Yay! iTunes Store for Asia

Categories: Techtoday   In light of the news that iTunes has finally opened its door to Asia, its obvious that Apple is prepared to make even more money than every before from the mesmerized masses of monetarily-enhanced Asians. For my part, I felt that getting access to content from the Philippines, China, and Malaysia is long overdue.  Considering how popular the brand is in Asia (and how much of the hardware is produced...

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Your next browser should be Opera 12

Travails with Mozilla Firefox has made me look further than Google Chrome for an alternate browser in my Linux machines. And obviously, I ended up with an old mainstay, the Opera browser.    My experience with Opera over the years has always been disappointing. In previous releases, it had trouble opening "complex" pages like www.newsarama.com, www.digg.com, and several other sites that Firefox had no problems...

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Bumblebee Project for Nvidia Optimus: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ideapad Z360

After being blasted by Linux founder Linus Torvalds in the media, Nvidia responded with a little damage control regarding their lack of support for Linux.  To be fair, Nvidia may not have deserved the harsh words from the Linux developer considering the number of generic Nvidia Linux drivers available on their support website.  However, Nvidia's rebuttal regarding Optimus is somewhat weak - citing the Bumblebee...

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Linux on Film: Supernatural Season 7 Episode 20 (with Felicia Day)

  Although Hollywood proudly displays Apple products in 90% of their shows and movies with a middling few points for Microsoft products (such as the TV show "Chuck"), Linux does get a bit of exposure, especially when the producers/directors want to look "technical" and "sophisticated."  Today's Linux on Film entry is an unlikely example with the surprisingly endearing Felicia Day using the command line and an obviously...

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Getting started with DocBook using XML Copy Editor

Category: TechwriterIf you're only getting started with a markup language like DocBook, XML editors can be helpful in learning the different elements, tags, and attributes available in the language.  However, editors won't teach you to write markup and you would still need a reference such as the online Definitive DocBook Guide .  That said, XML Copy Editor, available for Linux and Windows, is a popular XML editor used by...

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Microsoft Windows 8 Tablets: iTunes, skinnable Metro, virtualization, Kinect, and other Questions

Categories: Techtoday   Having followed the numerous articles regarding the Microsoft Surface Tablet, I could certainly see the potential for the admittedly  sexy device.   Almost immediately, a few thoughts popped into my head about possible uses for the Windows 8 tablet.   Windows 8 and iTunes on a Tablet   If the Windows 8 tablet is a fully-featured operating system, this means that users can install...

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Where are the Skype Conversation Ads?

Categories: Techtoday   Microsoft Skype has announced that Skype will regularly release ads when making free phone calls.  Considering that the service has been abused by users for years, with overseas callers leaving their Skype calls running as they go about their business, it's only a fair trade.  According to the news reports, the "Conversation Ads" will be limited to Skype-to-Skype calls for non-paying users without...

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Using LyX to Publish or Organize your Journal/Diary

Categories: Techwriter You don't need to learn LaTeX or Docbook in order to prepare your journals or diaries for printing.  Neither would you need commercial and occasionally expensive software such as Adobe InDesign or Adobe PageMaker.  Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer are great word processors but somewhat ungainly and overkill for compiling your digital journal or diary.  Note-taking...

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Congratulations Linus!

Linus Torvalds recently received his share of the cash reward from the Technology Academy Finland for being a joint winner of the 2012 Millenium Technology Award.  In a very interesting interview with BBC, Linus opines that selfishness and trust is good for Linux and open source.  It's nice to know Torvalds doesn't believe that open source is a "goody-goody" approach to technology and is very "selfish" though I wish that...

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Editing EPUB using Sigil and Calibre in Linux Part 2

Category: Techwriter   Getting started with Sigil is pretty much the same as using any WYSIWYG application.   Thankfully, it focuses mostly on creating/editing the EPUB file rather than overwhelming you with XML add-ons - it's more of LyX than Adobe Dreamweaver in this regard.  More importantly, however, Sigil also allows writers to edit the XML markup, CSS, and XHTML code without leaving the application. ...

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Taiwan Computex Booth Babes vs. WWDC's Apple Macbook Pro

Categories: Techtoday   Having attended the Taiwan Computex and WWDC by proxy in a parallel universe, were you overwhelmed with this . . .     or many, many, of this . . .     Same here.    Photo from Apple.com and CNET.com.   &nb...

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Britannica and Bing Beats

Category: Techtoday   As a proud owner of the Encyclopedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, I'm pretty happy that Bing has now included Britannica as part of its search results permanently.  Laugh if you will, but I have a huge fondness for the traditional encyclopedia as well as its discontinued rival Microsoft Encarta.      I am, however, somewhat disappointed that the Britannica entry appeared ...

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Technical Writing with an iMac PowerPC G5 with 512MB of RAM Part 2

Category: Techwriter   The Hardware, Operating  System, and Software     FYI Technical writers   OS X 10.4 and Adobe Suite CS2 exhibits issues with JPEGs and old versions of EPS.  There are some bugs in the Adobe Suite's interface in Mac, though not as much as when running in Windows.    I've never been a fan of shortcuts but feel somewhat ashamed when someone sees me using menus. ...

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Technical Writing with an iMac PowerPC G5 with 512MB Part 1

The illusion of Apple Mac systems being better at design and graphics persists even today despite obvious hardware similarities and improvements to Windows.  Publishing companies still believe that any type of Mac, even ones running on long-obsolete hardware and software, are superior to Windows when it comes to technical writing and page layouts. However, when your employer or client foists you with an iMac circa late 2003-2004...

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openSUSE 12.1 in China: Updating and Mirrors

Category: openSUSE   SUSE may boast that its enterprise release is the most popular commercial Linux system in China, but is openSUSE getting the short-end of the stick in the Middle Kingdom?   openSUSE 12.1, the latest release for the community version of SUSE, is an excellent and stable release.   I haven't had any issues with KDE or any applications since its release last year.  Although I skirt danger...

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