Mobbler

I haven’t got money to burn, or the need for a mobile phone contract, and as a result I have only just upgraded my mobile phone, and am now the owner of a Nokia N95-1.  Of course it’s a lovely phone that suites me greatly, hence why I got one, plus it’s old enough to now be within my price range for a new unit.  Anyway I like my music, a lot, and I use last.fm mostly to scrobble but sometimes to just listen to.  We’ll I was looking for a scrobbler for my N95 and found Mobbler, a piece of free software that runs on your N95 and will scrobble your music, or play last.fm stations.  It can run in offline or online modes and will queue songs to scrobble.  This is perfect for me since I don’t have a data plan.

Mobbler can be found here and works on many S60v3 and v5 phones.

We’ll see how it is after a week of use.

Firefox 3.5

Yes yes people, it’s finally out.  I didn’t actually realise this, and only just noticed when I forced a manual check for updates.

It’s apparently faster, and of course now has support for private browsing.  Full new features list is available on the firefox site.

Now I don’t have numerical figures, but I’m pretty certain it’s loading web pages in half the time.  All I hope is that it’s a better memory user than previous versions.

As always, worth the upgrade.

Trillian Astra – Expanded

Trillian Astra, now I’m well aware that a brief article has already been started on its subject matter but with this I hope to expand on what Jon was originally trying to touch upon.

Both Jon and myself have been using Trillian Astra as our primary IM’ing software for the good part of a week now and in that time we’ve both discovered features which we definitely weren’t expecting. Touching on a point Jon made originally, Trillian is extremely good with its memory usage. It constantly clears its memory usage and even in extended use with multiple accounts running I’ve rarely seen Trillian use more than 30mb in memory usage generally idling at around 20mb.

A little feature I’m glad has been implemented is the docking and auto hide feature. Rather than having to constantly hunt around for the IM client such as I have had to do in the past with AIM and MSN respectively I’ve been able to dock the Trillian client to the right of my screen and auto-hide it bring it back into view simply by floating to the right edge of my screen to bring it back. I’m well aware that both previous IM Clients may have included these features but I certainly don’t recall stumbling on them myself.

Another interesting feature is how Trillian Astra goes about implementing the history. You can sort through a calendar to find conversations you’ve had with specific contacts, sorting through months days and years. Within these days it also includes a graph of sorts to show what time of day your conversation went about. I like the concept but it does make one wonder what the real purpose is for it.

One can also create an Astra profile which other users with Trillian Astra can view. This page can be customised via widgets but it can be customised to show which chat services you use within Trillian Astra, you age, sex, relationship status and location. There are sub branches under this as well which include a wall where you can basically add your widgets which include world clocks, the local weather, dictionary.com word of the day and others.

I’ve noticed that there are certainly more options and it seems to be more integrated towards Facebook rather than Myspace. The options and features certainly favour Facebook in terms of it providing updates in status, the ability to poke with the client whereas Myspace’s integration only goes as far as being able to chat with those currently logged into Myspace.

It’s also nice to see Trillian begin to include features within this version that were pay to use in previous versions such as the video functions. What with the gradual progression in IM’ing clients it has become a necessity to provide such services for free to be able to compete with the competition.

It will also be interesting to see how easily the average computer user will be able to deal with Trillian as it can appear daunting at first although it definitely helps you every step of the way to get what you need done. The implimentation of plug-ins is a brilliant feature which allows one to set up RSS feeds through Trillian or a fully featured audio player. There are a vast array of plug-ins available to keep things fresh although I’d be interested to see if these features will be available within the free version of Trillian or just within the version you have to pay for.

My one major niggle with Trillian Astra seems to be its inability to remember to auto-connect to my accounts. Although set it seems to reset these options to default although I have yet to hear Jon complain of similar issues so perhaps its just me.

There are certainly one or two bugs that still need ironing out, but certainly do not allow these small issues put you off what is otherwise an Instant Messenger clearly in a class of its own. Be sure to keep an eye out as a Web version has recently been released and a Mac and Iphone version should be appearing on the scene in the not too distant future!

Check it out here.

Jaunty Jackalope and XP

I’m going to start this post with a little synopsis of my computer based skills as I deem it relevant.

Unlike Jon I’m not quite one step up and beyond when it comes to computers. My skills certainly aren’t lacking, although they don’t quite meet par. My expertise lies more in graphical design, using specific software although I am more than capable of maintaining a windows desktop for many years without issues.

Now we have that out of the way on to the task at hand!

I recently decided that I wanted a fresh start with my desktop computer. My Windows XP was running stable just as always, but I had noticed some real slow down from extended use, and I happen to be a ~little~ bit of hoarder when it comes to old pieces of software or music I have laying about. I used the old “I’ll keep it for now, you never know when I’ll need it!”, well two years later and I didn’t need any of it to be fair. The music was never touched in those two years, and the software was now many moons out of date.

From times past, I still had my hard drive partitioned into four segments:-

- Windows XP

- Windows Swap

- Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

- Ubuntu Swap

The last time I frequented my Ubuntu partition was a good year or so previous, it certainly wasn’t in any recent months in any case. What I hadn’t counted on when it booted up, was for my Windows to have played havoc with some of Ubuntu’s key files [A problem which arose from my own mistakes I.e. allowing the Linux drive to appear in my windows, forgetting and commencing an anti-virus sweep of all available hard drives] …suffice to say, my Ubuntu was dead. I attempted a recovery via doing what it asked, but subsequently made it worse and savagely murdered Grub in the process and without Grub I certainly knew no other way of getting into my Windows Partition.

This is where having laptops in the house came in use. I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu and swiftly began an installation over my old Linux partition, formatting as I went.

[As a quick side note, if any of you are debating whether or not to to install Ubuntu, we do have a guide floating around here on CTN Today which you can find here. It may be a little out of date but it still leads you down the right road as the installation process doesn't appear to have changed that dramatically.]

Grub was now back up and running, so I now had complete access to my Windows partition. After what seemed to be an age waiting for my XP to boot up [After booting into Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope I finally realised just quite how slow my Windows was] I set up moving files I wanted to save onto my external hard drives whilst constantly cleaning my external hard drives of junk which was no longer useful.

Now something I recommend, although it certainly isn’t a prerequisite is to spend a little time looking through your start menu. What software do you want? What do you need? Is there something better out there? When was the last time you looked? I found it a great experience just to spend time evaluating exactly what I did and did not use, and went about finding the set up files [.exe] from their websites and sifting through my installation CDs ready for when I formatted Windows.

Windows reinstalled without issue although it did take a fair while longer than Ubuntu. It was here that I now discovered an issue. Windows needs to be there first, before you install Ubuntu or Grub doesn’t quite work. Thankfully I had left my Jaunty Jackalope as a basic installation so a quick reinstallation was in order. Now I know what you’re thinking, “You could have just as easily searched the famous Ubuntu forums for a more direct way of getting Grub back up and running!” …Suffice to say last time I tried *coughs* things didn’t go too well.

Ubuntu is such a delight to install, especially since the more fundamental pieces of software you’ll want came already packaged with Ubuntu Jaunted Jackalope i.e. Mozilla, Pidgin [IM Client] Open Office, and my personal favourite Mahjongg! Man do I love that game! There are a few other bits and pieces you may find the need to look for such as setting up the CompizConfig Settings Manager but a quick google search will pull back many results in how it can be achieved.

Windows on the other hand, although not exactly difficult to get up is certainly long. Working my way through the set up files of software I wanted to reinstall took me the good part of an afternoon with coffee breaks between sessions but the improvement is certainly one to be admired.

My Windows and Ubuntu use has certainly improved now above and beyond before. You see my personal experience of Windows is that the more you use it, the worse it seems to perform so as a work around I’m now using my Ubuntu installation for IM’ing and general internet use. It runs perfectly for it and this entire article was written within Ubuntu rather than Windows.

Windows will always have a place in my heart though as it has some brilliant pieces of software which I’m certainly not willing to give up. I enjoy my online games a little too much and I’ve recently fallen in love with Trillian Astra which Jon recently wrote about.

There’s certainly a happy medium for myself at least between using two of the best operating systems on the market to optimise my overall desktop experience which I’m sure the most of you acknowledge.

Chris

Trillian Astra

Yes, it’s finally here, for windows users at least.  Trillian Astra is something that we’ve been waiting for, and I can tell you after using it for just 5 minutes it was worth the wait.  Now why would you want to use said IM client?  For starters it handles multiple protocols, which means you can use AIM, MSN, Facebook chat, Myspace IM, or Google talk (and others) in one client.  It also seems to have a much better memory footprint and usage than the msn client on it’s own, and that makes it a winner in my books, especially when I can link my two most used (currently) networks facebook and msn.

Why not give it a shot, setup is easy.  If you use multiple clients currently, see if you can use Astra.  Download here.

We’re back!

I have been busy the last few months, but I now finally have the time to get posting again.  Also I know that Chris has been working in ubuntu the last week or so and will no doubt post his experiences, tips and tricks.

That’s it for now, keep watching for new posts.

Protecting Children from Pornography

I’ve covered this topic before, however I have recently watched Channel 4’s Sex education vs Pornography, a series which is confirming my fears that parents have no idea what is on the internet.  What is worse is that I never realised the scale and impact that pornography is having.  (This is in the UK by the way).  If you live in the UK, and are a parent, or even anyone, age matters not, I suggest you watch it, simply since I find it fascinating to see how these things impact on people.  It’s still available on channel 4’s website if you look for it.

I’m not a parent, if anything I’m the opposite end of the scale.  I’m 20, and I can tell you right now that the internet is a shocking place.  The internet brings with it an incredible level of freedom of information, you can find out anything, I mean anything, there are sites that describe death, explosives, guns, you name it I can tell you that there is information (some very in-depth) available online.  The worse thing is, you don’t even have to look hard.  If you do look hard then it gets pretty rough.

My nephew is five years old, he’s able to use a computer, he doesn’t know how to use a computer properly, but he can click and type, and knows how to get on the internet.  Now all it would take would be for him to mistype a word into the address bar, and rather than a kid’s TV channel, he could end up anywhere.  The thing is he’s too young to understand a lot of the stuff on the net, and he perhaps wouldn’t understand the warnings.

Now, many people are ignorant of the internet, I mean if you say to people what they use the internet for, most people would say Porn, or if they couldn’t give that answer perhaps online shopping or social networking.  I’ll be honest, most male internet users know of porn, female internet users may not be so aware.  That’s down to how we work, men do think of sex a lot, and do search for such things.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an idea of what is on the internet.  I wouldn’t be surprised if you became quickly appalled.

The media distorts, they are very good at distorting the truth, they are terrible.  However, to see TV programs like the above makes me realise that they can fix some of the problems they cause.  You cannot cushion your children from life, you cannot cut them off from what is, undeniably, a brilliant thing – the internet.  You can block and control their access at home, but you cannot control their phones or their friends computers.  Schools do a lot, schools lock down anything questionable, so the computers at schools are safe, well they were at my school.

Technology is a blessing and a curse, however you need to remember a few things, the internet is not evil, it’s done many good things.  It’s an almost totally unregulated means of sharing information, this is a good thing, and a bad thing.  If you start regulating it then you hit problems.

So what can you do.  It goes back to one of my philosophies I guess, that you need to discuss this.  There is so much misinformation, that even I have trouble sometimes finding the truth in a sea of rubbish and lies, but that’s the internet.  It’s important for parents to realise that anyone can get access to anything, even when they block it at home.  Internet filtering software can be free or paid-for, and can block internet, or other programs as well.  I would actively review them myself, but I don’t have a need for one right now.  Saying that though, I am currently running Blue Coat K9 Web Protection (site here).  It’s certainly not the most customisable, but it is free for home use, and quite easy to understand and set up.  I’m currently using it to block explicit popups, which are finding ways around my already good defences, and it seems to be working.  There are other programs out there, you might even already have one built into your internet security suite, or in the Operating System.  Searching on the internet will turn up some helpful information about how to use them effectively.

If anything though, talk to your kids about the internet, the problems it poses, the content available, and make it clear that a lot of what is online is misleading and wrong, this in turn has it’s adverse effects, what can you really trust in the end?

Thank you for taking the time to read this.  I hope it is of benefit to someone.

Spring cleaning…

In the sense of your pc’s and laptops.  I’m sitting here listening to music on my laptop and it’s not liking it one bit, my CPU is spiking and the music is stuttering, and I now know why.  I’ve let my hard drive get full up and my pc hates it.  So in classic fashion I’m going to write a little post summarising what things you need to do to get your system into shape.

Well, we all know the biggest cause of slowdowns to computers is time, simply put the longer you have a system the slower it gets, but you can solve this.  Firstly, check for malware, adware, and crapware on your system, simply start by going through the add/remove programs menu, and remove stuff you don’t want, or toolbars and other rubbish.  Then scan with an anti-malware software (we recommend Malwarebytes anti-malware).  Next thing to do is to remove any clutter using the disk cleanup tools on windows.  If you don’t run disk cleanup regularly you should get back a few gigabytes of hard drive from that.  You want to keep plenty of free space on your primary system drive, at least 20 gb free (or 15% I believe it is).

Next on the agenda, you could clean up your registry using one of the various programs out there.  Finally you should defrag your system.  I currently use Ultimate Defrag 2008, but you can use whatever, really since it’ll all help in someway.

Not really much but all worth it.  OH, and if you fancy it whip the case off your system and clean out all the dust, your CPU, GFX card and hard drive will be happier for it.  Try and clean the dust out every 3 months, but at the minimum once or twice a year.

Hiatus (sort of)

Yes, I’m afraid that’s how it’s been and that’s how it may well be.  I’ve got a busy time coming up and so probably won’t post at all.  Chris also has a lot on his plate right now, but I’ll try and bug him to post.

Anyway, We’re not stopping or anything like that, I just haven’t had, and won’t have, time to post or keep track of things, hopefully this will only last for a couple of months… and then I really really hope to be back in full force, posting left, right and centre.

Who knows though, my next post might be technological gold… but probably not.

Is Firefox really better than IE? – Security

Ok, this is being called into question recently, now I did a bit of searching, because as a Firefox user I’d like to know how much truth there is to these reports.

Now, I’ve only looked at two reporting sources, not the original report from Secunia.
I first saw this article from LinuxInsider, then found this on Mozilla’s Security Blog.

Now feel free to draw your own conclusions, both articles raise very good points.

Will I still use firefox? Yeah, for me it’s more usable, more flexible, and nicer.  Sure it’s security is an important factor, but as has been stated on those articles and in the past, security bugs will always appear, the question is usually how quick are they patched and Mozilla does win hands down with that one.  Of course, since Microsoft don’t fully disclose their full fixes on updates (as far as I remember) you never know how many holes they are patching.

With the web  browser now becoming increasingly important and used, it’s important that security is constantly dealt with.  I trust Mozilla far more than I trust Microsoft, I know how open source works, so that’s probably why.

What browser you use, is totally your choice, and I do believe Microsoft are getting better with their patches, but still, their patch cycle (monthly) and things like that obviously cause them problems.

With Firefox I control my browsing, nothing runs without my say so, hence I know I’ll very rarely get hit by spyware.  I always remember the trouble IE used to cause (and still does) with regards to installing spyware. 

Common conversation:
Them: “My PC is really really slow”
Me: “Do you use IE?”
T: “Yeah Why?”
M: “That’ll be why.  Get some antispyware software, try and clear the rubbish off your system, and ditch IE.”
T: “But I like IE.”
M: “So do hackers.”
T: “I don’t like Firefox, It’s different to IE.”
M: “It’s not that different, here install these add-ons. *Gives list on add-ons*.  Restart it and see if that’s any better.”
T: “Ah… yeah a bit better, still prefer IE though.”

See, browser exploits come in two forms, holes in the program and holes in the way the program handles internet (website scripts and things) code.  Unfortunately even when I get people to use Firefox, they always switch back to IE.  They just don’t understand the true problem of malware.  Firefox is much better against webcode exploits, especially when I throw in something like the NoScript add-on, total script execution control.