Tech Pulse 20070711: iPhone Nano Rumors, E3, OpenOffice.org, Quicksilver and Launchy, GeekHosting.com, and more!

Josh, Anthony, and Big-O discuss rumors about an iPhone Nano and share some E3 highlights, tech tips, and picks including OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice, Growl, Quicksilver and Launchy, and GeekHosting.com.

Notes and links related to this episode:

Tech News
Discuss some interesting recent news in the tech industry

• iPhone Nano rumors are discussed - when might one be released? Around the end of the year, perhaps around the holiday season?
• Highlights from the E3 electronic entertainment expo
  
• Halo 3 looks cool, but of course it's only for Xbox 360
• Nintendo is bringing back the light gun: the Wii Zapper
  

Tech Tips
Anthony's

• In Mac OS X, you can Force Quit an application from the Dock using the contextual menu
• Right-click (or Control-click) on the application in the Dock and hold the Option key, and Quit will change into Force Quit
• Josh and Big-O discuss ways to force an application to quit via the Terminal
• Use the command top to find out the process ID number of the crashing application, then use kill -9 processid
• Alternatively, killall applicationname (case sensitive, e.g. "Finder", not "finder")
  

Orien's

• iPod setup and maintenance
• Enabling disk mode for PC and Mac
• Format it on a Windows PC, then you can use it on both
  
• Improving performance
• You can defrag the iPod hard drive (not recommended by Apple)
• Alternatively, you can reformat and reload all songs
  

Software/Hardware/Site etc. Picks
Josh's

• OpenOffice.org (Windows/Linux) / NeoOffice (Mac)
• free and open source Microsoft Office replacements/supplements
• support opening Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works, WordPerfect, and several other document formats
• NeoOffice can open and save documents in the new Microsoft Office 2007 file formats (e.g. ".docx")
• The OpenOffice.org team is working on their own official port for Mac OS X
  
• Big-O warns that NeoOffice is slow on all but the newest hardware
  

Anthony's

• Growl system alerts utility for Mac OS X
  
• adds visual effects to system alerts, application notifications, etc. on your Mac
  
  
• Quicksilver application launcher for Mac OS X
• quick application launcher - faster than Spotlight on Tiger
• Launchy for Windows mentioned by Josh
  
• alt+spacebar brings it up, very much like Command+spacebar to bring up Spotlight on the Mac

Orien's

• GeekHosting.com
• Host your own Web site through this service, which has lots of great features at a reasonable price

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