The Mystic Bird

Another win in the battle to take back lives from the corporate dark horse called Microsoft. I came across this report in my GoogleReader and thought it fit to reproduce here as this blog is pro open source by nature.

At TechCrunch they reported the news that the New South Wales Dept. of Education had decided to give Outlook/Exchange the boot and go with GMail for all it’s students. The faculty, which had also been using the M/$ product will instead go with an email application based off the Department’s own servers.

Google again shows the world that it can do better than M/$ who seems to think that sucking the money and souls out of it’s clients/customers is the way to go.

The story on TechCrunch is here and the original story is here.

Leave a comment to show your opinion either here or on the TechCrunch posting. Are you pro M/$ or pro open source?

Came across a news feed about Flock releasing their V2 Beta and decided to give it a look-see. This is one sweet browser here. This coming from a man who really likes his Firefox 2!

There are so many features available right out of the box in Flock that I’d never have the time to cover them all here but to touch on one that is a nice touch is the Blog Editor function. This post was created using it.

It opens an editor with many useful functions in itself that you post your entry into including images that you can grab right off a web page if you like. The image below I dragged from a web page of mine.

This is just a taste of what all Flock is capable of. An interesting thing to point out also is the fact Flock is built on the same engine that powers Firefox 3 which is in a download frenzy mode right now.

Flock is getting a lot more attention lately and as far as I can tell it’s well-deserved. From keeping up with friends on your favorite social networking sites, media hounds, news junkies and more….Flock seems to have the bases covered.

Give it a try yourself and see what all the fuss is about. It’s available for all platforms too (Windows, Mac and Linux) so there’s no excuse for not giving it a try.

There some reason why that little question should give you pause? You betcha there is! When was the last time you peeked inside your computer? Aw, come on! You never have? Well, if you’ve owned it for a while you might want to have a look because the fans that keep the insides cool probable are having a tough time of it by now due to dust buildup.

I had noticed a whining noise in mine on startups that made me nervous enough to have a look inside and when I popped open the case, I was shocked at all the dust built up inside. Shouldn’t have been I suppose but I never really gave it a second thought as I sat here beside it typing away.

The fans were covered slightly with dust and so was pretty much everything else. It was actually embarrassing. One fan was even slowed down by the buildup to a point that it was having a time at startup. It was first on my cleaning project.

Then the other fan over the heat-sink for the CPU and then the entire case got a good shot of air to blow out all the dust hidden or not.

End result? A much quieter running machine and cooler to boot.

One thing to note is that I used a hose from an air compressor that I had turned down to around 30 psi and kept it away from direct contact with any of the various boards so I wouldn’t blow any required components away.

Go ahead. Open that case up and have a look. You might be surprised at what you find.

Still having some database issues so as they say on TV….”Please stay tuned!” As soon as I find that hairball that’s choking things down, The Mystic Bird ought to be in the wind again.

Heeeere kitty, kitty!

<— Evil Cat Hacker