Review: Check Your Computer Temperature With HWMonitor

Keeping an eye on the computer temperature, especially the most relevant components like the processor (cpu), hard drives and video cards is essential to ensure data integrity and reliability of the computer system. Temperatures that reach critical levels can lead to all kinds of computer hardware related problems like crashes, blue screens, data loss and even permanently damaged hardware.

One option to monitor computer temperatures is a software based temperature monitor. These programs usually draw their information from the hardware components (for instance by reading SMART information from hard drives). HWMonitor is but one of the many programs out there that can monitor computer temperatures. Continue Reading »

Review: Taste The Flavor of Firefox 3.6 Beta 1

Mozilla officially released Firefox 3.6 beta to the public, in order to be final dinikimati later. Not only Windows, Mac users and computers with Linux operating systems can taste the dish is presented in this popular browser.

As quoted by PC World, Tuesday (2/11/2009), Firefox 3.6 beta version is updated several excellent features. One of them, the browser is capable of capable of running Javascript quickly, do periodically check plugins, as well as to synchronize bookmarks. Continue Reading »

News: Bing and Google search engines

A great way to do side by side comparisons of what will be returned in Bing and Google search engines…

News: Privacy Software Indo Cleaner

(Woot) Indonesia made i thing …

The Windows operating system keeps track of the most recently used (mru) files. Most Windows users do not know that and are surprised when someone points this out to them. This can be a privacy risk as anyone with access can access these file lists to see which files have been recently opened by the user. These recently opened file lists are used – among other things – to display the most recently opened files or documents in the Windows start menu.

Indo Cleaner is a privacy software that can deal with most recently used file listings. It basically is a cleaner that checks various lists for entries giving the user the option to delete some or all of them so that they cannot reveal any information about which files have been opened in the past.

Continue Reading »

News: Gnome 3.0 Stealth Preview 'Will Anyone Notice?'

GNOME 2.28 was supposed to preview GNOME 3.0. But it hasn’t quite turned out that way, and whether what is visible will leave users eagerly anticipating or uneasy and rebellious is still anybody’s guess.

The GNOME developers did their part, bringing the GNOME Shell, the basis of the GNOME 3.0 desktop, into presentable shape. Unfortunately, neither the GNOME 2.28 release notes nor many of the distributions which packaged GNOME Shell give any detailed instructions about how to swap out the existing desktop and replace it with GNOME Shell. Trying several distributions, I found packages that installed without dependencies, and at least one that conflicted with a standard package.

In the end, I found that the most successful way to install the preview was to follow the installation and compiling instructions released last spring, and forget about the distro packages altogether.

More details available at LinuxPlanet.com

News: Jaangle Music Player

I have been trying to get Teen Spirit to work for quite some time but never succeeded. The developers have in the meantime renamed their application to Jaangle and surprise, surprise: the music player does not crash anymore on my computer system. Windows users have lots of choice when it comes to music players from the popular Winamp to resource friendly players like AIMP2 or highly configurable ones like Foobar. Jaangle does offer a few features out of the box that might make it the prime choice for some users.

Probably the most noteworthy is the automatic recognition of music that gets added to the music player. It is possible to scan folders on the local hard drive for music. Album art and additional information are automatically retrieved by Jaangle and displayed in the player. This does include band and artist information which are usually not provided by many music players. Continue Reading »

News: gOS – The Cloud Distro

Over the past years I have helped a number of people switch to Linux. One of these folks is a good friend of mine who has recently taken an interest in my collection of LiveCD’s. I carry a cd carrier in my backpack so I always have my livecd’s with me and my friend wanted a copy of gOS.

gOS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution created by Good OS, a Los Angeles-based corporation. Its CIO Dave Liu realized that his dream to bring Web 2.0 applications into mainstream use could be realized by creating a Linux distribution that made it easy for users to access Google and other Web 2.0 applications. The company initially advertised gOS 1.0 as “An alternative OS with Google Apps and other Web 2.0 apps for the modern user.” On January 3, 2009 Good OS released gOS 3.1 Gadgets (SP1), or Service pack 1, and simultaneously launched a new official forum, as a replacement for the google discussion group used previously.

Based on the idea of cloud computing, gOS leans heavily on on-line applications built on Web 2.0 and AJAX technology so it doesn’t use much hard disk space for applications. Many of the documents created with gOS, such as Google Docs documents, can be saved on Google servers instead of on the local hard disk, so gOS can work with very small hard disks.

More details available at ardchoille42 Blog

Review: Can Ubuntu 9.10 Outperform Mac OS X 10.6?

Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements, but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” will be out in October and does have some performance improvements as our earlier tests have shown, but Canonical engineers have not been exclusively focusing on performance optimizations with this release. Can the Karmic Koala outperform Snow Leopard? Yes and no.

More details available at Phoronix.com

Review: Control your Mac apps via Keymote for iPhone

Keymote, a brand new iPhone application from Iced Cocoa, is much more than just a remote for you Mac. The application is an extended keyboard and a shortcut aide. It’s a must-have utility for anyone who has a Mac hooked up to a TV, uses complicated keyboard shortcuts, or needs to control a Mac from another room. It isn’t the first application of its class to grace the App Store, but it may be the most polished, most useful, and most attractive.

The beauty of Keymote is the flexibility of the application, even though all the application does is send keystrokes to your computer. These can be as simple as a single character or as complicated as a long series of keystrokes. Since Keymote isn’t tied to a single application, but instead the current active application, it works in conjunction with all applications with keyboard shortcuts—including those that are X11-dependent.

More availabel at ArsTechnica.com

Review: Mandriva 2010 Alpha Brings Plymouth, New Features

The first alpha release of Mandriva Linux 2010 was released on Sunday. This development update brings a number of core improvements to Mandriva such as a faster boot time, Plymouth integration for enhancing the boot process, Tomoyo for providing the security framework, Moblin packaging, and various other improvements. In this article we are taking a brief look at Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1.

More details come to Phoronix.com/…