This week is the final installment in my four-week series on open source software alternatives. My goal has been to provide you with a list of software applications that duplicate what is commercially available and just maybe save you a few bucks. I encourage you to always seek out open source alternatives before you plunk down your hard-earned dollars. You can find them by simply googling your software...read more

This week we are continuing our discussion of open source software that aims to replace or eliminate the need to pay outlandish prices for commercial software. Previously we discussed biggies like replacing Microsoft Office with Open Office, Photoshop with GIMP/Paint.NET, and tools for protecting your computer from viruses, spyware, and for working with PDFs. The focus this week will be on audio/video...read more

This week I'm going to continue with my list of Open Source software alternatives to save you a few bucks. Last week I talked about some of the biggies, Open Office to replace Microsoft Office, GIMP and Paint.NET to replace Photoshop, and some great music tools.

Let's turn to desktop email/calendar clients.

•Thunderbird, http://www.mozillamessaging.com/thunderbird/, is an excellent...read more

A regular theme in my columns has been Open Source versus corporate-driven software. This week, I'm going to provide you with a list of excellent free software that can replace common software that people pay good money for. I'll still assume you're paying for the operating system (Windows or OSX), unless you're a die hard Linux fan, in which case this is old hat to you.

Let's...read more

During high school, I interned and volunteered at a planetarium and had my own 6 inch telescope. In college my major was Astrophysics, the result of a childhood dream of understanding the stars, the galaxies, and the universe. I have always been fascinated by space and it's wonderful to now have at my fingertips more information and better images than even the telescopes at UCLA displayed. Now...read more

A few years ago I read a book called "Paradox of Choice" by Barry Schwartz. The book delves into our modern life and explores how the staggering number of choices we have available to us can actually cause us to freeze up. Just think what happens in your mind while you're standing in front of the toothpaste aisle.

I think it's time for a revise on the book, this time dealing with...read more

As a kid, I was fascinated by science, going through dinosaurs, my Radio Shack 160-in-1 electronics kit, starter microscope kit, and then my first telescope. Man, was I missing out! Kids today have at their fingertips more knowledge than was known at any prior point in history. It's just up to their imagination and a little help from Mom and Dad to begin the exploration.

I started putting together...read more

I was sitting at a restaurant this past weekend, reading a book on my Kindle when my phone beeped to tell me that I'd just received an email at my Google account. Popping open my phone, I noticed that it had connected to the restaurants WiFi network for me, enabling faster browsing. I opened up the Gmail app and started to read the email. It was from a friend of mine who recommended a book that...read more

I'm a gadget guy; I love anything with bells and whistles, or more appropriately, circuits and buttons. I also like building things. So you can imagine my delight in discovering a company called RepRap. They've been around for awhile, and I've checked in every so often to see how they are progressing, and they've finally reached the point where I want one.

RepRap is a company that...read more

Since I spent the past few columns talking about world-altering technologies, I felt that this week, I'd just kick back and talk about a bunch of cool little things.

First up is something I haven't had a chance to personally check out yet, but will as soon as things slow down a bit. I'm talking about a cool new storefront that's opened in Boise. It's called the Gamers Cave. Located...read more

The computer is arguably the most important tool that has been developed in our history. Most of us interact with one on a daily basis and we are all faced with the same challenge of getting information in and out of these pesky devices. We've even had to coin new terms for the impact it's had on our health. From carpal tunnel and gamer thumb, to qwerty-itis (the impressions on your face when...read more

A team of UCLA scientists have found that Myelin (the fatty layer of insulation coating neural wiring in the brain) plays a critical role in determining intelligence. The amount of Myelin is largely genetically determined. And as you remember from one of my past columns, we're getting close to being able to genetically engineer humans to spec. Read the full article from Technology Review.

Recently...read more

I saw this the other day as I was Stumbling. Has to be one of the coolest gadgets ever! Tell me you don't want it!

...read more

H+ magazine, the first magazine devoted to the transhumanist crowd is out with a new edition. You can download it for free. And guess what's on page 3, a nice follow up to my last article. A company called Knome that provides personal, encrypted gene sequences, delivered to you on a memory stick. They even keep you updated with new anaylsis, letting you know what's happening on the forefront...read more

This week is part three in my future technology series and this week I'm going to talk a little bit about one of the scarier new technologies that is coming to maturity. That technology is 'GM' - genetic manipulation

The Human Genome Project was funded by Congress and launched in October 1990 and was completed on April 14, 2003. The goal was to completely sequence the human genome, and...read more

Last week I talked a bit about Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors per square inch was doubling every 24 months, and how the rate of doubling has itself been increasing. Today even that has become conservative. Two US groups have announced new breakthroughs in transistor design and memory storage in the past few weeks. Thomas Russell at the University of Massachusetts and...read more

I am, fairly obviously, a huge fan of technology. I thought that it would be nice to share with you my top list of technologies that are on the horizon. We live in a world of technology that is growing exponentially in complexity and power. Ray Kurzweil, a famed futurist and inventor has mapped the rate of change in computational power per dollar and noted that the rate of change itself is growing...read more

This week heralds the release of a great new game title, Fear 2. I had a chance to play just the first few areas and it looks amazing! Dead Space was billed as "creepy" but delivered rather weakly in that area; Fear 2, on the other hand, delivers in spades. If you played the first Fear, you'll remember Alma, the creepy little girl who has a habit of appearing out of nowhere. She's...read more

It's a little amazing that what was once a simple little college project has grown into a world-spanning service used by hundreds of millions of people. It's become the Kleenex of the search engine world, so ubiquitous in usage that it's now a part of our dictionaries and our common language. Of course we're talking about Google. More than any other search engine, it's captured...read more

Maybe just to we geeks, but still, this is really impressive.

IBM and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Labs have just signed a contract to build a the next generation of IBM's BlueGene supercomputer by 2012. This new "Sequoia" system will offer 20 petaflops of performance -- nearly 20 times faster than the current fastest supercomputer, the 1.105 petaflop/s...read more

It's 2009, and if you thought last years game line up was good, just wait till you see what's coming. Better limber up your thumb and trigger-finger, it's going to be a blast.

One of the long awaited sequels coming soon is Resident Evil 5. Set to release on March 13, this game promises awesome graphics and survival horror killing mayhem. The trailers so far look incredible and I'm...read more

In the past few weeks, I've talked about the differences between Macs and PCs, a bit about open source software, and a little on how to decide what you really need in a computer before buying one.

This week, I'm going a step further and want to talk about the future of the desktop.

For a very large percentage of home computer users, a correspondingly large percentage of their computer use...read more

Last week I talked a little bit about the history of the modern computer. This week I'm going to take you a bit farther and talk about what's coming.

The open-source community developed Linux to provide an alternative to Mac and Windows, though coincidentally the Mac OSX software is actually running on a Linux core. Firefox is a great example of open-source development reaching the mainstream...read more

This has become one of the defining questions in our culture. What was once the domain of the geek is now something even grandmas regularly use.

Mac and Windows have been battling for market dominance for over 30 years, ever since the Apple II was released in 1977, followed in a few years by the IBM PC in 1981. Surprised that Apple was first? Back in the dawn of the home computer age, there were...read more

A couple of weeks ago, I stood on my soap box and talked a bit about all the social networking hoopla that's taking the internet by storm. This week I decided to talk about it again, however, this time I'm going to talk about the positives.

I'm a Facebook-er and a bit of a twitter-er. I still haven't formed a habit of updating and posting daily snippets of my life, but I do use it...read more

Christmas has come once again, bringing joy to children of all ages; and bringing the needs for millions more batteries. I counted my nephews' battery requirements this year: 8 D-cell, 14 AAs, 7 AAAs. It really starts to get a bit expensive, especially considering that some of the toys will go through a set of batteries in a week.

The smart thing to do is invest a little more up front and pick...read more

A curious phenomenon is sweeping the world these days. It's called social networking and in my opinion it's getting a bit out of hand. Social networking includes the biggies you hear about on the news, like MySpace and Facebook, along with countless smaller, but growing sites that either target specific demographic groups, or just cater to a topic.

These days it seems more likely that a 20...read more

Really, I don't have a problem. The first stage is denial, right?

Online gaming: the thrill of competing against fellow man online, sword wielding orc against laser blaster carrying space marine. It's a relatively new phenomenon and the researchers are still debating whether or not it's a true addiction. Researchers at Charite University Medicin Berlin, in Germany, say that those who play games excessively...read more

World of Warcraft. If you play games, you've probably heard of it. Even if you don't you still may have heard of it. It is the most popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) in the world, boasting millions of subscribers. It was released at the end of 2004 and it's publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, has kept it fresh and polished for four years, with continual updates and expansions...read more

Last week I picked up Left 4 Dead from publisher Valve (makers of the Half-Life series). This game has delivered one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences so far this year.
Picture this; you and four of your closest friends are some of the only survivors after a virulent disease kills off most of the population. That would have been bad enough, but the infection also turns the dead into zombies...read more

This season has been a great one for games. Over a dozen grade A games have been released, and so close together that I've barely even gotten a chance to play them all yet. Besides long awaited games like Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, Dead Space and Far Cry 2, there was also a little gem known as Left 4 Dead from publisher Valve (makes of the Half-Life series). This game has delivered one of the most...read more

With the holidays rapidly approaching I thought I'd spend a few columns talking about all the cool things that fellow geeks could buy for themselves (or hint heavily about).
If you have suggestions, just add your two cents worth as a comment so others can see what kind of gadgets you'd like to get.
The first is an Amazon Kindle. I talked about this a few weeks ago, and so did Oprah, so it must be...read more

So my xbox is still in the shop, though it's only been a week so I'm not too annoyed with Microsoft yet. But my brother finally picked up Mercenaries 2 last night and called to see if I wanted to play some co-op destruction. Then he said, "Oops, forgot yours was in the shop"...

It was the drop that pushed the water over the dam. Twenty minutes later, I was back home, plugging in the new...read more

The dreaded red ring of death.

The moment that all 360 owners fear.

It happened over the weekend, just after a successful assault against an insurgent held base in Mercenaries 2. The last round left the tank, splattering the barracks, bodies flying... then... nothing.

Pretty much everyone I know with a 360 has had to face this tragic moment, some have had it happen multiple times. A tiny engineering...read more

Welcome to a new feature of the Idaho Press-Tribune. I'll be your guide as we explore new games, check out gadgets and in general explore all things geeky. I'd like to give you a little bit of background into who I am so you'll be able to get a sense of where we're going. I started playing games with an actual Atari Pong game machine (talk about a sweet console for its day!) and have played and programmed...read more