Greate OneNote like Free Notetaking Application - BasKet Note Pads

I've recently taken up using my laptop as the main source of notes, instead of paper based note systems. As a result, I searching around for a note taking application that would help me take notes quickly and efficiently and then easily review them (the biggest problem with hand written notes is that it's hard to find/read them when you need them) later on whenever I'd need to do so.

However, instead of using 'professional' (and expensive!) software like OneNote from Microsoft, I decided to find an open source alternative that would do just the same. So I wouldn't have to worry about "bad karma" as they say. Although there were several alternatives out there for the Mac and also for Windows, the best alternative in my opinion so far has actually been an application for Linux!


It's called BasKet Note Pads (an application originally developed for the KDE environment, but works fine on Gnome too... so it should work on almost any Linux Distro out there) and it's almost like Microsoft OneNote... but better! Why? Because, it's free... and it's open source too (so that means that it will at least get an update once in a while hopefully..). So far, I've found it to be the best note taking application out there.

In BasKet Note Pads not only can you emulate the beloved one note feature of being able to click anywhere and type in a OneNote document, but you can also assign special categories to each note that you type. For example, you can give the note the tag of a Todo, and once you do this an empty checkbox will appear beside the note. Then once you are done the Todo item, just check the checkbox and BasKet will automatically place a line (strikethrough) through the text indication that the job was done.

I find that this is a great app where you can just "write down" all your ideas really quickly and then come back later and arrange them into logical categories to create a computer "mindmap" of sorts. Plus, its great to be able to take notes at a lecture in little bits and pieces and then add them together in their own little notepages to get a whole overview of the lecture topics.

There's other categories as well... like the 'progress meter'. So you can click on the progress meter once you've reached another stage in the assignment... making sure that you're on track with each project. Plus, you can create a main note for a project (with its tag as a project meter) and then drag and drop additional to-do "notes" in the project. BasKet will automatically group the notes as one whole note so you can easily minimize and maximize a project depending on what you want to look at.

If that's not enough, it also has the ability to have funky backgrounds and the ability to grab screenshots (great for doing online research... where you can grab screenshots of products you like from their website and put them in one document and then compare them side by side) and place them right into the document. The only thing it pretty much cannot do right now is take audio notes and link them to the typed notes. However, I feel that it's only going to be a matter of time before they add that feature too.

BasKet note pads is a great free way to add a little organization to your life and a great way to take notes if you are a college/high school students. Although you'll need Linux to run it, I recommend you get linux and give this little app a try. Once you figure out how to do things, I'm sure you'll find it a formidable replacement for OneNote.

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Protecting your computer on a public network

Do you own a laptop? Have you ever used your laptop at a public wi-fi (wireless internet) location to use the free (or paid) wireless internet services? Often, places like Libraries (or at least some libraries here in Toronto), Starbucks, Coffee Shops and even some restaurants offer a wireless internet service which anyone can use if they bring along their laptop or mobile computing devices.

Why should you care about protecting your computer while using pubilc wi-fi netoworks?

Although this is pretty cool, one thing that you must be aware of is that using these networks might not always be the most secure thing to do. Using public internet might mean that you are opening up your computer for lots of snoopers and malignant people to take advantage of your computer. In fact, after a recent visit to the library I noticed that many people (unknowingly I presume) were actually sharing the files on their computer with everybody else in the network. As a result, anyone else on the network was also able to freely access these shared files and folders. What’s more? Some people even stored files (fortunately, being the good citizen that I am, I did not open these files or do anything malicious with them!) in these folders!

What does all this mean?

It means that if you use your computer on a public network, you have to be extra secure.Theoretically, someone could delete files, edit files and even transfer malicious files to the computer to execute code (plus, if you never visited any website or downloaded anything… and you get a Windows UAC prompt, you’re likely to just click Confirm and allow the malicious application that some transferred to your computer to happily go on performing its evil tasks!)! If this doesn’t sound more scary than Conficker, I don’t know what will.

How can you protect yourself?

Protecting your computer while using public networks should be the first thing you do, even before you start using the network. In this post, I’m going to assume that most of you will be using Windows Vista. The settings for Windows XP (you might want to make a google search if you are unsure… most things that I mention here for Vista also apply for XP, but configuring them for XP might be a little different) are similar, but since most laptops now come with Vista, I’ll only cover the Windows Vista and Mac OS X in this article.

The first thing that you should do is turn off all File Sharing.

To do so on Windows Vista:

1. Double click on the “Internet Icon” in the system tray in your taskbar. In the picture below, it’s the icon between the “Battery Icon” and the “Volume Adjustment/Speaker Icon”. Doing so should take you to the “Network and Sharing Center”. If there’s no “Internet Icon” then, you’ll have to open your start menu (or click on the “Windows Orb” and type in “Network and Sharing Center”.
2. In the '”Network and Sharing Center”, under Sharing and Discovery click on arrow beside any topic that has a “Green” light (meaning that the sharing for that area is turned on.. and anybody on the network will be able to see whatever you are sharing). Then, simply select ‘Turn Off’ and click ‘Apply’.
3. Then accept the Windows UAC prompt.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for any other feature for which file sharing might be turned on.

Doing so will make sure that no files/folders, be it the Public folder on your computer or any other folder, is shared on the network.

On a Mac, the process is similar. Click the Apple Button on top left hand corner, choose ‘System Preference’ and go to ‘Sharing’. There, uncheck all checkboxes to make sure that your computer isn’t sharing anything.

Step 2: Use a firewall to prevent any direct connections from other computers

Often, although you might disable any sharing of files, other computers might still be able to connect to your computer through any other ports (think of them like ‘doors’) that might be open. So naturally, the best and easiest way to protect yourself, although not the most ‘sure fire’ way, is to turn on a firewall that will try and block most of the attempts to access your computer. If you don’t yet have a firewall, you might want to consider getting a free firewall if your computer is not running too slow (although if it is running a bit on the slower side, you might want to check out this article to speed up your windows computer).

At the very least, turn on Windows Firewall, which will prevent incoming connections (or others) from accessing your computer.

Step 3: Use an anti-virus program and keep your computer updated

Well, there isn’t much you can do after you’ve secured all the entry ways into your computer, so the only other ways to make sure that nothing else malicious is already on your computer and there are no ‘security’ holes in your computer are to run Anti-Virus software and keep your computer updated.

As for the Virus software, you don’t always have to turn on heuristics for it to keep on searching your computer all the time and making it really slow. Like I mention in my article to make your computer a bit faster, just turn on it’s basic settings and let it perform a scan once in a while when you are not using your computer. However, if you do across a suspicious (and when I mean suspicious I mean really suspicious…. like a birthday greeting card from your friend) just manually scan it.

Also, don’t forget to let Windows install the Microsoft updates when it bugs you do.. you don’t always have to do it right when it starts bugging you to.. but it’s a good idea to do it when you have the time.

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Best Free Downloadable Firewalls for Windows Computers

With the advent of the internet, it’s really easy for anyone to connect to the internet and access other computers (i.e. servers) across the globe. However, this also means that other computers across the globe can actually access YOUR computer in a similar fashion. By doing so these evil, evil men can actually take control of your computer, insert malicious files that will track your password/credit card number and/or use your computer to do something evil.

How do you protect yourself from other malicious programs or people from accessing your computer? With a Firewall of course! But like most things in the computer software world, Firewalls often come at a price. Although this price might be minimal (around $20 – 30 on average, some times you might have to renew it every year), considering the safety it provides, it might still be worth it to get a free firewall that will be able to do almost the same thing.

Here are a few things that you might want to try out. Keep in mind though that sometimes having a firewall might actually be more annoying, since it will often ask you whether or now you’d like to connect to a server or website. However, in the long run it might save you the trouble of reinstalling your computer or calling up your credit card company to report a fraud. Also, it might slow down the speed of your computer as it constantly monitors your incoming/outgoing connections from every application that connects to the Internet. But given the speed of average computers the speed should be “negligible” or at the most unnoticeable.

Additionally, you might at least want to turn on your Windows Firewall (although this will only prevent incoming connections and not prevent any outgoing connections) if you don’t plan to use a third-party firewall. If you do use a third party firewall, you should disable Windows Firewall.

Some free firewalls, in order of preference

Comodo Firewall – Comodo make a lot of great products that I like, and their firewall is one of them. For the most part it is unobtrusive, but does a good job of notifying you of any incoming/outgoing connections that it thinks are ‘suspicious’. Plus, it has an easy to use interface that doesn’t look like anything from “the Matrix”. If you’re looking for a simple free firewall that does it job quite well, Comodo should probably be your first or second choice. Also, do note that when you download the firewall, it actually might download their firewall AND their antivirus suite. So you you already have an antivirus suite, and you’re okay with it, you should only install their firewall.

Free Zone Alarm – The free version of the Zone Alarm Firewall is not as powerful (or so they say) as it’s paid big brother, but I still thing that it does a fairly ok job of making sure that no internet packet goes unnoticed. It also has a pretty simple interface to use, so if you aren’t an experienced Firewall user, you might prefer to have something like this.

Sunbelt Kerio Firewall  – If you’re using Windows XP (but it also works for Vista now apparently, although I haven’t tested it out) then this firewall is still one of the best ones out there. It does the job of every other firewall out there, and also provides some of its premium features (like ad-blocking) for a period of 30 days. If you don’t want to buy it (you probably don’t need to… unless you’d like to support their software), then after 30 days, it’ll just function in the normal firewall mode.

Tall Emu Firewall – Again, this is a fairly good free product, but doesn’t have all the pro features such as ‘Keylogger detection’ and so on. But obviously, you don’t need these features if you have a little common sense (i.e. if you are getting an incoming connection from some random computer on the internet, you probably shouldn’t allow it to access your system files).

Of course, there are several other Free Firewalls out there, but I’ve never used or heard of any other good ones. So, if you feel like you know about something else that might be worth while… do share!

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xMod - Change hidden Mac OSX settings for Leopard!

I've always wondered if there was some application like the ones for windows where you could tweak additional system settings to make the mac perform better or customize it. Turns out, there's a great little application that can do a lot more than that.
It's called xMod, and it's a small, free utility that can do a lot of things. You can find a whole list of stuff it does on their website, but here's a list of things I find interesting:

• It can repair permissions to make sure everything is fine on the OS X file system. (Yes, I know, disk utility can do this too.. but xMod can do so much more!)
• It can check the SMART status of your Disks, and tell you if your hard drive is about to fail (hah. and you thought computers couldn't have fortune tellers)
• It can verify preference files (these are the settings and so on for the applications on your Mac) and find out if there are any errors in them
• It can tweak finder and it's appearance. It can also tweak screen capture settings and menubar styles. Plus, it can also make your screensaver as your desktop wallpaper! (Sort of like Windows DreamScene, but it takes up too many resources on your computer and will slow you down, so I'd recommend that you only have your screensaver as your desktop wallpaper when you aren't doing any actual "work" on your mac)
• It can change the appearance of your OS X dock to make it a 3d dock or a 2d dock
• It can disable dashboard
• It can Enable 'Sticky' mode for Dashboard widgets (so you can drag them on to your desktop if you wish)
• It can:
  
• Enable/Disable Spaces
• Add dock spacers
• Remove Dead tracks from iTunes
• Change a whole load of Disk utility/Address Book/Expose/ Terminal/Safari Options!

Plus, you can change all the things listed above with just clicking on the 'Apply button!'. Undeniably, xMod is a great little application that's powerful and easy to use at the same time!

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Hack to Make FireFox Much Faster!

I've written about how you can make Firefox start up much faster, but in this post, I'll write about how you can get Firefox to load web pages much faster (or at least it'll feel like its loading much faster) using a couple of techniques. One of them is a plugin and the other is a hack.

First, the plugin.

Get FasterFox add-on to make Firefox much faster

FasterFox (registration required to install experimental plugin) is a little plugin that has the ability to do a lot. In essence, what it does is allows Firefox to download data much faster from websites and loads web pages before you click on the link. So naturally, when you click on the link, the web page will load instantly because Firefox would have already downloaded it onto the computer. Of course, this uses up more internet bandwidth, and the speed you'll gain form a website will differ depending on a lot of factors.

But nevertheless, if you have a fairly fast internet connection, then you might want to give it a try. If FasterFox causes a page to load slower then you can simply uninstall the add-on and continue.

If you don't feel like installing an add-on, then you can peruse the hacks I've listed below:

Firefox Hacks to make Firefox faster

The following are some age-old, time tested hacks that will improve the page loading speed for websites by a couple of milliseconds (or nanoseconds) and thereby improve the overall browsing experience in Firefox.

1. First, type in "about:config" into the address bar and hit enter. If you get a message saying it'll void your warranty (heh.. funny Firefox Developers!), click on 'I'll be careful, I promise" button!

In the place where it says 'Filter': type in the entries listed below, and double click on them to change them.

So if it says set "network.http.pipelining" to "true", simply type in "network.http.pipelining" in the "Filter" box and double click on the value to make to to change to true.

For values containing a number, a pop-up will come up asking you to enter a number when you double click on the entry.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Right-click anywhere and select New > Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and click ok, then set its value to "0".

4. "network.http.max-connections" should be changed to 50

5. "network.http.max-connections-per-server" should be changed to 15

6. "network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server" should be changed to 15

7. Finally, change "network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy" to 15

Then once you are done implementing the tweaks above, simply visit any website of your choice, and you'll instantly notice that the webpage loads a couple of milliseconds faster. If you are unsatisfied with the changes, simply go back to the "about:config" window, and right click on the entries you just edited and choose "reset".

Here are my results:

Firefox with FasterFox Only:
Load Time For Beyond Teck (without any previously cached information): 10.979s

Firefox with FasterFox + Hacks:
Load Time for Beyond Teck (without any previously cached information): 8.762s

Now I realize that this blog's homepage isn't the fastest page in the world to load, but 2.215s is a lot of gain when you think about it... if you browse to 1000 web pages a day.. you'll be saving a lot of milliseconds!
Post your results in the comments below!

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Great free PowerPoint/OpenOffice/Symphony Templates

If you tend to give a lot of presentations, or even if you only give presentations occasionally, then you know how hard it can be to find a good background for your slideshow. Most people I see often use vague combinations of colours and text that makes it harder to read the slides… if you’re one of them (ask your friends, they’ll know) then the following site will help you too.

The resource I’m talking about here is the IBM Symphony Gallery Page, where you can download all sorts of presentation templates and background for your OpenOffice and IBM Symphony (Symphony is also something like PowerPoint… but free like OpenOffice’s Impress software). As a result, you can probably use them in PowerPoint too (although you’ll have to open it in Open Office first and save it as a .ppt file to open it up in PowerPoint).

I find that these templates are fairly professional and can be used for a variety of presentations, whether it’s a presentation at school or at the workplace. Here are some examples:

  

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to the IBM Lotus Symphony Gallery and find that perfect template!

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Stop MSN messenger from starting up with your computer

Is it just me or does anyone else also find MSN (or now called Windows Live Messenger or WLM) messenger popping up all the time right after you start up your computer annoying? I mean, I didn't even tell that thing to start up right after I start my computer... it's like it has a mind of its own.

Any way, I realize that there might be a few out there who might need some help to stop MSN from starting up automatically every time you log into your PC. Here's how you can do that...

First, sign into MSN messenger. And then Press the "Alt" key on your keyboard to open up the menubar. Alternatively you can also click on the show menu button, as shown below.

Then, simply click on Tools > Options > "Sign-in" (on the left hand side of the window that pops up.).

Once you do that, uncheck the boxes beside:

• "Automatically run Windows Live Messenger when I log on to Windows"
• "Open Windows Live Messenger main window when Windows Live Messenger starts"

Optionally, you can also uncheck:

• "Allow automatic sign in when connected to the Internet"

Once you are done, just click ok!

Now, no more annoying Windows Live Messenger when you're trying to do some work!

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