Chrome is the word
So, a year and a half after I blogged about Chrome being released I am finally making the switch from Firefox 3....
posted on: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
USB Modes
I'm the proud owner of a new Sandisk Sansa View, an mp4 player in the style of an Apple Nano, but without the Apple baggage that goes with it (and some might say, without the style)....
posted on: Sat, 02 Jan 2010 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Patched FireFox RSS Editor
RSS Editor is a great extension for Firefox that adds functionality to allow you to edit (doh!) RSS files....
posted on: Sat, 19 Dec 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Open Source Graphics
I regularly end up doign all sorts of quick graphics edits. I have been a long time fan of Pain Shop Pro and still run v8....
posted on: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
USB3 is here
PCPro have published some results of the first USB3 devices to hit the market. Motherboards with USB3 ports are yet to arrive so you have to make do with PCI Express cards, but they're cheap at under £30. Clearly this will be a boon to external HDDs, portable media, external monitors etc etc and data transfer rates appear to be 2-4 times faster. As previous posts show, I use a portable HDD wherever possible for storing data and running apps, so USB3 is a big deal. I'll be on the look out for a USB3 drive caddy ASAP!
posted on: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
USB3 drives out shortly
PCP Pro briefly rounds up the latest news on the USB3 standard. This promises speeds of up to 600MBs over the interface and one area that could really benefit is external hard drives. Freecom and Buffalo both have drives for release by the end of the year, although whilst the USB3 headline speed is high, they will be aiming for ~125MBs, apparantly due to restrictions in drive speed (rather than the interface). That said, it's considerably faster than current USB2 speeds and they will ship with a USB3 expansion card (so you can use them!!). Good news for those of apps that carry all our USB apps around with us.
posted on: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Win7 Student Offer
Microsoft are offering HE students Windows 7 for £30. That's a damn good deal and includes either Home or Professional; the latter offering quite a few more features. It is download only (universities will be pleased with that!) and you must have an HE email address. You can pre-register from 1st October.
posted on: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Windows 7 RC Hibernation
Just a brief update about my install of the Windows 7 RC. Everything has worked very well on may Sony Vaio TX3XP; the RC drivers did their job, although a couple of device specific hardware failed....
posted on: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
PogoPlug
Now this is just too cool not to blog about. A PC that is part of a 3-pin plug?? With a 1.2GHz processor, plus 512MB of DRAM, 512MB of NAND Flash memory, plus Ethernet and USB port. How cool is that?! They are touting it as an ideal media server but I can think of all sorts of environmental applications where you could plug a sensor in to it and just let it record. Very neat.
posted on: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Windows 7 Release Candidate
It was quite some time earlier in June that Microsoft made the release candidate of Windows 7 available for download....
posted on: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Palm Pre is here
Perhaps somewhat quietly to European audiences, the Palm Pre was launched last Saturday in the US. Apparantly stocks have sold out and it has been largely well received, being described as the only likely rival to the iPhone. Clearly an awful long way to go and in depth reviews seem to praise webOS highly, with the Pre itself being a satisfactory starting point. A ROM image restorer has had the techniques in palpitations as the 200Mb file has allowed some disassembly to see whats going on. As ever, plenty of gossip over at Palm InfoCenter. However the biggest news has got to be the porting of Doom on to the Pre. A thoroughly worthwhile cause.
posted on: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Minimap for Firefox
Minimap is a great extension for Firefox allowing access to a range of online mapping services through a sidebar. However it is much more than that; default view is the (broad) location of your IP address. You can drag and drop addresses on to the map to move to that area. Route planning is integrated, along with import/export of KML and support for many webservices (such as FireEagle, Flickr etc). Really takes web mapping to the next level of integration.
posted on: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram's Alpha has made quite a big splash on the search engine scene and looks likely to redefine the whole search business....
posted on: Tue, 19 May 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Palm Pre Update
There's been a slow trickle of PR concerning the Palm Pre and it increasingly looks like a May release date on Sprint....
posted on: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Portable R
Carrying on in the portable apps vein, R is rapidly becoming the de facto standard in statistical analysis software for research. Its command line driven so not for the point-and-click brigade but incredibly powerful and, importantly, all the algorithms are peer reviewed. If they get in to R then they have to be good. It therefore surprised me when I realised that I hadn't looked for a portable version. And it's not quite as obvious to find as I thought it might be, but Andrew Radd has put together a portable version in the portableapps.com vein. Well worth a download.
posted on: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Search for everything
I came across this Windows search engine recently called, not surprisingly, Everything Search Engine! Its a 300kb stand alone application that ties in to NTFS file indexing, allowing you to search for any filename on an entire filesystem. What's amazing is that, besides being so small, it indexes your entire disc in ~1s. Results are instantaneous. A worthy program to have at hand.
posted on: Fri, 06 Mar 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Dial2Do
I'm a big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done and one of his mantras is to clear your mind of all the things you need to remember and to keep it clear....
posted on: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Keyboard PC
With the phenomenal success of the netbook form factor (and, not least, the price!) Asus are clearly trying to capitalise on their market success by diversifying the basic idea in to new form factors. A "desktop" netbook has already be released integrating the hardware in an LCD screen. Well now comes the Eee Keyboard, a standard size keyboard with, yes, a netbook built in. It does come with a 5" screen on the side and runs Windows XP. Perhaps the neatest aspect is the wireless HDMI interface, designed so that it can display direct to your TV. It'll be interesting to see how variable netbooks come become.
posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Palm webOS
Palm appear to have been wowing the crowds at CES this year with no sign of the downturn at all! Before Christmas Palm announced that an invitation only event, which was hotly thought to be an announcement about their new operating system....
posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2009 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Foxit Reader 3
Foxit Reader 3 has recently been released and it's a worthy upgrade. Again, you can download the ZIP and simply extract the EXE in to any directory you want meaning you can run it from a USB stick). At 7Mb, and 1 file, it's a pleasantly small and simple bit of kit. As with previous releases the speed of rendering PDFs is excellent, with functions supporting thumbnails and layers added in this release. The latter is particularly welcome as GeoPDFs (and layers) have become far more prevalent. Thoroughly recommended.
posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Folder and file synchronisation
As I've mentioned before backup is the cornerstone to any serious use of IT and any good backup strategy will involve some form of file/folder synchronisation....
posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Enormous Google Earth images
If you haven't come across Super Googer before then it is well worth a look. This is a simple hosted PHP script that uses Google's tile encoding system for Google Earth imagery to download as many tiles as you want....
posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
The iPod, another great British invention (that we didn't make any money out of)
This really seems a recurring theme for us Brits; hover craft, jet airliners.....
posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Google Power Tips!
This article is worth a look at power tips for using Chrome. Note the startup options, about: keywords, portable USB version and anonymizer. Very useful.
posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Google Chrome
If you've been living on another planet for the last 24 hours then you might just have missed Google's typically understated announcement that they are releasing a new web browser called Chrome, designed to meet the deficiences in Firefox, IE and Opera....
posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Getting things done...
I've been an advocate of the Getting Things Done (GTD) for a number of years now. In a management era that seems to be defined by self-organization manuals, this one stands out from the crowd by its relatively simple explanation of why things don't get done and how to go about rectifying the situation....
posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
TagCrowd
Came acrossTagCrowd today which is an interesting service that analyses a piece of text and provides a visual cue as to the types of words and their frequency....
posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Mobile broadband speeds
For those that have taken advantage of the tumbling subscription rates for mobile broadband through the likes of 3, T-Mobile etc (as cheap as £5 per month), the different data rates might prove a little confusing....
posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Firefox 3 and addons
I've finally taken the plunge and upgraded to Firefox 3, although through the portableapps.com route....
posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Bibliographies and referencing
Referencing is a bit of a black art in universities and something we try to drum in from the first year....
posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Extracting images from MS Office documents
For quite a while image handling in MS Office has bugged me. Its never been particularly great for two reasons:
1....
posted on: Mon, 02 Jun 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Foxit PDF Read 2.3
A new version of Foxit PDF Reader has been released and whilst on the face of it it only appears to be an incremental update, the big news is that it now offers full audio/video support for PDFs....
posted on: Fri, 16 May 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Opera Mini 4 and McDonalds
I've been using Opera Mini 4 on my Palm TX for a while now and it is very slick at viewing websites. Its not a "one-size-fits-all" product but for certain niches its excellent....
posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
SD Cards and beyond
SD cards are all the same right? You stick them in your camera, PDA, laptop etc and they just work? Well have a look at the above article and you'll quickly realise that this isn't the case....
posted on: Sat, 23 Feb 2008 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Animated GIFs and Powerpoint
I wanted to put an animated GIF in to Powerpoint recently and, when imported, it simply showed a blank square. A little bit of Googling later and it would appear that, from Powerpoint2000 onwards, animated GIFs can be viewed (fully animated) in presentation mode only. When in editing mode, they simply show the first frame. Useful to know...
posted on: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Free your mind
I have been a fan of "mind mapping" for a number of years, a technique for brainstorming, organising and structuring data first developed by Tony Buzan....
posted on: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Concatenating in Windows
I was recently sent some LiDAR data x,y,z triples (i.e. x coordinate, y coordinate and elevation); actually, it also had intensity so quadruples I guess. Anyway, the data were extracted for a 1km2 area from multiple flight lines which meant I had multiple x,y,z values. Before importing these as a LiDAR LAS file I wanted to concatenate them. Easy to do in Linux but I couldn't remember how to do it in Windows. A quick Google later led me to this useful article over at Lockergnome. And for those too lazy to click, this for loop will do the work for you:
for %f in (*.log) do type "%f" >> aggregate.txt
posted on: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Latex and change tracking
If you've read any of my blog entries over the last year, then you will realise that I'm a regular LaTeX user, primarily for typesetting at the Journal of Maps....
posted on: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Converting Word 2007 Files
Now that Office 2007 is fully upon us, expect to be receiving the DOCX (and equivalent PPTX and XLSX) files from colleagues....
posted on: Sat, 25 Aug 2007 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Creating ISOs
One of the nice things in virtual machines is that you can mount real, or fake, CDs on to the VM. So if you load a CD in to your own system, the VM can access it....
posted on: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
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