On the cheap: software

We love open-source software. It’s usually small, fast, and does one or two things wickedly well.

As we mentioned yesterday, Firefox 1.5 launched yesterday. Aside from a few extensions not working properly (grrr), it seems to work pretty well. Our current biggest upset is that the Calendar extension no longer works. We use Calendar to keep track of some serious stuff, so that’s a bad thing there. Lifehacker (whom we love) has a workaround for some externsion blargaring.

We were particularly excited about installing the update, as we had installed a Beta version on our machine, which created a huge Status Area at the bottom of the browser. Uninstalling the Beta did nothing to erase it. But thankfully, as we suspected it would, the release version wiped it up.

But more than browsers, we love to actually do stuff. And for that, we look to the Open CD, which has recently launched version 3.1. We have also recently found that Wikipedia has a nice directory of open-source software. The one software that we are most looking forward to is Jahshaka, a video and movie-making software.

On a parallel topic, we love things that make us more productive. This is why we began this who blogging thing. Okay, one of the reasons. The blog groupies are amazing. We recently heard Paul Ford — author of Gary Benchley, Rockstar, and frequent contributor to our favorite morning news site, The Morning News — on NPR talking about disctractions and computing. He had some compelling suggestions, but we don’t think we will be installing WordPerfect for DOS any time soon (sorry).

But he mentioned a keyboard that “stores your text”, but doesn’t do anything else. We were intrigued. Imagine, no (computer) distractions as you type! Lo and behold, here is the AlphaSmart Neo. It seems like it’s all the use of a portable word processing program–check out that fancy but low-fi software!–, but with none of the laptop overhead to go with it. (It dumps into a computer via USB come time to print.)

We are thinking of buying the rechargeable version, which has an AC cord. 269 bucks is a lot, but we are also thinking that future generations of Free Tacos (Free Taquitos?) will get much use out of it. Especially when daddy won’t let them chat or surf after hours.