Pidgin - Multiple Instant Messenger Service

If like me, you find yourself juggling multiple messenger applications to keep your friends, family and colleagues happy you will be glad to hear about Pidgin. Formally known as Gaim, Pidgin is an open-source messaging program that allows the simultaneous use of multiple instant messenger services through one application.

Available as a free of charge download from www.pidgin.im, this small program supports 17 networks including favourites AOL, MSN and Yahoo as well some lesser known ones such as Jabber and Gadu-Gadu. Additional chat clients such as Skype and the Facebook Chat tool can be added through the use of freely available third party plugins which are easily located on the Pidgin site.

Once installed, simply select the type of account you want to add (for example a Google Talk account) along with your user name and password. Any of your contacts from that account that are currently online will automatically appear in the buddies list and you can begin chatting straight away. Not only does this offer the distinct advantage that you don’t need to switch between several applications if you have contact with friends on multiple networks but it also cuts down on the resource requirements of having multiple chat services running on one machine.

Along with being cross compatible with different networks, the Pidgin application is also available for many different Operating Systems; as well as the obvious Windows version, the developers have provided support for Solaris, SkyOS, Qtopia, UNIX, Linux and even the AmigaOS.

All the standard features you would come to expect such as contact organiser, custom smileys, file transfers and group chats are present. The only slight criticism that I would have is that it doesn’t support video and voice chat however my assumption is that these protocols are difficult to integrate in to an application that has been designed to be compatible with dozens of networks and half a dozen different Operating Systems. Hopefully this lack of functionality will be addressed in future releases.

Pidgin is completely customisable; the preferences dialog box provides an area where you can define every conceivable option including the interface, sounds, network connection, chat logging and your default availability status. In terms of appearance you can also change the font type, size and colour, formatting along with installing new themes which change the appearance of smileys and status icons. An additional option to install themes in order to change the actual user interface would be welcome as the default interface may be a little dull and unintuitive for some users.

from : www.computerarticles.co.uk

Google Books – Online Literature Library

The idea of Google Books was first conceived in 2002 when a small group of Google programmers started pondering the question of how many man hours it would take to scan every single book ever written. We still don’t know the true answer to this question although just eight years from the idea conception there are now over 10 million books catalogued in their database.

While the first scan was done manually on a 300 page book and took 40 minutes to process, Google now use cameras capable of scanning at a rate of 1,000 pages an hour and also work with 20,000 publisher partners who provide content directly. They have also been able to provide over 1 million books that can be read in full from cover to cover; these unrestricted works are either books that have fallen out of copyright or have been provided with publishers express permission.

As well as simply scanning the books, Google performs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the pages, thereby turning them in to pure text which can be entered in to their database. As a result when you do a Google Search you are now not only returned results from relevant websites but also your search terms are checked against a library encompassing millions of books and appropriate matches are suggested for further reading.

The integration in to the Google Search engine means you may have already inadvertently stumbled across Google Books but if you haven’t and are eager to explore then the Google Books can be found by visiting the site http://books.google.co.uk/ directly. Being a Google service, it almost goes without saying that the service is completely free of charge and is instead paid for via a minimal number of sponsored links which are in no way intrusive or detrimental to the service.

From the Google Books site you can perform searches, add books to your virtual library or organise your collection in a logical manner. Searching for a book and then subsequently clicking on it opens an interface which allows you to either view the directly scanned pages from the book or in some instances a ‘plain text’ version. This plain text can then be copied and passed to another application or simply printed out for reading offline.

Books still under copyright enjoy the protection of a variety of access limitations and security measures which limit the number of viewable pages making the experience somewhat akin to being able to flick through the first couple of pages in a library or bookshop. Despite this protection there have rather predictably been a number of fairly major lawsuits issued by individuals and publishers alike; some with legitimate grievances and others just seeking money or publicity.

Possibly the most notable case was between The Authors Guild, the publishing industry and Google which resulted in Google agreeing to a settlement on October 28, 2008. This would see them pay a total $125 million not only to pay the court costs of the plaintiffs but also create a Book Rights Registry which will collect and disburse revenue generated by all third party sites such as Google which provide content based on the content of books covered by the agreement.

These issues aside, on the whole I am amazed that again this relatively new company have been able to offer such an incredible gift to the world. With Google Books we have the potential to preserve centuries of human literacy work for generations to come as well as promoting the spread and availability of knowledge amongst all groups and all classes of people.

From : www.computerarticles.co.uk

Google Buzz - Social Networking Website

The Click article for this week is brought to you by Hayley Underwood, my soon to be wife, so that she can tell you about Google Buzz; a new social networking application that she has been getting to grips with.

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Google Buzz is an extension of the Google Mail service offered by Google which the Internet giants hope will lure users away from alternative services such as Facebook.

Google Mail initially created shockwaves when first introduced as they offered a huge 1GB of storage space for messages and attachments compared to most of its competitors who at the time offered a feeble 2 to 4MB. Today they offer a huge 7GB as standard however times have moved on and alternative providers such as Yahoo Mail and Hotmail also now offer an almost unlimited amount of storage space free of charge.

Despite not having the advantage over the competition in this respect any longer, Google Gmail continues to be a popular service due to its ability to integrate well with other e-mail accounts and the way in which it allows you to manage your messages. As an example, Gmail groups together messages that are of the same subject, making them part of a conversation file. In this way you can manage large number of e-mails grouped into the same conversation quickly and easily so that deleting or achieving them doesn’t cause a headache.

Google Gmail is free to use and paid for by advertising however the adverts are very small, non-intrusive and are targeted so that they are more relevant to subject matter that you might find of interest. There are no large graphic adverts and no pop-up or pop-under adverts to clutter your browser.

Google Buzz is a social networking application integrated into Gmail. It aims to offer a better method to share photos, links, videos, and events with your Gmail contacts and personally I believe it is rather coincidental that this was developed after Facebook announced plans they were developing their own email system.

Buzz has all the basic features that you would expect from a social networking application including the ability to share status updates, photos, links and videos both privately and publically. You can choose who you’d like to follow by simply entering their Gmail address at which point they can be added as a friend for you to see a steam of all their updates that have been shared either publically or privately with you. As with Facebook, other users can comment on public posts and show their appreciation for an update or users status by clicking the ‘like’ button.

You can direct a comment into a fellow users Gmail inbox by simply putting @ the beginning of your comment and the user name of that person is then hidden to protect their privacy. This feature can only be used with people that are in your Gmail contact list. Also by clicking on the arrow to the right of any post, you can link content to the post, email the contact directly and mute the buzz that appears in your inbox.

Google Buzz also integrates with Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, YouTube, Blogger, and Twitter meaning that you are able to share content from these applications directly. This is a nice feature as it allows you to post files and albums you may have already created without having to go through the hardship of creating them twice.

The social networking market has the potential for huge rewards, especially for a company such as Google that makes such a large amount of its profits from revenue generated by advertising. With news that Buzz will soon be available on the Android phone and iPhones platforms, it will almost certainly give the more established social networking sites a run for their money.

From : www.computerarticles.co.uk

Microsoft Office 2010

Despite it being the second most used application on my work computer (behind the Mozilla Firefox browser), it’s still impossible for me to get excited about a new edition of the Microsoft Office suite.

With the final release due in a couple of months, Microsoft have provided a beta test version of Office 2010 that’s free for members of the public to download. The beta test version will run unhindered until October 2010 at which point users must decide whether they wish to purchase the final release or have it removed from their hard drive.

For the costs involved the majority of home users may still be better off with the free OpenOffice Suite (www.openoffice.org) as it should provide all the features you are likely to need at no cost. This having been said, the Office Suite has remained a popular flagship product over the years due to business users often requiring a specific function or application only present in the Microsoft offering. I, for example, use Outlook on a regular basis and haven’t yet found an alternative that suits my needs.

Having not been the biggest fan of Office 2007 (especially the ‘ribbon’ interface discussed in the past) I wasted no time downloading the 64-bit professional version of the beta to put it through its paces. I have now been using it for a couple of days it does appear notably faster than Office 2007 and certainty incredibly stable. The speed increase could easily be attributed to the fact that a 64-bit version of the application is now available to run on modern 64-bit computers.

Office Professional 2010 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher. The home edition (also currently available in beta) includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. After the official release, computer manufacturers may choose to bundle new machines with a starter edition of Office which includes just Excel and Word; this version of Office will replace the aging Microsoft Works Suite.

Although the ribbon interface remains, it is certainly a lot clearer than that provided with Office 2007; the confusing Office orb has been replaced with the familiar file menu, there are fewer distracting borders, a neutral colour scheme and most importantly it is customisable to the users individual tastes. The applications look and behave like a ‘family’ now and have become more intuitive to use as a result of the more refined user interface.

An important new feature due for release in the final version but missing from the beta is the ‘Web Apps’ which will extend the Office functionality to a compatible web browser. Very similar in form to Google Docs, Office Web Apps allows users to collaborate, edit and share Office documents online. This is an incredibly important new feature that has no doubt come about due to the success of Google Docs and one that I would like to field test when complete.

This article isn’t long enough to go in to details about minor new features so I will summarise by observing that the changes made from Office 2007 to Office 2010 are evolutionary rather than revolutionary; very much in the same way that Windows 7 was an evolutionary change compared with Vista. Excluding the Web Apps there is nothing substantially new however the minor improvements are certainly welcome as is the chance to road test a new piece of software completely free of charge for a year.

Users interested in downloading the beta version of Office 2010 should visit www.microsoft.com/office/2010 to get their hands on a copy.

From : www.computerarticles.co.uk

Aviary Online Design Suite

This week we’ve been making paper penguins. Our reasoning isn’t quite as tenuous as you would imagine; our company mascot is a penguin, we had an hour to kill, and we needed something to put on the Refresh Cartridges blog.

Of course, you never know where a journey to create a penguin template will take you and while looking for a free vector image editing program, Matt fortunately stumbled across the website www.aviary.com. Aviary is essentially a free online design suite which consists of many powerful tools ranging from a simple audio editor to a variety of fairly sophisticated image/vector editing software.

The applications are all used online rather than being downloaded and installed on to your hard drive. This offers a number of advantages, most notably the ability to ‘dip in’ quickly and easily, without having to install, and the fact that everything is stored on a central server means you will always be using the most up to date version of the software.

The list of applications currently includes:

Phoenix – A free image editor that handles pretty much anything from basic image retouching to complex effects. Features include a wide selection of tools, support of layers and 72 helpful tutorials to get you up and running.

Toucan – A colour editor which is ideally used in conjunction with other creations tools in the suite. Toucan can be used to pick and analyse colour by either colour association rules or by grabbing colours from within existing images.

Peacock – Described by its creators as a ‘visual laboratory’, Peacock is used to generate a whole host of effects and image manipulation tools to make some quite stunning and abstract artwork.

Raven – This tool is used for generating vector artwork, which is used by artists to create images that are fully scalable and suitable for applications such as logos and t-shirt designs. The intricacies of vector artwork are too deep to explain in one sentence but the bottom line is that rather than every pixel of an image being assigned a colour value, a vector image is saved using descriptions of the lines, curves and shapes making up the image. This means that if the image has to be radically resized the descriptions of those shapes are just changed proportionally resulting in no loss of image quality. Due to the restrictions of creating drawings using just shapes and lines, vector images are typically quite simple.

Falcon – This utility is used to capture images and web pages quickly and easily in order to crop, resize and ultimately save them for use in another package. A similar utility ‘Talon’ on the site allows you to do the same with an complete computer screenshot.

Myna – Use Myna to edit and remix music tracks and audio clips. The application can be used to trim, loop, stretch and reverse audio clips along with adding fade ins, fade outs and other effects such as pitch change, delay and reverb.
Each of these tools is free to use and comes with at least one tutorial to help newcomers get to grips with how to use the software and what to use each program for. Each program is free to use and advertising is nonexistent, however users do have the option for upgrading for just over £15 a year. By paying for a subscription you are given a number of additional features such as unlimited storage of your creations online, the ability to add personalised watermarks to your creations and access to the advanced premium tutorials and forums.

From : www.computerarticles.co.uk

AC Networking

One of the biggest growth areas for home computing this decade has been the humble network.

At the turn of the century it was most often the case that we used a single machine connected directly to a phone line whereas now it would be rare to find a home that hasn’t been networked to some extent. Applications range from wireless Internet on a laptop, file sharing between two machines, a hard drive set up to distribute media around the home, a wireless printer which all the family can access or a games console piggybacking the main Internet connection.

The conventional methods of deploying a network around your home are well known; you can either connect via a network cable or connect wirelessly over the airwaves and while usually suitable, both methods have potential disadvantages. A wired network is of course limited by a physical connection being needed between your devices whereas a wireless network can fall down if installed in to a house that doesn’t have favourable conditions; a particularly large house or one with particularly thick walls for example.

A route that few people are familiar with is that of AC Networking. Although not the ideal solution for many, it does have some quite distinct advantages if you find that a conventional wired or wireless network lets you down. To get started you simply need a minimum of two power line access points which can then be plugged in to any of the existing plug sockets in your home for the two to begin talking to one another. The technology works by modulating a carrier wave along the existing power cables in your home therefore your entire home wiring essentially becomes a network cable that can be tapped in to at will.

Because you are using the mains cabling that runs all throughout your house the distance or objects between the two points are irrespective while at the same time removing the need to lay dedicated network cabling. Plug your broadband router in to an power line adaptor downstairs and your computer in to one upstairs and with the minimum of fuss you’ll have a physical connection between the two.

You can restrict access to the network by implementing a number of security procedures similar to those present on a wireless network but owing to the fact your neighbours will be on a different wiring ring, these features are potentially redundant.

What makes the technology more useful is that you can combine elements of power line, wireless and conventional wired networking together in the one location by building on the strengths of all three technologies. You could for example have a wireless router plugged in to both your broadband connection and a power line adaptor with a second router plugged in to a power line adaptor upstairs; by having two wireless routers in opposite ends of the same building the chance of being without wireless signal would be slim.

Alternatively, have the wireless router plugged in to both your broadband connection and a power line adaptor downstairs but upstairs plug a power line adaptor straight in to a conventional wired network switch in a kids game room upstairs. They could then connect a PlayStation 3, Xbox and PC directly in to this switch therefore benefiting from a physical connection straight in to the router downstairs without having to worry about issues such as wireless signal strength.

Most modern day power line adaptors support 200Mbps which compares favourably to a standard wired network which would run at 100Mbps and a standard ‘g’ rated wireless network running at 54Mbps. Prices start at around £60 for a pair of power line access points.

From : www.computerarticles.co.uk

Media Player Classic Home Cinema

One of the most common problems I experience when playing movies and videos on my home PC is poor lip syncing caused by the sound and video not marrying up perfectly. Rather than performing any degree of troubleshooting I always fall back to the trusty player ‘Media Player Classic Home Theatre’ which despite a complete lack of both bells and whistles always performs admirably.

The user interface for Media Player Classic looks just like the old Windows Media Player 6.4 which was bundled with Windows ME and early versions of Windows XP. I expect few users to know this specific version off the top of their heads so simply refer back to the version in your memory that could be described as looking ‘particularly primitive and dated’.

There are no fancy skins, no modern looking icons and no ribbon style interface; what you simply get is a blank screen along with play, stop, pause, rewind and fast forward buttons, a volume control and a series of options running along the top of the application in an old school grey drop-down menu.

The compensation for the primitive looking interface is that the 3mb application is capable of playing a huge number of audio and video files without the need for any additional software or codecs. Out of the box Media Player Classic Home Theatre includes support for MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, VCD, SVCD and DVD playback. It also has built-in codecs for LPCM, MP2, AC3 and DTS audio along with H.264 and VC-1 with DXVA support, DivX, Xvid, and Flash Video formats. Media Player Classic Home Theatre can also support Quicktime and Realtime formats with the use of additional software.

The player is based on the old Media Player Classic application which was being developed up until the original author ceased development back in 2006. In the last few years, asides from the name change, a number of new features have been integrated in to this new release including additional video decoders, several bug and vulnerability fixes and a 64-bit version for those with compatible versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.

The main appeal to me has to be the sheer simplicity of the application; it will load in literally a second and rarely skips a frame or misses a beat. If I ever find myself in a situation where a more ‘advanced’ player is struggling then immediately I’ll load up MPC Home Cinema and on the same PC with the same video file the problems cease. The low resource requirement means that it’s suitable for use on low specification machines making it especially tempting for those that can’t run the latest version of Windows Media Player.

Downloading a copy will take literally a few seconds from http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ and as with all good software it is free of charge and doesn’t include any advertising.

From : www.computerarticles.co.uk