Touch Board: Interactivity Everywhere

Passionate people produce powerful products.

An open source friendly company named Bare Conductive has created a masterpiece. These open source computer geeks truly love innovation. They have created the Touch Board!

The Touch Board makes everything interactive! It uses an Arduino base for it’s main structure and uses their revolutionary Electric Paint to connect to their Touch Board. It’s one of those “epic things that you want to have all over your house” kind of technology.

I find it amazing and worth checking out! Here’s their KickStarter video!

I see the future implementing this idea in our homes — and I can’t wait to have one!

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Cheat Sheet for Geeks

There are so many things a computer geek needs to know.

We need to know everything from hardware to software to freeware to groupware — and trust me, that’s not an easy task.

One of the things that can actually make a computer geek feel dumbfounded are those computer ports at the back of a desktop PC. At some point, I’ve always messed up at least twice or three times and confused one port to the other. So, I searched far and wide to find this!

Not only does this include ports, but it also showcases different types of RAM, CPU sockets, peripheral cards, power connectors, desktop card slots, hard drive types and processor card sockets and slots. It’s a great resource to carry around.

I, myself, have one on my phone in case I need it — and I think computer geeks need to know, or at least familiarize themselves, to these components.

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Tools of the Geek

School slowly crawled in back into our schedules and we all know that it won’t take long before crazy projects, heavy homework and large paper pileups will occur (trust me, I’ve been doing this for quite some time now). I am here to present to you Tools of the Geek.

For all you geeks and nerds out there, you should know what this is all about.

But for those who need the help, here are a few tools that could definitely help you in school.

OpenOffice is Better Than MS Office

The open source world has largely increased. Through software, and potentially hardware (think of OUYA), it is slowly growing up from the young, child of the day, to the powerhouse that most of us, including me, love today.

Although I have little experience with open source, ever since I’ve used it (about 2 years ago), I fell in love with it. Sure, I wasn’t a programmer back then, but the fact that I can tamper, hack and play around with the source code, I knew two things: it will be heavily supported and it will probably have little to no bugs (I could be wrong though).

Let’s talk capabilities…

MS Office – What does it offer?

Currently, there are many distributions of MS Office. There’s MS Office 365, which gives the consumer a full year of subscription to use the whole office suite – MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel, MS OneNote, MS Publisher, MS Access and MS Outlook. It also offers full access to MS SkyDrive, Microsoft’s attempt at online storage that is accessible anywhere. This SkyDrive has 20 GB of storage. All of this, for $99 every year.

Then there is their typical packages. All of these are at full, meaning you will not need to pay a fee every year. The Home and Student package (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) for your everyday use at only $139. There’s also the Home and Business (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) at $249. Finally, there’s Office Professional (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Access) at $519.

Of course, if there are updates with the software, Microsoft will provide it for you. MS Office is pretty stable and if bugs are present, they are rarely found by the consumer.

OpenOffice (Apache) – What does it offer?

OpenOffice offers a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation maker, fully capable drawing software (think about Publisher), a database management software and formula software. Although it may not offer SkyDrive or an email program, there are always alternatives. What’s the price, you ask? Well, because it is an open source program, the price is approximately $0. Not too much, but I think it’s worth it.

Conclusion

I think we should all have the freedom of using office suite programs. They help with productivity and it just works. Simple as that. One thing that I like from Microsoft, is MS PowerPoint. It’s probably because I’ve used it for such a long time, that I think there would be no alternative better than it. If you do have time to learn all of the software (I only use Writer, Spreadsheet and Drawer), then use all of them. They will always have some kind of upper hand compared to MS Office.

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Why I Didn’t Install Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution. It’s the most user friendly and a very heavily supported open source operating system. It’s what Linux newbies (like myself) install.

I definitely liked it when I worked with it in school, but the OS is terrible for laptops. Here’s why:

1. It’s a battery hog. It’ll eat all of the battery power it can take. Jupiter, the famous power management application, is no longer supported and so it was taken off the Ubuntu market.
2. It overheats my laptop. Like I said, Jupiter is no longer supported, so that’s never going to get fixed.
3. For some reason, my settings don’t stay the same. Each time I reboot my laptop, everything is there: my account, background and customization, but my power settings, brightness settings and other things such as my Unity Tweak settings do not stay the same.
4. It looks a lot like the Mac OS X user interface. I just don’t like it. Period.

I am hoping for some more apps similar to Jupiter that can help my battery life. Get this: when I had Ubuntu on my laptop, it only ran approximately one (1) hour on a 96% battery percentage. Usually, on my Windows 7, I’d be using my laptop for at least five to six hours.

At some point, when Hannah Patricia doesn’t perform her abilities (I’d say that would be five years from now), I’ll be getting a System 76 or something like Lenovo or ASUS.

If you have any suggestions for a battery friendly distro, comment below!

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The Personal Computer

The personal computer is one of the greatest, most prominent advancements in human history. Great inventions such as the car, airplanes and cup holders are no match to your everyday PC. Almost everyone in the entire North American grid owns a computing device, whether it be a home computer, laptop, smartphone, tablet – the list goes on. It is also the fastest growing technology. Almost everyday, there is something new for the PC. It could be hardware or software – most of which help enhance the use of the PC.

One question that has never been considered answered is why is it a Personal Computer called a Personal Computer?

Personally speaking (pun intended), I think it is because of how we use it. Almost everything we do is on a computer. We talk to people using the video chatting application called Skype, which continues to grow as a service for people who would like to communicate with friends and family all over the world. Social networking has exploded, with the popular use of Facebook and Twitter. Writing became easy to share with the blogging sites like Blogger, WordPress and Weebly. Video sharing has also popularized with YouTube and the new website called Vine. The Internet truly became a community and a hub for people all over the world.

The computer is personal because of our daily needs. Because of the PC and its strengths (back then), we are able to create documents for work (Word), presentations to show off ideas (PowerPoint), spreadsheets to keep important data, numbers and information (Excel) and publish flyers or brochures to further increase sales for your small business (Publisher).

Everyone seems to love video editing. Photo editing too! I’m sure you know someone who would love to make some funny videos, action scenes, edited CGI or animations as a hobby. Or even someone who wants to touch up pictures for a certain online dating site. For video, Windows usually comes with their infamous Windows Movie Maker, which allows PC users to edit videos. The only problem with this was its limitations. It was only a drag and drop program with minimum options for editing. For someone to professionally edit videos, they have to purchase software or find freeware/open source software that can handle all the rendering, file management and high quality videos. Photo editing was a big deal for Microsoft. Instead, Adobe took the stage and created Adobe Photoshop. It is widely used for editing photos. Animations also became popular in the Internet. Blender usually takes the cake for animations. It’s a great freeware!

Music has always played an important role in human history. It defined eras and even created its own history. In the computer, users can create, listen and play music without hassle. It allowed many hidden musicians (excluding Justin Bieber) to shine. With music tools and applications, making and recording music is as easy as pressing a button, literally!

The gaming industry has recently exploded. The gaming community is ten times stronger than ever! PC gamers are proud. They either take pride of their prized possession – their own, personally built PC, or are happy to play some League of Legends with some actual players! No, seriously, the gamer can be a console gamer or a PC gamer. I’d say, in my opinion (although I am a console guy), PC gamers are cooler. Tons of games are free to play, there is more hardware power on a PC right now compared to the upcoming next gen consoles and the PC gaming community is growing in numbers! The PC is truly the core of gaming.

And then, there was development. The computing world would not consistently progress without programmers, software developers and code writers. These are the wizards of the world. They are the ones who should be considered the rock stars of this generation. Without them, the computer would be a throwaway. It is those who know how to write C++, C, C#, Java, JavaScript, HTML, etc that revolutionized our daily lives. As an aspiring programmer (game developer and future CEO of Blizzard or Google), I believe that credit should be given where it is due.

Now, it seems that we still have not answered the question correctly, why is it a Personal Computer called a Personal Computer?

The answer is: it is because we make it personal.

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Guide to Linux

So, I haven’t had much insight towards this topic: Linux.

Linux, being an awesome, open source and free operating system is growing fast! There are new users each day, no matter which distribution. Truly, it is a remarkable piece of software.

I found this site, talking about what Linux is and everything in between. It’s called Newbie’s Guide to Linux.

NEWBIE’S GUIDE TO LINUX

What’s my take on Linux? Not much, really. I haven’t got the chance to fully use, although I’ve learned how to install it and used it for a few days in class. It’s a great operating system and worth downloading and installing. Honestly, I don’t have enough experience with it to give it any verdict. I did enjoy using it even though it was only for a while.

I actually laughed a little after reading Microsoft’s comment on Linux.

Sorry if I haven’t had any activity for the past few days. I missed the Chewy of the Week from last week, so I’ll be posting three Chewies this week.

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System 76

System 76: Ubuntu PCs!

Every Thursday on Tech Gum, I post some of the coolest links that I’ve seen on the internet called Chewy of the Week.

This week’s Chewy is System 76. Recently, I wrote about how I want to have Ubuntu on my PC, but due to hardware limitations, I cannot (for now). I thought of searching up PCs that offer Ubuntu built in. System 76 was one of the first results. I took a look at it and it is awesome! You can go to their site and order a laptop, desktop or a server. It’s worth a look and I think it speaks for itself. It offers amazing processing from Intel, customizable RAM (you customize it when you order the system itself) and overall a great build. I plan to buy a System 76 in the future when Hannah Patricia stops working (I expect this to happen with 6-7 years). I hope you enjoyed this week’s Chewy. Come back next week for another one. Don’t forget to follow my blog!

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