wordbit » software

Delete your iTunes

Antoine — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:01:16 +0000

Not all of Apple’s offerings are shiny and perfect. And when it comes to iTunes, most sane people will agree that this music player is just plain ugly. I applaud Scott Gilberson for calling it like it is in his blog post, “The Top Ten Reasons iTunes Sucks”. Here are his main beefs:

1. It’s a store stupid
2. The library manager is prehistoric
3. No web browser/Wikipedia/anything
4. No plug-in architecture
5. Massive memory footprint
6. No support for other music formats Ogg/FLAC/etc.
7. Drag and drop sucks
8. Bloatware downloads
9. Can’t use iPod as a music transport with iTunes
10. iTunes is slow

I can’t stand iTunes. Every time I open it (which, admittedly isn’t very often), it wants to upgrade and install all sorts of memory and bandwidth leeches. The only feature I like is the party shuffle. But I don’t have many parties.

Firefox 3 coming June

Antoine — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:14:58 +0000

With the recent release of Firefox 3 Beta 5, the end is in sight for an official release of this popular browser (in the meantime, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 has just come out). Here are some of the improvements Firefox 3 has over it’s predecessor:

Faster (better memory management). Two to four times faster than Firefox 2.
Safer. Scans for malware and checks for phishing.
More intuitive address bar (with autofill feature).
Improved history, bookmarks, and password manager.
Better customization. Supports skins.

That said, here’s a word of caution if you’re thinking of trying out the Beta at this stage of the game.

Although you can theoretically run both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 separately, in practice this doesn’t work. I tried the Beta a while ago and found it was too buggy for me. So, I opened Firefox 2 and found some of my settings had changed. No big deal, I just changed them back the way I had them before.

A few weeks later, I decided to uninstall the Firefox 3 Beta because I never used it. Unfortunately, in doing so it deleted all my passwords, cookies, and bookmarks from Firefox 2. So the moral of the story is, just wait for the official release of Firefox 3 before you upgrade and save yourself a major headache. Or go ahead and take the leap – just don’t look back.

Internet privacy saves lives

Antoine — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:12:27 +0000

It doesn’t matter how many firewalls, P2P filters, script blockers, or spyware removers you use, the one giveaway to your identity on the Internet is your IP address. Those numbers will trumpet your location to whoever’s interested, which is why you’ll often see annoying ads like “Find friends in (insert your city here) now!” This lack of privacy is a huge problem for political dissidents in China, or for anyone in that country who wants to surf an uncensored version of the net.

Fortunately, there are anonymous proxies that you can use to redirect your traffic through servers in ‘safe’ countries. One piece of software that does this extremely well is Ultrasurf 8 by Ultrareach Internet Corp. Ultrasurf was designed specifically to provide surfing freedom and anonymity to the Chinese. The beauty of this software is that is searches for the fastest US proxies in the background while encrypting Internet Explorer so that you will never be hounded by the Chinese Internet police. Plugins like Firefox’s ProxySwitch, or ad-supported software like Hotspot Shield are not nearly as good.

The benefits for Canadians of using this software is that you can get around copyright restrictions on streaming your favourite US TV shows from network sites, or streaming music on pandora. I do not endorse engaging in these sorts of activities, of course, but thought you should be aware of the possibilities.

Vista #1 disappointment of 2007

Antoine — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 08:03:23 +0000

PC World has boldly declared that Vista is not all that Microsoft promised it would be. Alex and Kevin from Diggnation were talking about this on their show and how they just want the latest OS despite the sacrifices in frame rates for some games. I’ve seen Vista in action and it looks slick, but it seems to be all flash at this point. I’m extremely satisfied with the robustness of Windows Server 2003, which is so rock solid because it was designed to administer networks. The only bad thing about it is that some software doesn’t offer support for Server 2003, most notably Adobe CS3. Fortunately there is an unofficial workaround for it, so as far as I’m concerned Vista can wait.

Free software

Antoine — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 05:36:27 +0000

I’m mostly writing this entry to make sure my website doesn’t die a horrible gurgling death as it flushes away down the internet drain of obscurity. I’ve been busy writing and editing full-time at alive, and loving it! I especially enjoy interacting with readers of the magazine and answering their questions and concerns in that nice, friendly manner that sometimes straddles the line between professionalism and condescension. I’d love to write about it in more detail here, but there are confidentiality issues involved, suffice to say, I do get a lot of ‘interesting’ letters from those that perhaps do not have full reign over their mental faculties. ’nuff said? I promise to soon reveal the answer to my impossible writer’s challenge. One of my friend’s attempted it and failed miserably. I’m sure that nobody will get it, so that’s coming up, along with a brand spanking new challenge that involves a Japanese product that got lost in translation.

But for today, let me tell you about a website that I’ve been digging over the past few months: Giveaway of the day, a site that literally gives commercial software away every day for free! There has been some whiners on the site that think they give away too many screensavers and that sort of thing, but hey, it’s free and once in a while a really good one comes along, so check it out! The same company has also started Game giveaway of the day which gives away, you guessed it - oodles of games.