ABC mobile phone application for election results
Twine: The First Mainstream Semantic Web App?
described as a "knowledge networking" application. It has aspects of social networking, wikis, blogging, knowledge management systems - but its defining feature is that it's built with Semantic Web technologies.The aim of Twine is to enable people to share knowledge and information. At first glance it is very much like Wikipedia, but there is a whole lot more smarts to the system.It's not based around socializing, but to share and organize information you're interested in. Using Twine, you can add content via wiki functionality (there are many post types), you can email content into the system, and "collect" something (as an object, e.g. a book object).
Twine
Use Twine to better leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your friends, colleagues, groups and teams. Twine ties it all together.
Blu-ray’s DRM crown jewel tarnished with crack of BD+
One advantage that backers of Blu-ray have touted in the format battle with HD DVD is its extra helping of "unbreakable" DRM called BD+. It's not unbreakable after all. SlySoft, makers of AnyDVD, have released a new beta of their AnyDVD HD disc ripping application that it claims can successfully crack and rip Blu-ray discs protected by BD+.
Paramount and Warner Bros. market $3 DVDs in China
Paramount has become the newest movie studio to make efforts to compete with pirates by offering low-cost, legitimate DVDs in China. New movie titles will go on sale some two months after their theater debut in the US, and for only $3. Paramount will also be joining forces with an unlikely partner in order to combat piracy: competitor Warner Bros., which already has outlets set up in China to sell DVDs.
Networks want to nobble ad-skipping - Technology - theage.com.au
The free-to-air television industry has declared war on ad-skipping personal video recorders as it prepares to release a free electronic program guide for the first time. Despite releasing the guide, the industry is pressuring PVR makers to limit the advertisement-skipping functions of their products before they are authorised to access it. The networks have threatened legal action under Australian copyright law, but manufacturers say Australia-specific modifications to the advertisement-skipping features would not be possible as their products are made for global markets.
Slashdot | 90% of IT Professionals Don't Want Vista
A survey by King Research has found that Ninety percent of IT professionals have concerns using Vista, with compatibility, stability and cost being their key reasons. Interestingly, forty four percent of companies surveyed are considering switching to non-Windows operating systems, and nine percent of those have already started moving to their selected alternative. "The concerns about Vista specified by participants were overwhelmingly related to stability. Stability in general was frequently cited, as well as compatibility with the business software that would need to run on Vista," said Diane Hagglund of King Research.
Virtual Visa cards for secure online shopping | Lifehacker Australia
For those wary of using their credit card online, our mates at Gizmodo AU have written up the new Visa Virtual Prepaid (VCARD) - which works as a virtual debit card. You buy a card of the value you want (with a $5.50 set up fee) - and if you want, you only have to use it once and then ditch it.
Microsoft Launches Windows Live Domain Apps | Lifehacker Australia
Microsoft has quietly launched a free for-your-domain apps suite, Windows Live Community Builder, that offers a number of Windows Live services customised for domain owners, including Live Mail, photo sharing, calendars, the LiveDrive online storage app and more. The services offered indicate a clear attempt to match up with Google Apps, but users of Windows Live and other Microsoft applications may be to get more out of this suite—alerts, central contact lists, the "Spaces" page builder and other features. The Live Community Builder requires a free sign-up and a registered domain name.
Monitor Application Usage with RescueTime | Lifehacker Australia
Windows and Mac only: Monitor your computer activity easily and efficiently with freeware application RescueTime. Just install the application and let it run in the background so that it can capture data for your online activity and application usage, then check the dashboard and view graphs and charts about your habits. Beyond the rich set of analytics provided, RescueTime also knows when you're away and will not collect any data during that time. If you really want to know how you're spending your time while you're "working," RescueTime is a solid choice. RescueTime is a freeware application for Windows and Mac, requires a free registration to download.
Give or get tech support at Fixya | Lifehacker Australia
In beta at the moment, Fixya is aiming to be a one-stop-shop for people seeking tech support, user guides and repair guides for products from a range of vendors. Rather than a tech support business, Fixya is designed as a community, where users provide both the questions and the answers. You can browse the database of already answered questions, or pose your own question to the community of registered experts. Experts are users who have registered with the site and nominated their own area of expertise. They can post answers to the site, or help users directly via online chat. The success of a site like this will be in attracting knowledgable people who can provide decent answers to user questions. The site encourages people to sign up and answer questions by paying them. It's not a huge amount, a few bucks per answer posted to the site. I noticed that the Top Expert on the site has already racked up 300 solved problems, so the incentive scheme seems to be working to attract problem solvers to the site.
Ditch Your Taskbar for Minimised Thumbnails with miniMize | Lifehacker Australia
Windows only: Freeware application miniMize creates thumbnail images of your minimised application on your desktop, providing an interesting and customisable alternative to the Windows taskbar. Similar to previously mentioned ThumbWin, miniMize boasts virtually all of the same features in addition to an arguably improved interface. If thumbnails on the desktop sound to you like clutter, miniMize won't be for you. If you like the idea of ditching your taskbar for minimised thumbnails, miniMize or ThumbWin should do the job. miniMize is freeware, Windows only.
iiNet cuts the cord and delivers nation-wide Naked DSL - Telecommunications - www.itnews.com.au
iiNet has unveiled its long awaited and Australia’s first nation-wide Naked DSL broadband service which eliminates the need to pay telephone line rental for ADSL2+ internet access. iiNet's Naked DSL offering has been positioned for both home and business users and is bundled with the ISP’s iiTalk VOIP product, allowing customers to retain their existing phone number. The bundle offers free local and national phone calls over the VoIP service. It is worth noting that upload traffic appears to be counted as part of your monthly limit.
Internet could face meltdown by 2010 - Internet - www.itnews.com.au
The internet could suffer drastic slowdown by 2010 as the sheer scale of data carried exceeds the ability of the network to handle it. Analyst house Nemertes Research Group has spent the last year analysing both data flows over the internet and the core infrastructure that carries it and concluded that in three to five years serious bottlenecks will occur. "Our findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years," reads the report, 'The internet singularity, delayed.' "We estimate the financial investment required by access providers to “bridge the gap” between demand and capacity ranges from $42bn to $55bn, or roughly 60 – 70 per cent more than service providers currently plan to invest."
BBC NEWS | Technology | Warning over net address limits
Internet Service Providers urgently need to roll out the next generation of net addresses for online devices, internet pioneer Vint Cerf has said. Every device that goes online is allocated a unique IP address but the pool of numbers is finite and due to run out around 2010. A new system, called IPv6, has been awaiting roll out for 10 years. Unless IPv6 is switched on in the coming years, some devices might not be able to go online, Mr Cerf has warned.
Search: Find Anything Online with Search Operators
Search operators—those commands that engines use to narrow down what you're looking for—are pretty useful. The HybridSEM weblog goes into extreme detail about the various search operators that work for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Looking for a video on MSN about monsters? Use the feature:video monsters operator. If you're a searchaholic, this guide comes in pretty handy, and you'll certainly learn a thing or two about how to find things more easily on the 'net.
Featured Firefox Extension: Save a Link for Later with Read It Later
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Keep track of your daily to-read list with the Read it Later Firefox extension. Similar to previously mentioned Readeroo—which integrates directly with Del.icio.us—Read it Later takes a slightly different approach, keeping your reading list local until you read it and decide whether or not you want to bookmark it. If you do, you have the option to bookmark on any number of popular bookmarking sites, from Del.icio.us to Digg. The drawback is that Read it Later doesn't currently sync across browsers, which would be a nice touch. Read it Later is free, works wherever Firefox does
Miro 1.0: the free and open future of video on the net - Boing Boing
Miro, the open and free video player, has gone 1.0, and launched in a polished, slick package for Windows, Linux and MacOS. Miro (formerly Democracy Player) is the open and free alternative to Joost, Windows Media Player and iTunes for getting, watching and organizing your video. In place of DRM and proprietary formats, Miro uses the VLC video-engine to play practically every video format under the sun. It has over 2,700 channels of free content (and does extensive outreach to indie creators to get their material front-and-center in Miro's excellent channel-guide). And it uses BitTorrent to download, which means that the creators you love won't get clobbered by bandwidth bills when their videos get popular.
Daily Show writer explains writers' strike -- if digital content isn't worth anything, how come Viacom is suing YouTube for $1 billion? - Boing Boing
In this youtube, Daily Show writer Jason Rothman delivers an hilarious monologue about the Writers' Guild strike against the studios, who claim that they can't compensate writers for digital media because no one knows how much this stuff is worth. The clip delivers a Daily Show-style montage of coverage from the $1 billion+ Viacom lawsuit against YouTube, including clips of Viacom's CEO talking about how digital content is worth tons of money and getting paid is the name of the game. The clip includes a nice guest appearance from Daily Show correspondents, too.
Obama's innovation plan a Christmas list for the geekerati—analysis
Barack Obama's campaign has now released a relatively comprehensive and extremely ambitious technology document (PDF) that lays out a whole slew of general and specific proposals for doing everything from reforming the patent system to implementing a national broadband policy. In releasing this "technology and innovation plan,"
Digg - Opera Mini 4 released
After three beta releases Opera Mini 4 is finally here!
HOWTO Use Creative Commons licenses - Boing Boing
"Creative Commons" explains the fundamentals of using CC licenses for people who are interested in the idea but haven't tried it yet.
Slashdot | Wikipedia Begets Veropedia
"October saw the launch of Veropedia, a collaborative effort to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it in a quality stable version that cannot be edited. To qualify for inclusion in Veropedia, a Wikipedia article must contain no cleanup tags, no "citation needed" tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images after which candidates for inclusion are reviewed by recognized academics and experts. One big difference with Wikipedia is that Veropedia is registered as a for profit corporation and earns money from advertising on the site. Veropedia is supposed to help improve the quality of Wikipedia because contributors must improve an article on Wikipedia, fixing up all the flaws, until a quality version can be imported to Veropedia. To date Veropedia contains about 3,800 articles."
Flashback | Lifehacker Australia
You love to read the Wikipedia, but do you write it?
Digg - Electronics + YouTube = Engineer Resource [Google Ajax API]
Your Electronics Open Source blog, used the new Google Ajax API to make an electronics project video-page. The Electronics Engineer can bookmark this page, and everyone can grab this idea (code) to insert video-related content in own Blog.
laptop TV | Lifehacker Australia
CNET reporter Elinor Mills has a computer but no TV and runs down how she watches television on the laptop on the cheap. See also "6 ways to catch your favourite TV shows online".
FileMaker diversifies, offering yet another OS X personal database app
FileMaker has launched a brand-new product, called Bento, which is being billed as an easy-to-use "information manager" that will use databases to store all of your bits and pieces. The new application includes lots of templates and themes for organizing all different types of information, and also allows users to easily customize the various templates and displays. Actually, the applications looks much more like something that Apple itself would release, three-pane interface and all. If you'd like to play with Bento, FileMaker has already released a preview version of the application, and says that the full version is expected to launch of January or February. Both the beta and the final version are Leopard-only, since they use Core Animation as well as other Leopard tricks.
Mac OS X 10.4.11 lands, along with iPhoto 7.1.1
The latest update to Mac OS X Tiger, 10.4.11, was finally released this afternoon at a medium-hefty ~130MB for Intel users (just under 70MB for PPC). The update includes a long list of improvements that affect both PowerPC and Intel users.
Check Software Update: 10.5.1 is upon us
Mac OS X 10.5.1 should be appearing in Software Update shortly, bringing a whole slew of improvements. Here's a brief rundown of what's covered: * Password-protected AirPort disks now show up in the Finder sidebar, and an issue with saved passwords for wireless networks is resolved * Back to My Mac reliability improvements * Tweaks to Disk Utility, including improvements to disk partitioning when multiple RAID sets are created on the same drive * Tweaks and fixes for iCal and Mail * Fixes a bug where Windows shared folders are sometimes read-only over SMB * Printing and security fixes * Time Machine tweaks
Top 10 Quicksilver Plug-ins | Lifehacker Australia
check out top 10 favourite Quicksilver plug-ins, and how to set them up.
Digg - Terminal Codes for Leopard Tweaking
Beautify your Leopard with single liner terminal codes.
Digg - Top 15 Leopard Hints
It’s been almost a month since Leopard was officially released, and in that month we’ve had some time to play with the OS and get to know it.
Batch Process Images with Photo Drop | Lifehacker Australia
Mac OS X only: Resize, rotate or convert multiple digital images at once with Photo Drop, a small utility that creates programmable image editing droplets. Launch Photo Drop and set the actions you want to perform, like rotating, padding, cropping, resizing, resampling or adding copyright or other meta info and save your droplet. Then, drag and drop any number of images onto the droplet, which processes them and saves them. Great for making high-res digital photos fit for email, watermarking your stuff or resizing a group of images for your blog, Photo Drop is a free download (donations encouraged) for Mac only.
http://macapper.com/2007/11/17/dockulicious-customize-your-dock-in-a-jiffy/
http://macapper.com/2007/11/17/tip-stack-your-recent-items-in-leopard/
http://macapper.com/2007/11/18/imagewell-33-leopard-ilife-08-compatible/
http://macapper.com/2007/11/15/seashore-freeware-image-editing-for-mac/
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