February 5, 2009 - Reading time: 6 minutes

**–Edit: Your personal Mileage may vary. My experience was great on an XP Pro Netbook, XP Home Compaq Laptop, and Server2008 Workstation. Please read the comments of our community after this post before deciding if you are adventurous. –**

Hardware driver management is not a pleasant task. It’s painful enough finding the drivers for a system when first setting it up, especially if you have old hardware or hardware of mysterious origins. Once this initial trial is over, it’s rare to think about updating your drivers (especially if they aren’t malfunctioning). This, however is no excuse not to.

If you hit up any 3rd party driver download site, you will see countless ads for programs that claim to handle all of this for you, half the adds are spyware (SCAN YOUR SYSTEM NOW!!1) and the other half are very expensive and often times subscription based (Great solutions for multi-seat licenses in which you have to maintain entire networks of computers for a company, etc.). Read more

February 5, 2009 - Reading time: 9 minutes

UPDATE: Rising Antivirus is dead now, unfortunately.

Welcome to the eleventh installment in our series on free antivirus programs. Be sure to also see the Main Overview, which contains links to all the separate reviews.

Up for review today is Rising Antivirus 2009 (version 21.24.20).

Rising Antivirus is a relatively new competitor in the free-antivirus arena. Based in Beijing, Rising does not yet have the big reputation in the West that other security programs enjoy, but that doesn’t mean it sucks. Google thinks highly enough of Rising Antivirus to bundle it with Google Pack China, so let’s see how it compares.

Installation

At just over a whopping 60 MB, Rising Antivirus 2009 is one of the heftiest downloads in this series, topping even the latest version of AVG by a few megs. Fortunately, no registration, serial number, or activation is required. Just download and install. Some other free antivirus products could learn from this model.

During installation, you can select components to keep or remove. We applaud the inclusion of an automatic USB Flash Disk scanner. Make sure that box is checked. Read more

January 29, 2009 - Reading time: 2 minutes

For those of you just getting started with Ubuntu Linux (and for you seasoned veterans as well), don’t miss this opportunity to get your hands on a FREE pocket guide (PDF).

Download – Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference

Written by Keir Thomas (author of the venerable Ubuntu Kung Fu), the 170-page Ubuntu Pocket Guide is aimed particularly at Windows users curious about the Ubuntu operating system. It covers everything from installation and configuration to security and command-line tricks.

Here’s the Table of Contents:

1. Installing Ubuntu
2. Configuring Ubuntu
3. Getting to grips with the desktop
4. Users and the filesystem
5. Hands-on at the command-line
6. Software management
7. Securing the system

• Appendix A: Glossary of terms
• Appendix B: Learning more and getting help

Don’t feel like reading 170 pages on a computer screen? I don’t blame you. A print edition is available (Amazon link).

This is definitely a handy resource to keep near your desk, whether you’re installing Ubuntu for the first time or just need a refresher on some CLI magic.

Have fun.

January 27, 2009 - Reading time: 3 minutes

Here’s a video of me installing the MODx content management system. In case it wasn’t clear why I was doing this series, I REALLY like MODx and I find it the easiest CMS to work with both as a PHP developer and as a front-end designer. The video is my small contribution to make it easier to install this nifty CMS, and sometimes less is more. There are already a lot of high quality resources available for anyone who wants to try out this CMS. See the references below.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1679175&dest=-1] - Sorry, blip.tv is now dead. :-(

References

There are already a lot of resources available to help people install MODx. Here is a list of what I feel are the most useful: Read more

January 26, 2009 - Reading time: 5 minutes

UPDATE: this project is now dead, sadly.

The free remote file storage service – Who.hasfiles.com – has recently updated to include web sharing and hosting capabilities. We’ve written about Who.hasfiles.com before.

Essentially, Who.hasfiles offers 100 MB of free online storage. No, that’s not a whopping amount of space by any means, but what sets them apart is the manner in which you access it. Who.hasfiles allows for remote drive mapping from your operating system, all without installing anything. Your 100 MB of storage simply shows up as another disk or as a remote folder.

They have instructions for mapping the drive in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Read more

January 22, 2009 - Reading time: 7 minutes

A while back I did a brief overview of the MODx content management system. Well, I was asked to do a high-resolution video so you can see what the manager interface looks like and you can get an idea of why you might want to choose the MODx content management system for your next web site.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1694923&dest=-1] - blip.tv is dead, sadly :-(

Overview

Publish/unpublish a document by right-clicking the document:

You can set publish/unpublish dates by changing the Page Settings: Read more