Lifehacker gave me a nice little present today. How to keep the widgets on my mac desktop. If you you’re running Mac OS X this is nice and simple.
Category: Uncategorized (Page 11 of 22)
Business Week reports today that Itunes will soon start downloading feature length films, and Walmart is fighting tooth and nail to hinder it. Looks like we’ve got us an old-fashioned “grudge match.” May the best behemoth win!
(Via TechCrunch)
Speaking of music downloads, Paste has a pretty good selection of free MP3s available right now on their download page.
I love to listen to novels and poetry, but I hate to re-buy books I’ve bought in print. If a book is in the public domain, it may soon be available for free at one of the free audio books sites now emerging. NY Times recently featured several audio sites of interest.
LibriVox already has an interesting selection of books recorded by amateurs and professionals: all available as free downloads.
Telltale Weekly offers a variety books, dramas, poetry and more for a small fee with the goal of using the fee to build a large online library of free stuff available at Spoken Alexandria Project.
Literal Systems (strange technical name for a book service) has a smaller selection but they’re supposed to be professional recordings. They have a Dickens books, so I am already stoked!
Creative Labs beat Apple to the patent office by just months on the original MP3 players. When I bought my MP3, I chose Creative for the 40GB disc space and the dramatic price difference from i-tunes. Obviously iTunes rules the market. Creative and Apple have been fighting this patent battle in court, and they finally settled. Creative gets 100 million from Apple plus they can start creating accessories for i-Pod.
Looks like Apple is the real winner. iPod will continue to soar, and my poor Zen Nomad wander off into obscurity.
Be careful of private information on public wifis. NY Times offered an interesting article yesterday about the dangers of travelers using the Internet in the airports or other public wifis. For anyone who travels, this is worthy caution to make sure you are properly guarding your info.
“Someone may have some software on their computer that allows them to look at all the wireless transactions going on around them and capture packets that are floating between the laptop and the wireless access point,” he said.
These software programs are called packet sniffers and many can be downloaded free online. They are typically set up to capture passwords, credit card numbers and bank account information — which is why Mr. Vamosi says shopping on the Web is not a great way to kill time during a flight delay.
“Where I’d draw the line is putting in your bank account information or credit card number,” he said, adding that checking e-mail messages probably is not that risky, but if you want to be cautious, change your password once you are on a secure connection again.
Using business center computers also involves dangers:
Last fall, InfoWorld magazine published an article about a security researcher who managed to collect more than 100 passwords, per stay, at hotels with lax security (about half the hotels she tested).
Michael Totten interviews a peace activist in Israel. But don’t expect him to sound like an American peacnik.
“I think what’s different from our peace movement,” Amichai said, “from the peace movements in the United States, in other countries, and in Europe is the question of serving in the army. Peace movements are usually pacifists and they don’t encourage their members to serve in the army. The Israeli peace movement believes that Israel would not exist if we didn’t defend it. There is a slogan that’s going around: If the Arabs put down their arms, there will be peace. If the Jews put down their arms there won’t be any Jews left. And I think there’s a basic truth to that.”
If you’ve got a moment, this is a worthy read.
Sounds to good to be true, but the buzz is that Steorn creaetd an energy source that produces free, clean and constant energy. Their inviting testing of their concept now. We’ll see.
If this is true, I want to put one in my Cadillac!
After signing up and waiting for a Writely invite (and never getting one!) Writely announced today that anyone can now sign up for an account. So whoever wants to test another online writing tool,
check it out!Update: I checked it out. Disappointed that I wasn’t a part of the exclusive pre-release testers. While most of the features are similar to the other online tools I’ve mentioned, it does have an interesting collaboration tool, so multiple authors can work on a doc. And it can save in OpenOffice format. But for my applications, I still like ThinkFree the best.
Last fall I was looking for some good options on transferring some of my old tapes and LPs to CD. I found a few sites that explaining what I needed to buy to do it, but I wanted something simple. SciFi may have shown me the solution. It comes with the software I need, looks like it is easy to hookup. Let me know if anyone has an better ideas.
Simply hook up an old turntable or cassette deck to the InstantMusic and plug it in into an available USB port on your PC. The included software allows you to convert your music to MP3 files, or burn directly to CD. It even smartly detects the gaps between songs to divide that old Journey LP into individual MP3 files perfect for transfer to your newfangled iPod.
