The Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 has been released a bit more than a month ago and is already beginning to cause problems for several users who applied the Service Pack. I would think that a Service Pack adds functionality and fixes security vulnerabilities. This one apparently blocks old file formats from being loaded by Microsoft Office applications.
So, what do we make of this ? The rumor is that Apple is launching a record label together with Jay-Z according to BSG who say they have confirmed it from a high-up person attached to Jay-Z. We do not have many details as of yet but we can make some assumptions. The deal makes perfectly sense if you consider that Apple already has a very popular distribution model in place which would profit the most from artists that sign under the new label.
Youtube is a well established video portal with the huge advantage that content is added every second by its visitors. Most Internet users probably do not know that Microsoft has its own video portal called MSN Video. That is probably the greatest weakness of MSN Video that hardly anyone knows about it and that this has direct impact on the amount of available videos.
A picture comparing Apple's iPhone with the iPhone Nano which is supposed to come out in October 2008 was published on Flickr. The iPhone Nano, as usual, will be smaller than it's first generation predecessor but also cheaper retailing for a price of $300 or less.
Microsoft competes with Google in many areas but has still chosen to create a video channel on Youtube to promote Microsoft products. While this seems odd it could be an effort to reach potential customers in enemy territory. What most websites reporting about the ads are reporting is that the PR guys decided to leave the comment function activated which invites many comments that are criticizing Microsoft.
If you have one of the newer iPods with 8GB+ you might want to consider putting all the information of Wikipedia on it for fast reference. I personally think that this is an excellent idea if you regularly visit Wikipedia to research information but do not have Internet connection all the time. This could also be useful on your holiday trip if you want to quickly lookup information about a place, location or historical fact.
I have been praising emTube just a day ago which was an application for Symbian S60 mobile phones such as the Nokia N73 and Nokia N95 that made it possible to browse Youtube with your mobile phone and download + view movies as well. No conversion was needed and the quality of the service was astonishingly good.
Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1 has been finally released - sort of - and can be downloaded from the Microsoft download website. The links are already up and it is only a matter of time when the links do not point to a Ups sorry link not found message but the real download link of the Office 2007 Service Pack 1.
I have to admit, I'm not the cheapskate, I don't try dodging costs and I don't employ the technique described here, but it is a fairly easy way to get rid of […]
Graham send me an email just a few minutes ago informing me that Youtube users could finally upload high definition videos to Youtube which have the benefit of a much sharper, clearer image and the negative side effect (for some users) of a size increase of the videos.
Amazon Subscribe and Save was mentioned in the Cybernet News RSS feed and it sounded that interesting that I decided to take a look at it myself and write a small article about it. The service offers a way to subscribe to household items and select a delivery schedule for those items. Shipping is free of charge and buyers do get a 15% discount on purchased items.
The blogosphere was going crazy last week with rumors about the sudden Pagerank drops of several authority sites like Problogger or The Washington Post. Soon enough lots of theories made the round which ranged from being punished because of selling links to being in a blog network that would list all of its sites in the sidebar.
A white background with blue links and black text is how the default Google website looks like. While this might be effective and offers a great usability it looks pretty boring but this is going to change right now. It is possible to redesign Google Web Search if you use Firefox.
I was thinking about looking at other services that I could try to see if they were any better than the Google services that I'm using at the moment when I came upon a post by Everton who was writing about the same thing at this blog. His main domain received a major Pagerank decrease from 6 to 3 and this made him realize that it is probably the time to move on and look for services that do it better than Google.
Price Drop is a Firefox add-on that gives the user the option to track prices for selected items at the Amazon.com online store and notify him when the price drops. Besides keeping track of prices drops at the Amazon store it also notifies you if the price dropped after purchasing the item which helps getting a refund for the item that you bought because of the lower price.
The so called Flickr Related Tag Browser offers an interesting and comfortable way to search Flickr using tags. The user enters a tag of his choice and the website compiles the relevant information and pictures from Flickr. 25 of the pictures are shown as tiny thumbnails which increase in size if the user moves the mouse over any of them.
I never played around with Google Earth for long and did not follow the news that closely. Maybe that is why I never heard about the flight simulator that is build into Google Earth. I read about it today in a computer magazine and thought it would be cool enough to post it along to all those other unknowing ones.
Preezo is a fast powerpoint maker on the web. Like most of the web 2.0 apps it uses Ajax to power its site. To use the application you need to register and log in. The first thing I notice is there is no lag at all using the different features. It is very responsive. Even with Google Docs there is some lag while adding stuff. I would happily use this on my browser.
Some images at Flickr are weakly protected with an image overlay called spaceball.gif. Whenever you right-click the image to save it you do save spaceball.gif instead which is a 1x1 pixel image showing nothing at all. The same happens if you try to drag the image to your desktop or hard drive.
I always wondered which company would be able to compete with Apple's iTunes store and only a handful companies came to my mind. Besides Microsoft and eBay Amazon came to my mind. They are a established brand and I do not know a single person who does not have an Amazon account already.
Microsoft released the Office 2003 Service Pack 3 just a few hours ago which contains the latest updates for Office 2003. The pack with a size of 117 Megabytes contains 22 security patches and updates as well as the previous two service packs for Office 2003. The main emphasize of this service pack seems to be security related because 14 of the 22 updates are security related.
Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 is currently priced at $619 at Amazon. Microsoft knows that only a few students have the money to buy a software suite for roughly $600 which is why they decided to run a promotion that sells Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $59 which is an absolute bargain.
Frozen iPods are more common than you might think. Read on before you go out and buy a new iPod just because you can't get your old one fixed. As I said, frozen iPods are common and there are a few steps that you can undertake that will most likely fix the iPod and get it out of it's frozen state.
Apple once again announced a new batch of iPod devices to lure consumers in the trap of buying just another iPod that can store more Gigabytes, is smaller or offers a touch screen interface. High-End users have the choice between a 8 and 16 Gigabyte iPod Touch which looks pretty similar to the iPhone but ships without phone capabilities or between a 80 and 160 Gigabyte iPod Classic device.
NBC wants more control on pricing and usage restrictions while Apple did not want to give in which is why the current relationship between those two is a little bit icy and it remains unclear if NBC shows will still be available in iTunes at years end. Meanwhile Amazon and NBC announced that NBC's tv shows will be made available on Unbox.
I was just reading a long post by Steven Mansour on his website where he described how he tried to close down his account at Facebook. He still received numerous emails from Facebook after using the so called "Account deactivation" which made him wonder if his account was really gone from their system.
If you ever wondered how so many users are able to watch hundreds of videos that are published on Youtube on a daily basis you might want to consider using a service like SlapVid which offers previews of the daily top 25 videos at Youtube.
I did not pay much attention to the Apple iPhone hype until now but today the newest commercial for the iPhone caught my attention on Youtube. The first thing that struck my mind was that the navigation was blazing fast. As you might know a multi-touchscreen is being used for writing and navigating through menus.
It looks more like a multimedia gadget with phone capabilities than the other way round which I personally do not like that much. I like slim, fast gadgets that are not that bloated than the iPhone. I would never for instance watch Youtube videos on such a Gadget, does not make sense to me.
Microsoft Office introduced several new file formats which can't be read by older versions of the various Office products. I'm not sure why Microsoft decided to change the file formats but it is really a hassle for me. I'm running Office 2007 on my system while my girlfriend is still running an older version of Microsoft Office.
It happened twice already that she worked on my computer and saved a Microsoft Word format in the new format (.docx) and was not able to read the file on her computer. She does not have Internet access there which means that it was really problematic to get the right format on her computer.
A collection of the best photos published on Flickr in 2006 with an option to vote for all of them in a voting process that reminds me of those hot or not type of sites.
Your first option is to take a look at how the photos have been rated by other users. Please be aware that all of the photos on the site are the best of 2006 and that the rating on this external site is only a rating of good photos. It can happen that a photo gets only 1 point which means that is is bad considered to a photo with a higher rating but still great if you consider all photos on Flickr for this year.
If you are looking for a rather unique screensaver for Windows 2000, XP or Windows Vista you should take a look at Flitter which is a mashup from Flickr and Twitter at the moment. What it does is that it is retrieving realtime data from both Flickr and Twitter to display those when the screensaver is active.
You obviously need a computer that is connected to the Internet to use this screensaver but it is very well worth it. The default setting for the screensaver pulls data from the public timelines of both Flickr and Twitter but you have the possibility to custom this further.
Youtube Sunday it seems. We all know that Youtube likes to cooperate with everyone who looks a bit like authority and takes down videos pretty fast. It does not always have to be copyright infringement, it can also be original works of art that some authorities like the Turkish or Thai government want removed from Youtube pressuring the site with a countrywide ban. (man I love the Turkish interpretation of Democracy and free speech)
Now ain't that interesting ? You can use Google Maps to get directions from one location to another. It is most of the time pretty accurate displaying information about highways, signs, exits and so on to give you a good impression of the route that lies ahead. You can try it now and head over to the Google Maps website and use the Get Directions tab to enter a starting point and destination to see how the system works.
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.
It seems that the big three, that is Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, always have to compete against each other. When someone introduces a new feature the others are surely going to announce a similar feature that is just a tad better than the feature of the other company. We are witnessing the race for Email storage at the moment. Microsoft has a storage limit of 2 Gigabytes for their users while Google has currently a limit of 2,8 Gigabytes. Yahoo decided to accept the challenge and give the others something to choke on, they announced today that they will offer unlimited Email storage to all of its users in the near future.
You might know that Youtube held a video awards voting on their site for the last five days were everyone was able to vote for their favorite videos that Youtube preselected. Ten entries were shown and you could assign spots from 1 to 10 to them. Now, after all votes have been cast Youtube presents the Winners of the 2006 Video Awards in the categories Most Creative, Best Comedy, Best Commentary, Best Series, Best Music Video, Most Inspirational and Most Adorable. The videos below are in the same order in case you are wondering.
Amazon offers a huge product catalogue on their different (country) websites which has one major problem and that is clarity. Navigating through the content can be really painful, especially if you only want to check the current price of several items that you would like to buy. One way to handle this would be to store all products as bookmarks and check them manually every day to see if the price was reduced. This is however not very practicable.
The free Amazon Price Watcher aids you in this task. It allows you to search many Amazon stores - including those for the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Canada) - using the Amazon Price Watcher interface. Just search for products in selected categories and save interesting results in a library. The library offers fast access to information such as price and availabilty including a price chart which displays the overall price trend.
We already know that most iPod can store various information next to music and videos. Wikipedia can be uploaded as well as information about subways in various citys. The iPod city guide is another excellent application for most iPods, including iPod Nano and iPod Video, which adds information about more than 300 cities to your iPod.
Did you know that there are more emoticons accessible in Skype than the 56 that are displayed during chats ? I'm not sure why those additional ones have not been included in the menu where you can choose the emoticons. The only way to add them to your text would be to enter them manually.
You might remember the other stories that circulated the internet before: get a free usb stick, get a free microsoft visual studio 2005. This time it is a free microsoft vista and microsoft office if you do the same as last time. Register at the power together website, listen to three webcasts and bam, you might get vista and office shipped right to your doorstep.
