Episode #144
What are the pros and cons associated with “ditching” office and moving to openoffice.org or Google Docs and Spreadsheets?
Brian, Toronto, ON
Mostly there are some features you may (or may not) miss. I’d give it a try and see if you can live with the differences.
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Air Date: February 5, 2008
TranscriptCaller Questions
- Fern, North Bay, ON
- David, Kanata, ON
- Nick, Montreal, QC
- Brian, Toronto, ON
Yewell's Jewels
- Diawindows
Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.
Sean's Shinies
- Dreamgear Soft Sports Kit
$40
One of the great things about the Wii is that the bundled Wii Sports game is more fun than many of the games you can buy separately. Dreamgear is trying to make the Sports game even more fun with the Soft Sports Kit, which consists of a holster for the Wii-mote, as well as soft foam heads meant to look like a tennis racket, a baseball bat, and a golf club. While it certainly seems a bit more fun, the whole apparatus also blocks the Wii-mote’s IR port, which means that doing any menu selection will require you to tip the Wii-mote out of the holster, which can get a bit frustrating.
Shiny
- lightweight
- interchangeable sporting good heads
- fun
Dull
- blocks Wii-mote’s IR port
- kind of pricy for foam
Kate’s Tips
- Extratasty
Used to be, a social network for booze hounds was called “a bar,” but apparently, there are also Web sites devoted to keeping track of your friends and your drinks. ExtraTasty lets you search for drink recipes, share drink recipes, and talk to friends about drink recipes. Get the picture? Our favorite part: Catalog the ingredients you currently have in your bar and ExtraTasty will provide you with recipes based on those ingredients. There’s also tagging, rating (which results in a Drink of the Day), and downloading (to your mobile phone or Apple iPod).