Rather than splashing out on MS Office, spending on other software packages and website memberships, what are the free alternatives? It might surprise you how much you can get for free (legally!).

This is a free alternative to Microsoft Office available on PC and Mac. It includes alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. It is absolutely free, developed by a community of developers offering their time without charge. It’s compatible with MS Office, so if somebody sends you a document you won’t have a problem opening it.

Go to the OpenOffice website

Rather than make calls over the phone, Skype allows you to place calls to other Skype users for free, or to landlines and mobiles for a small charge.
Go to the Skype website

As well as being free, the beauty of Google Docs is that your documents are stored online, so they’re available wherever you can access the internet from.
Go to the Google Docs website

This is a collection of free textbooks that anyone can edit. It’s a wiki so expect similarities to Includes the World History Project.
Click here to go to WikiBooks

Includes literary analysis of many classic novels. The site is a bit confusing to navigate, but does have excellent content.
Go to Novelguide.com

Not a content provider in itself, but a useful starting point for searching with Google, Wikipedia, a dictionary as well as unit conversion tools and translation facilities.
Go to the Schoolr website

Useful website for finding the online degrees available in your country.
Go to the Study2U website

This is a great tool designed to help students organise their studies and take notes during school. It’s designed to make note-taking during lectures as easy as possible.
Go to the Notely website

Price comparison website for books. Bookfinder searches both new, used and rare. Boasts the capability to search 150 million books.
Go to bookfinder.com

No list on educational resources would be complete without this fantastic (yet contraversial) encyclopaedia.
Go to Wikipedia

A great idea for a site. Live Mocha is a social networking site where you can help others speak your native tongue, whilst at the same time learn another language from other users.
Go to the Live Mocha website

As a Developer there isn’t a day that goes by without making use of a name, acronym or phrase that doesn’t have an interesting history. Whilst we’re familiar with the usage of web technologies and concepts, not everyone knows much about their respective etymologies. I’ve looked up a few of them, and listed the more interesting ones here.

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I wrote a post about backing up databases to email a while ago, but didn’t really explain what could be done.

I use a budget web hosting company for a website that collects data that’s important to me. I don’t want to rely on the hosting company to maintain this by themselves, as I’ve been burnt this way before. I also don’t want to pay for a further hosting solution to look after my backups either.

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New video from awesome Sydney band, Kid Confucius

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX5OVu4OP8Q

As the world divides over the risk versus the scientific merits of starting up the massive Hadron Collider today, I found this picture. As much faith as I instil in CERN scientists, seeing this researcher in a hoodie with his hard hat back-to-front doesn’t do much for the image of those supposedly enriching humankind with new knowledge and capabilities.

Last week people started talking about Cuil, a new search engine with ambitions on taking on Google’s own search service. I guess it’s about a week after the PR machine swung into action and I can’t help but feel that the public’s enthusiasm is wavering from what wasn’t exactly the warmest reception in the first place.

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Before the Internet, a brand was something you would trust and identify with. You’d have expectations about the quality and possibly put more value (that value might be monetary or emotional) into your relationship with the brand.

Today we have the same relationships with our brands, but some of the products they represent are intangible technology. Google is undoubtedly the prime example of this relationship. Much as you might ask for a Kleenex rather than a tissue, you will Google rather than search.

I’ve begun to question the reasons for my relationship with products like Google. Do I use Google for search, email, website tracking, RSS and my calendar because I believe the technology is the best or because  I want to conform?

I’ve been in meetings with other web-savvy types in the company I work for (in advertising) and when we talk of group calendars, SEO techniques,  IM solutions and such; Google is the solution. I have to admit it’s frustrating when people stick to what they think they know because the technology lives under a familiar brand. There’s lots of fantastic technology out there made by a vast community of talented and creative people. We should be trying to discover what we don’t know rather than stick to the beaten path.

To me, branded technology indicates an expected standard, not cutting edge innovation.

Sometimes after a long day at work it’s nice to put my feet up and check out the news. I’ve been in Australia for nearly 2 and a half years now, in that time I’ve made conclusions about the television news in the country and the quality of the journalism behind it, and the quality of the newsreader who fronts it:

Personally I like SBS news, but sometimes it’s just nicer to spend an evening in front of Channel 9 News. Depends on my mood I guess.

Recently the Associated Press has gone after bloggers quoting its articles. Although to most bloggers it may look as if the AP has created this condition just to make life difficult, it was mentioned in the BOL podcast (#746) that this is a rule they’ve had for a long time; it’s just that they’ve now decided to apply it to bloggers.

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I installed this line of code in a crontab the other day. It exports the entire database (schema and data) to text, then emails it to you. Makes backing up easy.

mysqldump -h DB-SERVER -u DB-USERNAME –password=”DB-PASSWORD” DB-NAME | mail -s mysqlExport EMAIL-ADDRESS

To use, replace the fields (in caps) with your database info and run in a crontab.