I just noticed over the weekend that Project Gutenberg has updated their downloadable DVD/CD of free etexts. (Tracker at this link.) The last update of the dvd has been a few years (as far as I can tell (2003?)) It should be noted that you can now create your own image of selected works through a web interface. Given all the hoopla over Google releasing free book downloads, I would have thought that there would be more people reminding us of Project Gutenberg which boasts 19,000 FREE downloadable ebooks (which has been quite a labor intensive process – they’re all in text or html format.)
Category: Computers
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Fairuse4wm back on top
In the struggle between fairuse4wm and Microsoft DRM, it appears that fairuse4wm is out on top again. Just to sum up – the last few weeks saw a release of fairuse4wm that stripped DRM from Microsoft DRM protected media files, then MS fixed their DRM to break fairuse4wm and now fairuse4wm has released a NEW version that breaks Microsoft’s fix and strips DRM from Microsoft DRM protected media files…. DRM software arms race, kind of fun to watch.
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Multihead PC
More than once I’ve wished for a second (or third) set of keyboard/mouse/video for my main desktop. Linux is a true multiuser operating system which means that it’s capable of hosting multiple graphical logins at the same time. For MOST things, a single, modern CPU is more than adequate to deal with this (memory is usually the limitation, but 1 GB ought to be enough.) So, I think all of this was prompted by a blurb about hubster which looks like it’s just a VGA-usb adapter. The company that makes it though bill it as a thin client of sorts. So, they’re essentially thinking thin-client over usb as opposed to thin-client over ethernet…
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Google Maps and package tracking
I saw this over the weekend and saw it as marginally more useful than traditional package tracking…. This is called packagemapping.com and is a mashup of package tracking and google maps. I don’t know, I mean, when I read that a package is in Cincinnati, I have a pretty good idea of WHERE that is, Knoxville, etc…. the idea of an RSS feed for your tracking number is interesting – that could be useful. (Although I wonder how quickly that feed would be updated.)
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Privacy concerns abound…
Well, the weekend saw news stories of Google planning to eavesdrop over pc microphones to hear what you’re watching on tv to target ads….. (I’m not holding my breath on that one, but… I do know how to disconnect the microphone.) Also, there was the story of Browzar which was supposedly THE solution for private web browsing…. well, it turns out it set’s it’s own search engine as the default and uses your search information to give sponsored links. Sans also mentions that the last visited url may be saved to disk as well. Really, we have several places where information is kept on us anyway (ISP/etc.) But, if you’re really concerned about private browsing you might try out the vmware browser virtual machine (or a portable web browser on a usb-key.)
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FreeDos 1.0 released
After 12 years of effort FreeDos has reached the milestone 1.0 released. It can be found here. I’ve really found freedos to be quite usable for quite some time as a drop in replacement of MS Dos environments. I’m struggling to remember any dos-based prorams that it wouldn’t run well. *(Possibly some games?)
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Audio on Linux weekend…
For most people here in the US, this last weekend was known as Labor Day weekend, for me though… it was more like Audio on Linux weekend. I’ve mentioned before that I use my computer for most EVERYTHING and that’s not far off…. I have watched movies on the PC, I’ve recorded multitrack audio, captured tv shows to disc, and of course, work…. database server, digitial photos/editing, test web sites, word documents, test various hardware, etc. etc. test software, etc…. vmware…. oh the list could keep going and going and going…. Well, sometimes it seems that optimizing the machine for one thing comes at the expense of another. Since I had to swap out the system board on the main machine (massively failing probably due to overheating…. multiple pci slots had failed, etc….) I hadn’t had a chance to see why some things didn’t work the way I used to….
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CDROM drives with yellow exclamation point in Windows XP
I ran into something I hadn’t yet seen firsthand today. A PC (running Windows XP home) with 2 optical drives (CD-RW and DVD drive). However, neither cd drive showed up in My Computer and both of them had a yellow exclamation point in the device manager listing. Of course, two drives don’t just go bad at the same time, so I wondered if it might be the Secondary IDE connector on the system board or the cable that was causing the trouble. In retrospect, I might could have assumed that they wouldn’t show at all if that were the case, but I checked against a usb connector and good cd drive just to be sure that we could rule out hardware as the problem. So, then it came time to see if the driver was the problem.
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Tools of the trade – USB2.0 to IDE & SATA Cable
Today is the first chance I”ve had to try out my new usb/ ide adapter “in the field”. I have previously used external ide enclosures for either laptop (2.5″) or desktop (3.5″) drives as well as larger (5.5″ cdrom’s) But, it was a bit of a nuisance to have to remove the drive that I had in the case and carrying around an empty case seemed like a waste, so I ordered this from Newegg.com It’s made by Sabrant (in China..) and is designed to connect any IDE or SATA drive to the usb port.
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Open Source OCR
I remember several years back I tried out gocr which is an open source character recognition engine. I wasn’t thoroughly impressed, but it sort of worked. Yesterday, I saw the news that Google has released Tesseract as an open source Optical Character Recognition engine. It was originally developed by HP and has been shelved for some time, it’s supposed to be among the top 3 in accuracy according to testing by UNLV. The source code is available at their sourceforge.net page. It’ will be good to see this taken up and integrated as a backend by open source scanning applications. (Maybe even office suites as a “recognize text in image file” type option….)