Trade in your old monitor
Posted by Webmaster in New in our shop on January 21, 2010
The Kiswahili Workstation
Internationalization, also referred to as i18n, is the process of translating an application into a different language. Here in East-Africa, we have of-course been eagerly awaiting the process of translating the mainly Enlish language based applications and operating systems, into Kiswahili.
With the dawn of Open Source software in East-Africa, thanks to the growing communities involved, translation has over the past few years taken a good step forward. Whereas Microsoft had been dragging its heels for years, soon after fully Kiswahili versions of OpenOffice.org and FireFox Web-browser became available (see below) Microsoft announced a Kiswahili Office. Though the latter was costly, cumbersome and badly translated, and as such failed. So what is available today? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Webmaster in Open Source Software, Updates on January 15, 2010
Prey – Open source computer theft protection
It is something we all fear; coming into the office in the morning to find out your workstation, or server, was stolen during the night. Or leaving your laptop unattended for mere seconds only to find out it’s disappeared. Apart from the costs of replacing your stolen computer hardware, there’s the company data that’s now out on the street. (You’ll be feeling a lot better if you encrypted that data though – we’ll be adding an article on the excellent Open Source encryption solution called TrueCrypt soon…)
Gone forever? It might be. But in case the thief does not immediately formats the hard-disk but instead uses the laptop or PC anywhere it’s connected to the internet, there’s a number of services that actually track and locate your stolen equipment, using IP addresses and more. There’s LocateMyLaptop, LocateLaptop, and so on (read the WikiPedia article on this). Trouble with all these, is that they are subscription (and European/US) based. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Webmaster in Technicians Toolkit on December 15, 2009
Email, the perfect tool for hackers
As web-masters for a growing number of companies in town, we are often asked about the validity (or dangers) of emails certain received. Especially the info@ and webmaster@ addresses are under attack from viruses and phishing, often twice or trice a week, so asking is is the right thing to do! What happens?
A legitimate looking email arrives from one of your contacts, a potential client, paypal, facebook, twitter or even from your own email server (see below). Something is wrong with your account and they need you to login and verify your password. Click here. Or one of a thousand other reasons why you would want to follow the link they provide. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Webmaster in Security & Anti-Virus, Updates on November 17, 2009
Ultimate Boot CD
A well deserved first in our new ‘Technicians toolkit’ category is called the ‘Ultimate Boot CD’. A freely available image you can put on an empty CD or any available USB-stick (256Mb+), giving you a bootable solution to diagnose, test and fix any processor, motherboard, memory, hard-disk and so on.
Simply put, the authors took hundreds of freely available solutions and put them together with a simple bootable menu. Download the ISO, burn it onto a CD/R and take it with you wherever you go. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Webmaster in Technicians Toolkit on July 13, 2009
Technicians Toolkit
Here at Mica, we’re all technicians first, and sales-people, consultants etc. second. Working in IT throughout the years, we’ve collected quite a library of tools and utilities. Thanks to the blessings of the Open Source community, the large majority of these are available free of charge!
For this reason, we’ve opened up a new category on our site, ‘Technicians Toolkit’, under which you’ll find articles, tips and tricks helping us (and you), Arusha ICT technicians, with our daily work. All solutions and tools listed are free to use, copy and share amongst your friends. And because we know from painful experience how long it can take to download a CD image using our flaky Tanzanian internet, all of the tools mentioned are available for free from our shop! Just drop by with a memory stick or empty CD and we’ll fill them up for you, free of charge… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Webmaster in Technicians Toolkit on July 13, 2009
Statistics
Recent Comments