Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I’ve made a couple posts recently about free software that I’ve found useful. One of the most used pieces of software on any of my computers (and I have too many) is a media player.

First of all, media player covers a lot of ground. I divide that into two camps: ones I use to listen to audio and ones I use to view video. Most of them try to do both and often it is this Swiss-Army-Knife approach that limits them and annoys me.

As I mentioned in one other post, my long-time favorite music player, Winamp, will play movies, but I’d only use it as a last resort. Actually, my favorite video player, one I use all the time for watching both downloaded video and DVD discs, is the lean and simple VLC player. In full-screen mode, there are no annoying player buttons that pop up if you bump the mouse, but everything you need is found in a popup right-click menu. It has screen format options that none of the fancy DVD player programs have.

But, I don’t want to rehash all those programs. Instead, I want to mention a new audio player that I just found out about. It’s called Songbird and is another project that comes out of the Mozilla program. I don’t know when it came out, but it’s now in version 1.0, which is the initial public release. Continue Reading…

I began to touch on this in a previous post Cheap Computer Set Up, so I thought it was worth a post of it’s own.

I’ve got a sort-of standard set of plug-ins, or as Firefox calls them, add-ons, that I like to use. The basic Firefox is by todays standards a plain browser. Maybe that’s because it’s set the standard we all expect, by comparison to older browsers, say IE 5, it’s pretty fancy on it’s own. But adding these extensions to the basic interface can make it a program that does everything you need. Continue Reading…

A friend sent me this. I couldn’t keep it to myself!

I saw this headline in the local paper today and thought to myself, “Wow, I didn’t know they had a problem with child labor in greenhouses…”