Week in Review - 2013-09


  • I came across BackBox Linux - although it's not my area of expertise, I always find different distributions of Linux interesting. On the website it is described as follows:
 "BackBox is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. It has been developed to perform penetration tests and security assessments. Designed to be fast, easy to use and provide a minimal yet complete desktop environment, thanks to its own software repositories, always being updated to the latest stable version of the most used and best known ethical hacking tools."
  • I love listening to podcasts, and PocketCasts is an Android podcatcher that looks great! It supports variable speed playback, which if you haven't realised, you can easily play some podcasts at up to 1.5x without missing anything. Not sure if it does pitch correction to compensate, but I'll have to try it out.
  • I have to admit to being a big Google+ fan. Whenever I scroll down my stream, I just find HEAPS of very cool interesting stuff. This is mostly because I found some circles (of scientists, photographers etc) that were shared by other people and now I'm following a bunch of interesting people. Too many to keep up with, but whenever I go look at Google+, I've got to time-box it.
  • I've also got to admit to loving the FireFox profile manager. This easily lets me fire up a browser that is isolated from other profile settings - useful if someone (family members, friends) wants to quickly do something on your computer. I normally use chrome for all my day to day activities, but to test things out as someone who is not logged in as me, or to let my wife check her email or Facebook account, I'll bring up FireFox which has profiles set up for these things. This can also be very useful at work, instead of clearing your cache or using incognito (another good alternative if you don't want history/settings to be persisted).
  •  I tried writing a Chrome app a few months ago, but ultimately it didn't quite have the access to the local system that I needed to make my application effective. This paradigm is VERY interesting to me though, and if the restrictions were loosened up somewhat, then this could be an extremely effective platform (it already is, but I just need an app that suits). 


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