Calibre, on the other hand, is also a Qt application, but does a better job (because of its icons, to be honest), of fitting in, but it has a complicated, powerful interface and is a lot more than “just” an eBook reader.  If you’re looking for a simple eBook reader that’s available for Linux, as well as Mac OS X or Windows, Lucidor is a great choice.

Lucidor is an ePUB reader.  It won’t convert your LRF files to MOBI, or your HTML to ePUB, but for simple reading of books in ePUB format, it’s fantastic.  It has basic library functions, and even has a few different ePUB sources, so you can download books right from its interface.  But first we need to install it.

Installing Lucidor

The first step is to head over to the Lucidor website.  Here you can read up on Lucidor to get a better idea of if it’s right for you.  When you’re ready, click the Download link at the top of the page.

Once the download page loads, click to download the installer of your choice.  For this article we’ll be using the Linux version, but you can also grab the Windows or Mac installer (or the source code).

Note: For Linux users, the .deb file is for Debian/Ubuntu, while the .rpm is for Fedora/OpenSUSE/Mandriva users.

Once downloaded, run the installer to install Lucidor.  You can use a GUI program or install it from the Terminal.

When the installation is done, you can delete the installer file, and should find Lucidor in your Applications menu, under Office.

Go ahead and open it; it’s time to use it to read some books!

Reading ePUB Files With Lucidor

When Lucidor Opens, you’ll see its main window.

The main window is simple, yet still manages to include easy access to your Bookcase, allows you to browse catalogs, read from the Newsroom or the User Manual, and even browse the Web.

Note: It would also, if we’d used it previously, include a link to our most recently read ePUB.

To start using Lucidor, click the Open the Bookcase link.  You’ll see a familiar 3-pane interface, with your Bookcase in the left column, the list of available books above on the right, and below, information about the highlighted book.

To add a book to your Bookcase, click the Add Book link.

A standard file picker will appear.  Choose the ePUB you want to add to Lucidor.  You can find good quality, free and legal ePUB files from Project Gutenberg and ManyBooks, as well as other places on the Web.  Here we’ve added a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, from Project Gutenberg.

By default, Lucidor only uses the author or book title to organize your collection, but you could also use the publisher.

To get more information on a particular book, highlight it, then click the Properties link.  A new window will appear, showing you all the pertinent metadata embedded in your ePUB file.

When you’re ready to read a book, highlight it, then click the Open Book or Open Book in New Tab link.

You can navigate through your ePUB by hitting the space bar (to move down one page), or by using the up and down arrows (to scroll up and down through the book).  When you come to the end of a chapter, click the Previous or Next buttons in the lower right corner.

Do More Than Read Books With Lucidor

In addition to reading ePUB files, Lucidor does allow you to download them from a few places on the Web.  To access these features, choose the Bookcase tab, but then click where it says Personal Bookcase to reveal a menu with other options.

In addition to Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and Smashwords, you can use Feedbooks, which has access to hundreds of free, public domain ePUB files, all ready to be downloaded, right from inside Lucidor.

Finally, you can create your own ePUB files from Web feeds, using the Newsroom feed from the main Lucidor page.  This is an experimental feature, but by entering in the URL for a feed (such as for a blog), you can create a news feed inside Lucidor itself.  The service scans your feed URL, grabbing text, pictures and links to videos.  You’ll need Internet access once you’ve saved the book to view videos, but the full text will always be available.

You will also find that Lucidor – even when reading from a saved version of your feed, recognizes that it originated from a feed and asks if you want to update it, which would pull in new posts.

Also, a single feed actually has the capabilities of being a bundle.  Simply add multiple feeds, and they will be aggregated together.  In this way, you can read up on a single topic, all from the same feed.  As mentioned, this is experimental, but seemed to work pretty well.

There’s more to Lucidor than would appear at first glance.  It is a great reader, but is more than just that.  No, it can’t interface with your eBook reader like Calibre can, so if you need that feature, use Calibre.  For basic reading, Lucidor is great.  Lucidor is available for Linux, as well as Mac OS X and Windows.

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If you have ripped a lot of CDs or purchased music elsewhere, chances are your tags may not be correct. Manually editing mp3 tags is not an option if you have more than a few hundred files, and chances are you will make mistakes.

Pollux is a low-cost solution to your music tagging problems. It is a very small application that costs $10 per year to use, and does a great job of updating your music’s tags. It works with iTunes, so all you do is fire up your iTunes library, select the songs you want to tag, and choose Tag Selected iTunes Tracks from the Pollux menu in OS X’s menu bar. Pollux uses the track’s fingerprint to identify it and tag it appropriately.

This is what the iTunes library looked like before we started Pollux.

Pollux went through the tracks we selected one at a time, and applied the correct album art, title, artist, year, track number, and even lyrics. The status screen shows you what track Pollux is editing. If you hide the status screen, you can choose to use Growl notifications on OS X.

This is what the iTunes library looks like after Pollux applied the correct album art and tags.

One of the best things about Pollux is that if the tracks are not tagged correctly once Pollux applies its changes, you can always use Pollux to revert to the original tag information.  Select the files you want to revert and choose Undo Tagging of Selected Tracks from the Pollux menu. Pollux will undo all of the changes it made.

Pollux will save you a lot of time and energy by doing what iTunes (and other music management applications) still cannot do. It will clean up your entire collection, and provide you with more accurate tags than you started with.

If you have thousands of mp3s you need to update, Pollux will do it in the background for you, and you can always undo incorrect changes. It will also automatically update new tracks you add to iTunes. Pollux is available for Windows and OS X, and you can try it out on 20 tracks for free.

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Of course, some of these tasks are already automated for you.  Providing you have a decent security software package, the virus and spyware scanning are already covered.  You may have a program that routinely checks for excessive temporary files, and cleans accordingly.  Perhaps you even have a program like Diskeeper to help stave off file fragmentation.

Each of these types of programs has a practical purpose on your Windows computer.  However, in order to view information on what all of them are doing, you have to go to each application and view the current activity or historical log files.  The average person may not keep tabs on each program.  Sometimes it helps to have a good overall picture of your computer so you know where to shift your focus.

Every so often, a program comes along that is helpful in getting you the information you need in short order.  PC Matic’s (found here) free scanning routine, rather the trial version of PC Matic, does a very good job of showing someone the inner workings of their Windows computer.  This scan looks over many aspects including the amount of junk files on your computer, security threats, missing hardware drivers (if any), and a host of other areas.

When you open up PC Matic, the only clickable area is the Free Scan, illustrated by a large gear shaped icon.  This is where you begin the assortment of scans run against your computer.

In this test sample, the scan took just shy of six minutes to complete.  Keep in mind, PC Matic does not run a very detailed spyware type scan during this process, just a high level, quick scan (so it is not a substitute for your current anti-virus or anti-spyware software).  Additionally, depending on the size of your registry, the amount of temporary files you have, and the overall speed of your computer affect the duration of the scan.

When the scan is finished, you will be presented with a dashboard covering all the sections of your computer that were scanned.  On the left hand side of the dashboard, you have a brief Summary area, Security, Performance, and Disk results.  Other than the summary box, any of the listings in the three other boxes are links to more information.

The colored boxes indicate one of four things.  Green mean the test passed without issue, blue is simply information, yellow is a warning, and red needs immediate attention.  Looking over the dashboard further, on the right hand side you will notice the Other and Reports areas.

One of the nice features of PC Matic is that each clickable item contains further explanation regarding the presented data.  For instance, if you were to click on the High Security Threat Test, you will see a list of potential or actual threats.

Paired up with this list is a brief summary of the data, or actions to be taken.  This may help alleviate some of the confusion people run into when running applications like this.

Moving on from the security section, one area to pay particular attention to is the Registry Test.  When you click on this link, a list of registry errors is shown.  If you notice a large amount of entries, they, among other things, can drag down your computer’s performance and should be addressed.

Perhaps you are having issues with certain hardware, such as a video card.  Even if you are not, if the Drivers test comes up red, you should look into it.  In this section, any hardware that is not up to date with current drives files, will be flagged red here.  Should you need to reference the driver version, it can be located under the Driver Details column.

No scanning utility of this type is complete with a temporary files (junk files) scanner.  PC Matic is no exception.  Clicking on the Junk Files Test will navigate you to the Junk Files section.  When you click on one of the red arrows, a list will drop down and display the folders where the unneeded files are currently residing.

Last but not least, and this is a particularly interesting test, is the top ten largest files on your computer.  Though you may not use the results of this test at all, this section is worth a look.  Odds are, the largest files on your computer are system files like pagefile.sys, and other files with dollar symbols in their names.  Granted, these are ones you do not want to delete.  When you do locate one you wish to remove, hover the mouse pointer over that file to see its location on your computer.

Once again, this version of PC Matic is simply a free trial scan.  The actual product, should you click on the Fix All link, is $49.99 for a 5 license version.  The scanner itself is a good way to find issues on your computer without the need to purchase the paid version.  There is a good chance your software tool set includes programs to fix these very issues.  If nothing else, the PC Matic scan is a good starting point to create a “to do” list for computer maintenance.

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The first eye catching feature is its support for the web Open Font Format or WOFF.  In Firefox 3.5 they included support for linking to TrueType and OpenType fonts.

Over these two popular font formats, WOFF has two main advantages: it is compressed so it will load quickly and it contains meta information that allows developers to see where the font came from.  In theory, this will open up a wider range of font options for web designers.

The beta version also has improved handling of embedded native videos using the <video> tag. Users will be able to right click any supported video and click “Full Screen” to view the video in full screen. 

The other new features focus on performance improvements.  Now it can handle multiple JavaScript scripts running asynchronously.  It also starts quicker and the overall responsiveness is faster perhaps due to the improved JavaScript engine.

Other new features in this release of Firefox include the follow:

• Support for the new HTML5 markup language
• Support for lightweight themes
• Support for hiding the menu bar automatically
• Built-in support for Personas (change theme with one click)

With more than 140 bug fixes this should be a more stable release than the current 3.5 version.  As an added stability feature, it will alert users of out of date plugins.  There is also a change on how extensions are integrated to prevent crashes due to bad code.

To try the latest Firefox 3.6 Beta, get the installer from www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

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However, for those businesses that have database savvy personnel, and even those who do not, converting information between database types can prove difficult at times.

For database administrators and database programmers, knowing the particulars surrounding the syntax and operation of a brand of database is important to their job.  However, just because one person understands SQL queries, does not necessarily mean that they know how it translates into Oracle.

In this instance, an Oracle aligned person and SQL trained person may both have to sit down and discuss how to move data between SQL and Oracle, or vice versa.

Thankfully, there are quite a few translation and conversion software packages available to help overcome this obstacle.  One such software title, the ESF Database Migration Toolkit (found here), is capable of converting between major database types, such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL, MySQL, IBM DB2, and InterBase.

This program can also convert to and from Microsoft Access, Comma Delimited files, and Microsoft Excel.  All of these and more can be found when you open up and use the ESF conversion wizard.

Before getting too deep into the migration wizard, make note of the Settings button at the bottom of the window.  You will see this button more than once throughout the migration process.  The Settings button opens up a separate selection of options that you will not in the wizard itself.

Within the Settings selection, you can instruct the wizard to take certain actions, depending on the environment to which you intend to migrate.  For example, in the General tab, the “If Table Exists” area allows you to let the wizard know what to do in case there is a similar table in your target database.

Also, the “Replace Table / Field Name Characters” lets you covert a variety of non-alphanumeric characters to a specific one, should you have the need.  The CSV/Text tab contains other details you may need if converting to a CSV file type.  The other tabs, Oracle, PostgreSQL and IBM DB2 contain options to change fields to upper case, lower case, or nothing (no change).

Moving on with our data conversion, the second page contains the selections for our data source.  Depending on what data source you choose, the fields for initial information collection will change accordingly.

If you choose Microsoft SQL, if will prompt you for the server, port number, user name and password.  Should it be an Access file, for instance, just click on the Browse button to find your file in Windows Explorer.

Having completed the Data Source section, we move on to picking a destination.  The only difference here is the intended target.

The next step in the migration process offers greater control than in the previous sections.  At this point, in the Select Source Table(s) and View(s) screen, you are looking at a list of the current database’s tables.  In this screen, you can preview the tables, choose to overwrite the target database, as well as select other options, by clicking on the small button in the Transform (third) column.

Should you venture into the Transform options, you will be able to manipulate the table, to a degree, prior to a completed migration.  By default, Append Data is selected should the migration process discover existing tables.

If you select Overwrite Table, you can now alter the Type, Size,  and be able to allow Null on any of the listed fields.  You may also choose to bring over foreign keys, indexes, and auto-incrementing data.

When ready, you can click on Ok to return to the previous screen.  Now you should be ready to complete the database migration.  After you click on Next, you have only to click on the Submit button.  A synopsis of the migration sequence will appear in the Log area of this screen, which can be copied to the Clipboard for reference purposes.  You can now open up the database information in its new format.

It would be safe to say that this type of software is an incredible time saver.  At $219.00 for a copy of the Standard Edition, this software easily pays for itself with the buyer not paying out extra funds for consulting work, or purchasing data conversion services.

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