Once and Still a Techie Weblog

Spice up your Chrome

No, I’m not talking about having a car fender for lunch. Google Chrome has become a favorite browser for many a couch surfer and continues to gain market share. As of June 2010, 7.24% of the pie has Google Chrome written all over it.

For the Chrome users out there who don’t know it yet, there’s a way to customize your browser through Chrome Themes. Similar to Firefox Personas, themes allow you to dress up your browser. I’ve personally installed the theme for the Spanish Football Team since I’m rooting for them in the 2010 FIFA World Cup. If you’re a soccer fan head on over here to pick your Nation.

For the longest time, Firefox was the most customizable browser out there with all the add-ons you can imagine free to download and install. Google has been catching up fast with Chrome Extensions a wide variety available for download here. One extension I’ve found quite useful is the FIFA.com extension which I’ve configured to keep me abreast of the latest World Cup News involving my favorite team Spain.

I’ve always been a Firefox fan and it’s still my primary browser. But recently, I’ve noticed myself use Chrome more often. It does seem a bit faster at times. The address bar/search bar feature of Chrome is, from a usability standpoint, faster then the Firefox Awesome bar experience. Who know’s, maybe as more extensions get developed for Chrome, I might see myself switching permanently to the “Shiny” side…

Tags: firefox-awesome-bar, firefox-personas, google-chrome-extensions, google-chrome-themes

Posted in Internet Technologies, Personal Computing, Software | 8 Comments »

Microsoft Office Web Apps are Live

Initially advertised for a June 15 launching, Microsoft quietly enabled Office Web Apps on June 7. All you need is a Live account and any of the following browsers: Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 3.5+, and Safari 4+. Just head on over to office.live.com and start creating new Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote documents. This is all free, by the way, and direct competition to Google’s Google Docs.

Office Live uses your Live Skydrive for online storage needs, all 25GBs of it. So there’s plenty of space for all your amazing Powerpoint presentations and short stories written in Microsoft Word or that 200MB spreadsheet you play around with on the afternoons.

With such a powerful suite of tried and tested and much improved Microsoft productivity applications now available online for free, we’re now one step closer to realizing true cloud-based computing.

For more information on Office Web Apps or OWA check out the Inside Windows Live blog here

See screenshots of OWA in action after the jump.

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Tags: Microsoft Office, microsoft-office-excel, microsoft-office-onenote, microsoft-office-powerpoint, microsoft-office-word, office-web-apps, productivity-applications, productivity-suite

Posted in Advances, Internet Technologies, Personal Computing, Software, Websites | 4 Comments »

A 1000 Megabit Internet Connection

Imagine having an internet connection with a 1Gbps download speed. In more meaningful terms, that’s like downloading a 700MB movie in less than 10 seconds if your connection was 100% reliable. Oh, wait a minute, there’s no need to imagine all this. Especially if you live in Hong Kong. City Telecom an ISP in Hong Kong is offering just that for a measly US$26 a month. If $26 is a bit excessive for you, then go with their 100Mbps service for just US$13.

I find it depressing that I have to pay the same amount for 1/1000 of the connection speed at home. When, oh when, do we get internet as fast as that?

Tags: 1gbps-internet

Posted in Advances, Internet Technologies | 4 Comments »

New MacBook Pros Launched

The new MacBook Pros, Apple’s most powerful laptop offerings use Intel’s Core i5 and i7 dual core processors. Despite these powerhouse CPUs you can expect up to 10 hours of battery life. They still offer 13-inch, 15-inch and 17-inch options with the 13-incher having neither an i5 nor i7 but a previous generation Core 2 Duo. Main RAM starts at 4GB and storage options start with a 250GB 5400 rpm SATA drive up to a 512GB solid state drive (SSD). With an SSD you can be up and running seconds after you switch the laptop on.

All other features of these new MacBook Pros—802.11n WiFi, Gigabit Ethernet, SD or ExpressCard slot, ports, 8x SuperDrive, unibody aluminum enclosure—remain unchanged. The 13-inch models start at $1,199, 15-inch models at $1,799, and the 17-incher at $2,299.

Tags: apple-macbookpro, macbookpro-2010

Posted in Advances, Personal Computing | 1 Comment »

Resize Photos Automatically with Shrink Pic

For you chronic photo uploaders aching to share your Christmas and New Year pictures on Facebook and Multiply, this free tool is a delightful time saver. Simply named Shrink Pic, it runs in the background detecting whether you’re about to upload a large photo to a website, through IM, or attach one to an email. It will then compress the image depending on a pre-configured compression level, pixel resolution or JPEG-quality level and to the format (jpeg, png, bmp, etc.) you desire. Once it is installed and set up, there will be no need for you to manually resize images ever.

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Tags: automatically-resize-images, shrink-pic-image-resizer

Posted in Personal Computing, Software | No Comments »

WordPress 2.9 out the door

To all WordPress users it’s time to do the update dance once again. WordPress Version 2.9 was released about a week ago with around 500 bugfixes and enhancements to make online publishing an even more seamless and customizable experience.

From the user’s standpoint, here are the newest enhancements based on the WordPress blog:

Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.

Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.

Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.

Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

I personally love the new image editing and video embedding features.

Check out the video for more details:

Tags: wordpress-2.9, wordpress-upgrade

Posted in Advances, Internet Technologies, Personal Computing, open source, video | 2 Comments »

Wirelessly Transfer Photos to your Computer

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Eye-Fi. All opinions are 100% mine.

I’m sure it’s happened to you. Especially if you’re the “official” photographer for the family outing or company party. No more than a day after, you start getting requests from people to upload the latest batch of scandalous pictures to Facebook or Multiply. But occasionally, time does not allow you to do just that and before you know it, it’s been a week or a month since that last get-together. Sometimes you feel it so inconvenient to whip out your camera’s usb cable to connect it to your PC or laptop. If you rely on a cable to link your camera and computer, there’s always the risk of losing that cable. Or if you normally remove the memory card from your camera to transfer pictures through a card reader, you could potentially lose that card.

Ok, stop it already with all that negativity and cynicism. Look at the bright side, there’s another way of getting those pics off the camera. Without any wires and at the push of a button, you can have those pictures transferred without the fuss. It’s called the Eye-Fi. The Eye-Fi looks like a standard SD Card with 4GB of memory space, but with one trick up it’s sleeve. It has a built-in WiFi capability allowing it to connect to your PC to automatically transfer your data or straight to a wireless router and onto your favorite sharing site.

For a quick look at what the Eye-Fi can do, check out the video below:

Tags: eye-fi, photosharing, sd-card, wi-fi

Posted in Internet Technologies, Mobile Technology, video | 5 Comments »

Choice Tech Tools Part II

Keeping a personal computer safe from malware and hackers should be a priority for any responsible netizen. It may come as a surprise to some of you but  having a firewall and updated anti-virus/spyware software isn’t necessarily enough to keep internet malcontents at bay.

Aside from having a firewall and installing anti-malware applications, you need to make sure your operating system is regularly updated with the latest security and stability patches. Everyday someone in the world, for either legitimate or illegal purposes, is trying to find a way to get into a computer system. And you can be sure there will always be a way. Quoting from a bulletin posted on the NIST.gov website:

“The more complicated a program is, the less secure it generally is.”

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Tags: microsoft-windows-7, microsoft-windows-server-2008-r2, secunia-personal-software-inspector, software-vulnerability, zero-day-vulnerability

Posted in Internet Technologies, Operating System, Personal Computing, Software, security | No Comments »

Choice Tech Tools Part I

Today my geeky self enjoyed configuring two brand new laptops. They came without an operating system preinstalled so I had to install the OS, install an antivirus, run updates, and install applications on both. I came across two very helpful tools in the process. One of them simplifies and automates application installation and the other ensures that all the installed apps are updated and patched from security holes that may compromise your system. I take pride in knowing that computers I configure are fully updated and secure from potential malware/hack attacks.

Those of you who have tried setting up a new computer, maybe one that you’ve built yourself, have had to go through the painstaking process of finding applications, heading to the app’s website, downloading the installer, and installing the application. This is a process you have to repeat until you’ve installed everything you need. If this is something you do often, you would probably have your own app installer repository on some USB flash drive somewhere. But how certain are you that it contains the most updated version of each application?

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Tags: compaq-cq20-411tu, ninite-custom-installer, software-installer-service

Posted in Internet Technologies, Personal Computing, Software, Websites | 4 Comments »

Firefox at Five

Everyone’s favorite open-source browser, Firefox, turned five years old on November 9. When version 1.0 was launched, a good number of netizens migrated to it as the best alternative to Microsoft’s problematic Internet Explorer 6.

Probably one of the reasons for the rapid rise in Firefox’s popularity was the lack of innovation in IE 6. MS had been sitting on their laurels since IE 6 came out in 2001. Firefox was a highly customizable browser allowing users to add functionality through the use of extensions/add-ons. It also supported tabbed browsing. Firefox was also perceived as being more secure than IE as Microsoft’s browser was prone to exploits mainly due to it’s large market share which made it a primary target for malware.

Firefox currently has around 330 million users holding the second spot with over 24 percent of the browser market share. Internet Explorer currently holds over 64%, with Safari, Chrome and Opera bringing up the rear with 4.42, 3.58, and 2.17 percent, respectively.

Tags: firefox-1.0, firefox-browser, firefox-five-years-on

Posted in Internet Technologies, Personal Computing, Software, open source | 3 Comments »