« January 2006 | Main | March 2006 »

February 23, 2006

Kent Linux User Group

On Saturday the Kent Linux User group is holding a meeting in Rochester, Kent, and I will be attending. This will be the first 'user group' meeting I have ever attended and I am hoping to learn a lot from the other members and look forward to talking to like minded people. It was only by chance, from a impulse google search, that I found out about the meeting.

Recently I have been spending a lot of time using Fedora Core 4, which I am enjoying using more and more, but there is so much I do not know about Linux and hope the members of the Kent LUG can help me with some of my questions.

Posted by The Technician at 09:43 PM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2006

The Art of Network Troubleshooting

TechMentorEvents.com has available a great podcast of a session by Mark Minasi called 'The Art of Network Troubleshooting - How to Fix Any Network Problem'. The audio file is available from the TechMentorEvents.com site and goes on for 1hour and 35minutes which might seem long but it is very interesting and as an IT professional myself I learnt something. If you would like to work in the IT industry then I recommend downloading this podcast and sticking it on your MP3 player as you will learn something from it and it may just give you an advantage over others when you are interviewing for your first tech job.

Posted by The Technician at 06:06 PM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2006

Opera 9 Preview 2 released

Opera has been my favourite browser since it release version 8 and made it free. It is at version 8.5 at the moment and version 9 is expected in March, but labs.opera.com have released a preview of the new browser and it looks brilliant.

Looks are the same, but the new features are going to make this browser a must have. Opera were the first to integrate tabbed browsing but Firefox really made it popular, but with the new version 9 Opera gives us a much needed feature, one I have wanted for a while. It is the ability to switch through the open tabs with a keyboard shortcut, much the same way you can switch between open windows with ALT+TAB. The short cut is CTRL+TAB and lists the open windows in the center of the screen allowing you to easily select the tab you want.


Pressing CTRL+TAB displays open tabs in the center of the screen.

A closer view of my open tabs.

The other nice feature is the thumbnail’s that now appear when you place your mouse over a tab so you can ‘preview’ the contents of that page. I think this could be very useful for people like me who like to open lots of tabs. The thumbnails were a little slow to appear which could just be caused by my slowish computer, but I am sure the final release will perform better as they normally always do.


Place your mouse over a tab for the thumbnail to display.

A closer view of the thumbnail.

Other new features of Opera 9 are ‘widgets’ which are much like Konfabulator or Dashboard widgets. Reviewers have not been enthusiastic about the widgets, but I am sure they will develop further and be of use. Opera 9 is also the first browser to support the downloading and seeding of BitTorrents, which even though most people will use a standalone client is a nice inclusion as lots of IPTV show distribute their content via BitTorrent and using it within the browser will make it easier for others.

So far I am very happy about the features in the preview of Opera 9 and have had no stability issues or problems, which is something I can not say for the recent IE 7 Preview which freezes constantly.

Posted by The Technician at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2006

'Get It Done Using Technology' vidcast

Another IPTV show has been discovered on the net thanks to Digg.com, which almost killed the guys server. GIDUT.tv has 7 shows so far and 2 and 7 are very good demonstrations about how to make network cables. Well worth showing to my Cisco students.

GIDUT.TV - Internet Television

Posted by The Technician at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)