I found a great free software that is able to manage all of my media collections with ease. One of the greatest feature of Data Crow is that it is not only a software for managing DVDs, CDs or books but provides a way to manage all of them. To be precise it is able to manage Software, Movies, Music Albums, Audio CD’s, Books and Images.

Data Crow was written in Java which means that you need a Java Runtime Environment installed on your computer to be able to install and run the software. When you have done that you can start adding your collection to the program by either adding items manually or importing items from online databases such as Amazon, Imdb, Freedb and Musicbrainz.

If the item is found covers, tracks, and other information are imported directly to the database. One nice feature is that you can search for an artist for instance and import all of the CDs found at once.

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First Dell PCs with AMD chips and now Dell PCs with Linux preinstalled. It seems that Dell finally managed to see that giving its customers a choice is the way to go in this matter. Linux has some advantages over PCs that ship with Windows Vista or Microsoft Windows XP. The first and most prominent one is of course the price tag. Dell can reduce the costs that customers have to pay for a PC even further and advertise this properly.According to DesktopLinux.com Dell will offer Ubuntu Linux on a Dell e-series “Essential” Dimension desktop, an XPS desktop, and an e-series Inspiron laptop.

There has not been an official announcement so far on the Ubuntu or Dell homepage but this is surely going to follow in the upcoming days. This is a great step in the right direction for the Linux community to bring Linux more in the focus of the mainstream media.

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I prefer to use a mouse and a “real” keyboard over working with the touchpad and the keyboard of my Toshiba notebook. I do like slim keyboards but I’m not that used to keyboards from notebooks and have troubles typing as fast as with the keyboard on my desktop pc. I obviously have to use the keyboard and an external mouse when I’m travelling around with my Toshiba notebook but I thought that it would be nice if I could use the keyboard and mouse from my desktop pc for my notebook as well when I’m at home.

The open source software Synergy makes this possible. Once installed you can use the keyboard and mouse that are connected to your desktop pc on your notebook as well. This is done by installing the Synergy software on all computers that you want to work with that way. Synergy is available for Windows, Linux and Mac which means that it is also possible to use this feature for computers with different operating systems.

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The VideoLan team has upped a first test version of VLC Media Player 0.86b which happens to be my favorite media player. The new version fixes some crashes, adds VP31 decoding to Windows platforms and Direct3D Video Output modifications for Vista compatibility. You can download this version right from the VideoLan ftp site; Simply select the version for your operating system (Win,Mac,Linux) and install it. I had no problems using the new version. If you experience crashes you might want to try this new version out.

VLC Media Player is one of the few players that is able to play most file types out of the box without the need for additional codecs or plugins. It does not use a lot of processing power or ram even when playing large video files. A 700 megabyte testfile used about 32 megabytes of ram and most of the time 0-2 processing power. Media Player Classic used less ram on the files (24.6) but between 18-28 processing power. So, if you are looking for a new media player to switch to give VLC a try, it is worth it.

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The open source alternative for Microsoft Office Open Office has been released today. In version 2.2, users will immediately notice the improvement in the quality of text display in all parts of OpenOffice.org. The reason for this is that the previously optional support for kerning, a technique to improve the appearance of text written in proportional fonts, has now been enabled by default. OpenOffice.org’s unique pdf export function has also been enhanced with the addition of the optional creation of bookmarks feature, and support for user-definable export of form fields.

Turning to some of the enhancements made to the individual components of OpenOffice.org, the Calc spreadsheet has received additional enhancements to its support for Microsoft file formats, including improved support for Pivot Tables and some specialised trigonometric functions. Base, the database component, has improved SQL editing functionality as well as a new “Queries within Queries” feature. Compatibility options for some database drivers, such as Oracle ODBC, have been improved. Impress, the presentations component, offers improvements in the handling of hidden slides which has been made more intuitive.

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