It is extremely important for some businesses and individuals to have the latest weather information at hand. These weather information can be retrieved numerous way, for example by listening to Radio, watching TV or calling a weather hotline. Something that was missing in the picture was a reliable live weather forecast for computers. Most PC applications would display a weather forecast and other information on a daily basis which might be not enough for some businesses.

Weather Watcher Live tries to fill that gap by providing updated weather information throughout the day.The update interval can be anything from realtime to a period between five minutes and five hours. The interval does not only depend on your settings but also on the update frequency of the Weatherbug or local weather station.

The main window of Weather Watcher Live displays hourly forecasts, the current temperature and a wealth of other information like high and low temperatures throughout the day or the humidity level.

continue reading "Weather Watcher Live"

Lots of updates for popular applications in this week. The usual suspects have been updated, like uTorrent, Azureus, Opera or foobar that seem to be updated on a weekly schedule but also some applications that don’t get updated that often, say Azureus or Tagscanner.

A short explanation about this post for the new readers. I’m writing an article each Wednesday about last week’s software updates. Only free and Open Source software makes it into that list and if you follow it regularly you can be sure that the software on your system is up to date.

This week’s update of the week award goes to Tagscanner, one of the best automatic tagging applications. As usual, if you know of another update let me know about it.

continue reading "Software Updates Week 19"

I’m building my personal page right now, and since I write 2 blogs of my own (with one more coming up) and contribute to 3 other blogs I thought it would be a nice feature to have a list of my most recent posts on my personal page. You could of course always update the list by hand, but how much easier it would be to get it done by a script. It turns out that this is harder to do than it sounds, but a tool I found, called Magpie RSS makes the job easy (or easier, rather).

If you want a simple job done quickly then download the tarball file (for Windows users, I know Tugzip will unpack it for you) and upload the four .inc files and the extlib directory to your server. You then just place some simple php code where you want the list and off you go.

There is one option that I found really useful, namely that it doesn’t only understand a set number of tags. As long as they are in the following two forms Magpie will understand them. <field_name>value</field_name> <namespace:field_name>value</namespace:field_name> This is great if you need some customization, let me show you a quick example of what I needed and did.

continue reading "Pull feeds into your website and customize them"

CD to HTML can create an html file that contains information about a directory, its subdirectories and files. The source directory can be any folder or drive connected to the Windows installation which makes it an excellent tool to create an index of files before burning them to CD or DVD. That index file could then be included on the media to provide users with fast access to all files on the disc.

The process itself is fast and simple. The source directory is chosen at the beginning. The user has the choice to select a CD drive directly or browse the computer to pick another folder.

The target folder and filename of the html file is defined in the second step. CD to HTML will automatically pick the name of the root folder as the title of the html file. The title can be changed in the same menu as well if another title is preferred.

continue reading "CD to HTML"

Open Office 3.0 beta has been released by the Open Office development team and is ready to be tested by the large community. The biggest change in my opinion is the support for Microsoft Office 2007 files, you know those docx, xlsx and pptx type of files that could not be opened not long ago and caused a lot of frustration by users who received such files from colleagues or friends. Other additions are Mac OS X and OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard support.

The beta can be downloaded and installed on computers that run Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X Intel Aqua. Localized versions are available as well and can be downloaded from the external mirrors that host all localized builds.

A Beta page lists all of the features that have already been implemented in the current Beta of Open Office 3. It divides the changes in New Core Features, like the import filter for Microsoft Office 2007 formats, Core Features that have been introduced in minor releases since the release of Open Office 2.0 and Features that have been released as extensions or complimentary tools.

continue reading "Open Office 3.0 beta released"