Friday, April 27, 2007

Byte Into It 25th Apr 2007

PS3 and realtime tv video downloads in Australia
"By snapping up a million dollar share of struggling ReelTime.tv, Sony may spark a video on demand war with Australia's 800 pound internet gorilla - Telstra Bigpond."
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/11569/1085/

Supreme Commander
State of the art hardware pushing entertainment! You really need the latest and greatest hardware to get the most from this game.
http://www.supremecommander.com/

Ubuntu 7.04 and Nvidia drivers
Popular Linux distrubution Ubuntu (based on Debian Linux) has just released "Feisty", it's latest version which is simple to instal, runs on most PCs, is free and contains useful applications including Firefox and the Open Office suite of programs that read and write Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Ubuntu 7.04 screenshots
http://debianadmin.com/copper/thumbnails.php?album=77&page=2

When a Mac vulnerability really isn't so.
"It turns out that the vulnerability isn't in Apple's Safari web browser after all, but in the interaction between QuickTime and Java."
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/11579/53/

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Byte Into It 18th Apr 2007

US webcasters will face sharp rises in royalty fees that could be "fatal" to the nascent industry, a coalition of web broadcasters has claimed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/technology/6562823.stm
http://savenetradio.org/


Opinion on DRM provision in Vista
http://www.livingwithoutmicrosoft.org/2007/03/18/schneier-on-vistas-drm-provisions/
A cost analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

Proof of concept program that can enable or disable "protected processes" in Vista:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/07/1426200&from=rss

10 Vista tips and tutorials:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/10-vista-tips-and-tutorials.html
20 Vista how-to's:
http://www.vistababble.com/forums/vista-tips/1482-20-how-windows-vista-tips-most-people-dont-know.html

People posting the output from the free Belarc Advisor PC auditing tool may not realise that they are publishing windows key s (and other software keys as well):
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Windows+XP+Professional%22+%22Belarc+Advisor+Current+Profile%22+key%3A

Fast XP and Vista disk defragmentation:
http://vistarewired.com/2007/02/15/defragment/

Lifehacker's top 10 free windows downloads:
http://lifehacker.com/software/windows/lh-top-10--free-windows-downloads-248303.php

How to use Google to view blocked sites:
Google Proxy Trick #1
The first tool is Google's translation service. This service will dynamically download and translate any web page you request, and if you specify the "to" language as English, Google Translate will just spit out the destination document, acting as a simple proxy NB you may have to specify another language to translate from.

Google Proxy Trick #2
The second Google tool that can be used as a proxy service is the Google Wireless Transcoder. This service was designed to make web pages viewable on mobile phone browsers. It will download a destination site's web page, including images, and rework the entire page, on the fly, to fit into an average cell-phone's screen space.

To try it out, go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n and enter the url you'd like to view.

Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the deal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick.htm?_r=1&oref=slogin
Microsoft contends that Google's $3.1 billion deal to buy DoubleClick would hurt competition in the online advertising market.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/technology/16soft.html?ex=1334462400&en=c2f04ecf952de7e6&ei=5124&partner=digg&exprod=digg


Introducing Microsoft Silverlight - Cross platform, Cross browser plug-in
Redmond's next-generation, cross-platform, cross-browser web client runtime. This MS developers's blog gives top 10 reasons why you should use it, including a tease of a big announcement at MIX. Enjoy!!!

Samsung says another dual-format Blu-ray/HD-DVD combo player on the way.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/12/samsung-bd-up5000-dual-format-blu-ray-hd-dvd-combo-player-on-the/

The new VESA-approved digital interface standard is meant to replace DVI and VGA ports while co-existing with HDMI for HDTV connectivity. It's about the size of a USB connector yet offers 2x the performance of DVI in a much smaller package.They also bake in HDCP 1.3 content protection for Blu-ray and HD DVD
http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/04/vesa-approves-displayport-1-1-kiss-those-dvi-and-vga-ports-good/

Virtual Worlds:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/special_reports/20070416virtuallife.htm
http://www.virtualworlds2007.com

Video sites with less regard for copyright than Youtube:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/04/forget-youtube-go-to-these-sites-if-you-want-hard-core-copyright-infringing-content/

YouTube recently announced that they will be launching a new site called Citizentube that will specifically cover political content:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/youtube-to-launch-citizentube.html

Social Media - the right tools for the right job:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/right-tool-right-job-social-media.html

A comparison of social-news sites
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/16/whos-taking-on-digg/

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Byte Into It 11th Apr 2007

Palm will be launching a homegrown Linux-based OS by the end of the year. http://digg.com/tech_news/Palm_prepping_its_own_Linux_based_OS

Microsoft ships Windows Home Server developer tools - SDK and APIs expected to bring home monitoring and security applications:
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=49553&r=rss

With U.S. copyright royalties threatening to kill Internet radio in the U.S., Michael Geist explains why webcasters considering a move to Canada will find that the legal framework for Internet radio trades costs for complexity. stations.http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/10/219231&from=rss

Arguing that the RIAA and big record labels may be misusing their copyrights, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has jumped in on the defendant's side in a New York, court conflict. They argue that the declaratory judgment remedy must also be made available to defendants, in view of the RIAA's habit of dropping the meritless cases it started but can't finish http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/10/216206&from=rss

Tim O'Reilly and others have proposed a code of conduct which could include restrictions like the outlawing of anonymous accounts:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/10/0257213&from=rss


Automate Your BitTorrent TV Downloads on OS X http://torrentfreak.com/automate-your-bittorrent-tv-downloads-on-osx/

How to sync your iPhoto library across Macs... http://digg.com/apple/Mac_tip_One_iPhoto_library_to_rule_them_all

Complete Guide To OSX Keyboard Shortcuts http://digg.com/apple/Complete_Guide_To_OSX_Keyboard_Shortcuts

VMware will release Beta 3 of VMware Fusion http://digg.com/apple/VMware_Fusion_Beta_3_due_Friday

Google Desktop for Mac OS X
http://digg.com/apple/Google_Desktop_for_the_Mac_1_0


Quicksliver tutorial videos:
http://lifehacker.com/software/quicksilver/hack-attack-the-quicksilver-video-extravaganza-250949.php

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Byte Into It, 5th Apr 2007

Blogs, Blogs, Blogs!

This week we talked about blogs. What they are, how to make them and some of our favourites.

Technorati - The Blog index / search engine
http://technorati.com/

Blogger - Where it kinda kicked off
http://www.blogger.com

Wordpress - Blogging applications and blog host
http://www.wordpress.com

MoveableType - Blogging applications
http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/

Drupal - Open source content management system
http://www.drupal.org/

Sage - RSS reader for Firefox
http://sage.mozdev.org/

XML
XML's primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different information systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet.[1] It is a simplified subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and is designed to be relatively human-legible.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

RSS
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

Users of RSS content use programs called feed "readers" or "aggregators": the user subscribes to a feed by supplying to his or her reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
* RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed," "webfeed," "RSS stream," or "RSS channel".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss

Neat Vid on 2.0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Tips on making a good blog
http://www.copyblogger.com/zen-and-the-art-of-remarkable-blogging/

Mac Blog Readers
NetNewsWire - http://www.newsgator.com/NGOLProduct.aspx?ProdID=NetNewsWire
NewFire - http://www.newsfirerss.com/

Mac Blog Editors
Mars Edit - http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/
Ecto - http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/

Free on-line blog sites
wordpress - http://wordpress.com/
blogger - http://www.blogger.com/start

UPDATE! 7/4/07
Awesome article in The Age about blogging.

Byte Into It 28th Mar 2007

The Playstation 3 is a computing powerhouse, with the new Folding distributed net plugin, the PS3 can now act as part of a giant net-wide cluster! Yellow dog Linux has been tailored especially for this platform.

PS3 and Yellow dog linux
http://arstechnica.com/articles/columns/linux/linux-20061018.ars