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  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

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Computing

Page history last edited by Philip 14 years, 8 months ago

Computing

 

Hardware

 

 

  • PC warranty repairs can be difficult here. Dell in Greece, for example — unlike local Dell representatives all over the world — does not honor American Dell warranties. You'll have to deal with Dell in America directly (who, incidentally, will probably be surprised to hear about the Greek policy).

 

  • Mac warranty repairs used to be limited to Rainbow Computing, a company so useless as to inspire public protest from Greek Mac users. Let us reiterate: do not do any business with Rainbow if you value your sanity. Thankfully, times are changing. Elite Computers in central Thessaloniki should be able to take Apple warranty repairs starting in September or October 2008. Note that not all Apple products come with worldwide warranties. iPods, Mac laptops, and some Apple peripherals do, but desktops historically have not.

 

Software

 

Dictionaries

 

  • Magenta makes the most well-known Greek software dictionaries, not only Greek-English, but many other kinds as well. We are interested in hearing about people's experiences with them. We can't recommend their single Mac product, Magenta Gold Version 2007: it's painfully slow and not at all Mac-like.

 

  • Mac users might well do better to buy the Windows software and run it using Parallels or VMware Fusion. (It might also be possible to run them using CrossOver, which does not require purchasing or running Windows; something we'd like to hear about.)

 

  • There are several online dictionaries and other language tools listed on the Links page.

 

Writing tools

  • Greek spell-checking for both Windows and Mac is available from Neurolingo, in the form of proofing tools for Microsoft Word or OpenOffice (and NeoOffice and StarOffice). The software also includes a thesaurus and a hyphenator. The company plans to release a stand-alone spell-checker and hyphenator for the Mac (developed using Cocoa) by the end of 2008.

 

 

Other

 

Typing

 

General

Arranging to type in Greek is actually pretty easy: all modern computers ship with several fonts that include Greek characters, and handy Windows and Mac instructions for producing them are available online. (Incidentally, you may want to learn just a little about what Unicode is since that's what makes it all work.)

 

Fonts

 

Mac tips

  • You might find it convenient to add the Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer to the input menu.
  • Normally, you'll be typing monotonic Greek. Typing polytonic Greek is more difficult, considering the number of key-combinations involved, so for that you might want to consider the free SophoKeys software. It includes a keyboard layout intended to be easier-to-use than the built-in one. Also, it includes software that enables you to generate Greek characters by typing in Beta Code (the method that Thesaurus Linguae Graecae uses to encode Greek).
  • If you aren't satisfied with the existing keyboard layouts, you can try creating your own using a free keyboard-layout-editor called Ukelele.

 

Windows tips

 

 

Contributers: add another category of tips here!

 

  • ...and make each individual tip a bullet-point (click on the bulleted-list icon located just above the "Format" menu). For main categories (like "Computing"), choose "Heading 1" from the "Format" menu. Choose "Heading 2" for subcategories (such as "Hardware" and "Software").

 

Comments (1)

Anonymous said

at 6:03 am on Jan 5, 2007

Make each individual tip a bullet-point (use the button in the upper-left of the formatting menu). To add a tip category, choose "Heading 1" from the "Format" menu. Format subcategories of tips (like the two in "Legalizing your stay") as "Heading 2".

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