The community behind the OpenOffice freeware have released a new version (2.2) of the program this past week, the “rival” of Microsoft Office is already on my must-have-list of programs, and should be in yours too because it is good and free.

The update comes in a good time due to the recent discoveries of security problems that created vulnerabilities and could affect (negatively) OpenOffice users:

OpenOffice.org 2.2 protects users from newly discovered vulnerabilities, where users’ PCs could be open to attack if they opened documents from, or accessed websites set up by, malicious individuals.

Anyway, the programs that got updated with the 2.2 version are the following: Writer, Calc, Impress, and Base. This means that Draw and Math don’t feature anything new.

Download OpenOffice2.2 – 93MB for Windows.

I only got one complaint about the OpenOffice Writer, it is related to the spellcheck and dictionary that marks some words as misspelled or non-existent, when in the end there is no problem with them.

[Source: ZDNet]

It looks like the time has come make a revolution on your house, after getting some good sound to be played as the doorbell it is time to rearrange your living room, bedroom, kitchen, and so on.

With the Furnish program you can make this changes easily in a virtual way of course, just create a virtual room with the real world measures of the space you want to arrange, and recreate your furniture by designing it or using samples from the library. After that, it is all about positioning the furniture and make the room look better, preferably with more free space.

The Furnish is available to download for free at BoConcept. One of the things that scares me is their FAQ section:

- Question: When I attempt to download Furnish®, it stops in the middle of the download?
- Answer: Check, whether you have sufficient Internet capacity.

Dowload Furnish

[Via: LifeHacker]

[tags]furnish, freeware[/tags]

If you are the Windows kind of person that mistakenly delete files, what you really need to make the stress level go lower is the Undele Plus.

It is a free program that is able to recover deleted files easily, if there are too many files being displayed you can sort them by filetype and it will become even more easier to select the desired file.

Here is a nice tip when using Undele Plus:

As soon as you discover that vital files have been erased, the most important thing is to prevent erased files from being rewritten. To do so, avoid any use of the disk where the file was erased until after the files are recovered. Also remember that Undelete Plus shouldn’t be installed to this disk – install it to floppy if no other disk is available.

Undelete-Plus.com

[Via: LifeHacker]

[tags]undelete plus[/tags]

This is cool news, as Palm seems a bit stuck in the water, leaving us a handful of other options, but having a heavy hitter like Motorola jump into supporting a Linux-based PDA phone could get that whole phenomenon moving a bit more.

[source: Gizmodo]

Users might appreciate Paint.Net, a freeware application that allows you to do all of the above. There’s no need to nuke a fly when a swatter will do just as well, and for most people Paint.Net will cover all their bases. It also has a look and feel very close to MS Paint, so the learning curve should be minimal.

PCMag says:

You can download the Windows release candidate of Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 directly, along with Mac and Linux versions, but beware. It will overwrite your existing themes, and render existing extensions unusable. A “portable” version of Firefox 2.0 that will let you try without affecting your existing Firefox setup has also been made available.

Gawd, I love Firefox.

[tags]Firefox 2.0, PCMag, Alexandra Ansgar[/tags]

[Source: PCMag]

Open source and ‘nix freaks will love this pic of two young ladies sunbathing topless on a beach in Greece, with a Unix book… Aww heck, you’re still looking at the picture and not even reading this, so I’ll stop typing now.

[Source: Flickr Photo set (NSFW!) Via: Valleywag]

[tags]Unix, Greece, Topless Photos, Valleywag[/tags]

arstechnica is reporting that Firefox 2.0 alpha 3 will be available today for download. The biggest change is having Googles anti-phishing tools:

The next version of Firefox will come out of the virtual box with Google’s anti-phishing tools built in. While the Googlified security services have been available through use of the Google Toolbar for either Firefox or IE6 for quite some time already, this marks the first default installation.

A new beta version of Firefox 2.0 will pop up during June.

[Via: arstechnica]

[tags]firefox, browsers[/tags]

Microsoft Word and the Symantec Antivirus aren’t alone while screaming for attention on security measures.

Skype was also a victim of this nightmare and the flaw was discovered by Brett Moore, Head of Research at Security Assessment – an Australian company.

The flaw is enabled through the URI (Uniform Resource Identifiers) handler installed during initiation of the Windows Skype client. It allows additional command line switches to be passed onto the Skype client, potentially allowing a file transfer.

Take note:

A patch was created to fix the issue, and it’s all under control.

[Via: TechWorld]

[tags]skype, flaw, security assessment, freeware[/tags]