Archive for the ‘Free Software’ Category

The Minifree Libreboot T400 is free as in freedom – TechCrunch

The Libreboot T400 doesnt look like much. Its basically a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad with the traditional Lenovo/IBM pointer nubbin and a small touchpad. Its a plain black laptop, as familiar as any luggable assigned to a cubicle warrior on the road. But, under the hood, you have a machine that fights for freedom.

The T400 runs Libreboot, a free and open BIOS and the Trisquel GNU/Linux OS. Both of these tools should render the Libreboot T400 as secure from tampering as can be. Your Libreboot T400 obeys you, and nobody else! write its creators, and that seems to be the case.

How does it work? And should you spend about $300 on a refurbished Thinkpad with Linux installed? That depends on what youre trying to do. The model I tested was on the low end with enough speed and performance to count but Trisquel tended to bog down a bit and the secure browser, an unbranded Mozilla based browser that never recommends non-free software, was a little too locked down for its own good. I was able to work around a number of the issues I had but this is definitely not for the faint of heart.

That said, you are getting a nearly fully open computer. The 14.1-inch machine runs a Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 processor and starts at 4GB of RAM with 160GB hard drive space. That costs about $257 plus shipping and includes a battery and US charger.

Once you have the T400 youre basically running a completely clean machine. It runs a free (as in freedom) operating system complete with open drivers and applications and Libreboot ensures that you have no locked-down software on the machine. You could easily recreate this package yourself on your own computer but I suspect that you, like me, would eventually run into a problem that couldnt be solved entirely with free software. Hence the impetus to let Minifree do the work for you.

If youre a crusader for privacy, security, and open standards, than this laptop is for you. Thankfully its surprisingly cheap and quite rugged so youre not only sticking it to the man but you could possibly buy a few of these and throw them at the man in a pinch.

The era of common Linux on the desktop and not in the form of a secure, libre device like this is probably still to come. While its trivial (and fun) to install a Linux instance these days I doubt anyone would do it outright on a laptop that theyre using on a daily basis. But for less than a price of a cellphone you can use something like the T400 and feel safe and secure that youre not supporting (many) corporate interests when it comes to your computing experience. Its not a perfect laptop by any stretch but its just the thing if youre looking for something that no one but you controls.

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The Minifree Libreboot T400 is free as in freedom - TechCrunch

The best free back to school software 2017 – TechRadar

With students everywhere preparing to head back to school and college, it's time to make sure you and your kids are prepared with all the essentials for the coming term or semester.

Whatever the subject and level, this toolkit contains all the essential software students need to get the most out of lessons and seminars, and make their assignments shine.

We know this can be an expensive time of year, so all the programs we've picked here are totally free for students to download and use, leaving you with more money for all the other school essentials.

LibreOffice is packed with everything you'd expect from a modern office software suite

There are some great student discounts available on premium office software, but there's no need to pay at all

Almost every subject involves writing in some context, and for this you'll need a reliable word processor. Microsoft Word might spring naturally to mind, and students get a discount on the regular price, but there are plenty of free options out there too.

LibreOffice is a powerful free alternative to Microsoft Office, and its powerful word processing tool matches Microsoft Word almost feature-for-feature.

LibreOffice also includes a spreadsheet tool, a presentation tool and much more. And just because you're opting for free software, it doesn't mean you have to save your documents in weird formats LibreOffice is fully compatible with Microsoft Office so you can create, share and open files with other people with ease. The software is updated very frequently, and extras such as support for cloud storage are a nice touch. There are also addons available which can be used to extend the capabilities of an already-powerful suite, making this well worth a look.

Review and where to download: LibreOffice

A reliable antivirus tool is essential for protecting valuable work

Kaspersky's newly released security toolkit will protect your work from damage caused by viruses and other malware

Keeping your computer free from viruses shouldn't cost you a lot of time or, ideally, money. But if you want to ensure that your valuable work doesnt get destroyed by a piece of malware, or your computer is not rendered inoperable by some form of nastiness, protection is needed. By Kaspersky's own admission, Kaspersky Free offers the "bare essentials". What this means is that you're protected against dangerous websites, and your emails, downloads and files are automatically scanned for signs of infection. If anything untoward is found, the offending file is quarantined for you.

Delightfully simple to use, you may never have to do anything to the software. Once it's installed it will keep itself up to date and scan your computer on a regular basis. Kaspersky Free's detection rates are high, thanks to using the same database as the company's premium offerings. You really are getting high-class protection without impacting on system performance for free. What's not to like?

It's still wise to make regular backups of your work in case of physical damage of your PC. Thankfully, there are lots of excellent free backup tools that make this a piece of cake.

Download here: Kaspersky Free

Simplenote is ideal to jotting down ideas during lectures and seminars

Manage important tasks, stay on top of deadlines, take notes, and keep everything synced between desktop and mobile devices

You don't always need a fully fledged word processor; sometimes you just want to take quick notes using a simple app with an uncluttered interface and no distractions. This is precisely what Simplenote is, and it lends itself beautifully to a huge range of uses.

Simplenote is a brilliant tool for students heading back to school. It can be used for everything from basic shopping lists and reading lists, to taking notes in class and creating reminders. There's even support for versioning, markdown formatting and sharing, all wrapped up in a wonderfully minimalist interface.

What's particularly appealing about Simplenote is that it is a cloud-based tool which is available for various platforms. There are desktop apps for Windows, Mac and Linux, and mobile apps for iPhone and Android. As soon as you create a note, or make a change, it's available on all of your device instantly.

You can use tags to organize notes and make them easier to find, but there's also a powerful search function to help you easily track down your notes without having to hunt for them manually.

Review and where to download: Simplenote

Make sure your work and emails are perfect before submitting them to tutors

An advanced grammar and spelling tool for your web browser

When you're writing in a word processor, you have a spelling and grammar check whirring away in the background pointing out your mistakes but what about the writing you do online, like preparing an email to a tutor or submitting work via an online form?

Grammarly is a browser extension (available for Chrome, Safari and Firefox) that will not only check your spelling but also, as the name suggests, keep an eye on your grammar for you.

While the core software is free, this version only checks for what are termed 'critical' spelling and grammar issues as well as punctuation and contextual spelling. If you want more comprehensive checking, plus plagiarism detection and support for different writing styles, you'll need to upgrade to Grammarly Premium. At US$11.99 (about 10, AU$15) per month, this is a little on the expensive side, but it might be worthwhile for essays and theses.

For most people, the free tool will suffice and being a web-based tool means it's accessible from anywhere. You can even use it to check your offline documents thanks to an online editor where you can paste text for analysis.

Download here: Grammarly

Paint.NET is particularly handy if you need to prepare images for a class presentation

A powerful but accessible editor for all kinds of everyday graphics tasks

Whatever course they're studying, all students need a graphics program from time to time. Whether you need to touch up a photo you're not entirely happy with, scan a document to share with someone, or crop in on a screenshot you've taken, Paint.NET is ideal for the job.

While not as powerful as the likes of Photoshop, the program is highly capable and covers all of the essentials. There's support for layers and even plugins so you extend the program to suit your needs, but the base program should be enough for most people.

If you like the idea of getting to try out new features before anyone else, you can sign up to get the beta versions delivered to you as app updates, and the developer does a great job of keeping on top of any bugs and problems that are reported. An essential piece of software for every student's PC or Mac.

Review and where to download: Paint.NET

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The best free back to school software 2017 - TechRadar

Open-source entrepreneurship – MIT News

Open-source software is free software whose underlying code, or source code, is also freely available. Open-source development projects often involve hundreds or even thousands of volunteer coders scattered around the globe. Some of the best known are the Linux operating system, the Firefox web browser, and the WordPress blogging platform.

This past spring, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science Saman Amarasinghe offered 6S194 (Open-Source Entrepreneurship), a new undergraduate course on initiating and managing open-source development projects. The course had no exams or problem sets; instead, the assignments included consulting with mentors, interviewing users, writing a promotional plan and, of course, leading the development of an open-source application.

The course is an example of an academic trend toward project-based curricula, which have long had vocal supporters among educational theorists but have drawn renewed attention with the advent of online learning, which turns lectures and discussions into activities that students can pursue on their own schedules.

But where many project-based undergraduate engineering classes result in designs or products that may not make it out of the classroom, the goal of the new MIT class was a public software release, complete with marketing campaign. And the students learned not only the technical skills required to complete their projects, but the managerial skills required to initiate and guide them.

The creation of the course had a number of different motivations, Amarasinghe explains. MIT is a very structured place, and we ask so much of our students, sometimes they dont have time to do anything interesting outside, he says. When you talk to students, they say, We have ideas, but without credit, we don't have time to do it.

The other thing that happened was that for the last three, four years, Facebook had this Facebook Open Academy that got students from multiple universities and paired them up with open-source projects, Amarasinghe adds. What I found was a lot of times MIT students were somewhat bored with some of those projects because its hard to meet MIT expectations. We have much higher expectations of what the kids can do.

A third factor, Amarasinghe says, is that many research projects in computer science spawn software that, even though it represents hundreds of hours of work by brilliant coders, never makes it out of the lab. Open-source projects that clean that software up, fill in gaps in its functionality, and create interfaces that make it easy to use could mean that researchers working on related projects, instead of building their own systems from scratch, could modify the code of existing systems, saving a huge amount of time and energy.

Entrepreneurial expectations

Classes for Open-Source Entrepreneurship were divided between lectures and studio time, in which teams of students could work on their projects. Amarasinghe lectured chiefly on technical topics, and Nick Meyer, entrepreneur-in-residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, lectured on topics such as market research and marketing. During studio time, both Amarasinghe and Meyer were available to advise students.

Before the class launched, Amarasinghe and his teaching assistant, Jeffrey Bosboom, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, had identified several MIT research projects that they thought could be the basis of useful open-source software. But students were free to propose their own projects.

After selecting their projects, the students first task was to meet with or, in the case of the students who proposed their own projects, identify and then meet with mentors, to sketch out the scope and direction of the projects. Then, for each project, the students had to identify and interview four to six potential users of the resulting software, to determine product specifications.

When you start out with the project, you have certain preconceptions about what the problem is and what you have to do to solve that problem, says Stephen Chou, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, who audited the course. One of the first things we had to do was to look for potential users of our project, and when you talk to them, you realize that the priorities that you start out with arent necessarily the right ones. At the same time, some of the people we talked to were working in fields that were completely unfamiliar, at least to me. So you start learning more about their problems, and sometimes you get completely new ideas. Its a good way to orient yourself. That was new to me, and it was very helpful.

The third stage of the project was the establishment of a software development timeline, and at the end of the semester, as the projects drew to completion, the students final assignment was the development of a promotional plan.

The projects

Several of the class projects built on software prototypes that had been developed by the students themselves or by their friends. One project, Gavel, was a system for scoring entries in contests such as science fairs or hackathons, in which teams of programmers develop software to meet specific criteria over the space of days. The initial version had been written by an MIT undergrad who was himself a frequent hackathon participant, and two of his friends agreed to use Amarasinghes course to turn the software into an open-source project.

Typically, hackathon judges use some sort of absolute rating scale, but this is a notoriously problematic approach: Different judges may calibrate the scales differently, and over the course of a contest, judges may recalibrate their own scales if they find that, in assigning their first few scores, they over- or underestimated the competition.

A better approach is to ask judges to perform pairwise comparisons. Comparisons are easier to aggregate across judges, and individual judgments of relative value tend not to fluctuate. Gavel is a web-based system that sequentially assigns judges pairs of contestants to evaluate, selecting the pairs on the fly to ensure that the final cumulative ranking will be statistically valid.

Another of the projects, Homer, also reflects the preoccupations of undergraduates at a technical university. Homer is based on psychological research on the frequency with which factual information must be repeated before it will reliably lodge itself in someones memory. Its essentially a digital flash-card system, except that instead of picking cards entirely at random, it cycles them through at intervals selected to maximize retention.

Other projects, however, grew out of academic research at MIT. One project dubbed Taco, for tensor algebra compiler was based on yet-unpublished research from Amarasinghes group. A tensor is the higher-dimensional analogue of a matrix, which is essentially a table of data. Mathematical operations involving huge tensors are common in the Internet age: All the ratings assigned individual movies by individual Netflix subscribers, for instance, constitute a three-dimensional tensor.

If the tensors are sparse, however if most of their entries are zero there are computational short cuts for manipulating them. And again, in the internet age, many tensors are sparse: Most Netflix subscribers have rated only a tiny fraction of the movies in Netflix library.

Taco provides a simple, intuitive interface to let data scientists describe operations involving sparse and nonsparse tensors, and the underlying algorithms automatically generate the often very complicated computer code for executing those operations as efficiently as possible.

Other projects from the class such as an interface for a database of neural-network models, or a collaborative annotation tool designed for use in the classroom also grew out of MIT research. But no matter the sources of the projects, the students were the ones steering them to completion.

They had a lot more ownership of a project than being part of a very large project that has thousands of contributors, finding a few bugs or adding a few features, Amarasinghe says. They got to think of the big-picture issues how to build a community, how to attract other programmers, what sort of licensing should be used. MIT students should be the ones who are doing new open-source projects and leading some of these things.

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Open-source entrepreneurship - MIT News

How to Nab Deals with Your Student Email Address – WIRED

College isn't cheap, and we're not just talking about tuition. Between the cost of books, living expenses, food, and going out, your budgets probably pretty tight. Good news, though: All you need is your school-provided .edu email address to take advantage of plenty of sweet student discounts. We hunted down the best deals for you to study (or party) on. Use all that extra cash to treat yourself to something nice, like beer.

Even if you're an old-fashioned pen and paper kind of student, you're going to need a laptop. Apples back to school deals offer up to $300 off most Macs and now the iPad Pro , and theyll throw in a pair of Beats headphones to keep the tunes playing between classes. If youd rather work on a Windows machine, Lenovo gives students 10 percent off and Dell offers students $150 off qualifying laptops.

Want a more traditional desktop setup in your dorm? Invest in a good keyboard. Das Keyboard gives students a 20 percent discount on their keyboards. Just make sure you dont keep your roommates up with your clicking and clacking.

Getting a degree takes a lot of work. Make it easier with a good set of productivity tools. Microsoft will give you a freetotally free!subscription to Office 365 if you have a .edu email address, so you can tackle the bulk of your work in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote. Should your .edu address use Gmail, its probably through Google for Education , which entitles you to unlimited cloud storage for all your essays, projects, selfies, whatever.

If your studies involve 3-D modeling or animation, try the free three-year license to Autodesks software suite . That includes Maya, software for 3-D animation, and AutoCAD, software for 3-D modeling. Adobe gives students its Creative Cloud subscription, which includes Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, and more for $20 per month. And if you're on the computer science track or just want to add coding to your list of skills, Githubs Student Developer Pack gives students a suite of text editors and web hosting credits to get you started on your coding journey.

No matter what you're studying, youll probably be writing a lot of papers. Endnote can alleviate some stress from your last-minute essay writing by helping you find scholarly articles and format your citations. Normally the software costs $250, but students can pick it up for $114. A good alternative is Papers $80 normally, $50 for studentswhich has a built-in reader to let you dive into your research from inside the app. Get the iOS app and you can sync across devices for on-the-go research.

On top of all the knowledge your professors will drop on you, its important to stay informed on whats going on in the world. Take advantage of your university email address by getting a discounted subscription to The New York Times ($6 per month for students), The Wall Street Journal (15 weeks for $15, or $50 per year), or The Economist (12 weeks for $12, or $115 per year). Those rates are on par with introductory offers but can last you all through school. Don't have a few dollars to spend on news? The Washington Post offers digital subscriptions to students totally gratis.

Of course, you're not going to spend all four years with your nose in a newspaper. Socializing is important too! Create the soundtrack to your college days or a playlist for your next party with a subscription to either Spotify Premium or Apple Music for $5 per month. And when you need to stock up on Solo cups for your next party, cut down on shopping time with Amazon Prime . Students get a six-month free trial, which gets you free shipping and access to its video streaming service. After your trial is up, you can hold onto your yearly subscription for $50.

Whether youre heading home for the holidays or just need a weekend getaway, AMTRAK offers 15 percent off tickets year-round as long as you have a valid student ID. You might find cheaper fares through Greyhound , which gives students a 10 percent discount; Zipcar also gives students $10 off membership fees. When it's time to move out, use FedEx's 20 percent discount to trim down shipping costswhether you're starting your first job or moving back in with your parents.

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How to Nab Deals with Your Student Email Address - WIRED

Converting Pictures Into Words You Can Process – New York Times

Q. With my iPhone I copied numerous documents, many of which are in typewritten Hebrew, and now I have JPG files. I want to convert these into text files and translate them. How do I accomplish this? Or is there another way to do this?

A. Optical-character recognition (O.C.R.) software is commonly used to convert pictures or scans of the original material into text files that you can edit, format and use with a word-processing program. O.C.R. software analyzes the shape of the letters on the page and converts the visual information into live text. To convert images of Hebrew characters, you need an O.C.R. program that can recognize the Hebrew alphabet.

There are a few commercial O.C.R. programs available that list Hebrew as a supported language, including Readiris ($100 for Mac, iOS and Windows; a free trial is available). Other options include the $50 Prizmo O.C.R. software for the Mac, as well as Abbyy FineReader Pro for Mac ($120) and Abbyy FineReader Standard for Windows ($200); a free trial is available. An online version of Abbyy FineReader works through the web browser and you can try a limited number of conversions in exchange for your email address.

Free O.C.R. software for Hebrew, mobile O.C.R. apps and online conversion sites can be found around the web, too. You may want to try uploading a few sample photos of your text or use one of the free (or free trial) programs to see if you are satisfied with the character-recognition results. Some O.C.R. programs may have trouble recognizing characters in stylized fonts or in photographs that are not in sharp focus. With Hebrew, the nikud diacritical marks used to represent vowels or alternate pronunciations may also cause some programs to incorrectly recognize certain characters.

Once you have created text files you can edit, you can translate them by hand or try computer translation from some of the various sites like Google Translate, or with a dedicated translation program. Depending on the software, the quality of the translation may vary. You should also note whether the program is designed to convert classical/biblical or modern Hebrew. It is important to get the right version for your source material because the dictionaries used by the translation software can differ.

For those interested in Hebrew texts from around the world, the National Library of Israel recently unveiled its Ktiv site, a huge collection of digitized manuscripts that can be freely searched and studied online.

Personal Tech invites questions about computer-based technology to techtip@nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually.

Link:
Converting Pictures Into Words You Can Process - New York Times