I was reading a report about data mining tools usage, and something that catch my eye was this:
It’s interesting to see how Western Europe is the region with a greater quota of free (and probably open source) tools, followed by Latin America, and on the completely other end there is US/Canada. For sure it can be related to the culture of these countries, and therefore to the economic systems.
For sure you have heard or read, at least once, recommendations about how to improve the battery life of a laptop, mobile phone, or whatever gadget. But I’ve detected that several times that recommendations are wrong, and they do more harm than benefit to a laptops battery. That’s because battery technology has been changing along the years, and the methods of taking care of them also. So, I’ll try to summarize some of the most basic up-to-date tips to increase the life of a laptop’s battery. Before applying them, just check that you battery is of lithium-ion (Li-ion) type.
The tips of this post are only applicable to Lithium-ion batteries.
Acabo de darme cuenta de que tengo muy pocas entradas dedicadas a los juegos de estrategia. De hecho, las entradas referentes a juegos de mesa, estrategia y rol pueden contarse con los dedos de una mano… quizá ya es hora de remediar eso.
Para volver a avivar estas temáticas, nada mejor que hacer publicidad de un sorteo de miniaturas. Vale, no es de forma desinteresada porque al hacerlo tengo más posibilidades de ganar, pero no les voy a hacer ese feo :P.
A lo que iba: el blog sobre miniaturas Dragones y Castillos, para celebrar que cumplen dos años, han montado un sorteo más que digno para sus seguidores. Participar es facilísimo, pudiendo hacerlo simplemente dejando un comentario en la web o siguiéndolos en twitter. ¿Y los premios? Fuá los premios. Una miniatura del Asesino de Shadowcrafter pintada por Iguazzu (que bien quedaría en mi estantería). Otro: una caja Starter Pack del juego Némesis de Zenit Miniatures. Y, por si fuera poco, un manual y una miniatura de Carnevale de Vesper-on Games. Tres premios, tres posibilidades de llevarse algo.
¿Aún estás leyendo este post? :)
Primero de todo, decir que este tutorial no es obra mía. Su autor es Abdziel del foro de Marcus Beli, que muy generosamente lo ha ofrecido (bueno, yo se lo he pedido) para colgarlo en este blog. Así de paso añado un poco de variedad, que últimamente me estaba cebando mucho con el tema de la privacidad.
Aunque me habría gustado que lo hubiera hecho con Gimp, la herramienta que ha usado es el Adobe Photoshop CS2. Aún así, él mismo asegura que es posible encontrar funcionalidades equivalentes en Gimp. Bueno, después de este breve ¿prólogo?, os dejo con el tutorial en cuestión:
1. Creamos un nuevo archivo con fondo transparente. El tamaño que yo he utilizado es de 450×450 pixeles. Luego, rellenamos de negro y con la opción de “Marco Elíptico” hacemos una circunferencia perfecta:
I’ve been a heavy Google services user. I used on a daily basis Google Search, Gmail, Google Calendar, Picasa, Google Reader and Google Maps. And as I stated before, this dependency is not good, so eventually I got rid of it. On this post I want to explain the alternatives I’m currently using, and how happy I am with them. It could have been a “30 days without Google”, but it has been more than 30 days since I’ve been living with not-so-much-Google-in-my-life and I didn’t a detailed follow-up of the migration process, so it was a bit out for this title. Continue reading
On this post I will explain how to set-up an e-mail server on Debian using Postfix, Cyrus, Courier, PAM, PostfixAdmin and Roundcube. I’m not going to explain nothing completely new or revolutionary neither reinvent the wheel. To be clear, what I did to implement the server was following this guide: Simple Virtual User Mail System. But, it’s for Arch Linux, so if we want it to work on Debian there are several changes that we have to take into account. So, instead of repeating everything, I will just highlight the changes. Continue reading
With the new home page, the old cube logo was a bit out of place. It still had the old flavour of the previous web page, so I also wanted to change it.
I remember that I did it with Gimp, following a tutorial about how to do a 3D cube. I even used the same colours and did everything exactly as explained there, so it was not very original… but I liked it. Geez, so many years have passed since then…
The old cube
This time, I tried asking my brother (who is supposedly studying graphic design or something like that :P) for help, but after a few weeks he has not shown much interest on it. So, “ni corto ni perezoso”, one afternoon of boringness I opened Inkscape and started to play with it. The results are what you can see below.
The new cube?
So, what do you think? Actually, I’m open to new options, therefore if you think you can do something much better and appealing than that (quite easy to achieve), just sent it to me and I will praise you on this so cool place that my blog is. Or if you have a suggestion about how I could improve it by myself, leave a comment, it will also be welcomed :).
If you work with several computers, sharing data between them, you probably:
For convenience, I use the second option. I have some files in the cloud, so they are always accessible and updated from any PC I use (three PCs at work and my laptop at home/wherever). In fact, I can even access them from my phone. For that, I greatly recommend Dropbox. I’ve already talked about it, but in Catalan, so I will make a short summary for English speakers (the Google translation is not so good).
Pros:
Cons:
If you like the idea of using Dropbox, but you are worried about your privacy, or you have to store sensitive/confidential data, there is a solution to the dilemma. Do not share files; share encrypted files.
Truecrypt allows you to create encrypted partitions or containers. A container is a file which can be used as a partition or disk drive, encrypted and protected with a password. Actually, it can be encrypted with a password + a key file, but then you always need to have at hand this file for accessing to it. As I like lists a lot, I will explain how to use Truecrypt in this way.
To create your encrypted container:
How to use the container:
Quite simple, right? So, what’s the deal with Dropbox? You can put the encrypted container inside the Dropbox shared folder, so instead of getting access to all the files, they only receive a single encrypted file with no idea of what’s in there. Sure that they could try to crack it, but its like if somebody would like to hack your server by brute force (not impossible, but at least quite difficult).
To be sincere, there is a couple of drawbacks on that:
I have found a balance between convenience and privacy putting on the encrypted volume just the sensitive files or personal data (e.g., pictures and documents), and outside of the container (but still inside the shared folder) the files that are not important but I want accessible and updated at all times.
Before starting with my brick of words, I would like to advise you that if you try my proposal, it’s going to have a big impact on your internet habits. Actually, I’m going to propose you to use a different search engine from the one you are used to, and I’m sure that at the beginning you will feel uncomfortable with it and you will be very keen to come back to your previous tool. But, honestly, give it a try for at least a month. The more you use a new tool, the more you discover how to use it correctly, and the more you enjoy it. After that pseudo-disclaimer, let’s begin with the interesting content.
Nowadays we use search engines a lot. They have become the standard way of finding websites on the jungle of information that the WWW is today. Web directories are a resource of the past, we just input our words of interest in a textbox, hit the Enter key, and rely on the answers of Google, Bing or Yahoo. They seem to work quite well, and they are free, so what’s wrong with them?
Just two things:
When using a search engine, you are getting results according to its criteria. At the beginning, the results were sorted according to more or less objective parameters that measured the quality of the sites. But it has changed. You have probably noticed that you get different results for the same search when you use other computers or compare it with the results that other persons get. I could explain here why this happens, but the web page Don’t Bubble Us explains it with a lot of pictures, not much text and in a funny and easy to understand way. So, before continuing, please have a look at it (and then come back ;) ).
Done? Are you a bit disappointed about the search engine you use? I was. You have probably read the last part about DuckDuckGo, but I’ll talk about it later.
This is how it works. They know about your interests, your problems, what you are shopping… your life. Again, and in order to do not repeat what others have explained better, I recommend having a quick look at Don’t Track Us.
How do you prefer to be recognised?
So, now you could just be in the mood of “I don’t care about all this bullshit, you are a paranoid” or “OMG! I’m selling my life and having a distorted view of the world! I’ll never use it again.” Or something intermediate, just a bit worried and willing to find a better search engine that keeps your privacy while providing a good service.
That’s the search engine I’m using, and the one I recommend: DuckDuckGo (DDG from now on). The have a very nice privacy policy, and I’m quite happy with the results. Actually, what they do is using other search engines to get a bunch of results, and then rank them according to its parameters of quality. So, we could say that they are acting as an anonimizer between you and several search engines.
In addition to that, they have some tricks that make the experience more enjoyable. One is the red box, also known as zero-click info. It is a red box (d’oh!) shown at the beginning of the search results, containing a topic summary or related topics. It could be the explanation of an acronym, the result of a mathematical operation or conversion between units, a short definition, etc. I’ve solved several of my quick searches just with that, with no need to go inside other sites.
Zero-clik results for ESA
Next tip I love is the !bang. There are a set of keywords that allow you to perform specialized searches. You can !python to look at python documentaion, !mineforum for minecraft forum, !images for Google images (yes, they don’t provide this service yet), !filestube for search in filestube, etc. So, kind of shortcuts for other sites. And the list of options is huge.
To sum up this short review, to get an idea of the overall capabilities of DDG, try the searches on the goodies page.
If you have decided to give DuckDuckGo a try, do not rely just on opening the web page each time. You are not going to do it. You will just use the search box in Firefox or the omnibox in Chrome/Chromium, therefore relying again on you previous search engine. To force yourself to use it for a while, you have to configure it as you default search engine on your browser. Fortunately, it’s really really easy, just a couple of clicks. If you visit the DDG homepage, you’ll see a link with the instructions to do it. So, do it. Now. If you don’t like it, you can always come back. But I haven’t ;)
Happy searching!
