Hatsune Miku will be playing a Live Concert in LA on October 11th and 12th at the Nokia Theater. Then again in New York at the Hammerstein Ballroom on October 17th and 18th. But to kick off her North American tour, first she will be at The Late Show with David Letterman October 8th, so if you can’t make either city you can still see how her technology works. Thanks to Crunchyroll for the heads up on this one.
Portable Apps has updated themselves to version 12.0.5, which has some minor bug fixes, but Portable Apps 12 has a huge array of new features and functionality. This program suite is a lot like the Live Disc Linux builds I love, which allow you to launch a full OS from a disc with a huge range of software. If you don’t already use it, Portable Apps is a platform that runs like a program in any Windows computer off of a thumb drive, external hard drive, cloud drive, smart phone, iPod, or anything else the computer recognizes as a storage device. I actually installed it to a MicroSD chip which I use in my camera to save photos and video to, and when I plug the camera into the computer I can run it off of that. It doesn’t have its own OS like the Live Discs do, but it certainly has the huge range of software. Also like a Live Disc, you never install any software on the computer you are using, it all runs straight from the media source.
When you launch Portable Apps, it opens a menu with whatever collection of software you installed on the device, ready to run on the computer you plugged it into. All the software has your settings included, so Firefox (or Chrome, or Lynx, or Opera, or SeaMonkey; I am not going to go through the list for each kind of program mentioned, but you get the idea) remembers your homepage and has all your bookmarks, Thunderbird has your mail server config and downloaded messages for offline reading/responding, Filezilla has all the connectivity info for uploading to your web servers or downloading from file repositories you like to visit, and so forth. They have over 300 programs organized in 10 categories, each of which has 5 to 10 subcategories covering anything from graphics/audio/video creation and processing to a portable web server with Apache, PHP, MySQL, and CGI-BIN, and a lot more besides. And yes, you can install WordPress to that server, or anything else you would want to have as part of a XAMP/LAMP installation. And the list of apps goes on.
The other way it resembles a Live Disc is that when you are through using your software on whatever computer you walked up to, you shut the computer down, unplug your media source, and when the computer is rebooted it has no trace of your personal settings or information, everything was saved to the Portable Apps media source. That means whatever new bookmarks you saved, files you downloaded, etc, all goes with you; you never lose it. If you are not already a major fan, download it and install it on something and try it out. I am betting you become a big fan of the project once you have seen just how powerful it is. All of the software is free, legal, and open source, and if you enjoy the freedom of never having to leave your favorite software behind, you might consider offering them a donation.
There is a brand new version of Gentoo Linux as a live DVD with multiple desktops and a ton of free software available. Gentoo Linux 20140826 features a collection of powerful updated software packages including Firefox 31.0, LibreOffice 4.2.5, GIMP 2.8.10, Blender 2.71, Amarok 2.8.0, Chromium 37.0.2062.35 and more. The desktops include KDE 4.13.3, GNOME 3.12.2, Xfce 4.10, Fluxbox 1.3.5, LXQt desktop 0.7.0, and i3 desktop 2.8. Plus, being a Live Disc, you don’t even have to risk your computer installation to run it. Just download the appropriate *.ISO file for your system and burn it to disc as an image, and you are ready to play with it. To use it, make sure your BIOS recognizes the CD/DVD hardware in your computer as a boot drive that it checks before the hard drive (that is the default on most computers made in the last 10 years or so). Then just drop the optical disc into your CD/DVD drive and power cycle your computer. When it wakes back up, it will be running an amazing collection of software on an OS you have not seen before; go play and explore! When you are done, shut down Gentoo, eject the disc, and reboot again. Your original system OS, be it Windows, Mac, or other, will be running just fine, without even any new files stored to your hard drive, pristine and unchanged. Live Discs are a great way to try new software and OS’s risk free on the hardware you own without having to worry about losing what you already had working. In a lot of cases, it is the software you never even knew to look for that ends up being the most worthwhile, and then you can check for instances of it built to run on the base system you have.
They had an H. P. Lovecraft festival this weekend in Second Life, and there were a lot of creatures to see and become. This one towered over the trees.
Wonder what the technology you are going to be able to buy and use 3 to 5 years from now might look like? Visiting the SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies exhibit each year should give you a pretty good idea, and this year there are a few particularly interesting ones collected on this video out of the 26 on the floor. The annual event ends today, and I wish I could have been there; perhaps next year. The other SIGGRAPH paths I enjoy are the Art Gallery and the Studio, so I am also including their trailers for this year.
The newest version, Knoppix 7.4.0, is now available for download. This Linux build is specifically designed to be a Live Disc, meaning you can boot it directly off the CD, DVD, or USB device, and never need to install it to your computer. It comes with a ton of free software, up to 2Gig on the CD and 9Gig worth on the DVD, thanks to the on-the-fly decompression it does as you launch each program. Besides having more programs, the DVD version also supports both 64Bit and 32Bit platforms, and has multiple desktops to choose from, including both GNOME and KDE as well as the default LXDE file manager. It includes a full set of rescue programs, software utilities designed to help get your broken Windows or Linux computer working again, including anti-virus cleaners, partition managers, and much more. It comes with Wine 1.7 so you can run your windows software in it, and Virtualbox 4.3.14 on the DVD version if you want to run any other operating systems inside it. A lot of the Live Discs I have mentioned here are built on this platform, which is the longest running Live Disc Linux build I know of, and there are a host of specialized builds spun off from it. If you haven’t tried Linux yet, download the ISO file, burn it to disc, and then boot your computer from it. You will be amazed at how easy it is to use and how powerful it is.