New releases
NOTE:
Gearblog has morphed into Gibbsblog. All new postings, same great Gibbs. Come on over!
Windows Vista and HDCP
September 14, 2005
We keep seeing articles and blog entries that make it sound as if the forthcoming Microsoft Windows Vista ("Longhorn" as was) will not be compatible with existing monitors. Let's make this clear, the requirement for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP)...
Apple announces iPod nano and other (yawn) stuff
September 07, 2005
They've done it again! A new iPod! At 3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27 inches and 1.5 ounces with a 1.5-inch color LCD display and a 14 hour battery life, the iPod nano is definitely a cool piece of engineering and...
yellowTAB ZETA or BeOS rides again
August 11, 2005
A couple of weeks ago we received a copy of ZETA, the recently released child of BeOS, but due to the depth of our testing queue and the death of a server we haven't got around to installing it yet....
Microsoft IE7 beta 1, a cancer that does not impress
August 02, 2005
So far those who have had a look at Microsoft's IE7 beta 1 release have not been impressed. Described as "very beta" by Ken "Caesar" Fisher in a blog posting on arstechnica this release also shows that Microsoft is still...
KDE 3.5 Preview
July 27, 2005
Interested in what's coming up in the 3.5 release of KDE? Check out part 1 of this review of the current pre-beta version....
Linux goes to the Devil
July 26, 2005
Want a Linux distro that boots from CD and can save its configuration to a floppy or a USB drive? How about running on hardware as lowly as a 486 DX2/66 in only 32MB RAM? We have just the system...
Apple developer transition hardware smokes
July 14, 2005
According to an AppleInsider article, developers who have been lucky enough to get their hands on Apple's first Intel-based "developer transition systems" are pretty impressed with the performance: The systems started shipping to Mac OS X developers three weeks ago,...
Konfabulator -- cross-platform Dashboard widgets
June 23, 2005
If you have a Macintosh running OS X you'll be familiar with Dashboard widgets, mini-applications that provide "things" such as weather reports, calculators, and utility functions that you might or might not be able to live without. Well, if you've...
Review: Virtualization - From the Desktop to the Enterprise
June 17, 2005
While the VMware book market is healthy (we liked "The Book of VMware: The Complete Guide to VMware Workstation" by Brian Ward a lot) and despite all of the excitement over virtualization (for example, see a couple of recent Backspin...
FreeBSD 5.4: best release since 5.1 but perhaps not quite ready for prime time
June 13, 2005
"One of the oldest Unix-like operating systems, FreeBSD, continues its advancement with the sixth release in the FreeBSD-5 series. Its developers have added nothing major, but have made many modifications, fixing a number of problems introduced in previous releases. FreeBSD...
Stealthy surfing and messaging
May 26, 2005
We just got a really cool personal privacy tool set for Windows 2000 and XP users: Stealth Surfer II. Complete with support for secure, anonymous surfing and e-mail this is a clever and reasonably simple solution for portable privacy....
NetCraft's Toolbar community scores 5,600 phishing sites in 5 months!
May 03, 2005
We know we've written about Netcraft's Toolbar before but we can't remember where ... what reminded us of this free utility for Internet Explorer was a note in the company's monthly newsletter: Some 5,600 phishing sites have been detected and...
askSam version 6 released
April 14, 2005
The free form personal database called askSam from askSam Systems has been around for 20 years this month and today the latest version, askSam 6, was released. We are just about to check out the new version but until we...
Multiplicity multiplies your input
April 05, 2005
A new product from Stardock Corporation is one of the most creative ideas we've seen for a while. The product is called Multiplicity and it addresses the situation where you have several monitors on your desk each attached to a...
Daddy, where do MP3s come from?
March 23, 2005
"About 36 million Americans—or 27% of internet users—say they download either music or video files and about half of them have found ways outside of traditional peer-to-peer networks or paid online services to swap their files, according to the most...
Tsarfin NetInfo 5.4 and IPMonitor 5.4
March 07, 2005
Today, Tsarfin Computing Ltd. announced the simultaneous release of new versions of a couple of network diagnostic tools we really like -- NetInfo 5.4 and IPMonitor 5.4. We wrote about Tsarfin's NetInfo and IPMonitor some time ago in Gearhead --...
Make: magazine launched
March 01, 2005
New magazine for geeks who like to build stuff ...
AIM Sync beta [AIM utility]
Obviously AOL isn't going to rest on its laurels with all these upstart IM outfits getting in on the action. A new tool, AIM Sync, does a good job of making their IM client more useful ... AIM Sync was...
VMware Workstation 5 beta [virtual machine environment]
February 25, 2005
If you're a VMware shop you'll definitely want to check out the new beta release of VMware Workstation 5. This release is exciting because it addresses one of the big irritations in dealing with virtual machines (VMs): It allows cloning...
