New Macintosh Ads makes fun of XP and Leopard

Macintosh today released three new ads from the popular "Get a Mac" campaign commercials. The new commercials now focuses on Vista, and makes mockery of the fact that a number of users are downgrading from Vista to XP, and even Microsoft has made deals with select vendors to make it easier for new PC and laptop buyers to do just this (PR Lady commercial). The ad also mentions the new Macintosh release for the first time, called Leopard, and how Vista is presumably trying to salvage their sales by challenging Leopard to a match where they will go down fighting (Boxer commercial). Lastly, it mocks the user experience, challenging the PC users to ask themselves what they can buy for Vista, rather than what Vista can do for them, a jestingly reference to Kennedy's famous speech (Podium commercial).

Great marketing has been one of the more proven strengths of Apple over Microsoft, but I'm wondering if Microsoft would retaliate with an equally funny and amusing Windows commercial. The ads can be found here.

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New Yahoo! Mail out of Beta

Noticed today that the new version of Yahoo! Mail no longer identifies itself as a beta. I've observed that the responsiveness of the popular web-based email client has improved, resulting to faster display of information upon click, which overall results to a better user experience.

This is good news for the millions of Yahoo! mail subscriber. How I wish though that Yahoo! gives away their POP3 for free and also includes IMAP features like Gmail.

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Don't Shelve Money to Burn your CDs/DVDs

Want to burn ISO to your CD/DVD without shelving at least 80 bucks? The following are a list of programs out there that would help you do just that, for free.

• DeepBurner from Astonsoft would let you burn data CDs/DVDs, burn AudioCDs, create and burn ISO images and has bootable CD/DVD support. The paid version has more features added such as disk to disk copy, burning video CDs and photo albums, but the free version has just enough features to satisfy most of your burning needs.
• CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Everyone, even companies, can use it for free. It does not include adware or similar malicious components.
• Burn4Free CD and DVD is a burning solution that's compatible with more
  than 3,000 DVD and CD burners. Burn data and audio from different file
  types (WAV, WMA, MP3, OGG, FLAC, WavPack, and CDA). Burn and save ISO
  files, open and save your project to disk, verify content, print
  compilations, copy DVDs, and import your audio compilation from M3U and
  ASX playlists. The drives supported include dual-layer DVD, CD-R,
  CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM (SCSI, IDE, EIDE, and
  USB 1.0 and 2.0).
• 
  ImgBurn writes a variety of DVD and CD images (including ISO images) to your CD / DVD writer, and is able to handle things like
  booktype and bitsetting. It is also able to burn DVD Video double layer images using the layer break you specify in the IFO file
  (or it can calcuate the layer break for you if you wish). The program is also able to erase and format rewritable media.
  Other features include the ability to create your own ISOs, with support for the various ISO levels, Joliet support, UDF,
  bootable CDs and DVDs, etc, from files and folders on your disk. In other words, you can basically use this program as a
  CD/DVD mastering program.
• Active ISO Burner is a freeware application that will allow you to burn an ISO image file to CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R, CD-RW, DVD-RW and
  DL DVD+RW

And last, certainly not the least, is one of the best apps out there that is still being actively developed by the open source community

• InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows.
  It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use
  application interface and Windows Explorer integration.

How to know if your Yahoo! Messenger Buddies are Invincible or 'Stealthing' you

There is a neat program out there that would allow you to check whether your Yahoo! buddies are playing invincible or stealth on you. Wouldn't it be a big surprise to someone?

The first option is to install Buddy Spy. on your windows based-PC. This has more features than the next two other options that will be described below, because aside from their online status, you would be able to reveal their webcam status and chat status as well.

The second option is actually a collection of techniques you can do within the Yahoo! Messenger client. They are nicely described as:

• Doodle IMvironment Technique
• Voice Chat Technique
• Conference Invitation technique
• Stealth Settings Check

They can be found on this webpage. A little downside is that in these techniques, you would need to buzz or send a test message to the buddy you would like to check.

The third option is the easiest and most simple, as there is no software to install (first option) nor there are numerous steps to go through (second option). All that is needs to be done is to enter the Yahoo! username and you will easily know the exact online status of your buddy. To do this, visit XeeBer.com or VNGrabber.com.

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Gmail got even better with IMAP support

Google has now officially rolled-out IMAP support to all gmail users. Gmail has previously offered POP3 support for free (something that Yahoo! still only provides to paid users), but IMAP has a few advantages over POP3 that makes it more appealing to other users.

According to wikipedia, IMAP's (Internet Message Access Protocol) advantages over POP3 includes:

Connected and disconnected modes of operation
When using POP3, clients typically connect to the e-mail server briefly, only as long as it takes to download new messages. When using IMAP, clients often stay connected as long as the user interface is active and download message content on demand. For users with many or large messages, this IMAP usage pattern can result in faster response times.

Multiple clients simultaneously connected to the same mailbox
The POP3 protocol requires the currently connected client to be the only client connected to the mailbox. In contrast, the IMAP protocol specifically allows simultaneous access by multiple clients and provides mechanisms for clients to detect changes made to the mailbox by other, concurrently connected, clients.

In practical terms, if you're a typical Gmail power user that has more than a gigabyte of messages, IMAP would result to faster response time on your email client as messages are downloaded by demand. When clinking to your inbox, by default only message headers are downloaded. On my account where I had more than 1000 emails in my inbox, my client listed all my emails almost immediately. Also, labels that are applied to my messages are also downloaded as folders by my client, which is very neat especially if you're using labels to organize your emails.

The second advantage is especially useful if your using diferrent computers to access your Gmail via a destop email account (a laptop, office, or home computer for example). IMAP keeps all the changes made to each client (computer) concurrent or synchronize. For example, when you have read a message on one client, that would be marked as read on any other clients you're using. When you delete a message or move it to a diferrent folder, that change will also be reflected on the other clients.

To enable IMAP, you need to enable IMAP on your Gmail settings page:



Make sure your email client also supports IMAP. Some of the popular email clients out there with IMAP support includes Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution for Linux and even Opera's built in mail client.

Tools that can help you write Blogs more easily

There are many software productivity tools out there from which you can be efficient in writing your blog entries, personally the following freewares have proven to be invaluable:

1. Screenshot Captor is a program for taking screenshots on your computer. It's different from other screenshot utilis in several notable ways:
• Optimized for taking lots of screenshots with minimal intervention.
• Smart autonaming of files, and ability to embed textual comments in files.
• etc... link here
2. WordWeb is a free English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows, and can be used to look up words from within almost any program in just one click. It works off-line, but can also look up words in web references such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia.
3. ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) is a full-featured
   blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post
   to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are
   browsing, take notes, and post to your blog. Since this is an add-on for Firefox, obviously, you need to be running Firefox web browser to be using this.
   
4. Inkscape -
   An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to
   Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable
   Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
5. Picasa - Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps
   you:
   
• Locate and organise all the photos on your computer.
• Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
• Share your photos with others through email, prints and on
  the web: it’s fast, easy and free.
• And more importantly for me, Picasa has a feature that allows somebody to blog photos directly from inside the program to Blogger. This comes in very handy because there is no other way to publish photos directly to your blog in Blogger other than that using Blogger's own web-based blog publishing tool. Other than that you can use a 3rd party online image provider like imageshack to link your images, but its a little bit too cumbersome.

Most of these tools by the ways are not merely limited to blogging
purposes, as they are very useful as well in other day-to-day computing work.

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Using Live Bookmarks and Reliby for Better Browsing

One of the more overlook features of Firefox is Live Bookmarks. Its a big time-saver for people who likes to keep posted of new updates on their frequently visited websites. Why not just visit the website then? Well, if you have 10 or more websites you often visit, that would mean having to open and browse 10 websites to look for updated content. With Live Bookmarks, website feeds is stacked neatly in a menu form, and clicking each menu item will list the most recent contents from the website.

To use Live Bookmarks, the website needs to have RSS or atom feeds. Firefox will automatically tell you if a webpage has a feed or not, through the yellow RSS feed icon on the address bar. To list them in live bookmark, you need to click on that RSS icon:



Clicking the icon on the example website above will take you to the feeds content summary page, where snippets of the most recent contents will be displayed. You need to subscribe to the feed using Live Bookmarks, and click on the Subscribe Now button.



A new item will be added to your Bookmarks Toolbar (View >Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar), in this case, a menu list of Slashdot ITs most recent contents:



The Live Bookmark item can be updated by right clicking on it and selecting Reload Live Bookmark. This maybe needed if the website feed that was subscribed to contains frequently changing content such as website forums. An easier way is to install Reliby extension for firefox by Henrik Gemal. Reliby reloads all your Live Bookmarks aka RSS feeds with a push of a button. Reliby can be found here.

Featured Project: Mac4Lin

After getting my Broadcom wireless card working in Ubuntu and get connected online, I looked around the internet if there's an easy way to give my distro a mac osx flavor. I was able to do this with Windows XP using Flyakite OSX, and somehow my gut tells me that Linux being the most extensible and configurable OS out there, has to have one. Lo and behold, there's actually one to give your linux box a Leopard feel!

The project Mac4Lin can be found in sourceforge.net. According to the project site, the goal of this project is to bring the look and feel of Mac OS X (newest being Leopard) on *nix. Currently for GTK+ only. The step by step documentation guide can be found here.

This would make your Linux desktop, in my case Ubuntu, looking from this:

To this:

Setting up wireless card using Ndiswrapper in Ubuntu

Finally I was able to get my Dell D410 laptop running Ubuntu 7.1 (Gutsy Gibbon) in dual boot mode with XP to make my wireless card work. This was the only major struggle I had, everything else from installation to setting up a wired connection to giving my install a leopard osx flavor (something I'll blog about later). The wireless card culprit seemed to lie on the bc43xx-fwcutter wireless card driver wrapper that came out of the box. Although it was able to make my detect and make my Broadcom wireless card work, I experienced are intermittent signal failures and at times my network connection runs horribly slow. I was able to fix the problem by totally uninstalling the bc43xx-fwcutter and replacing it with Ndiswrapper, something I learned while scanning the Ubuntu forums for answer. There are various step by step guides in the forum that details how to make Ndiswrapper work. After several attempts, I was able to finally find the best guide in my opinion on installing and configuring the Ndiswrapper setup. Ironically, its in the Ndiswrapper homepage itself.

Here's the link to the installation guide for Ndiswrapper - link.