Digital Life

A better Office

chin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:31:19 +0000

THE exciting news last week was the release of LibreOffice 3.5, the latest version of the free and open source office productivity suite.

Like the OpenOffice project from which it sprang, LibreOffice is a completely free suite of applications for creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and databases. Versions are available for Microsoft [...]

VLC 2.0 arrives

chin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 02:55:24 +0000

VERSION 2.0 of the versatile, multi-platform media player, VLC, has been released, featuring faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs.

Version 2.0 also has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance [...]

Ubuntu 3, Windows, 0

chin — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:08:36 +0000

TOM’S Hardware has come out with a head-to-head comparison of Ubuntu 11.10 and Windows 7, running both operating systems through a battery of 19 tests in six categories (Start and Stop, File Copy, Archiving, Multimedia, System and Gaming). The results are surprising.

By category, Ubuntu leads with three wins (File Copy Times, Multimedia, and [...]

7 tools for Windows 7

chin — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:49:21 +0000

ALTHOUGH my main computer is a Linux box, I recently found myself setting up a couple of Windows 7 PCs. Outside of the usual free, must-have applications, I’ve settled on a small toolbox of seven free utilities that I like to install on every Windows computer I prep.

To more efficiently install all the [...]

OC about OCR

chin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:46:27 +0000

I RECENTLY needed to scan and post a book excerpt for a class I teach but wanted the pages to be available as text, not images. That meant using optical character recognition or OCR software that can translate scanned pages from my book to machine-encoded text.

The advantages of storing the [...]

Wikipedia blackout supported

chin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:05:52 +0000

Wikimedia Philippines, a chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation serving the Philippines and Filipino communities abroad, has issued a statement in support of Wikipedia’s recent 24-hour blackout to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA.

The statement reads:

In the interest of protecting American intellectual property against pirates, we end up [...]

Long time, no siege

chin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:54:29 +0000

Sorry, I couldn’t resist using the pun I found from the website for 0 A.D., a free and open source game of ancient warfare. The game, still in the alpha stage, is still far from complete and will probably crash a few times on you, but the quality of the graphics [...]

Who moved my menus?

chin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:01:02 +0000

ANYONE who has grown up using a mouse or a trackpad will understand the concept of menus.

In a computer application, menus give us access to commands or functions that a program can carry out. For example, in a word processing program, you could execute a search and replace command by going to a [...]