Month: August 2009

Despite the amount of time they’ve been around, Usenet newsgroups remain relatively unknown to the majority of Internet users. There are plenty of reasons for this, such as the fact that people who know about Usenet generally try to keep it a secret, or if not a secret then not as well known as, say, BitTorrent. Another reason most people don’t bother looking into Usenet is that in order to get a decent, reliable service you generally have to pay a monthly subscription.

But if you’re willing to pay for the extra security, anonymity and speed then Usenet newsgroups can be both a fun place to discuss any topic under the sun and a repository of as many open source apps and Linux distributions that you can think of. Apparently, some people have even found movies, albums and HD-TV shows on them. OnSoftware doesn’t endorse or condone copyright infringement or piracy, though. OK?

Once you’ve set up an account with a reliable newsgroup provider (I use the Giganews Diamond service which offers unlimited downloads via a secure SSL connection), you’ll need some software. Until recently, this was my setup:

Newsgroups reader: Unison

Unison (full version $25) is a nicely designed native Mac newsgroups reader. In essence, it allows you to browse through the thousands of groups available on Usenet, read and participate in discussions and download binaries (files). Simply configure Unison with your account details (including how many simultaneous connections you want) and you’re away. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll find the wealth of information and groups just a little daunting. So…

NZB search engine: Newzleech

Binaries are broken up into lots of fragments and you’ll need to download all of them if you want to be able to reassemble them afterwards. For this reason, it’s a good idea to use a search engine to find all the constituent parts of a file before you start downloading them. I use Newzleech because it’s quick, easy to use and generally helps me find what I’m looking for. To use it, simply add your search term (I often stipulate a filesize range too) and select the binary that looks most complete. E.g: searching for Ubuntu Jaunty with a minimum filesize of 700MB, I find one binary that’s tweaked for netbooks. Perfect! I hit the Get NZB button and open the resulting file with Unison. Continue reading “Essential Mac utilities for Usenet downloads”

The votes are in, the polls are closed and the results are ready…

Regular readers will remember that about a month ago, we decided to conduct a spam experiment to see what email providers perform best when dealing with junk mail. Bets were made, stances taken and friendships placed on the line, but NOBODY could have predicted the results. Read on, and prepare to be surprised!

Just to remind people, we took some deliberate risks to make sure the email accounts were given a run for their money. I entered the email addresses into a dodgy-looking Internet competition AND left the poor defenseless little fellas on the blog to be stolen by any passing spambots. We were looking for a challenge, and a challenge we got.

Many people, including myself, had high hopes for Gmail. When I took a peek, all seemed quiet – 3 emails in the inbox and a whopping 49 in spam. Unfortunately, and unexpectedly, the 3 in the inbox were out-and-out spam, while the vast majority of the ones in spam were actually genuinely from my competition!

Hotmail received the lowest number of emails overall. We found 11 in the inbox, and 7 in the junk folder. Almost all of the emails in the inbox were correctly classified, but most the ones in spam were actually genuine.

AOL took an interesting approach to the situation. There were only 2 emails in the spam folder, and both were correctly identified as junk. Over in the inbox, all but 4 of the 26 were genuinely related to the competition. Not bad going…

Poor Hushmail was very disappointing: all of the 19 messages in the inbox were spam, while the 12 in the ‘pending’ spam folder were actually a mixture of emails relating to the competition and junk. And this from the service provider that claims to have extra-special spam capabilities!

Lastly we took a look at Yahoo, one of the oldest webmail services on the block. Although it had the highest number of emails of all the accounts – 78 in total – it did well. All of the 37 emails in the inbox were related to the competition, and all of the 48 in the spam folder were total garbage.

The results were not exactly what we were expecting, but very interesting all the same. To be fair, the Internet competition that we entered generated a huge amount of correspondence and I have to admit that the emails definitely looked like spam. The key point to remember, however, is that although they look dodgy, I did solicit the communication. One of the biggest surprises was the variation in the total number of emails received by each account. Hotmail was best at keeping the numbers down, with a paltry 18, although as I counted a total of over 20 genuine emails in other accounts, it does make me wonder where the others disappeared to.

The main point of the test, however, was to see which provider did best in picking out spam and leaving the genuine – if spammy-looking – alone. To judge this, we looked at both the number of spam mails received AND the number of false positives, and when we did, the winner was clear. Yahoo, would you please step forward!

What can you learn from our little test? Well, bear in mind that the situation we created is somewhat unnatural, and that when picking an email account, there is more to consider than spam capabilities; security, usability and features are all hugely important. It is also worth asking around for the opinions of actual real-life users – even though Gmail didn’t perform great in the test, it always performs perfectly in my real accounts. That said, the test highlighted some definite winners and losers, and even though I have no intention of changing from Gmail, I certainly know which email providers I won’t be recommending to my friends!

I love traveling abroad and I usually take my camera with me. That means that I have thousands of photos and videos at home, but I wasn’t not sure what the best way to share those pictures would be. After doing a bit of research, I came to the conclusion that creating a multimedia presentation is probably the best option, and Live Movie Maker the best tool to work with.

Live Movie Maker is part of the Microsoft Live family: a basic and functional video editor with a visually appealing interface that doesn’t require any technical skills to use. Unlike other more professional video editing tools, Live Movie Maker doesn’t feature a timeline or complicated menus. Its interface is divided into two main areas (a built-in player to preview your video, and a library to drag and drop images and videos) and has adopted the characteristic ribbon interface from the latest Microsoft apps, with separate tabs for the program’s main areas: Home, Animations, Visual effects, View and Edit.

Creating a video with your photos in Live Movie Maker couldn’t be easier: after launching the program, double click the library pane or drag and dr0p media files onto it, and they’ll be automatically added to the movie. Click the ‘Add music‘ button if you want to have some nice background music, which you can later on adjust to the video length with the ‘Fit to music’ option. Other tools you can find in this Home tab let you insert titles, add credits at the end of the movie and insert text captions for each photo. A special feature that is also worth noting is ‘AutoMovie‘: it creates the complete movie automatically for you, with title, credits and crossfade transitions. Continue reading “Create great videos easily with Live Movie Maker”

The Great Flu is a short strategy game where you have to try your best to limit a global flu pandemic. The Earth is split into areas, and depending on problems in each part you can direct certain policies at them. Distributing face masks, improving health care, stockpiling vaccines and more are available. As you progress, you’ll receive media stories and messages that help you make decisions. Once the pandemic hits, the growing spread of red dots over the planet is quite disturbing!

The game seems to be based on genuine medical advice, and it’s interesting to see which polices don’t work so well. I contained the Gamers Flu in 25 days, with only 161,746 deaths. OK, that doesn’t sound too good I suppose. This flash game plays in your browser, and is beautifully designed. It’s not the most cheerful concept, but it’s an unusually good mix of entertainment and education, an often cursed mix.

If you need a quick fix of mindless destruction after that, try Max Damage, a really basic physics game where you have to fire a cannon at domestic items, and do the maximum amount of damage possible. It’s not a new idea, or a clever one but it’s still fun.

After I finally stopped laughing at Mashable’s round-up of the best songs about Facebook and Twitter, I’ve had time to compose my own list of the best software-related tunes. It’s amazing how many artists have felt compelled to write songs professing their love (or often their hatred) of applications and operating systems.  Here are the ten that moved me the most.

Free Software Song

The crowd at Richard Stillman’s impromptu ‘gig’ were left dumbstruck by his mesmerizing performance of his self-penned Free Software Song. Don’t expect the founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation to be getting an six-album deal anytime soon, though.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BH7poMtPVU[/youtube]

 

Photoshop

Check out this extravagant performance of Spark’s Photoshop song, recorded on the band’s Creatures of the Deep tour. Russell, we would never want to Photoshop you out of our lives.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKAZGsVU-Fc[/youtube]

 

Mac or PC Rap

One of my personal favorites, this Flight Of the Conchords-style hip hop parody debates the nuances of the Windows and Mac OS interfaces. Continue reading “Top 10 software songs”