[Geeks Are Sexy] Technology News

Xobni: Email Made Easier Than Ever

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Fellow Outlook users, prepare to revolutionize your email experience.
Allow me to introduce you to my new best friend and personal assistant, Xobni (pronounced ZOB-nee, and spelled like a backwards inbox). He and I just met this morning, but we’ve really hit it off.
Xobni is a powerful little tool [...]

One encoding to rule them all

Despite the joke in the image above, it certainly seems that the web “hearts” Unicode.  According to Mark Davis of Google, the use of Unicode on the web has recently surpassed both ASCII and Western European encodings, as shown by the blue line in the chart below:

In case you can’t read it, the [...]

How to Use Macros to Simplify Your Life

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Here’s an offer too good to refuse: Take every tedious, repetitive task that wastes your time…and automate it. The cost? Two minutes to read this article, and maybe five more to do what it says. Interested? Read on.
What we’re about to do will save you precious time [...]

Finally - a YouTube download script that WORKS!

By Mark O’Neill
One of my favourite websites that I visit on a daily basis is YouTube, and until now I have never been able to find a reliable online service to download a copy of the videos that I like to my PC. Many websites have promised me the world but when I click [...]

Upgrade Flash Now: 90 Percent of Windows Hosts Vulnerable

If you’re a heavy Internet surfer and are using Windows, you are probably vulnerable to a bunch of vulnerabilities in Adobe’s Flash Player without knowing it. A new version of the popular software has been just released, fixing seven flaws said to allow remote executable code to be run on a Windows system.
From Infoworld here:
Adobe has upgraded its Flash Player to fix seven vulnerabilities [...]

Drift off to sleep with Ambient Skype

By Mark O’Neill
When the cost of bandwidth is virtually next to nothing these days, couples who find themselves apart are using Skype to recreate that “at home” feeling. It even has a name - Ambient Skype.
Basically you leave the app constantly running on your computer as background noise. Since Skype-to-Skype calls are [...]

Novell versus Microsoft: A never-ending story

When I read yesterday that the United States Supreme Court has decided to reopen an old Novell vs. Microsoft case dating back to 2004, I couldn’t help but think back to what has happened between the two companies in the 20 last years.
If you weren’t following the news back then, here’s what went down: Four [...]

Heavily encrypt your ZIP and RAR files with SecureZIP

By Mark O’Neill
Despite the proliferation of file storage sites on the internet such as Dropbox, I am still a bit of an old fashioned geek at heart and I always end up emailing big files to people by zipping them first. But old-fashioned as I am, I am also paranoid, so I always [...]

The Early History of Programming Languages - Part 1

Yet another question for Geek Support comes from Guillaume Gallois:
as a GAS reader and first and foremost a geek, I’d be interested in reading topics about programming languages (comparisons between .Net and Java, evolution of programming languages, new trends, …) or topics about computer systems (evolution, comparisons between technologies,…)

Those topics are broad enough to fill [...]

AIR + AOL = One nice little desktop music widget

By Mark O’Neill

I am normally rather wary of anything coming from AOL, but I have to admit that their free little music desktop widget, which runs on Adobe AIR, has impressed the hell out of me. It’s a nice little program to have running while you’re surfing away on the net.
If you download [...]