This stuff even works on my Dell Axim pocket pc. It’s somehow amazing that I was able to walk around the office, watching “The Office” in the palm of my hand, knowing it was streaming via the wireless LAN and then via the Internet, all the way from my computer at home. The current version is a little buggy, it tends to crash but it does a great job when it’s running. Streaming quality is excellent, of course dependent on your network connection, and the new flash player allows for even more flexibility than before.

I would highly recommend this for anyone who is on the go a lot and just doesn’t have enough time at home to watch their media stored on their PC.

The BallFinder scout is the perfect accessory for golfers who want an easier way to locate a lost ball. It scans “up to 600 square feet in one second or almost 1/7 of an acre in 10 seconds.” That’s not all, “each of two million pixels is scanned in nanoseconds and analyzed pixel by pixel using proprietary GLS golf ball locating system technology to look for the unique color signature found on any standard white golf ball.”

Designed by Dima Komissarov, the Flashbag is a USB storage device that inflates as it “fills up with data”. Currently, the technology is patent pending. No word yet on if the Flashbag will go into produciton.

Why??

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FireAnt delivers a rich media experience through a simple to use, unified viewer that lets you watch all types of content without having to worry about which format it is (Quicktime, Windows Media, Real, Flash, MP3, and more).

FireAnt connects your favorite media to a wide variety of portable video players (Sony PSP, Apple iPod, Creative Zen Vision and more!) which gives you the power and flexibility to get media content right onto your portable devices! FireAnt also supports HTTP, Streaming, and BitTorrent downloads, bringing you an easy and efficient way of getting what you want when you want it.

With six 24″ flat panel displays that feature 1920×1200 resolution (5760×2400 combined) and 1000:1 contrast ratio, the ZenView is truly an elite command center. Each panel includes five digital DVI-D inputs, analog RGB/VGA input, and an S-Video input. The only weak link is its price. For $11,999 you can either buy a single large HDTV display or several powerful computers.monitors

From the looks of it, it’s pretty cool and may combine the features of your laptop with those of an iPod. From the video, it would appear that these devices can play back music, connect to WiFi networks (and possibly Bluetooth devices), and has enough power to handle graphics work and games. Like Tablet PCs, Origami makes use of a pen input device, as well as buttons on either side of the screen. The video also reveals the device will be available in at least two colours (black / lime green), and has a docking station to match.

Here’s another screenshot, plus the video:

First it wasn’t pleased with any of the partitions I had prepared for it. I eventually managed to squeeze all of my files into existing partitions and was able to clear an entire 80GB harddrive for it. Of course that harddrive had to be the master one. Windows is still snobby. The first installation, which I let run overnight, resulted in an unbootable system because of a missing or corrupted system registry. The second try decided to just stop half-way through and just sit there. The third try was the charm as I was finally able to log in.

At this point I reconnected my main harddrive (with Windows XP and Linux) on it and reconfigured the Grub boot manager to include Windows Vista as one of its selections. I’m actually amazed that it worked as easily as it did. So now I can triple boot between Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. Sweet!

This release of Vista seems much more stable than the prior one and also a bit faster. Graphically it’s very easy on the eyes but some of the design changes will take some getting used to. Navigating folders for example seems different. I still find myself looking for the Up button. All in all though, I’m more looking forward to the final Vista release than ever. Now as long as Microsoft doesn’t intend to charge us outrageous prices, I’m there, ready, willing, and able to upgrade as soon as it’s released.

Just to prove that I did it, here’s some screenshots:

 

 

 

This release of Vista is “feature-complete”, the company says, meaning that all of the fundamental capabilities that Vista will eventually offer are now baked in.

Development efforts aren’t slowing—the user experience will continue to evolve, bugs will get fixed, performance and compatibility will improve—but the basic shape of the operating system has been solidified, and from here on out we expect to see mostly fine-tuning rather than wholesale changes.

We’ve been running this latest release, build 5308, for a couple of days now, getting a feel for its capabilities while Microsoft prepared to make it available to the community of MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) subscribers, TechNet users, and registered beta testers. Our expectations, set high by the quality of the previous December CTP (build 5270), were largely met.

We found this build of Vista is responsive and highly usable, though still far from bullet-proof (as is to be expected for beta software). Aside from some of the predictable problems with hardware-device support and still-buggy features, one particular problem was that Windows Explorer crashes frequently. To Microsoft’s credit, these crashes were hardly dramatic, since Explorer managed to restart itself and resume each time.

Some screenshots below and more at the original article.

Xgl is an X server architecture, started by David Reveman, layered on top of OpenGL via glitz. Nowadays, most PCs are shipped with a 3D graphics card (foremostly from NVIDIA or ATI Technologies) and Xgl allows the X server to take advantage of its 3D processing power, assuming suitable drivers are available.

The results are absolutely staggering. See for yourself:

Windows Defender (Beta 2) is a free program that helps protect your computer against pop-ups, slow performance, and security threats caused by spyware and other unwanted software. It features Real-Time Protection, a monitoring system that recommends actions against spyware when it’s detected, and a new streamlined interface that minimizes interruptions and helps you stay productive.

I don’t really need to use antispyware software but a lot of people I know need to. So you should probably upgrade to this latest version. It updates itself automatically, can run nightly scans, etc, etc. Just make sure you have a legal version of Windows as this can only be downloaded after you’ve passed the  Genuine Advantage test.

What’s the chance of seeing the Terranaut on the street? Pretty good if you own a Holodeck.

Source: Autoblog

This story sounds pretty incredible but John makes some decent arguments. It’d be pretty tempting to buy one of those cool looking Macs and be able to play all the latest games on it. I’m not a huge fan of the Windows OS, nor have I ever used Mac OSX, but I do prefer the style of Apple‘s hardware over the usual Windows boxes.

Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP, and the stodgy Chinese makers.

goowy (re) is a rich experience site which helps you manage your digital lifestyle. We provide you with a fresh and powerful environment for managing your webmail, contacts, calendar, rss, widgets (search, bookmarks, photos, weather, stocks, quotes, scores, etc.), and fun flash games.

It’s really quite cool. The first thing I did was import my gmail emails into my goowy account. Now, I’ll continue to receive them at gmail but will use goowy to read and write them. The other nice thing it does is that it also acts as an RSS feed reader. Here’s a screenshot of the web-based version of it. Give it a try, it’s pretty useful.Web 2.0

After Google released a new Gmail logo to complement the addition of Talk, I thought that changing the actual Google logo to match would be a good idea. I’m happy with the results.

Here it is:

This is pretty damn cool. This guy has built a digital camera out of an old, low-end flatbed scanner. The resulting images can have some really interesting distortions, especially when the image is taken of moving objects. We all know how slowly the scanner moves across its surface, so the image on the left here makes sense. The website includes instructions on how to build your own flatbed camera and if it sounds like a good use for that old dust magnet scanner on your desk, good luck with it!

Top executives of Google have once again agreed to be paid annual salaries of $1 each in 2006, counting instead on stock options and grants of the company’s volatile stock for their pay.

In a regulatory filing on Monday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Web search leader said it had approved a base salary of $1 for Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and its two co-founders and co-presidents, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The three were paid $1 a piece in salary during 2005.

The action–which was approved by Google last Tuesday but only disclosed this week–occurred ahead of the 14 percent decline in the company’s stock price last week amid investor concerns over the Internet sector’s growth outlook and revelation of a legal spat with the U.S. Justice Department.

But before anyone offers to spring for bus fare for Google executives, note that the 7 percent rebound in the price of the company’s stock on Monday alone means that Schmidt’s shares had recovered $413.8 million in value during the one-day trading session, according to CNET’s CEO Wealthmeter site. As a result, his total wealth in shares is roughly $6.3 billion.

The pic on the left is an example of looking up google.com.Ajax

All the coolest gadgets, lightest notebooks, and niftiest electronics come from Japan. Some take ages to make it over the big pond; some never do. Dynamism imports the hottest new products from Japan and allows us to purchase them here. They have some really sweet notebooks, light, sexy, and powerful. Some even have a removable display! Check it out.

photo credit: premasagar

hardwareOptimus keyboard

Continue…

1. Include Blinklist in the external feeds section
2. Changed the text for Furl from furl.com to furl.net
3. Added in support for Rawsugar.com

That’s it. I’ve submitted this to the author of Taggerati, so hopefully he’ll incorporate these changes into the next release.

A little bit of background: Earlier in 2005 I bought a wireless router so that I could use my laptop from work freely around the house. The same applied to my girlfriend’s laptop. Unfortunately, that wireless router fried and even though I can return it for a replacement (Linksys still has an RMA open for it – I just haven’t mailed it yet), we managed to do fine without. But it’s always been a thorn in my side. Why use cables when you can do it wireless?

For Christmas I got a wireless PCI card and the plan was to expand my Linux based router by adding on a wireless subnet. Unfortunately, I’ve spent the past 3 days trying to make it work. I’ve used different firewall distributions, such as Clarkconnect (my favourite), IPCop, and Smoothwall. While I could get the card to run in Clarkconnect using ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers, the configuration just would not take.

So I finally gave in and decided to resolve the problem with a Windows based solution. Yikes, that took me a long time to stoop to that level. In the end, everything works perfectly. I now have a Windows XP based router/firewall running Kerio WinRoute Firewall 6. It serves two subnets, my wired LAN and my wireless LAN which is secured with WEP encryption and locked down to MAC addresses. All this plus the ability to have content filtering, firewall based anti-virus capabilities, and more. I’m quite happy. Too bad it’s Windows though.

PS: I’m posting this from my couch.

Called quasars, these massive black holes are the most radiant objects in the universe, outshining even the brightest galaxies. While the black holes themselves are undetectable, friction and heat from the swirling matter they ingest emit huge amounts of radiation that can be detected by radio telescopes.

This figure shows two Hubble images of quasars from a sample of 20 relatively nearby quasars. Quasar HE0450-2958 (left) appears to lack a host galaxy unlike HE1239-2426 (right), which resides inside a normal host galaxy that displays large spiral arms.

Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2003. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

Click the related link to download Paint.Net.

Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.

What it means to me is that all of a sudden I am able to find so many more free online services that help me get my shit together… For example:

BlinkList

BlinkList is a social bookmarking service. Social or not, it allows me to store my bookmarks on the internet, so I can access them conveniently from wherever I am. It also allows me to be more specific by tagging sites and providing descriptions. More importantly it keeps things organized. No longer do I have to deal with a huge list of local bookmarks that I have to scroll through. I can now bookmark anything that I think is even remotely interesting and I don’t have to worry about taking up precious space. Why? Because now I can search my bookmarks. Gotta love it.

MetaWishList

One of many online wishlist sites that I’ve stumbled upon recently. I have a horrible memory and everytime Christmas comes around I have no idea what I’d like, let alone what my friends would like. Now, if I see something online, I hit a couple of buttons, and BAM! it’s saved forever. Take that, memory!

Flickr

Everyone’s got photos they want to share. With Flickr you can upload them for free and share them with friends or family. Or maybe you just need to boost your ego by showing off your abilities when it comes to lighting (wtf?). In any case, if your harddrive ever goes kablooey, at least your photos will be safe, no?

Bloglines

So RSS is here, right? Let’s you read websites from one central place. I think Bloglines is typical of what Web 2.0 is all about. As opposed to having an app that runs on your PC, you can gather all your RSS feeds of interest in one place, online. Benefits again are that if you ever lose your harddrive or are somewhere else, or blahblahblah. You get the picture. I like it!

Gmail

Online email has been around for a long time but it’s getting better all the time. I can’t recall how many times I’ve vowed to stick with an email account, but I think my Gmail account may really be it. Hey, I have nearly 3GB of space and am only using 11% of it. I used to store my emails in a local app, like Outlook (shudder) or Thunderbird. But no more. My system goes down the crapper more often than I’d like and I’m sick of losing emails. Google to the rescue!

So, whatever Web 2.0 means to people, to me it means one thing in short: Comfort.

‘Nuff said.Funny

I decided “To hell with it – I’m gonna try to get a free iPod!” It seems easy enough, sign up for $1 and get a $25 Canadian Tire gift card. Then refer five friends to do the same.

You’ll be hearing from me