.  By that I mean, it reads and prints .pdf files.  If your computer hurts, try it.

(Go here for a better and slightly sales-y explanation of why Foxit Reader is better, from Mr. Foxit himself.)

Are you tired of Windows Media Player telling you what to do and spying on you behind your back?  Are the 50 free spyware-laden mp3s from emusic and the constant reinstallations of Winamp getting you down?  Is the buggy Apple Software updater that comes with Quicktime kicking you in the crotch?  Do you find that PowerDVD is too slow, ponderous, and expensive?

Well, have I got some software for you…

I first became familiar with VLC Media Player from my time with Ubuntu Linux.  There it’s merely an average media player with a knack for playing difficult formats.  In Windows, it’s the simplest, and therefore best, media player in the world.  You hear me?  Bang *smooch* the world.*

Here’s a list of what it will play: Basically everything besides realaudio/realvideo (although it does say “partial” playback ability).  Thankfully, that format will be deader than Napoleon very soon.  Everything else can be played in VLC without downloading extra codecs.  You just download it, install it, and go!  I’m pretty amazed by it.

The great thing is it loads and unloads instantly.  It’s got such a low system resources overhead compared to all those proprietary monsters of media like WMP 11.  I hate all those programs, and now I don’t have to use them.  Ha!  If you like system resources (and who doesn’t), you should try this program.

Another great thing are the extra features VLC has, like:  post-processing, frame capture, various audio and video settings, etc.  It’s not a full-featured video editor or anything, but it allows you to do more than any of the “free” media players that are tied to formats (like WMP or Quicktime).  I’m telling you, it’s cool.  Every PC with multimedia on it should have VLC.  So why do they ship with 20 other, much lamer programs?

* Obscure reference brought to you by SNL circa 1984.  Don’t ask me what I was doing up that late at age 12.

I can remember back to when I was a scholar of the ancient languages, I was aching for a computer Bible program that would:

1) Be searchable by word, like a simple concordance.

2) Display both the English and the Greek/Hebrew texts side-by-side, like the Nestle chocolate Greek text.

3) Display actual textual information with the text, like a real concordance.

4) Do a bunch of stuff I couldn’t think of but knew I needed.

Unfortunately, the only programs around at the time were either very sucky or very expensive. All that has changed with the very free and very cool BibleDesktop, which I think is part of Crosswire.org’s SWORD project.  Maybe someday I’ll write about SWORD and its many affiliated programs, but that day is not today.  I’m concentrating today on the one I actually use.

As you can see from the screenshot, BibleDesktop (heretofore known as BD) is able to at least display the English and Greek side-by-side, which alone justifies its presence on my computer.  It also comes with a bunch of installable Bibles, dictionaries, concordances, and Bible study tools like the Thompson Chain-Reference topics. This makes it great for planning Bible studies, or for just studying the Bible yourself.

There are also a bunch of Greek study things which are really cool, like showing variations in texts and what-not.  The great thing about BD is that it can go pretty much as deep as your study level allows you to go, which is the whole point of a Bible study computer program in the first place.
There is one thing missing in BD that I haven’t been able to fix, though, and it’s a biggie: The list of installable Bible translations (taken from SWORD, so it’s their fault) does not include the NIV or the RSV, which is totally lame.  Any program that includes the “Joseph Smith translation” but doesn’t include the NIV is kinda suspect, IMO.  I was reduced to installing the God’s Word to the Nations translation, which is a newer version that my church denomination was involved in.  It’s the only version of the Bible that one of my college professors worked on!  So that’s cool.  But it’s not what I’m used to, and it’s just not as good as the NIV for my purposes.

Once it gets some “standard” translations, this program, and the SWORD project, will rule the world. Until then, it will help me as long as I have an NIV Bible nearby.  Not perfect, but free.   Maybe that should be the title of this segment from now on, since every week it’s the same story.

In other news, Miro came out with a new version, and I just got a tip about remote support/monitoring software named iTalc that sounds insane.  I’ll keep you posted.

Open Source Software of the Week 

I’m in the land of snow and dial-up internet, so I’ve been out of commission this week.  But since this segment has developed a loyal following of at least two to three 6th graders, we’ll try to get this posted today.  For the sake of time, I’ll make it an easy one. 

Do you ever need a screen capture program?  Let’s say you’re doing a blog post on a piece of software, and want to show the people out there in blog land what it looks like.  Is there something free that could help you?  The answer is Mega-cap. 

I’m not going to link to it, but just do a Google search for “Megacap,” and its sourceforge.com page should be listed in the results.  It’s a very simple program that takes whatever’s on your screen and makes it into a picture, more specifically an uncompressed .bmp file.  This is not ideal, since a 1024×768 screen capture takes up about 3 megabytes of space.  Perhaps there is a free program that turns .bmp files into compressed .jpgs, but I just use an old copy of Ulead Photoimpact I got free with some piece of hardware years ago.  And unless you’re going to capture your screen 1000 times, it really doesn’t matter.  Since it’s a bitmap there’s no conversion involved, and you get pixel-for-pixel exactly what’s on the screen.  Hey, it looks I just turned a limitation into a feature.  I should sell free software.   

Another simple thing about Megacap is that it has three buttons: Print, Save, and Re-cap.  Print prints, save saves, and re-cap captures the screen again (since Megacap auto-captures the screen upon opening).  Simple, right?  If this was Microsoft Capture, it would cost $69.95 and have menus and context menus and integration into Office and an animated paperclip that pops up when you least expect it.  So let’s be thankful for the simple things in life:  snow, dial-up internet, and screen capture programs that speak only when spoken to.  Huzzah for simplicity! 

First of all, let me say that there will be no more wordplay involving “Flock” from this blogger. No, sir. That’s too easy, and this post could easily turn into “flock this” and “flock that,” and that’s so 6th grade.

What the flock is Flock? It’s a browser, built upon the foundation of Firefox, that has a bunch of neat little innovations. It’s basically Firefox with some social-networking add-ons pre-installed. And that, my friends, is too many hyphenated words in a row. Sorry. Anyway, I saw it on the Mahalo Daily podcast, and tried it out, and realized that some of you readers out there might really like it.

Flock is a perfect example of the open-source mindset. They’ve done nothing but taken a great program, Firefox, and added to it, all for free. If they do a good job, everyone benefits. If not, it’s back to the drawing board. They don’t have to give you your money back because there’s no money to give back. No risk, possible reward. Oh, that all of life were like this Flocking browser.

The best way to learn about Flock is from your parents, but failing that, go to www.flock.com and download it. You’ll find it has some handy state-of-the-art features, some of which I’ll delineate right now in bullet form:

• The greatest thing it provides (and the feature that ensures its continued presence in my life) is a kick-butt RSS feed reader integrated into the sidebar. Not only that, but when you click on a feed, it will mark a post as read if you even just scan over its title. No more opening every post or going through the extra step of having to mark a whole feed as read! I feel like it must be Christmas, because this was total gift to me.*
• A locally-hosted “my world” homepage, which shows your history, feeds, and favorite media links in a convenient and very blue format.
• A sidebar application that will sense when you’re logged into one of the very popular social-networking sites, and show who your friends are and what they’re up to. All in the sidebar. I’m not sure if this is an advancement or not. All it does is save you from clicking on “friends.”
• It also has a “media streams” bar you can toggle on and off. What does it do? Well, for example, you can mouse over a Youtube video, click on the “view stream” button that pops up, and that user’s videos will be shown in thumbnail form in the media streams bar. This is pretty cool.
• Speaking of the menu that pops up when mousing over a Youtube video, you can also hit the “blog this” button and blog post window pops up with a link to that web page in the body of the text. It would be better if it auto-embeded the video, but whatever.
• There’s also a “web clipboard” that you can drag pictures and all your media streams into. It’s like your favorites, but just for media. Unfortunately, again, it just links to the page the media’s on rather than the media itself. This probably makes Youtube and picture sites happy, but it makes a potentially groundbreaking browsing experience slightly more lame.
• There’s built-in batch uploading to one of several picture sharing sites. This is probably really useful for those who share pictures, and is kind of a neat idea.
• It’s got everything Firefox has, and most Firefox extensions will work with it. In fact, all the ones I’ve tried have worked perfectly. Huzzah!

Issues (glitches, really) that keep it from being my favorite piece of software ever:

• The browser search box (that box in the upper right-hand corner doesn’t actually let you type stuff in — clicking on the search engine just takes you to that search engine’s page and leaves Yahoo! as your search engine of choice, which it totally isn’t. This defeats the whole purpose of that box, which is to type stuff in and search your chosen engine from there. I know how to find Google, people.
• The real dealbreaker: The part of the “back” and “forward” buttons where you can look and see the pages you’ve visited, in order, doesn’t work. Or rather, it’s too small to click on. Whenever I want to select from the last few sites I’ve been to, I just end up hitting the regular back button and going to the previous page. The worst part is, there’s a little arrow by the back button, which tells me that the functionality is there and Flock just won’t let me use it. I think Flock is calling me stupid. Flock, it’s not me that made your arrow too small. Perhaps changing the theme to a Mozilla one would fix this, but it also could break my browser. What to do, what to do…
• There are also small glitches here and there that need to be worked out — things not dragging to the web clipboard that should, broken links when you drag a web address into the favorites, etc. But considering Flock’s long-butt time between updates (they’ve been at this since 2005, and this is their first non-beta release), these problems might live on forever.
• When I leave the “media streams” bar open too long, my computer starts acting as though I were asking it to raise the dead. In other words, things start seizing up like they’re under the influence of Norton Systemworks.

All in all, Flock has a lot of promise, and is a worthwhile addition to any desktop. I just wish it were perfect like Jesus.

* Side note: To get your Google Reader feeds into “.opml” format, export them to a file on your computer and change the extension from .xml to.opml. That’s all you have to do. You can then import that .opml file into Flock. Don’t ask me why Google Reader exports to an .xml extension. What is this, 2006?

Tags: flock, browser, opml, open source

Even though it takes up all my computer’s resources when it’s running,  Miro is my current favorite open source software program.  Essentially an RSS feed reader on steroids, Miro takes all your video podcasts and (any other thing, such as a YouTube search, you can make into a feed) and delivers it to you in one cohesive interface.  It’s got over 4000 built-in channels — everything from daily CNN newscasts to  “two guys in their garage” DIY programming — plus the ability to add any RSS or atom feed you can find with that mouse of yours.

I like it because its an extremely useful and convenient way to make sense of the incredible expanding world of internet video.  I come home at the end of the day and have like 10 interesting things to watch, already downloaded and waiting for me with a thumbnail and a description.  This is how internet TV has the potential to operate, and it’s available for download right now.  Do you want the news from Australia?  Do you want to be updated any time a certain Youtube user uploads a video?  Do you want to be notified anytime Google adds a video about horsies to its database?  You can do all these things, and much much more with Miro.

Its features include the aformentioned feed subscription and YouTube search capabilities, the ability to search a number of other sites including Google Video, Metacafe, and blip.tv, the ability to save searches as channels and be updated when a new video is added, the ability to search its 4000 built-in channels for keywords,  instant saving and deleting of downloaded videos.  It can also download files from torrents.

Now that I’ve been a bit hyperbolic to the positive, I’m going to state some negatives in the spirit of the SNL “Happy Fun Ball” commercial:

Do not even think about installing Miro if you don’t have 512mb of RAM, a 128MB video card, and quite a few gigs of hard drive space.  It’s a resource hog.  The good news?  It unloads those resources immediately upon closing, like a program should.

In a related note, do not expect to download and play videos at the same time unless you have a gig of RAM.

Do not try to use Miro for your textual or even audio podcasts.  That would be like killing mosquitos with a bazooka.  Plus, it would be 10 times slower to load than, say, Google Reader.

Do not expect Miro to go through and delete the inactive channels on its channel list for you.  That great cooking podcast you just found is liable to be a year old.  It’s the nature of the beast, holmes.  You’ll find this out by trial and error.

Do not expect Miro to be bug-free, especially in its YouTube searching and video storage functions.  It’s version 1.0 of the software.  Be warned, but know it will get better.

Do not use Miro to run your torrent downloads, even though it can.  That’s just mental.

Do not expect most of the channels on Miro to be good.  Some of the stuff produced by cable channels is just scaled-down versions of cable shows, and doesn’t add anything to your life.  Some of the stuff produced by people in their basements looks like it was produced by people in their basements.  Almost all of the programming is inessential, or fills an extremely specific technical or environmental niche.

As a way to illustrate the last point, here are some numbers I’ve crunched:  Number of professionally-produced, current, and interesting podcasts about football, baseball, or basketball — 0.  Number of daily-updated podcasts featuring an attractive woman talking about the latest in technology news and reviews: 100,000.

Do not taunt Miro.  Had to be said.

Do not expect Miro to be the standard for coolness in video podcast reading forever.  I can’t believe that Google and Microsoft won’t put their hats in this ring, given the potentially revolutionary advantages.  Of course, Google probably doesn’t like it so much, since viewing YouTube videos in Miro robs them of their ad revenue.  Something this cool has to be controversial, right?  So get in the game now, before Google starts putting commercials inside videos.

It’ll be interesting to see where video podcasting technology takes us.  For now, it’s nice to have a free program that simplifies my life.

Open Source Software of the Week: Evolution vs. Thuderbird

E-mail programs have been around since the dawn of the public internet — remember pine? Ahh, pine. I can still remember the woodsy smell of navigating through my text menu system in college, having no idea of the killer death ap that e-mail would become. Man, this internet age moves fast — that was like 15 years ago. Soon, we might not be using e-mail at all (and with cell phones and texting and wireless everything, it’s almost to that point now), but these days we still require software programs to read the thousands of spam e-mails we get in our POP3 inboxes every day. Today I’m going to discuss two open-source and free competitors to Microsoft’s Outlook — Novell’s Evolution and Mozilla’s Thunderbird. Will they meet my communication and organizational needs, or are they programmed by a bunch of sucka mc’s? Read on to find out…

Evolution

Being a semi-avid Linux user, I was familiar and impressed with the Evolution program in Ubuntu. It synced nicely with my palm pilot (when I could get Ubuntu to recognize the device, that is), connected to my company’s exchange server, and displayed e-mail like a real mail program. After a little investigation, I found a Windows version of the program on sourceforge and installed it. From the opening bell, it was a little buggy (or Outlook-y, as I call it). The calendar and tasks were missing from the “calendar” view, which after about 5 minutes of frustration I realized they were just hidden behind the giant “memo” panel. Once I resized everything and imported my Google Calendar, it looked like this:

Pretty cool, eh? Just your standard calendar with tasks and memos. Adding a task is easy, adding a memo slightly less so (you can’t just hit enter and have it save…dumb program). Of course, the absence of Outlook-style “mail” and “calendar” buttons means you have to either do a keyboard shortcut or to through a menu to get from one to the other. This is also dumb, and different from the Linux version. But you can live with the little stuff if you’re able to connect to Exchange and Google Calendars and read e-mail, right?

Looking at the e-mail interface, it’s pretty clean…looks like your standard open-source no-nonsense program, actually:

Isn’t that cute? Then I realized that my exchange folders were taking forever to load, the program was kinda slow (or, again, Outlook-y), and the program left 4 obnoxious files running on my computer after I closed it. Oh my goodness, is this a no-no in Mike’s world. Now, I realize it was converted from a Linux program that was acting as part of the desktop environment (and running all the time was is therefore par for the course), but I just could not accept this. To add Evolutionary insult to injury, I had to manually close those four processes if I wanted to open the program again(!) That was the dealbreaker. Immediately I said buh-bye to this little program, and reluctantly said hello to:

Thunderbird

Now, Thunderbird won’t connect to Exchange servers, and that makes it by definition a poor substitute for Outlook. You should know that going in. I’ve always kinda hated Thunderbird and it’s calendar add-on, Lightning — They’ve been slow and buggy and well, unfinished. Things are little better now. Lightning integrates well into the Thunderbird shell, and connects to my Google calendar more simply than Evolution did. It also reloads the calendar at the click of a button, which is handy like open-source software should be:

As you can see, it has a little more polish to it. I’m using a cool theme, too — the same one I use for my Mozilla Firefox. I don’t know what that’s really worth, but it gives my visual experience a little more Apple-style consistency. Now, if I want to make changes to the calendar, I have to do them in Google — which I would have done anyway, btw — but if I need to see the calendar and my internet’s down, it works just fine.

Also, it has the “mail” and “calendar buttons that Evolution was missing. When I press the “mail” button, it brings me to this:

Now, e-mail is a pretty simple task to perform, but that looks pretty elegant, right? The thing I like about it is that it’s well-organized. Things are generally the right size and in the right spot, and useful tools like the search box aren’t tucked away in some menu somewhere. Also, note the “events” box in the upper right — it convert your calendar events into a linear list automatically. No wonder Mozilla picked this as its second flagship ap after Firefox.

The problems? Well, I just don’t understand how to use the “tasks” part, probably because I’m not smart enough (they keep disappearing and reappearing in a fashion I think is arbitrary). And it’s a little slower than I wish it was, although way faster than those clowns Outlook or Outlook Express. The nice thing about open-source software, especially the Mozilla kind, is that it’s constantly improving. I’m sure someone’s notified them that their task applet is stupid, and it will be corrected in a later release.

Oh, and speaking of that bug-covered piece of crud (OE), Thunderbird just kills it, as much as a simple e-mail program could kill anything. I think I’ll keep it and pretend OE doesn’t exist on my computer.

Both Evolution and Thunderbird have built-in junk e-mail filters and are set to prevent images in HTML messages from loading by default. This is real nice. Hey, it’s e-mail, what do you want, enthusiasm? I, like the rest of America, hate e-mail!

Summing up: I use Google Calendars for my life organization, Thunderbird to locally view those calendars and read e-mail, and Evolution for a reminder that not all Linux software translates properly to Windows. Four constantly running processes…sheesh.

Did you know that there’s an entire community of people making free software for use on your computer?  Did you know that this free software will often perform its intended tasks better than its commercial counterpart?  No, this isn’t like one of those “Get millions of dollars in free grants from the government” things with the crazy guy yelling at you about “gumment programs.”  These are real, free, and entirely available software programs that you can download and use right now.  And they have other uses, too — such as resurrecting this blog from the broken-down pieces of technological rubble it currently is to the masterpiece of attitudinal geekdom it was always meant to be.

So every Friday I’m going to highlight a piece of open-source software, explain what it does, and show you how to use it.  Hopefully you’ll find this helpful.  I don’t know — do people still download and install software, or do they just use whatever stupid programs came pre-installed on their computers?  I think I know the tragic answer to that question.

I hope to make a little positive dent in the lives of those who aspire to make their computing experience better than it is.  Do you like things that are free?  Of course you do.  Well, come on then, and join our little revolution!

As a bit of background on this, I will reprint here my thoughts on the Open Source software movie Revolution OS, as first expressed in epthnation.com’s post #543:

Last night I finished RevolutionOS, which will heretofore be referred to as “that Linux movie,” since it’s a fair bet that this is the only movie about Linux that will be made in my lifetime. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: A movie about an operating system is bound to be boring and filled with ugly dudes talking about super-nerdy stuff and “educational” in the institutional movie sense of the term, i.e., “as opposed to entertaining.” RevolutionOS is all those things, but at least it brings all the major players (on the pro-linux side) together to explain what Linux is and why its important. For that reason, it’s worth checking out if you like computers and can put yourself in the mindset of a computer nerd 5-6 years ago, when the movie was filmed.