To counteract the seriousness of the last post, here is something a little more lighthearted courtesy of Ecogeek, an iPhone charger that generates its electricity by being bounced up and down as a yoyo, the iYo dreamed up by a man called Peter Thuvander.

One potential fear I had was relieved by the comment that it has a battery built in, so there's no need to yoyo while connected to the iPhone.

I'm not sure if I want one (no iPhone) but I would love to see crowds of people using them while waiting for the train.

Small tip, if you visit Peter's site click on the link '2' underneath the iYo description for an excellent video.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4)

But it's not Patch Tuesday I hear you cry! Even so, there is a critical update to be found in Windows Update. By critical we mean a vulnerability that could allow someone to run software on your computer from the internet, so that's pretty serious.

More information can be found in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Apple first released the 'I'm a Mac and I'm a PC' adverts I thought they were quite funny. I've just watched the latest collection and think that's it's time to find another way to promote Macs.

Let's face it, the ads have never been the most accurate. I'm sure plenty of gamers, musicians and artists were quite surprised to hear that Windows is gray, dull and only good for spreadsheets.

The other thing that annoys me about the adverts is that they tell me nothing about what Macs can do. It's not enough to tell me that Vista is buggy (I've had my fair share of crashes and far more than XP) or people are moving from it to Mac.

For the record, I often find myself wanting to take a break from Vista. But I do that by using Ubuntu Linux. I can keep it on the same computer and it doesn't cost any extra money.

I'll leave you with the parody of the I'm a Mac adverts that Novell released least year adding Linux to the fray.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (7)

Lifehacker.com has a roundup of its readers favourite compression software. It might seem odd to install a program for something Windows already does but they are worth investigating.

Firstly Windows file compression doesn't support all compression formats and every so often I have to try and access a RAR file. Normally prompting a forced search of the web.

My personal favourite from the list is 7-Zip. It's cross platform so it's one less thing to adjust to when switching between Windows and Linux. There's a portable version too, ideal for those of us who live off a USB key. Oh, and it's open source, so no price tag (unless you want to donate of course)

Posted by Tim Smith on October 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Having used the Beta for some time, it's time to download the final stable version of this office suite.

If you're new to OpenOffice it is a free office suite with word processor, spread sheet, presentation software and more.

New to OpenOffice 3 are filters for opening Microsoft Office 2007 documents as well as the OpenDocument format. I also found OpenOffice 3 to be much improved when opening Microsoft Office documents with macros.

Download OpenOffice 3 here. Or you can try it online at Softwaredemo or by signing up for an Ulteo account.

Speaking of hosted applications (and why not) Sourceforge has announced that it will start hosting applications for some project (via ReadWriteWeb). There are only three at the moment but hopefully this will start to increase soon.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5)

The Mozilla Foundation has released a new beta version of its forthcoming Firefox 3.1 web browser. As well as improvements in the Gecko engine used to display webpages, the new version also allows you to drag and drop tabs from one browser window to another - just like the facility in Google's recently-released Chrome beta.

The beta version can be downloaded from here, but beware: installing it will overwrite your current version of Firefox, so it's best left to a spare, or virtual, PC for the moment. More details on the release can be found here.

Posted by Tom Royal on October 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Windows 7. According to Mike Nash, Corporate Vice President of Windows Product Management. Really early versions are going to be made available to developers soon, so hopefully more information will be filtering through.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quick warning, courtesy of CIO.com, of an email claiming to have an update from Microsoft, but which is actually a Trojan, Win32/Haxdoor to be precise.

The email says that the attached program (that should get alarm bells ringing) is an "experimental private version of an update for Microsoft Windows OS users" (by now those bells should be so loud the neighbours are complaining).

The clever aspect of the attack is that today is Patch Tuesday, when Microsoft releases the latest crop of updates but please don't be fooled. Only install updates via Windows Update, not email.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to clever interactive web site technologies such as Flash or Javascript in web browsers, and the latest version is now out. I've not come across that many sites using it yet (apart from Microsoft.com of course) but it's always worth having the latest version of these programs.

It's also worth noting that Silverlight is available in more forms than you might expect for a Microsoft technology. It can be installed for Firefox and Safari as well as Internet Explorer on Mac and Windows. Support for the Opera browser is planned and there is an open source project supported by Microsoft called Mono working to bring Silverlight to Linux.

You can get Silverlight at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight

Posted by Tim Smith on October 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is a good idea for keeping a tidy Desktop, or a virtual one at least. TrayEverything can minimise programs into the Notification area rather than the TaskBar.

Down in the Notification Area the programs only take up as much space as one icon, rather than the full name.

TrayEverything is also useful for reducing distractions as it can automatically minimise programs that are left idle for a certain amount of time. So you won't get distracted by emails coming in or Bit Torrents finishing.

I've a couple of minor gripes, one being the inability to resize the window, but overall this is a very useful little utility.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's an interesting history of the different releases and versions of Windows over on Adrian Kingsley-Hughes Hardware 2.0 blog.

As Windows has developed there have been more and more versions of the same release. There was only one Windows 98 but now there are around eight for Vista (depending on whether you consider 64-bit to be a distinct version). Some of that is due to the merging of the home and business lines but there are still three main home versions: Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate.

The confusion has to be a bad thing from the point of view of ordinary users. I've been told by people that they've got Windows 97 many times having mistaken the Office splash screen for Windows. I wonder how many people really know whether they have Home Basic or Premium. That's a problem if I tell them to try out hand writing recognition.

I agree with Adrian that Windows 7 should have a much simpler approach.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Do you have an inkjet printer at home? If so, there's a decent chance that it's an HP Deskjet or Photosmart of some kind, and you'll be familiar with the standard HP design: a paper runs through the printer towards you as a moving print-head swishes back and forth, building up the image as it goes.

You may, if you're lucky, even have an A3 inkjet printer, in which case it'll look much the same but about twice the size. And, if you're really into photography, you may have forked out for an HP Designjet - again, these look much the same, but run to four or so feet wide. And that's presumably about as large as inkjet printers get. Isn't it?

As it turns out, the answer is an emphatic "no". Today I was taken to meet the HP Designjet L65500, which looks like this:

The effect of seeing a printer like this in the flesh is a little like being hit by a shrinking ray: it looks just like a gigantic DeskJet. To give some idea of how big it is, the printer takes six ink tanks, each one holding three litres of ink, it takes around three seconds for the printhead to move across the page, and it can produce 800 square feet of print per hour. These printers aren't generally available yet, but when they appear you could expect to pay around $100,000 for one.

And that's not even the biggest inkjet hidden away in HP's San Diego lab. Meet the HP Web Press:

The web press is the size of a few cars parked end to end, and can churn out 400 feet per minute when printing on both sides of 30 inch wide uncoated paper, using technology that's essentially the same as the printheads inside a desktop inkjet. So, next time you have to fork out £15 for a new ink cartridge, spare a thought for anyone who has to keep one of these running.

Posted by Tom Royal on October 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I strongly recommend the following download, the latest version of the Opera browser. The office is split over whether Firefox or Opera is better. I'm in the Opera camp, although I use both.

Opera 9.6 has been improved to show web pages even faster along with a collection of other bits and pieces.

  The email client in Opera is often forgotten, which is a shame because it is very powerful. Firstly it gives emails tags rather than putting them in folders. I prefer tags to folders because an email can be given several tags but only put into one folder.

Opera 9.6 has a new low bandwidth mode which should improve the download speed when on a slow connection. I'm guessing this is a similar technology to the mobile version of Opera, Opera Mini. The web pages or emails are sent to the computer via an Opera server that compresses them.

Opera Link has been improved. This is a synchronisation service that now shares bookmarks, SpeedDial settings, notes and even the browser history between different Opera installations using a My Opera account.

Opera is also worth trying just for mouse gestures, which are included by default (Firefox can do this with an addon)

Posted by Tim Smith on October 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5)

One of  the things that keep me with my increasingly elderly Nokia 9300 Communicator is that quality of the Windows software, Nokia PC Suite.

Not only does it synchronise all of my contacts and appointments but it will display incoming text messages. The limitation is that there is quite a delay between the text arriving and it appearing onscreen but this is more than made up for by being able to write a reply on the computer instead of the phone.

The only danger is that it is very easy to write an email rather than a text and spend lots of money. Luckily there is a counter that shows how many messages will be required.

The other great thing about PC Suite is it's the only synchronisation software I've ever got to work with Bluetooth. Don't even think about asking about ActivSync for Windows Mobile.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

ExtractNow is looking like it will enter into my hallowed list of must install apps.

It follows the philosophy of doing one thing but doing it very well. And that is extracting files from compressed archive.

What really caught my eye is support for the RAR format, often missing from other programs.

More info can be found on the ExtractNow homepage.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've got a Googlemail account. And it's my main email account, not simply because it's the one I give out the most, but also because it imports several other addresses to avoid checking lots of different mailboxes.

What's starting to worry me a little are the tales on the web of problems when trying to contact Google about problems with the email.

But if you don't pay for something, what level of support can you really expect? Granted Google displays ads on the site but in the three years I've used the account I don't think I've clicked on more than two.

My advice would be to prepare for the worst. I have a computer downloading all of my emails so I wouldn't lose any in the event of being locked out (well no more than 10 minutes worth). I wouldn't be able to access any emails in the meantime but it's a start, and I have other email addresses that could be used in the meantime.

My worries also pose the question, is having the ability to use the Google search engine to look for emails more important than other levels of service, and at what cost?

While I'm pondering that, I ought to try and make the time to learn some useful keyboard shortcuts thanks to the Official Gmail Blog.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The latest version of the GIMP image editing software is not out, GIMP 2.6.

There is a big difference with the new version as the menus have been moved out of the toolbox. A new window now appears when there are no open files. The good part of this is that it gives somewhere to drag and drops files on to but I'm not really sold on it yet because the menus are not shown in the main toolbox any more.

Some of the menus have also changed with a new option in the File menu called Create. The options to create web buttons and arrows have been moved in here. This makes a lot of sense.

While singing its praises, I am aware that the GIMP can be a little daunting for new users. I recommend persevering and getting to know it and there is plenty of help online, like this collection of 5 essential tips.

And if you're interested, a list of all the latest changes in 2.6 can be found on the GIMP website.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well maybe not the whole world, just Windows. Every so often we hear from people for whom Windows is the wrong way up, or on its side. After the initial amusing confusion over what 'Windows has fallen over' really means, the solution is fairly simple.

It is a clever feature built into some graphics card drivers to account for monitors that can be rotated into portrait mode rather than the normal landscape. It's great for editing long documents but only if Windows rotates as well to match.

The keyboard shortcuts for the four different modes* are

• Ctrl + Alt + Up Arrow: Normal
• Ctrl + Alt + Right: Rotated 90 degrees to the
• Ctrl + Alt + Left: Rotated 90 degrees to the
• Ctrl + Alt + Down: Upside down

*That includes upside down, though the possible rationale behind this other than 'because we can' escapes me.

Posted by Tim Smith on October 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)