Category Archives: Computers

My (not so) new toys…

Posted on by

I’ve got a problem that I really like buying computers, and while I don’t always have an exact use for them when I buy them I normally find something for them to do.

A few weeks back (about 2) I went round to a company called Bridgeport Technical Services. These guys sell refurbished computers. The nice thing is the machines are rather cheap and they don’t come with any Operating System so they perfect for installing Linux on to.

So I bought two machines, although I really wanted to buy alot more.

Continue reading →

Open Source CAD

Posted on by

I’m always desinging something, I admittedly never build anything… or not once I’ve worked out it’s do-able but I enjoy designing weird stuff. Almost all of my designs are scribbles on paper and I never actually make any kind of plans for them. Paper’s cool because it’s simple, you don’t need much to draw something and it’s quick. It does have it’s down sides, things aren’t that straight it’s hard to get the scale right without rulers and possibly the worst part is that when you decide to move something or want to see if perhaps putting a hole through the case would look ok or moving the bathroom next to the kitchen to see if it’s better you need to re-draw everythng because you can’t just move stuff around and theres no undo button.

Which brings us to CAD software, I’m not looking for anything fancy, my needs are simple. I want something thats easy to use and that I can draw any kind of technical drawing. Ideally I want to be able to in the same program do the floor plan for my million dollar mansion or the design for my new tv cabinet or the case for the ultimate HTPC. The problem is that I have a minimum requirement that the program works on Linux and it would be nice if it also ran on MacOSX and Windows and that it shouldn’t cost anything.
And so the search starts for an open source CAD program.
Continue reading →

Last.Fm is really cool…

Posted on by

I love all the new sites that are coming out… one that a friend recently introduced me to is called Last.Fm.

Now last.fm is very hard to describe but basically through special plugins in media players your computer sends them information on what music you listen to all this is then stripped of any “private” information and then grouped together with a the information gathered from thousands of other people. They then do lots of fancy stuff on all the data and finally come out with info that says “People who like Katie Melua will also like KT Tunstall”. By signing up for your own account at last.fm you can tell them what you like which means that they’ll then be able to give you better more accurate information on other artists you may like.

Continue reading →

The Internet Archive

Posted on by

A while ago I was watching an episode of NerdTV where Robert “X” Cringely interviews Brewster Kahle? the? creater of the Internet Archive.? I must admit that the only thing I? knew or ever used of the internet archive was the Wayback machine which? allows you to “go back in time” and view an older version of a website.

But in the interview they were talking about Movies, Audio, Books and all kinds of other stuff that the Internet Archive now archives so I decided to go take a look…

Continue reading →

Hamachi VPN

Posted on by

Hamachi is a really cool little application that allows you to build a secure encrypted vpn accross the internet. What makes Hamachi special is that you don’t need fixed IP’s or anything like that, this means you can create a network between machines even if you don’t know there current ip’s or if they’re behind a router/firewall/nat.

Continue reading →

Open Source Desktop Publishing Software

Posted on by

Having once run my own small business I know all about doing things yourself to save money. One of the things that we did alot of was brochures, manuals and other printed documents. When you’re a small company you can’t always afford all the fancy expensive software so alot of our documents were generated in OpenOffice.org Writer or Microsoft Word now theres nothing wrong with either of these but they not exactly the “best” in desktop publishing applications.

That was all 2 years ago and alot has changed since then. I no longer have my own business so I don’t need to do any desktop publishing and the opensource world has now caught up and there are alot of awesome applications available for free. This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on making and designing things I still am constantly tinkering with things although now it’s more a “just for fun” thing.

Below is a list and short description of some opensource applications that I’ve played with. This isn’t everything available and these are not necessarily the only applications available but these are the ones I know about.

Continue reading →

viZoo – Free Format – holographic projection.

Posted on by

I spotted this site along time ago but I keep getting asked about it. viZoo is a advertising company that according to their site “Are an advertising film company, developing and producing new media with “edge”. Something that has never been seen before. For window shopping, events and outdoor.”

So what makes them so interesting then? Well they’ve come up with something called Free Format that is sort of a cheap version of a holographic projection system. What they do is project using standard digital projectors onto an invisible screen the effect is that it looks like the items they are showing are really there in the showroom. Of course because they using Digital Projectors they can make the displays interactive too. If you watch the video clips on there site (under the Show Reel section) you’ll see that most of these displays attract a large crowd, in one the police step in to get the people to move on.
If you check out the site you’ll see they got a few demo clips on the system in action, best ones is the girl who walks around a clothing store at night and keeps changing into clothing (this one isn’t so much “technically” impressive but who cares… it’s a sexy girl removing her clothes…) the others are ones of various cars and other things.

I do wonder how easy it would be to homebrew a similar setup, projectors aren’t that expensive anymore… the problem is find something that allows you to create a screen that from a few meters away you can’t see.

Cool Programs for Cell Phones

Posted on by

I don’t like cellphones, there screens are too small they don’t have full qwerty keyboards and normally the only people who call my phone (during the day anyway) are people I really don’t actually want to talk to.

That all said there are a few cool programs that you can download for your cellphone (if it supports J2ME) that make it a little bit more useful.

Continue reading →

New version of Google Talk is out

Posted on by

Incase you didn’t know, theres a new version of Google Talk out. It’s now got things like voicemail and the ability to send files.

You can get the new version here. (Please note this version is marked “testing”) You can get the old version on the normal site here.

For those of you who don’t live permanently plugged into the Internet/Googlesphere. Google Talk is a IM (Instant Messaging) system that uses Jabber and allows you to talk or text chat to friends who use Gmail. The really cool bit is you can text using through the gmail web interface or you can use Google talk if you want things like voice.

Update: Fixed the link so that it actually goes to the new version… (Thanks Eduard for the info.)

Google Part 1 – GDrive

Posted on by

Google is part of everyday life for me, it’s become something that I can’t live without and I can’t work without. This is the first post of many in which I’ll write about some of the cool things you can do with Google and there suites of software and websites.

This post is all about the GDrive an extension for Windows Explorer that allows you to use your Gmail account to store files. I know it’s a bit of an odd place to start but a I was talking about it over the weekend and a friend asked me to please give him the link to it.
Continue reading →