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LG at work on WebOS-based HDTV, report says

The the slow pendulum swing toward the smart TV is about to hit WebOS.

LG has teamed up with Gram, the organization established by HP to handle the WebOS project, to create a television that will be running on the open-source operating system, according to a new report from WebOS Nation. That blog reports that LG and Gram have been working closely for several months on the project.

The road to Gram has been a long and hard one for HP. In 2010, the company made the ill-advised decision to acquire Palm for $1.2 billion. After a few product … Read more

View, save, or convert your e-mails with Winmail Opener

Winmail Opener could be useful for anyone who sends or receives e-mail in one of the older versions of Microsoft Outlook such as 97 or 2000 (winmail.dat). This utility allows users to view and extract the contents from messages from these sources. The rich-text message contents and attachments from these Outlook applications are not supported by several e-mail clients that are used today and Winmail Opener is a freeware solution to this problem.

Winmail has a traditional Windows look and feel to it with drop-down menus. It also has full Windows drag-and-drop capabilities so it is easy to move … Read more

View, save, and convert e-mail files from older versions of Microsoft Outlook

Winmail Reader is a useful and simple tool for anyone who sends or receives messages from the older Microsoft Outlook 97 and 2000 applications (winmail.dat). With Winmail Reader, the user can read, convert, and save file attachments that come from Outlook, Outlook Express, and Microsoft Exchange applications as well as Thunderbird and Lotus Notes e-mail clients. It is a freeware application that works on the later versions of the Windows operating system including XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

The layout of Winmail Reader will be familiar to any Windows user, and there aren't many options, so most people … Read more

OpenOffice.org is the free productivity suite to get

Apache OpenOffice.org is the free open-source productivity suite that rivals Microsoft's Office suite, the business world's standard. OpenOffice.org is compatible with most Office documents and many other file types. Like Office, it's a collection of powerful tools, but you don't have to install all its modules. The latest version of OpenOffice.org supports Windows 8.

The OpenOffice.org installer's custom option lets users choose which Program Modules to install from Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress, Base, and Math, plus shared Optional Components. During setup, we chose to make OpenOffice.org our default program for … Read more

Google releases Web site speedup software

As part of its "make the Web fast" effort, Google has released version 1.0 of a module designed to improve the very widely used Apache software that's very widely used to host Web sites.

The Apache Software Foundation's flagship project is Web server software that delivers Web pages to people's browsers when they request it. It can be extended, and Google believes its mod_pagespeed extension for Apache is ready for use, Google said in a blog post.

"Users prefer faster sites and we have seen that faster pages lead to higher user engagement, … Read more

Open WebOS 1.0 arrives for those who dare to port

Call it the ghost of Palm past. Today the once-lauded WebOS, originally a smartphone operating system, lives on once again in the form of Open WebOS 1.0.

Issued by Hewlett-Packard (HP), the first open-source version of Open WebOS is now ready for developers and others in the open-source community to port Open WebOS to any number of devices.

In a demo video, HP Chief Architect Steve Winston shows how the operating system works on an HP desktop.

The full version of Open WebOS 1.0 follows a pair of beta releases made available earlier this year. While HP is … Read more

Pulling back from open source hardware, MakerBot angers some adherents

You likely know MakerBot Industries as the poster child for the new era of 3D-printing. You might not know that, until last week, the company and its CEO, Bre Pettis, were considered shining lights in the open-source hardware movement.

Think of open-source hardware, OSHW, as the physical equivalent of open source software. The Open Source Hardware Association, founded just this past March, offers an extended definition for OSHW. Its Statement of Principles sums things up thusly:

Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or … Read more

How to use Siri's new features in iOS 6

Siri was useful on iOS 5, but it often felt like it should be capable of more. With iOS 6, Siri has gained some new capabilities, all of which are nice additions to the personal assistant on iOS.

Siri can now make reservations, give you movie info, keep you up-to-date on sports, launch apps, and post to Twitter and Facebook on your behalf. Let's start by taking a look at the process to make a reservation using Siri.

Twitter and Facebook

Having to type out a tweet or status update for Facebook is so 2011. In 2012 and beyond, … Read more

How a low-ranked tennis player used Twitter to raise her profile

Before the U.S. Open tennis tournament began this week, I had never heard of 18-year-old Laura Robson (@LauraRobson5), even though she won an Olympic mixed doubles silver medal in London this summer.

To me, the women's game is dominated by the Williams sisters, Serena (@SerenaWilliams) and Venus (@VenusesWilliams), and a revolving cast of mostly unmemorable Russian players, except for Maria Sharapova (I couldn't figure out her official Twitter feed -- can you? Her site has a social section, but it only lists a Facebook account).

But 89th-ranked Robson, who sent former champ Kim Clijsters packing in … Read more