Commonwealth Computer Consultants

KDE PIM Integration
Published April 18, 2011 - No Comments
In a previous post, I outlined some of the nifty ways that PIM information (calendars and contacts) sync across the Gnome desktop – today I will be discussing KDE. KDE has one main application that gathers the various PIM apps under a single umbrella: Kontact Kontact pulls in ...
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Gnome PIM Integration
Published January 27, 2011 - No Comments
Every desktop environment has its own methods of bringing PIM information to the forefront. In Linux, sometimes you have very tight integration of this information because a developer needed the ability to view calendar items on their desktop when the email program is closed. In the Gnome ...
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Scribus
Published December 30, 2010 - No Comments
Scribus is a free, open-source desktop publishing tool. Use it to create brochures or other “press ready” output. I recommend this to clients that need to create a tri-fold brochure (especially if they were using Word). http://www.scribus.net/
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Inkscape
Published December 27, 2010 - No Comments
Inkscape is a free, open-source vector drawing program. Fairly good tablet integration allows you to easily distort or transform your vector masterpieces. Vector art can be scaled up or down without loss of quality. Other popular vector editors are Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator. http: ...
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Agave
Published December 14, 2010 - No Comments
Agave is a free, open source colorscheme designer for Gnome. You can enter (in Hex) or pick your base color and Agave can determine color schemes from complements to tetrads. Agave also allows you to save colors – quite helpful when you’re trying to figure out if purple or red ...
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GIMP Image Editor
Published December 13, 2010 - No Comments
The GIMP is a free, open source raster image editor. You can use it in similar ways to Adobe’s Photoshop. I use it at least once a day to touch up photos or to create images for advertisements for clients. It has a quirky interface when compared with Photoshop, but really, Photosho ...
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MyPaint
Published December 10, 2010 - No Comments
MyPaint is a free, open source painting program for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It has fantastic tablet support, and works very well for freehand and tracing. The interface stays out of your way, which works incredibly well with a tablet. http://mypaint.intilinux.com/
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Transparent Proxying
Published December 8, 2010 - No Comments
Transparent proxies allow all of your web traffic to filter through a proxy for security or monitoring purposes. Using a transparent proxy has advantages over a traditional proxy setup for companies in that: There’s no maintenance for individual machines (‘I accidentally turned ...
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Browser Speed Comparison
Published December 7, 2010 - No Comments
Lifehacker has put together a nice browser speed comparison – if you follow the link you’ll see that each browser has its strengths in different areas. Windows: http://lifehacker.com/5575407/browser-speed-tests-safari-5-firefox-36-and-opera-106-beta Mac OS X: http://lifehacker. ...
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Firefox 4 New Features
Published December 6, 2010 - No Comments
Firefox 4 will be out soon (some time in January, hopefully) – and it has a raft of new features and improvements. My favorites: Faster Javascript engine, makes page response time and rendering much faster Hardware acceleration (not in Linux yet) Improved typography – fonts loo ...
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Openfire
Published December 2, 2010 - No Comments
Openfire is a free, open source XMPP server. It also happens to be the best XMPP server for small-medium business, and has clustering support for very large installations. It can be connected with Asterisk to provide information about who in your organisation is on the phone. You can a ...
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New Features in Office 2010
Published November 30, 2010 - No Comments
The folks at Digital Inspiration have provided a list of neat new features in Office 2010. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing really new or ground-breaking here, but some nice new things if you are just jumping into Office this year or are upgrading that copy of Office ’ ...
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Ubuntu moving away from X
Published November 29, 2010 - No Comments
Canonical’s founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that in about a year’s time (two releases), Ubuntu will transition from the X server to Wayland – a rather new display manager that provides several benefits for a desktop user. You can read more at Mark’s blog: http:/ ...
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JungleDisk Online Backup
Published November 23, 2010 - No Comments
JungleDisk is my personal favorite cloud-based backup solution. It has low monthly fees, is fast, and works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS. It simplifies cloud storage, and is a great supplement to an external hard disk or DVD-based backup solution. https://www.jungledisk.com/personal/desk ...
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Tab Pinning
Published November 12, 2010 - No Comments
One of the neat features of Google Chrome is tab pinning. If you have a site that you use all the time and leave open all day, simply right-click and choose “Pin Tab”. It will shrink the tab down to the favicon and free up some tab real-estate.
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Chrome to Phone
Published November 9, 2010 - No Comments
One of the neat new features in Android 2.2 (Froyo) is the ability to push any webpage, phone number or map that you’re viewing on your desktop to your phone! For users of Firefox or Google Chrome, you can install an extension and sign into your Google account. On your phone, install ...
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Using Googsystray
Published November 8, 2010 - No Comments
Many people, especially Android users, rely on a variety of Google’s services. Wouldn’t it be nice to be notified when you have a new voicemail or text message on your Google Voice account, have a new email in your Gmail account, or have unread articles in your Reader account? ...
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Other tools to clone hard drives
Published November 5, 2010 - No Comments
As a follow-up to my post about cloning drives in Linux, this great article lists several great tools to use inside of Windows to clone your hard drive. Some you must boot into (similar to the Linux live CD), and some run within Windows. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-to-clone-and-c ...
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Cloning a system with gddrescue
Published November 3, 2010 - No Comments
If you’ve ever had a hard drive that is going bad, then you might like to clone the drive to a new one before the crash comes. Below is a step-by-step guide to cloning a hard drive using an Ubuntu live CD and gddrescue. Prepare your computer for cloning. This involves detaching all k ...
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Merging KDE and QT Libraries
Published November 2, 2010 - No Comments
Over the weekend, several KDE developers have discussed merging the cross-platform libraries that allow for the K Desktop Environment to function. This would be a big change that would simplify KDE and QT app installation. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODczOQ
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iPhone Alarm Bug with DST
Published November 1, 2010 - No Comments
Due to a bug in the DST code, European and Australian iPhone users were hit with a discrepancy in the time set for their alarms and the time the alarms went off. Apparently, many Europeans were late to work due to the flaw. We will see if the bug remains when DST ends this weekend [...]
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Windows 8 Release Date Announced
Published October 25, 2010 - No Comments
Well… sorta. Windows 8 is scheduled to be released in two years, according to Microsoft Netherlands. That would put the release date at October 2012. In a future post, I’ll detail the planned features of Windows 8. Many, many companies are sticking with XP, and very few hav ...
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Ubuntu Moving Away From Standard Gnome
Published October 25, 2010 - No Comments
Ubuntu 11.04 is slated to have the new Unity interface instead of the newest stock version of Gnome. This is a surprising move for Ubuntu, as they have espoused Gnome from the very beginning as quick and easy to use. That said, they have always made many tweaks to make Gnome more user-fr ...
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RSS Feeds
Published October 25, 2010 - No Comments
RSS feeds are simply a method to push new content to viewers of a website. Since our move to WordPress, we now have RSS feeds for our blog posts. There are many free RSS readers out there. Google offers a web-based version at www.google.com/reader for those on the go. Some great feeds fo ...
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Open AudIT
Published October 25, 2010 - No Comments
In contrast with OCS Inventory, Open AudIT is a program that resides on a server and monitors software and hardware on every machine that you choose to scan. All information is stored in an SQL database for easy backup/transfer, and you can query information such as IIS configuration on Wi ...
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OCS Inventory
Published October 25, 2010 - No Comments
Do you run a network and need to know what type of computers or components are installed in each machine? If so, do you use an automated inventory tracking system? OCS Inventory is a freely available, open source inventory tracking program. All the information is stored in an easy-to-bac ...
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VirtualBox
Published October 22, 2010 - No Comments
VirtualBox is a program that is used to run ‘virtual machines’. You create a virtual hard drive (which exists as a big file – either statically or dynamically sized) and can install a single or multiple operating systems within. It can be used to take a snapshot of the vi ...
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MailChimp
Published October 20, 2010 - No Comments
Mailchimp is a email advertising platform. It is very easy to get signed up and start an email marketing campaign. They give you great tracking information, and best of all – it’s free up to a fairly large volume/list size! We’ve recently switched from a manual process ...
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LibreOffice
Published October 19, 2010 - No Comments
The former members of the OpenOffice.org Foundation have just released a beta version of their fork of the OpenOffice productivity suite, called LibreOffice. LibreOffice (which stands for “free office”) is different from OpenOffice in that it is owned and managed by The Documen ...
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Ubuntu 10.10 Is Here
Published October 11, 2010 - No Comments
Ubuntu 10.10 – the Maverick Meerkat – released on 10/10/10. Improvements in the Ubuntu One cloud backup and sync client (including streaming your Music to an Apple or Android phone), a revamped Software Center, updated applications and the replacement of F-Spot photo viewer wit ...
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