Digital Life
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Digital Life by Chin Wong » Firefox 4 Beta 1
THE beta 1 version of Firefox 4 released last week has a distinctly unfinished feel to it. I suppose this was to be expected, given the browser’s beta status, but after the dramatic improvements that Firefox went through going from Version 3.0 to 3.5 and 3.6, the jump to 4.0 seems almost anti-climactic. This is particularly true if you download … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Apple’s death grip
THE recent kerfuffle over the iPhone 4 “death grip” highlights how a simple problem can be blown out of proportion, not only by media hype but by a woefully inadequate response, in this case, from Apple. Shortly after the iPhone 4 was released in June to throngs of eager buyers, complaints began to appear about how signal strength could drop … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Cool designer tool
A YEAR ago, I wrote about Xara Xtreme 5, the fastest graphics design program I’d ever used. This week, I tried the latest update and found that the program, now renamed Xara Photo and Graphic Designer 6, has lost none of its snap, even as it gained a new look and a number of features. The new name emphasizes more … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Real title case for OpenOffice users
I love OpenOffice, the free and open source productivity suite that does pretty much what I used to do with MS Office. But one feature I sorely miss is a real title case command that will capitalize every first letter in a group of highlighted words. Now I know OpenOffice wonks will point to the obscure “font effect” secretly tucked … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Video grabbag
I RECENTLY received two hilarious videos that my nephew Thomas created using Photo Booth on the Mac. Unfortunately, the files were in Apple’s .mov format, and I wanted to burn them onto a CD as .avi files that my DVD player could play. Normally, I would simply run my video converter, WinFF, and convert the files locally on my hard … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Elegant speed demon
WHAT’S the fastest browser? If you guessed Google Chrome 6 or Safari 5.0, you’re in for a surprise. The current speed demon is Opera 10.6, the alpha test version from the Norwegian company, Opera Software (http://www.opera.com). The Download Squad Web site reports that Opera 10.6 scored 25 percent better than Google Chrome 6 (development build), using the Peacekeeper browser benchmark. … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » No relief from black screen problem in Ubuntu 10.10
I downloaded the alpha test version of Ubuntu 10.10, hoping that the live CD would solve my video problem. Sadly, the problem remains. More disconcerting, I found the same problem when I tried to run Fedora 13 and Linux Mint 9 from their live CDs. What’s going on? Most forum posts point to a problem with the Nvdia drivers for … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Election heroes
ONE of the supreme ironies of the last election was how vigorously some IT professionals opposed the government’s efforts to automate the process. One of these was Gus Lagman, a former IBM executive and one of the founders of STI College, who urged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to conduct a parallel, manual count. Another was Manuel Alcuaz Jr., a … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Cable madness
THE MagSafe charger for my MacBook died last week. It had given me some warning. Every so often, the power indicator on the magnetic connector would refuse to light up, and I would have to jiggle the cable to just the right position to get it working again. Finally, it had become so unreliable that I decided I had to … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Technology silliness
THE day I saw Tom Cruise waving his arms to manipulate video images on a transparent glass monitor in the 2002 science fiction movie Minority Report was the day I realized I had become a technological reactionary. While others were going, “Cool,” I was thinking, “What a waste of computing cycles.” As I watched Cruise “grab” hold of one screen … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Ubuntu toolbox
AFTER installing a new version of Ubuntu Linux, I always add a number of utilities that make my computing tasks easier. Most of these are not full-blown applications, per se, though some are really quite complex in their own right. Rather, the focus is on enhancing the capabilities of an already great operating system. The list of utilities has changed … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » iDiots
LIKE it or not, the technology world is ruled by hype, and the epicenter of hype these days is Apple. Everywhere you look, it's the iPhone this, or the iPhone that. There are applications for anything and everything, and we're supposed to drool over them while we visit the Apple App Store and eagerly surrender our hard-earned money to the … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Ubuntu Lucid ordeal
MUCH as it pains me to say this, installing Ubuntu 10.4 on my desktop PC was a nightmare. For the last three years, I have been a firm supporter and dedicated user of Ubuntu, a user-friendly distribution of Linux that seemed to get better and better with each new release. A few months ago, I had been thoroughly impressed with … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » The McAfee mess
IF you’re selling security, it’s probably a bad idea to send your customers’ computer systems crashing. Yet this is exactly what anti-virus vendor McAfee Inc. did last week when it released an updated virus definition file that crashed hundreds of thousands of Windows XP computers around the world. The latest update, released last Wednesday, misidentified a key Windows system file … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Presenting in Linux
IT’S been more than three years since the Linux Revolution blog declared that we need better presentation software. The call to action for open-source developers at the time certainly seemed timely. In 2006, if you had to create a business presentation on a Linux system, you didn’t have much choice but to use Impress, which came with the free and … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Cloud storage
THERE’S a lot of talk about cloud storage these days, which is just a fancy term for online storage. The idea of saving files on a remote server and accessing them from any machine with an Internet connection isn’t new. That’s been around since file hosting services from the early days of the Web. What’s new is that online storage … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Protecting online freedom
THE recent exchange of harsh words between Washington and Beijing highlights a major concern for Internet users all over the world. How this debate plays out in their own countries will determine how free individuals are to express themselves online. The latest controversy springs from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s landmark speech in support of Internet freedom as a … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Facebook: What privacy?
DO you have a Facebook account? It seems like every dog and his brother is on the world’s biggest social networking site these days. Facebook happily reports that it has more than 350 million active users. Of these, about 8.4 million are from the Philippines, which makes it the ninth biggest country in terms of Facebook users, says Nick Burcher, … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Ubuntu for Windows users
QUESTIONS that I get in the mail show that quite a number of Windows users are curious about what to expect when they make the jump to Linux. While answering one such question this week, I realized that I’ve already written quite a bit about how things are done in Linux as opposed to Windows, but that these snippets were … [Link]
Digital Life by Chin Wong » Doing more with your Ubuntu PC
My webcam captures motion and takes time-stamped shots. FOR more than three years, I’ve been using Ubuntu, a popular distribution of Linux, on my home PC for work and play. As a long-time Windows user, I appreciated the freedom from crashes and system slowdowns that plagued my computing life before I made the switch. The notion that I would have … [Link]
