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Articles from Opensoft

Thunderbird to fly solo? 2007-07-26 20:56:24 Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker has plans to offshoot Thunderbird into its own entity, so that the Mozilla Foundation can centre its attention on Firefox. According to ArsTechnica, the Mozilla Foundation wants to give Thunderbird more independence by creating an independent organisational structure to further the rather popular email client. Baker has yet to decide whether to create an independent foundation for Thunderbird, a subsidiary branch of the Mozilla Foundation or to simply let the bird fly back to the community, and hope a structure forms around it organically. ...

NASA worker caught in act of sabotage 2007-07-26 20:51:12 A space program employee is alleged to have purposely damaged a computer that was going to fly aboard the Space Shuttle ‘Endeavor’ in less than two weeks. NASA says the unidentified individual, who works for one of NASA’s subcontractors, cut wires inside a computer that was leaving for the International Space Station (ISS) on the shuttle. NASA hopes to repair the damage and launch the shuttle as planned, on the 7th of August. ...

Programming Language: Scratch 2007-07-26 05:35:18 Website Download Example Game (made by me) Scratch is a programming language designed for younger people ages 8 and up, but it is excellent for anyone who wants to learn the basics of programming, because the fundamentals of all languages is the same (if, while, for, variables, etc.). Although not very complex, you can make some fun games and I suggest going to the website and have a look at them. You create code by stacking blocks, much like the way many people say object-orientated programming is like lego. Example Game I quickly made a simple platform game to get the idea of the coding and other elements. Obviously it needs some improvement, like rolling downhill and going up slopes, however it gives a good idea of what can be acheived. Coding Take a look at some of the coding used: The green flag is the go button, and you can see the way it handles the main loop with a ‘forever’ block. Another important thing is the way that statements have the puzzle bits on the top ...

Cheat Engine 2007-07-23 06:32:15 Website Download We all love to cheat. Whether our reasons are honourable or not, typing in a cheat code is a satisfying experience. However, it is nothing in comparison to making your own cheat. And with Cheat Engine, this is very possible. Make cheats? How! Cheat Engine uses a popular method to make cheats. This is done by searching through the system memory for variables. They can contain anything, from health and ammo, to whether or not it is raining, to what position in the game you are in. When you originally search, there may be lots of variables that match, but you can change the value (eg. lose health) and search again. This time it will only include results found this time and last time. Eventually you can find what you are looking for, and set it to what you like. Once you have done everything you want, you can save what you did as an exe file, or a cheat table to open later. That’s too confusing! Don’t worry, Cheat Engine comes with an excellent tutorial that ...

Volume Normalizer: MP3Gain 2007-07-20 03:41:12 Website Download Tired of changing the volume on MP3 player? I know I am. One song will be very quiet, so I turn the volume up high. When the next song comes: BAM! There goes my eardrums. I even remember telling a friend, “I wish there was a program that made all the volumes of the songs the same.” There are lots of commercial applications that do this, but often they only change the volume based on ‘peak amplitude’. However, songs with different peak amplitudes often have the same volume. MP3Gain improves on this by using a different method: Replay Gain. With this method, MP3Gain can determine what it will sound like to you. Performance For a 4 minute, 4226 KB song, it took MP3Gain 18 seconds to analyze and less then a second to ‘gain’ (fix volume). The speed is obviously very dependent on the power of your computer. I also tried playing the song while is was analysing. It worked, but the speed dramatically decreased. It didn’t let me apply ...

Setup Extraction: Universal Extractor 2007-07-16 22:57:33 Website Download If anything really bugs me about Windows, it’s the registry. The fact that if you install many apps, it clogs up and slows your computer immensely (thank god for Ccleaner) really annoys me. I know people that reinstall their system every few months. This is why I love applications that come without an installer, because they don’t add anything to the registry. This is where Universal Extractor, or just UniExtract, comes in. It can take any (well, nearly any; see ‘Does it work?’ below) .exe, .msi, .zip or one of the other 45+ supported formats, determine the compression type, and extract it. If the setup was made with Inno Setup or NSIS, then it will even get the script used to create the setup file. Does it work? I tested 14 randomly selected installers from my downloads folder, to see if they worked. I ignored .zip and other normal archive files. youtubedownloader.exe Success! utorrent.exe Failed. itunessetup.exe Failed. eraser582setup.exe S ...

Sabayon Linux 2007-07-14 00:35:03 Website Download Sabayon is a Linux distribution that is based on Gentoo. It comes as a LiveDVD or ‘Mini Edition’ LiveCD. Unlike Gentoo, which builds a system from source packages, Sabayon uses binaries which take much less time. Mini Edition The Mini Edition of Sabayon has considerably less software and features then the normal version, but also a much smaller size. It is excellent for people who are impatient, such as me. This edition only comes with KDE and Fluxbox desktop environments, but the full version also comes with GNOME. Package Managment Sabayon uses the same package management system as Gentoo, which is Portage. Portage is made up of two seperate parts. Emerge, with handles dependencies and other small issues, and Ebuild, which makes and installs the actual packages. Sabayon was made with Python. LiveCD and Installation Before booting off the live cd, you have the option of browsing the internet anonymously, launching a game or even playing music while it bo ...

Barcode 2007-07-11 04:35:33 Website Download Barcode, which is part of the GNU project, is an excellent and efficient way of making barcodes quickly and easily. It is available as a command line program and a software library, which means you can make a script or application to generate barcodes or make them manually yourself. Parameters -i filepath Set input to a file. Multiple barcodes can be made with newline separated lists. Default is stdin (what you type). -o filepath Set output to a file. File should end with .ps, .eps or .pcl -b string Set string to encode. If this is missing, it will use the input file. -e encoding Set the encoding type. If this is missing, it will choose the best encoding for you. -E Output as an .eps file (instead of .ps). Only the first of a list of string will be encoded if you use this parameter. -P Output as PCL file. For a full list of arguments and supported barcode types, enter barcode -h. Examples barcode -b test Output the barcode ‘test’ in code on the screen. No ...

Mind Mapper: Freemind 2007-06-30 22:35:06 Website Download Freemind is an open source brainstorming application similar to the commercial Inspiration. It is also one of the few open source programs you should avoid. Features Freemind lacks many features seen in other similar applications. I was looking for a feature to orginize the bubbles into a tree going down, but there was no way to orginize them at all! However, that’s not to say that it didn’t have good features of its own. There is a file mode in which you can browse your hard drive, you can export maps as html, xml or bitmaps and you can make ‘nodes’ executable, so they open a file, folder or web address. Issues Whenever a menu is opened, the item highlighted is the item below the mouse (you can see this in the screenshot below, not underneath it. This can be very confusing.The entire program becomes disfunctional when windowed. At one point the menu would work at all, opening then closing as I pushed my mouse button. As you can see from the s ...

Linux for Newbies: Wget 2007-06-27 01:40:12 Website Full list of parameters Wget, or GNU wget is a versatile and power tool that allows download from the Internet via HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It allows you to download an entire website, or specific things in a website. Parameters There are way to many parameters to list here, but I’ll show you the most important ones. Remember, they are case-sensitive. -t set number of reconnects -nd don’t create directories –http-user=USER or –ftp-user=USER or –proxy-user=USER set the HTTP, FTP or proxy username –http-password=PASS or –ftp-password=PASS or –proxy-password=PASS set the HTTP, FTP or proxy password -r enable recursive download (follows links) -l set maximum depth of recursive download. 0=infinite -k make links relative (so they will work locally). If you don’t download the thing that is being linked to, it will change the link to point to the online source. -K backup the file to file.orig before converting links -p ge ...

Calculator: SpeedCrunch 2007-06-24 06:09:01 Website Download If you are looking to some maths that is more complicated then multiplication, the calculator that come with Windows is hopeless. Even an expression as simple a 1+1*2 (which equals 3) comes up as 4 in simple mode, and in scientific mode there isn’t even a square root button! Finally, there is a solution. SpeedCrunch is a scientific calulator that knows that round(sqrt(pi*sin(2))+abs(acos(.98))) is equal to 12. Do you really need more proof then that? There are many features not normally found on calculators. These include: Result as you type - You can see this in the screenshot. Unlimited variables - x=2 can be used later in y=2*x+1. exchangeRATE can also be a variable. Customizable syntax highlighting - for numbers, functions, variables and matched parenthesis. Advanced functions - such as tanh, abs, and ln. Auto complete - of functions. 50 decimal place accuracy - or less, if you want. History - expressions are remembered for each session. Smart expressions ...

How to correct spelling using Aspell 2007-06-21 05:59:28 Most people only use Aspell for use with Opera (the web browser). However, you can easily use it as a powerful stand-alone spell checker for text files. I will assume you are using Windows, but this should work in Unix with a few changes. Open command prompt. You can do this by opening run from the start menu, and typing cmd. Open My Computer and navigate to the Aspell folder where you installed it. Go to the ‘bin’ folder and drag aspell.exe into the command prompt. The path of the file should appear. Type ‘check “C:path o extfile.txt”‘. Don’t forget the quotation marks around the path to the text file. The text should look like this: D:StuffProgramsAspellinaspell.exe check “C:path o extfile.txt” The checking will begin. Type the number or letter next to the action to do it. It is as easy as that! This is a great way to check ordinary text files without a large program. Lucas Opensoft ...

Video Tutorial: How to build a computer 2007-06-19 04:19:51 This is a great video that is perfect for people who have no idea what they are doing. Just keep in mind that every computer is different, and this might not be exactly what you need to do. For example, you definately don’t need two dvd or cd drives, and not all cpu coolers have a backplate. Lucas Opensoft ...

Directory Changer: KCD 2007-06-17 02:30:35 Website Download If there is anything I find frustrating about using a terminal all the time in Linux, it is changing directories. Having to switch back to the desktop so I can see the folder name is a pain. This happens alot with folders like “kcd-7.6.2″. KCD fixes this. KCD operates in two different ways. The first way is to use kcd is like a search engine. By using the command ‘kcd search-term-here’, you can search for a folder instantly. For example, ‘kcd firefox’, ‘kcd firef’ and ‘kcd fir’ would all return folders with firefox in their name. The last two would probably return many other folders as well, so it is best to be specific. The second way invoked by the command ‘kcd’ by itself, opens a tree of your entire file system. This might seem harder to use then cd, but its great if you are looking for something which you forgot the name of (and you would remember the name if you saw it). You can also search ...