Widescreen monitors become more and more common these days which run on native resolutions like 1400 x 1050, 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1200. Many applications, especially games do not support the native resolutions of widescreen monitors and it is also extremely difficulty to find wallpapers that do not need to be stretched. I did find a resource that has a compilation of wallpapers for widescreen monitors offering the resolutions mentioned above

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continue reading "Wallpapers for widescreen monitors"

Youtube Videos which are also used on sites like Myspace or embedded into blog posts sometimes take ages to load which results in freezes and stuttering which can only be solved by pausing the playback until the video is fully loaded. There is a possible way that would accelerate the download of the youtube video by up to five times. This is done by the free software Speedbit Video Accelerator which builds up five different connections to the video server to speed up the streaming of the video. This method does not help if you are already using the maximum bandwidth available of course.

Each request for a youtube video is routed through the Speedbit servers which open five new connections to the video server offering the video which results in a speed increase which can be remarkable.

The service has to be running in the system tray while watching youtube videos and starts automatically whenever a new video is requested from youtube. I was not able to take a look at some of the program features that are shown at the developers website but the video acceleration is working fine.

continue reading "Speed up Youtube Video Playback and Download"

Did you ever fell into the trap that you signed up for an supposedly unlimited service only to find out at a later time that the unlimited service did not really mean unlimited at all ? I fell into that trap with my first website which i hosted using an unlimited webhosting plan. No extra money for transfers over a certain amount of gigabytes, no worries about cpu and sql usage, everything was advertised as being unlimited. I started hosting some file mirros and ran some pretty resource demanding scripts and it did not took long until I was told to either upgrade my hosting account to a dedicated server or leave the company and look for hosting elsewhere.

This was basically the termination of my account with that provider and I decided to read the terms of service throughly from that time on. Today I read about Verizons Unlimited Data Plan which has a download limit of 5 Gigabytes and restrictions in place that forbid many internet activities such as downloading and streaming movies, p2p or web camera posts. So, the biggest question I’m asking myself now is what exactly is unlimited in the unlimited data plan from Verizon ? It is obviously not the data, so what is it ? What justifies the name ?

continue reading "When Unlimited means limited"

A new version of the Internet TV application Joost has been released yesterday. The first thing that struck me was that I had to uninstall Joost 0.85 before I could install the new Joost version. If that was not bad enough I had to create a new account because Joost changed to a new user system. Signup was hassle free though. There have not been many changes to the system as far as I can tell, one new feature seems to be the so called channel catalog which displays all the channels that can be added to view in Joost.

The default selection does not contain all channels that are available and I was able to add a Poker channel for instance using the Channel Catalog. I would estimate that only a third of all available channels are added by default, everything else has to be added using the Joost Channel Catalog. You can add some great shows like Poker TV, a Trance channel and some pretty obscure ones like the recipe channel or a hobby channel.

continue reading "Joost 0.9 is out"

Apple and Emi announced today that the entire digital repertoire from Emi music can be purchased at Apples iTunes store without DRM. The songs will be offered at a higher quality which means an encoding quality of 256 Kbps instead of the usual 128 Kbps. There is however one downside: The DRM free songs cost $1.29 per song instead of the usual price of $0.99 per song. I’m a little bit concerned about the 30% increase which can not be explained rationally I think. Albums on the other side will not change in prices at all which makes the single song price increase a mystery to me.

Music Videos can also be purchased DRM free with no change in price. If you did purchase EMI songs on iTunes before you can upgrade the existing song to the DRM free version for $0.30 per song. This is definitely a step in the right direction, the only thing that really bothers me is the increased price for single tracks which surely is reasoned by EMI with losses due to people spreading the songs more freely around the net.

continue reading "DRM Free Songs come to iTunes"