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What a n00b is a blog about current trends in technology with a how-to mixed in every now and then.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'tech trends'
When Did Thunderbird’s Account Setup Become a Pile of Poo?
It really is a sad day. I used to think of the main Mozilla projects, Firefox and Thunderbird, the pinnacle of open source. I’ve always recommended Thunderbird as a mail client to those who prefer not to use the web client available from their...
Upgrade to Windows 7 Because.. It Sucks Less?
Well, after a busy couple of months I’m finally back. I did miss the release of Windows 7 on my blog, but I definitely enjoyed watching the fireworks between Apple and Microsoft through their commercials on tv. Microsoft has definitely come ou...
Forget Monitoring, Just Check Twitter!
Tonight Facebook seems to be having some issues. It has been resetting connections from my browser and is almost as reliable as my workout schedule. How do I know it’s not just me? I searched Twitter, of course, and seem to have found a signifi...
Is Microsoft Supporting Old Products Only When It Feels Like It?
It was barely a month ago that the web development community watched in horror as Microsoft told the world that dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 was not an option. I completely understand and would agree with the rationale here. They released...
The $10 Free App
I don’t think it’s fair to talk about my Snow Leopard experience this weekend without talking about the hosing I took from the iTunes App Store this weekend. A coworker of mine and Digg both told me about the new Facebook app for the iPho...
The Difference Between an Apple and Microsoft Upgrade
Like a good little Apple fan, I went out and purchased a copy of the new Snow Leopard OS from my local Mac store yesterday. I got it home, popped open the box, popped the DVD into my MacBook, told it to upgrade and in 45 minutes or so I was playing w...
Linux Vendors: United They Will Stand?
Ever since reading OStatic’s article about how Linux netbook returns really aren’t the problem with Linux market share, I can’t seem to quite get over the conclusion. They make an excellent point. Microsoft has lots of money and can...
Before Railing Apple or AT&T, Do You Know What Google Voice Does?
I had to laugh while browsing through comments on one of the articles on Digg about how the Google Voice App for the iPhone was rejected. While I would totally agree with the consensus that Apple is treating its developers poorly and walking on thin ...
Five Reasons I Would Switch (Exclusively) to Linux
Yesterday I took a look at some of the applications that I’d miss if I decided to switch away from Mac OS X to using Linux exclusively. I felt that wasn’t quite fair as there are some really compelling reasons to switch to Linux and I rea...
Five Apps That Are Keeping Me On OS X
I’ve been a Linux and OS X user for some time. Recently I’ve considered switching exclusively to Linux (Ubuntu specifically), but there’s a few applications that I need that are going to prevent me from doing so. If you’re a M...
Lose The Driver Disk, Install Linux!
I find it absolutely amazing how far Linux distros have come in the five or six short years that I’ve been using it. Anyone who uses Windows because they don’t want to fight driver problems in Linux hasn’t used a Linux distro in the...
Have We Forgiven Microsoft for Vista or Changed Our Minds About Apple?
Have we forgotten about the Windows Vista release, or are we ready to give Microsoft another chance? Just a few short years ago, around this time, we were getting ready for the release of Windows Vista. Microsoft was hyping its new security model and...
All My Data Are Belong to Google
I just got my Google Voice invitation today. It’s pretty sweet. It allows you to give out one phone number and configure it to ring multiple phones depending upon who is calling and when they are calling. It also packs voicemail and SMS into a ...
What the Print Industry Can Learn from the Open Source Model
The conflict between traditional print media companies and Google has been heating up for some time and Google appears to have had enough. The “Hamburg Declaration” effectively said that publishers (including several major newspapers in E...
Just What Is Google Doing with Two OS’s?
I just got done reading TechFlash’s account of Steve Ballmer’s comments regarding the newly announced Google Chrome OS project and he raised some good questions. Now, I have about as high opinion of Ballmer as the next open source person,...
YouTube Dropping Support for IE6, But Will it Help Drop IE6 Usage?
News has broken out on the web today that support for IE6 on YouTube is going away. It seems that other sites will be soon to follow as well. A fairly certain one is digg.com. As Digg reports, a small chunk of their traffic is still IE6, but very few...
Why I left my RSS reader for Twitter
Okay, so Twitter and RSS are not in any way competing technologies or services, but I’ve used Twitter to replace my RSS reader. While I can’t fully replace an RSS reader with Twitter since some blogs have Twitter, but almost all have an R...
Why Would Microsoft Not Offer Windows 7 Ultimate?
I just got done reading a post by Don Reisinger who makes a very good point that Windows 7 Ultimate (and really, Windows Vista Ultimate) offers very little in the way of features over Windows 7 Professional. Personally, I hate the idea of having seve...
Don’t Trust Your Computer.. Or Anyone Else’s
Last week was a bad week for tech people all over the world. There were outages reported at several major datacenter providers, including the likes of Rackspace, Equinix, and Google. As any good system administrator will tell you, what goes up will c...
Running Commands as Another User in a Script
There’s plenty of situations where you need to to open a shell to run something as a different user within a script. Scripts like the Zimbra start-stop scripts can’t be run using sudo (Honestly, I don’t know why and haven’t qu...
Google Voice and the Future of Telephony
When Google announced Google Voice, I looked at it, thought it was intriguing, and kept on my merry way. Now that it’s here and available by invite, I started looking at it and am realizing that it’s much bigger than I originally had thou...
Yet Another Reason Not To Use Outlook
If the slow speed, virus targeting, instability, and clunky interface isn’t enough to deter you from using the trainwreck of a mail client called Outlook (I have no opinion of Outlook ), Microsoft has just given you another reason not to use ...
What Canonical Is Doing Right To Boost Ubuntu Market Share
No, this isn’t one of those “year of the Linux desktop” posts. Linux on the desktop as well as the community have a long ways to go in usability as well as other issues before it’s ready for mainstream. It’s not that I d...
Free Antivirus from Microsoft: Can We Trust It?
For those who haven’t heard, Microsoft has decided to discontinue its OneCare product and release its own free antivirus. This concept of a Microsoft antivirus really has me baffled. I don’t understand why anyone would use an antivirus fo...
If Search Is Broken, How Has Bing Fixed It?
I really don’t mean to be one of those nay-saying Microsoft haters. Really, I don’t. But I’m still looking for that feature that Bing offers me that Google doesn’t (except of course for the cool images on the homepage). Is it ...
Is Microsoft Against the Same Thing Linux Is Against in the Desktop Market?
Microsoft’s new interface to Live Search, called Bing, seems to be taking off nicely for them. Their ad campaign has created quite a stir and they snagged a pretty good chunk of the search market share within the first few days of its launch. C...
Once Again, Social Engineering Proves Much Easier Than Real Engineering
Whatever Twittercut was or wasn’t, it does seem to have proved an already-known fact once again surrounding computer security: sometimes it’s easier to just ask someone for their username/passwords than to try to steal them. Twittercut wa...
If Linux Didn’t “Suck” It Wouldn’t Exist
There was a great presentation that made it to the top of digg in the last couple of days on how Linux “sucks” and how we can fix it. It was a very good down-to-earth overview of the problems with Linux, but the solutions that were sugges...
SaaS: Providing a Different Kind of Free
For a couple of years now the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Richard Stallman have been speaking out against Software as a Service (SaaS) warning that one gives up some amount of freedom since the software is no longer on one’s machine. The...
A Little Taste of What It’s Like
Converts from Windows Vista to XP may be getting a bit of a taste of what it has been like to be a Linux user. I heard a story from an acquaintance the other day of how his laptop didn’t run Windows Vista very well, so he decided to downgrade t...
