Heros Online Comics

Posted on October 30, 2006 by Michael Koby

The new hit show of this fall season is Heros. Heros is about a group of ordinary people who discover they have extraordinary abilities. For example, one girl can heal herself, another guy can fly, and still another guy can read mind. The show even has some of the best minds from the comic book industry writing and producing episodes. Since the show obviously has some basic comic book elements, it would only stand to reason that there be a comic for the show.

NBC is releasing a small 7-8 page comic a week in PDF format on the Heros’ webpage at nbc.com. The comics give a little insight to a character each week and gives a little bit of what happens between two episodes.

I am glad to see that the television companies are utilizing marketing campaigns like this. When a show is as good as Heros is, people can not seem to get enough extras to tide them over between episodes.

Points to NBC for this one.

[Technorati Tag: ]
[Technorati Tag: ]
[Technorati Tag: ]

Posted in Television | Comments Off on Heros Online Comics

I Blame the Parents

Posted on October 30, 2006 by Michael Koby

It seems that not a month goes by where I do not hear or read an news story about a violent crime that took place and people begin to blame video games because the culprit played a violent video game. Every time I hear one of these stories I get extremely angry and have to resist shouting at the television or computer screen because I am going to draw attention to myself. It sickens me that with all the problems we have in society today, ranging from broken homes to inadequate school systems, we as a public have to come up with other things to blame for society’s ills rather than ourselves.
Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment

Five Open Source Applications You Should Know About

Posted on October 27, 2006 by Michael Koby

If you have been reading this website for any length of time, you know that I truly enjoy open source software. You also know that I encourage its use where ever possible. For this week’s list article, I would like to tell you about five open source applications that you can use to get your work and play done. All of them are free to download and excellent to use. This list is really in no particular order, and the numbers are there for nothing more than to keep count.

  • 5) Gimp (Gnu Image Manipulation Program): Gimp, is probably one of the more popular graphics manipulation programs available from the open source world. Originally only for use on the Linux operating system it has been available for Windows for quite sometime. While there are better image manipulation software available strictly for Windows, they cost good money to get them (think Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro). Gimp, while it can do most of what the big boys do, there are some limitations but they are few and far between and the average user will probably not need to do these certain things.
  • 4) Gaim: Gaim is one of the better IM applications available from the open source community. This program is an excellent, replacement for Trillan because it does just about everything that Trillian does. The only thing that Gaim can not do is webcam viewing so if you need this functionality you are out of luck here. While work was done to help Gaim get this capability, the work was abandoned at last check. However, for normal instant messaging, Gaim is the perfect program to use. It handles all the major protocols (AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, and others), it’s plugin architecture is top notch, and can handle file exchanges just fine.
  • 3) KeePass Password Safe: If you use passwords for anything on the net then for security reasons you are suppose to be using a different password for every site you visit. Well, that sounds all well and good but how is a normal person suppose to remember that many passwords all the time? That’s where KeePass comes in. With KeePass, you can store every password for every login and organize it all into a nice folder like structure that makes things easy to find. Not only that, but you can have KeePass create your passwords for you using entropy from mouse movements and random text entry. This ensure totally secure passwords since the passwords created have nothing to do with you personally. Everything in the KeePass database is highly encrypted and is locked behind an encrypted passphrase that only you know. I personally use this piece of software everyday and highly recommend it to keep your logins secure.
  • 2) Open Office: Open Office has become fairly popular over the last couple of years. Toted as a replacement for the Microsoft Office Suite, Open Office does one of the best jobs of actually following through. Using Open Office you can save to a variety of file types including Office, Star Office, and even Open Office’s own format. And if that wasn’t enough, with Open Office you can output your files to PDF, which makes cross platform reading a breeze. When I set up new computers for people this is usually one of the first things I download and installed. Then to top it off I set the default file saving formats to the Microsoft equivalent so that the users save their documents into the Office formats by default.
  • 1) Mozilla Firefox: When it comes to the internet, the two things that most people do the most is surf the web and send/receive email. Surfing the web has become a dangerous activity with all the phishing, web bots, and spyware out there. Fortunately most of the bad stuff out there targets Internet Explorer due to it’s large market share. Which means that using any other browser than Internet Explorer greatly increases your level of protection while surfing the web. There are several alternatives out there but one of the most popular ones is Mozilla’s Firefox. Going through several name changes and many revisions, the Firefox browser available today is one of the best browser today. And with version 2.0 right around the corner its about to only get better. If you are surfing the web using Internet Explorer, stop now, download Mozilla Firefox and begin surfing with it. You’ll notice a dramatic decrease in the pop ups you see and you will be better protected from any threats out on the internet.

Hopefully, you’ve discovered some new applications to help you through your daily life and at much lower cost too. If you liked any of the applications here, I highly recommend downloading a copy of TheOpenCD which is a CD ISO that contains several more pieces of free open source software for you to install including a couple of the items I have mentioned here today. If you have a favorite piece of open source software that you use and enjoy please leave a comment so that myself as well as others might find out about it.

[Technorati Tag: ]
[Technorati Tag: ]
[Technorati Tag: ]

Posted in Lists | Comments Off on Five Open Source Applications You Should Know About

Firefox 2.0 Tweaks

Posted on October 26, 2006 by Michael Koby

Earlier this week Mozilla released the long awaited update to their popular Firefox browser. Now at version 2.0, the browser has gotten better and it continues to improve. With a new release comes the various news articles promoting the release as well as things surrounding that release and Firefox 2.0 is no exception to this rule. In full hacking swing, Lifehacker.com released an article yesterday on some very nice tweaks you can perform in Firefox 2.0 using the about:config page. The article gives a quick rundown on exactly how to perform the tweaks before actually discussing the various tweaks so if you’re not sure what to do, you have nothing to worry about because Lifehacker has you taken care of.

The article in question can be found here but some of my favorites include:

browser.urlbar.hideGoButton=true – this little tweak gets rid of the “Go” button that is placed right after the address bar. Most people rarely use the “Go” button instead opting to just hit the Enter key after entering in an address.

browser.cache.check_doc_frequency=1 – this tweak forces Firefox to redownload pages that are already in cache. This means that everytime you visit a page it downloads it, so you are always ensured to have the latest version of page instead of the page being pulled from cache (locally stored copy). This one is not included in the Lifehacker article and used to be accessible via the Options interface, but since I like it I decided to add it to my list :-).

[Technorati Tag: Technology]
[Technorati Tag: Mozilla]
[Technorati Tag: Firefox]
[Technorati Tag: Lifehacker]
[Technorati Tag: Tweak]

Posted in Technology | Comments Off on Firefox 2.0 Tweaks

Power of Information

Posted on October 26, 2006 by Michael Koby

You might notice that there are a couple of new items on the web page. The first is a new page called “Power of Information” and the second is a Power of Information link list on the left sidebar. Both of these items have been added in conjunction with the radio show that I cohost called (you have probably guessed), The Power of Information.

The page link at the top of this website will take you to a page that will give you a description about what the show, The Power of Information, is about and what kinds of things Derek and I discuss. The link list on the left side bar will link to stuff talked about during the most recent episode. All this allows me to have show related content on my website so that vistors who find my website via the show, have some content as well.

I have also added a post category called “Power of Information” so that any articles I mention on the radio show or if I go more in depth on a particular topic, users can easily find it.

[Technorati Tag: ]
[Technorati Tag: ]
[Technorati Tag: ]

Posted in Power of Information, Updates | Tagged | Comments Off on Power of Information

Building Your Digital Music Library (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on October 25, 2006 by Michael Koby

This week we continue our discussion on building your digital music library. This would be the second part of a two part series. Part 1 can be found here. In Part One we focused on how to get your music from the audio CDs you have most likely collected over the years and onto your computer in a digital format. We discussed the various kinds of digital audio files as well as how to rip them onto your hard drive. We even discussed storage requirements and touched on organization techniques. In this part the focus is going to be in getting these digital files we ripped last week prepared to be loaded into your media software of choice. We will also discuss three of the more popular media players out there: iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp. We will look at how these three programs read the tags inside the audio files as well as how those same tags are used to help the programs organize the music for ease of use in finding the song you want when you want it. So without further delay, lets get to it.
Continue reading →

Posted in Music, Technology | 20 Comments