Drop your bags, grab a drink, and grab the XP CD—it’s nearly time for the holiday ritual of fixing up your relatives’ computer. Here are some tips and downloads to keep handy while you’re cursing all the auto-starting crapware.
Windows/Mac/Linux: Nobody told Mozilla’s developers it’s a day off. They’ve just pushed out a fourth beta of Firefox 3.6, with more than 100 fixes from the last beta and more add-on security and compatibility.
Across the Pacific, our US bretheren are stuffing themselves with turkey. We don’t do Thanksgiving down under, but we can still be thankful for the huge bounty of free software we can enjoy every day of the year.
Ikea’s $19.99 Lack coffee table is an iconic site in budget-minded households everywhere. If your Lack is starting to look a bit worn for the lounge room (like the two in my garage), it converts with surprising ease into a drafting table.
Optus subsidiary Boost Mobile is offering 5-cent texts to any network as part of a prepaid plan. That offer might be appealing to teenagers, but does it really make financial sense?
Reams of information shooting at us via searches, social networks and email often make it hard to tell whether information is accurate. Expat Aussie writer and intellectual Clive James offers a thought-provoking summary on BBC News on why scepticism remains a useful value on nearly every occasion.
The National Broadband Network is progressing slowly, but individual ISPs are still working to get higher-speed connections to our homes. Earlier this year, Internode started offering a 25MBps connection on selected new housing estates, and now iiNet has a similar deal going.
If the details of Ubuntu 9.10 have you salivating to give it a whirl but you don’t fancy chewing up your download limit, don’t forget that Ubuntu does offer an option to get a CD shipped for free.
It took over a month (!), but Mozilla Add-ons has finally approved a long-delayed update to the Better Flickr Firefox extension. You can see more about what changed here; my favourite addition to this version is the Flic.kr Short URL script, which displays a short, Twitter-friendly URL on all Flickr photos for easy tweeting. (Forget Twitpic and those other photo-sharing services; Flickr is still where it’s at.) Download version 0.4.1 of Better Flickr at Mozilla Add-ons.
Quicksilver is easily one of our favourite tools ever, but since its future isn’t all that bright, die-hard users cross our fingers every time OS X updates. In Snow Leopard, Quicksilver stopped working for many users; here’s how to fix it.
