March 2009Monthly Archives

Windows only: Pod to PC can grab the music and movies off nearly any Windows-formatted iPod for transferring to your PC, and avoids duplicates while doing so.

Windows only: System tray application GMinder gives you quick offline display of multiple Google Calendars—and even alerts you of upcoming appointments. The application was created by reader Greg Todd, who wrote the application for his own use—but decided to release it for the rest of us to enjoy

If you’re a fan of Tab Mix Plus, you already know how handy having your unread tabs italicised can be—but you don’t need to install an extension for this useful feature.

Dustin Hoffman is so concerned about getting better science in science-fiction movies, he's helping to sponsor a "dating service" to match movie directors with real scientists.

Mozilla has revealed how it plans to integrate plain text commands directly into future versions of Firefox.

When he's not blowing things up, making models, or otherwise holding the job you wish you had, Adam Savage is serious about personal projects.

Fring has taken its mobile social experience to another level with its release of Twitter 2.0, a fully-functional Twitter client currently available for Symbian and Windows Mobile phones.

Today, Last.fm publicly responded to its users – first giving a more detailed explanation of why they’re implementing subscriptions internationally, and second, indicating that they’ll be delaying the move until a few much requested features are delivered to users.

Microsoft and TomTom have settled the much-discussed patent infringement suits they tossed at each other earlier this year.

For many companies a Facebook fan page is an integral part of their social media campaign. But, what elements help fan pages build up large followings and what can brands do to emulate the success of others? I’ve put together a list of specific elements that I believe have helped create fan pages with large, engaged, followings.

It's legit; Skype is coming to the iPhone on Tuesday, BlackBerry devices in May. While we've seen plenty of Skype-capable apps on the iPhone, the poor, often echo-infected calls should be easily bested by the official Skype App that doesn't need the extra audio transcoding workaround required by the existing crop of unofficial apps.

THE actor Dustin Hoffman is to spearhead an initiative to put real science into Hollywood science-fiction blockbusters.

wonderful:)

There may be times when you want to create a blog page or that looks different than a normal page. Or Perhaps you want to use WordPress to run your entire website but want the main page of your domain to look completely different than a typical blog. This is an easy way to customize WordPress that can be very easily accomplished by creating a custom WordPress page Template.

In short, the CSS3 Multi-Column Module is a functionality to flow the content of an element into multiple columns.

there’s no shortage of ways to spread the word. Blogs, social networks, instant messenger, and mobile phones are some of the many ways to let others know about the best content on the web.

Getting a good pizza from a decent pizzeria is pricey, and the cheapo frozen discs are often indistinguishable from their cardboard backing. Learn how to make your own without inheriting a wood-fired oven.

Universe Today has some great shots from the latest Shuttle mission, including (a much bigger version of) this shot of the ISS, surely the most beautiful of the station yet taken. It’s well worth your time to peruse the pix.

A little etching cream and some stickers is all it takes to create customised storage jars. At MarthaStewart.com, they have a simple guide to using glass etching cream for creating labels on glass storage jars.

AIG exec Jake DeSantis' NY Times letter asking for us to chill out about his poor overworked employees is a sick joke

Some NSFW language, but OH, finally, someone says it like it is:)

St. Augustine Pirate University offers the student an opportunity to earn a professional degree in their chosen field of piracy. We offer Associate, Baccalaureate, and Master degrees in Piracy, Buccaneering, Privateering, and Re-enacting. It is our hope that you enjoy your course of study while fulfilling the goal of obtaining your degree in piracy or associated careers.

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Close'n Forget, one of the runners-up for Mozilla's Best Firefox 3 Extensions, has updated to, well, actually work more often, erasing any site's cookie/history/AwesomeBar evidence from Firefox with one button click.

Not all of us can devote the money or space to a full-size greenhouse, but anyone can get into gardening with a mini greenhouse.

Mind mapping is a great way to add structure to brainstorming sessions and visualise your ideas. Check out the applications your fellow readers use to do their best brainstorming.

We pointed out a standalone Google Contacts page once before that used a URL from deep inside Gmail, but it looks like since then Google has made it even simpler to access your contacts: Just point your browser to http://www.google.com/contacts and enjoy.

The rows of silver dials and tangle of scarlet wires look more like a telephone exchange. But this is the inside of the Turing Bombe, the part-electronic, part-mechanical code-breaking machine and forerunner of the modern computer, which cracked 3,000 messages a day sent on Nazi Enigma machines during the Second World War.

There were 210 such bookcase-like Bombes that gave Britain advance warning of Hitler’s plans and shortened the conflict by two years.

Australian ISP iiNet is making a very bold move. They are asking the court to accept that essentially, BitTorrent cannot be used to distribute pirated content because a packet does not represent a substantial portion of the infringing material. They are also hedging their bets purely on the strength of the movie studios' 'forensic' evidence. This ruling will go straight to the heart of Australia's copyright law. At last, an ISP willing to stand up for its customers! Let's hope we have a technically-informed judge.

Here are all the details. The Tesla Model S Sedan will have a 300-mile range, 45-minute fast charge capability, a 0-to-60 time of 5.5-seconds and seat seven. Production supposedly starts 3rd quarter of 2011.
WANT!

oh, i want to go to london!!!

wow.

The name's ridiculous, but "Jaunty Jackalope," the next release of the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, is seriously focused on the user experience. Dig what's new and improved in the beta of Ubuntu 9.04, due out today.

It looks like any 8.9-inch Aspire One owners out there may want to refrain from playing music full blast through the netbook's speakers for the time being, as some users have found that it can have the unfortunate side effect of completely trashing the hard drive. According to reports on the HardwareCult forum, the problem only affects Aspire One netbooks with standard hard drives, not SSDs, and it arises when the right speaker causes enough vibration and / or magnetic interference to throw the hard drive into a tizzy

The Jaunty Jackalope edition of Ubuntu has been released to beta.
Ubuntu 9.04 brings a clutch of improvements to the desktop while taking the first step on the server closer to Amazon-style cloud computing.

People all over the world eat different foods, but when it comes down to it, there are only things from animals and things from plants. You may like chilli sauces, soy sauce, tomato sauce or a good gravy. You may season your food with salt or pepper or oregano or lemon juice or coriander leaves or rocket. You may like seaweeds and sushis or pate and caviar or lollies or vegemite. You may eat Mexican food or Japanese or Middle Eastern but they are all either of animal or plant origin. Even our drinks are just clever uses of plants. Do you drink coffee, peppermint tea or rooibos or even sake, gin, vodka, wine, lemonade or, horror of horrors, coke? Whatever the case, it all originates from animals or plants.

Google Docs takes another step toward becoming a proper document tool, adding a full-fledged find and replace toolbar, as well as a browser-based SVG drawing tool. Docs had a kind of low-powered, actually apologetic find and replace tool before that could only do whole-document, every-instance replacements

If you need your Unix command line on a Windows PC, chances are you use a terminal emulator like Cygwin–and if you do, you want to check out MinTTY.

If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access.

Copy and Transfer from iPod & iPhone

Switch to an every-other-week shopping regiment, and you might start throwing less money away.

This week isn’t going down as a good one in Last.fm’s books. First, they announced that international users (those living outside of the US, UK, or Germany) will have to start paying for radio streaming, and now they’ve effectively banned all third party mobile clients.

for all WordPress plugin developers out there, from newbies to professionals, here are the top 10 tips to make your job easier.

I am getting my modem tonight, and hooking into my Dell Mini 9 running Kubuntu Jaunty, as well a my dual boot Dell Studio 1536 (Vista & Kubuntu Intrepid). Will be using the guides below!

Netbooks are an obvious candidate for mobile broadband, but often require a little tweaking before you can get them to work. Over at our sibling site Gizmodo, Nick details the process for getting 3's Internet key to work on notebooks like the HP Mini 2140, which has a lower resolution screen than 3's software expects. If your problem is getting 3G broadband working on a Linux-based Eee PC, check out our earlier guide but bear in mind that some more recent modem models won't work without some significant hacking.

Working dropbox on Jaunty Alpha 6 Kubuntu:)

Web site Academic Earth is like Hulu for academic lectures, pulling free lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale into one attractive, easy to navigate site. It's incredible (albeit completely US-centric in terms of the universities selected). The site clearly takes its cues from Hulu and iTunes on its design, but it's ten times better than either, because it's open. The videos can be embedded anywhere or downloaded and enjoyed wherever you want to take them. It's easy to use, has tons of great content, and it doesn't cost a cent.

Brit-com Red Dwarf's return isn't just happening on television; a new ARG based on the show's three-part reunion special has launched, giving you the chance to track down your favorite smegheads for yourself.

Damn damn damn:(

If you use Last.fm and live outside of the US, UK, or Germany, you might need to get your wallet out. The online radio service has announced that users outside of those countries (their 3 most popular) will need to start paying €3.00 (about $4.40 USD) per month to continue streaming music on Last.fm.

Losing control is a primary reason stated by brands who are unwilling to open themselves up to the conversation – and a major reason why most continue to use social media as little more than a brochure on the web. And yet the illusion of control is just that – an illusion. By not involving yourself you actually do more to remove control than if you did.

If you're looking to impress the folks, the significant other, or your friends with a fancy-pants dinner, you only need a few hours to whip up a quick-infused olive oil that seriously boosts your offerings

In the late 80s, I kind of knew a bunch of people who were involved in what we called The Computer Underground. They weren't my friends, and I couldn't even tell you what their handles were (well, I could, but I won't) but I learned a ton of stuff about technology and other mysterious subjects by dialing into BBSes and reading the textfiles they left behind.

The good news is that the deal isn't just restricted to new accounts: any existing Internode customer with a Tivo can access the Tivo EPG software updates and the 'Blockbuster Movie Of The Week' without it counting against monthly cap totals, and with no special setup required. Internode has also said that further unmetered content will be offered later in the year; there's no details, but with iView already on its list, unmetered iTunes would probably be top of most people's lists.

Windows only: Free application DropboxPortable makes the popular file-syncing application thumb-drive friendly, so you can access your synced bucket from your thumb drive no matter what computer you're using.

Just as Twitter is an incredibly simple platform made rich and complex via its API that opens the door to 3rd party Twitter tools, WordPress becomes the most robust blogging platform (or even CMS, I’d argue,) when plugins are leveraged on top of its solid core and highly intuitive user interface. Yes, there are plenty of plugins for other platforms (Moveable Type, Blogger, Joomla, etc.) but WordPress takes the cake in terms of stability, flexibility, and depth of offering.

Your nominations are in and the teams have been seeded, all that's left to do is vote! Without further ado, the Official WCIA Committee would like to present… The 2009 Worst Company In America bracket!

Linux only: gcalcron allows you to issue terminal commands to a computer through Google Calendar. It's more beginner-friendly than editing cron jobs or remote shell work , and great for remote download control.

Windows only: SourceEdit is a feature rich text editor geared towards programmers. The editor has support for dozens of programming languages and their accompanying formatting and syntax.

We've seen some pretty kick-ass Lego creations over the years, and this one is no exception — if anything, it gets bonus points for not only being a pretty sweet hack, but for enabling sweeter, more complex, hacks in the future.

The live streaming service Ustream has been busy over the past few months.

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) enables site owners to automatically syndicate their content to readers in an easily digestible format. There are a number of WordPress plugins to help you manage your blog’s RSS feed, track subscribers, and much more.

Marketing Mule – a directory of popular marketing tools. This site has an abundance of marketing tools to choose from such as: Affliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Blog Marketing, and even Copywriting tools. There are literally over 1000 premium tools listed so, if you’re trying to find that perfect marketing tools you should definitely stop by.

Let’s examine the steeping of tea in its simplest form for a moment: when we steep tea, we are making a drink from the leaves of a plant. We take into account the type of tea leaves we are using and the way they were processed along with the water temperature and steeping time.

slideshow , not too bad

Some amazingly useful apps to enhance windows, as it isn't linux;)