Jim Lynch: Tech Tips, Opinions and Reviews

Linux users have been rocked this week by big news from two major vendors: Red Hat has bowed out of the race for the desktop market, and SuSE has been bought by Novell. What do these twin tremors mean for Linux users and the future of Linux itself? Red Hat’s exit from the desktop is [...]

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last winter, Sharp showed off a new, lither successor to the Zaurus — one that looked like a tiny PC. Since then, sadly, the company decided to only release the Zaurus SL-C760 in Japan, not the U.S. But these days, country borders mean little. You can now get the [...]

I’m a bit of a movie buff. I love all different kinds of movies and I always buy the ones I like. When DVDs came out, I thought they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. I bought tons of them, until an unpleasant reality slapped me in the face: I was running out of [...]

For most consumers, making Internet-based phone calls has meant either using free, but less than perfect services (like AOL’s voice chat), or paying a monthly fee to the cable company, Vonage, or the like. The former requires using a PC, which means leaving it on to get calls, and using a headset. The latter gives [...]

Sometimes people do things so incredibly inane and stupid that it makes me wonder how our species has survived on this planet for so long. I remember seeing Treadwell’s “Grizzly Diaries” on TV and thinking to myself that he was eventually going to get taken by one of the bears he got so close to. [...]

Well it had to happen – yet another Linux distro is now making a concerted effort to go after the mainstream desktop. This time it’s SuSE, one of the largest and most popular distros around. One of the biggest complaints people have with Linux is that they can’t run a lot of their old Windows [...]

Before getting into this review, we have to confess something – we recently fell in love with Red Hat 9. It functioned so well that we opted to use it as our regular desktop OS…until now. In our last review of Libranet, we carped about a few things. We’re happy to report that version 2.8 [...]

Lindows has come a long way from our first review of version 2.0. Each release has gotten a little bit slicker and easier to use than the last and version 4.0 continues along those lines. This latest version of Lindows adds a number of new features designed to help new users get up and running [...]

I have to confess something – I’m an iPAQ addict. I’m on my third one and it’s still my favorite line of PDAs. My last iPAQ, the 3835, started showing its age when the speaker jack stopped working. Time to buy a new PDA. Well, okay – maybe a dead speaker jack wasn’t the best [...]

Tired of surfing? Want to hang up your board? Through the magic of RSS, now the internet can come to you. All you need is a good RSS newsreader. If you’re not clear on what RSS is, don’t sweat it. It’s simply an XML-based format used to syndicate articles from blogs, news content and other [...]

I’ve been watching Discovery’s Shark Week. And the show they had on tonight was a hoot. If you’ve watched any of these kinds of shows in the past you might be familiar with Erich Ritter, a “scientist” famous for standing in waist deep water with bull sharks. Bull sharks, as you might already know, are [...]

This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write in my life since it involves the deliberate murder of another human being. Over the weekend I saw the video of the murder of Daniel Pearl. I have never seen anything like it in my life and I hope I never do again. [...]

I offer the following community management services: Community Planning and Strategy Documentation Message Board Management Technology Selection Community Planning and Strategy Trying to build an online community without a plan is like trying to start your car without your keys.  It just doesn’t work. I can help you figure out if you should build an [...]

Since it’s Memorial Day, I wanted to share some stuff about a member of my family that lost his life while fighting for his country. He was my uncle, I’m named after him (I have my mom’s last name not my dad’s). His name was James Joseph Lynch III. He was a PFC – E2 [...]

Why were so many prominent companies missing from the show?

Interoperability has been the Holy Grail of instant messaging for years. But squabbles among AOL, Microsoft, and others have prevented these companies from opening their services to competing IM client software. Fortunately, the open-source community recognizes no such limits and has come up with an excellent multiprotocol instant-messaging client called Gaim (free download). We looked [...]

I took a trek to frigid New York City in search of the latest desktop Linux news. Here’s the second part of my report from New York.

Intuit is following in the footsteps of giants. Wrongheaded, mistrustful, overcontrolling giants. (Agree with me? Tell me what you think in our discussion forum.) When Microsoft released Office XP and Windows XP with product activation embedded in both products, consumers and pundits alike responded with a gigantic hue and cry. Many Windows users were angry [...]

The latest blast of great distros continues with Xandros Desktop. Xandros is another debian based distro, geared toward the desktop and promising good Windows compatibility. Our initial impression of Xandros is very positive. It lives up to a lot of its potential, with a few drawbacks. Read the Rest at ExtremeTech

The real question though is – should KDE even be bothering with this project? Ximian’s Evolution is already a great Outlook clone and even lets users sync with Exchange servers (with a separately purchased add-on). So why should KDE waste its time reinventing the wheel? Why not let users simply use Evolution? Or some other [...]