Category Archives: Computers & Internet

How to add a text/word watermark on OpenOffice Word Processor and Microsoft Word

Just a quick reminder to add a text/word watermark in OpenOffice Word Processor or Microsoft Word:

In OpenOffice Word Processor

a- Create an image using GIMP

– insert a Text field

– choose your favourite font, size, colour (25-30% grey is suggested)

– use the “Rotate Tool” to rotate your text to 45.00 degrees

– save the file in a light graphic format (e.g .gif)

b- Create the watermark

– open OpenOffice Word

– go to Insert —> Picture —> From File and select your graphic file

– click on the image using the mouse’ right button and select Wrap —> In Background

– Done!

In Microsoft Word

– Go to Format

– Select Background and choose Printed watermark

– Click on Text Watermark

– Type “Your Text Here”

– Select Diagonal and then click OK

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PPASearch: la mejor herramienta para buscar repositorios PPA en Ubuntu

Hay veces que queremos instalar alguna aplicación y no sabemos muy bien cuales son los repositorios correctos PPA de Launchpad. gracias a PPASearch esto se hace todo muy muy fácil. Lo primero que hay que hacer es instalar esta aplicación en nuestra Distro con los siguientes comandos:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wrinkliez/ppasearch
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ppasearch

Cuando ya tengamos instalada esta aplicación, podemos buscar el repositorio que mas nos interese, para hacer eso lo único será ejecutar PPASearch y el nombre del programa de lo cual buscamos el repositorio: ejemplo

ppasearch skype

Buscando por los repositorios de Skype me salieron diferentes repositorios y cada uno identificado con un numero, para instalar alguno de ellos, lo único será elegir el numero correspondiente y PPASearch se ocupará de instalar el repositorio seleccionado. ¡Muy buena herramienta!

Agradezco mucho el Blog Ubuntulife por su labor y por todas las informaciones y ayuda incluida esa entrada  http://ubuntulife.wordpress.com/ AddThis mp3 link

Mozilla Concept Phone: Seabird

Recently, Mozilla presented a concept phone created by Billy May, a Mozilla Labs community member. Perhaps this phone will never be available for sale but the ideas behind it are really innovative and it let us dream. Compliments Billy!!!! AddThis mp3 link

Calibre: el mas versátil gestor, conversor y visualizador de eBooks

Los E-books están ganando cada vez mas espacio a los libro de papel y seguramente en un futuro no muy lejano llagaran a tener el mismo mercado que los libros de papel. Entre las varias aplicaciones para gestionar vuestra biblioteca digital y vuestros E-reader, he encontrado Calibre, que me parece una de las aplicaciones mejores al momento y es disponible para diferentes SO (Windows, Linux y Mac). Yo la he instalada en mi Kubuntu y tengo que decir que funciona a la perfección; tiene una interfaz gráfica muy intuitiva y aunque sea la primera vez que uso un gestor de E-book no le encuentro ninguna dificultad en moverme en las diferentes opciones que ofrece. Con Calibre es posible administrar nuestros libros en diferentes categorías: Fecha, Autor, Titulo, Editor, Tamaño… y también permite la conversión a diferentes formatos: ePub, PDF, MOBI, oeb, pdb y mas. Es posible también la sincronización con diferentes dispositivos: Kindle, Nook, Papyre, Sony. En el caso que algún libro tenga mas de un formato disponible, el mismo Calibre elige cual el mejor formato para nuestro lector. Calibre es disponible también para Iphone, Ipad e Android. Otra preciosa opción que ofrece es la configuración como lector de noticias y RRS pasándolas a formato de libro electrónico, Para concluir, os aconsejo de probar esta aplicación porque seguro que os puede ayudar mucho en gestionar vuestra Biblioteca Digital. AddThis mp3 link

How to speed up Firefox on Ubuntu 10.04 (or Windows and OS X)

In the past three months Firefox was updated more than we were used in the past also because it had some “speed problems” expecially on Ubuntu 10.04. Now, after the last updates, Firefox seems to go fast but for people who like to try some hacks we have collected some tips from the web:

– start Firefox

– in the address bar type about:config

– find and modify these lines:

– network.http.pipelining > Make it True

– network.http.pipelining.maxrequests > Make it 8 or 10 (we made it 30 and it really works fast especially on websites as ebay)

– network.http.proxy.pipelining > Make it True

– network.dns.disableIPv6 > Make it True

– last but not least restart and Firefox should work fine and a little bit faster.

Before trying these changes, please consider that changing advanced settings on Firefox can be harmful to the stability, security and performance of the program. Take notes of all the changes you are doing in case you need to revert them later. AddThis mp3 link

Dear Readers: Computer Borders is back!

We need to apologize to all of you because we promised weekly posts and then we took quite a long hiatus. We didn’t mean to be gone for so long, but life got strange, and so on and so forth. But now we are back, and we would like to apologize with all you.

On a more positive note, though, we just checked our reader’s statistics, only to see that we still have almost 200 daily readers. And, believe us, we are shocked! Thanks for waiting our return, everybody.We decided to change something on our blog. First of all we will not duplicate our posts in the Linux and Freeware pages but we post them just in the homepage. In this way, we will have some posts in English and other in Spanish… it is not orthodox but…. why not? We dare!

We would like to know what you all think of the blog so far. What would you like to read? Leave us plenty of criticism in the comment sections. And, you will see a weekly post, starting Monday! AddThis mp3 link

I2P a real versatile anonymizing network for Linux and Windows

This week for our Freeware Page, we tested I2P a freeware which let you to surf internet without revealing your IP and encrypt your data. As described on the I2P Homepage, this freeware is a “anonymizing network, offering a simple layer that identity-sensitive applications can use to securely communicate. All data is wrapped with several layers of encryption, and the network is both distributed and dynamic, with no trusted parties”. During out test we used bothXP and Ubuntu because I2P is a java file even is it seems to be a exe file and it could be used on all the Linux OS. On Windows XP it is very simple to use I2P but at the beginning it is really slow and for this reason we suggest to keep it run for about twelve hours because this freeware needs to build its own network and for this it takes some hours. When ready you have to setup all the software you want to filter through it. For this reason, we setted Firefox (Preferences-> Advanced -> Network -> Settings) Manual Proxy Configuration to HTTP Proxy as localhost, port 4444. Then we put a tick on “Use this proxy server for all protocols” and we finished indicating “No proxy for” as localhost, 127.0.0.1. After some seconds we discovered that our IP was now in the northern part of the France (far away from our real location). To setup I2P it is necessary to point Firefox on http://localhost:7657/index.jsp because, by default, I2P tries to launch Internet Explorer also when it works on Linux. After a week of tests we can say that I2P is a little bit slower than TOR but it can easily be integrated on your browser, mail client, chat and others programs. For our (limited) experience I2P is the most complete anonymizing network we know. To conclude, as already discussed also on this post none or nothing can create a perfectly anonymous software but I2P can help to better improve our privacy. Recommended! AddThis mp3 link

WinFF: the best mkv to avi converter for Ubuntu

This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we posted an essential manual about the best software to convert a video file from mkv to a more common (and readable) avi format. First of all we tried with a well known line program: ffmpeg but we had different problems and we did not succeed. For this reason we tried to install the specific libavcodec-unstripped-51 package but we were not able to convert our file. For our second test we installed avidemux but also in this case the mkv file resisted. Then we read in a post that VLC contains a powerful converter and we used it to transform the mkv file to avi. Unfortunately we succed only for the audio part of our file but we were not able to obtain a complete video file. Only during our last test we transform the mkv video to avi using WinFF. This program, based on  ffmpeg, has a very clear graphical interface and it is very intuitive to use. After ten minutes of trials we were able to correct our settings and to start the file conversion. In the WinFF menu you can easily choose between many different video and audio formats (in our test we chose AVI) with a Device Preset setted to XviD in AVI (16:9) and decide the output folder you prefer. WinFF -does not work- if you do not insert the mandatory data in the below part of the menu. In our test we setted:
Video Settings
Video Bitrate = empty (null = we did not write anything)
Frame rate = 25
Video Size = 592 x 320
Aspect Ratio = 16:9
Audio Settings
Audio Bitrate = 118
Sample Rate = 48000
Audio Channels = 2
Additional Command Line Parameters (advanced)
null = we did not write anything
We recommend WinFF to all that people who are not very clever with line command programs and need to easily transform video files to a different formats! AddThis mp3 link

Two new Backgrounds/Wallpapers on http://deeza.org

Today, we would like to suggest two new backgrounds/wallpapers we published on http://www.deeza.org/downloads.html. Enjoy  and let us know if you like them! AddThis mp3 link

Basket Note Pads: a powerful multi-purpose note-taking application for Linux

This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we have posted a review about Basket Note Pads, a well developed note-taking program for KDE Linux. Basket is nice to look and very well structured. One of the first things you notice are the import – export features which allow you to easily manage text, hiperlinks, images from many different notepad applications. In particular we were really impressed by the Tomboy notes imports on Kubuntu. Moreover, Basket has detailed setting menus you can use to set a password to a specific group of notes or use any PGP key stored on your PC. Unfortunately our tests on Ubuntu – Gnome were unsuccesfull because the program crashed many times and we decided to come back to NoteCase, more graphically simple but stable on every desktop environment. Recommended for Kubuntu! AddThis mp3 link