After my last post about the powers of PuTTy in conjunction with an SSH-enabled router, I started thinking about tutorials.
In a move that can only be described as desperate the RIAA, or better Cary Sherman, its President, suggested at the State of the Net Conference to bundle filters that check for copyrighted data with programs that would benefit the user such as antivirus applications to counter the problem with encryption that they are currently facing. He did not stop there though and suggested that the ISP would monitor, ehm, filter, the user as well through the likes of the modem for instance.
Television junkies will love Television Tunes. The website is a huge music archive of songs from known - and unknown - television series. As far as I can tell only the tunes of the original American tv series are available. All songs are listed alphabetically, just pick a letter and you will be presented with a huge list of tv shows beginning with that letter. There have to be way more than 1000 tv themes available on Television Tunes.
My first thought when I heard about the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Memory Card was that no one would be going to need this SD card with build in WiFi but when I read a little bit further my opinion changed from No-one-needs-that to Wow-what-a-great-idea. The Eye-Fi SD cards come in sizes of 1 and 2 Gigabytes, the 2 Gigabyte version sells currently at Amazon for $99.99 which is way more than a SD card without WiFi would cost.
UEFI which is an acronym for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface which will eventually replace the 20+ year old Bios. The new standard is backed by everyone so to speak including Intel, AMD, Microsoft, IBM, American Megatrends, Phoenix Technologies and Apple.
If you set up some kind of SSH Connection on a windows computer over the past few years, be it to connect to the university's network or to secure a line for an insecure FTP Transfer,you have probably encountered the program PuTTy on the way to salvation. It's easy to use, free and OSSish powerful. What many people don't know about PuTTy though, is what other powers aside from or better in addition to SSH slumber inside the little executable.
Most flat screen monitors these days come in sizes of 19'', 22'' and 24'' with a 16:9 ratio. The Samsung Syncmaster 2263DX LCD monitor is different. It does look like a normal 22" flat screen monitor if it were not for the little 7-inch monitor that could be added on top or at a side of it. It's a rather bold experiment in times where dual monitor setups become affordable to almost anyone.
There are two types of hard disk formatting possibilities, low and high level formating. High level formatting is the widely known formatting that erases data on the disks while low level formatting nowadays refers to the reinitialization to the factory settings. One of the major differences between both types is that data can successfully be restored after performing a high level formatting of a hard drive.
I always asked myself what the main reason for DRM - digital rights media - really is. It - maybe - can be used to stop legit buyers from giving a song to their friends or relatives but it surely does not step the spreading of music at all. Music pirates do get the music before any shop has them in their inventory which in turn means that everyone with a little bit of knowledge about P2P services can get their hands on the music.
A lot of things can be wrong if you setup a new monitor or never bothered to calibrate an old one. The screen could be to bright or dark for instance. I always hated calibrating monitors because it meant that I had to press all those tiny buttons on the monitor to access the functions but it is necessary for the best viewing experience.
Qtrax hype has reached a climax yesterday with reviews on many blogs and websites. The funny thing about this is that the client was not officially available yet and either all those reviewers had beta access or were simply using press material issued by Qtrax to review the service. Well, the client is available now but before I look at it I would like to describe Qtrax in a few words.
MP3 search engines seem to appear by the dozen every week and about 11 of them disappear after a while either because no one uses them or because they have been sued by a record company. I have seen defenses against this. The first is to search and play only music from "legit" sources like Youtube or Last.fm, the other is to host the mp3 search engine in a country that is outside of the Western jurisdiction.
Seeqpod is a mp3 search engine. You type in a song name, artist or any other information you got and Seeqpod displays results found on other Internet sites. Much like Google does but only for music and with the difference that a player is available on the result page that can play videos and music found that way.
Last.fm is not offering playback of full length music tracks and entire albums on their online music community website for users from the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany with other countries to follow soon thereafter. Songs can be played for a maximum of three times before information about a soon to be coming subscription service pops up. Details about the subscription service which will will have options for unlimited playbacks are scarce at this point, it is only sure that it will cost more than the current subscription price of $2.50 monthly.
A wonderful tip about a hack was send to me yesterday by Joe. It describes how to change the way a PC, or most other devices that use a power source, can be protected by by a simple magnet and some stuff that does not cost more than $5. All you need is a reed switch, a magnet and some duct tape. It does secure your pc as well from someone that wants to turn it on without your permission.
Yogi send me an interesting article published at the Guardian Online written by Simon Napier-Bell who has been a part of the Music Industry for over forty years. In it he takes a look back at the beginning of his career, how the Music Industry evolved in the wrong direction to finally experience today's meltdown.
My initial answer was one - of course - but then I realized that it is not that easy to answer. One video player is enough to play most videos on my computer, I use SMPlayer for this purpose. But what about all those video portals from tv companies or other companies that rent or distribute videos online ? It is beginning to get a little messy now.
The Internet offers several ways to view TV with your computer. Some TV stations offer tv shows on websites, some download clients and media players. Then we have those independent TV clients like Joost, Bablegum and Zattoo plus all those Asian P2P clients that stream TV - most of the time in Chinese - to your computer. And then there is another possibility, local stations. Most of those stations are independent stations that offer their TV program as a stream on their website.
The latest trends in the United States of America seem to be to create TV Channel portals offering streams of tv shows for authorized users. The other trend seems to be to push pay per bandwidth Internet which does not really match that well if you ask me. So, this time it's HBO with the announcement that a service called HBO on Broadband will go live tomorrow for subscribers living in the Wisconsin area with plans to expand the services later this year.
It seems that a script is currently sold that powers websites like Seekmp3, MP3zy and others. Those websites are mp3 search engines that all use the same Seeqpod database to provide users with mp3 findings. The question however is why someone would want to use a copycat website instead of the original one especially if the original one offers way more options and functions ?
It is possible to create ringtones from any song you like with free tools. Yes, that's right, you don't have to pay a dime for software, the music or the ringtone. All you need is some time and patience. You do need several utilities to create the ringtones: Audacity, the Lame Encoder if you do not have it installed already, FLV Extract, a browser and a video downloader. I suggest using Firefox and the excellent Download Helper extension. Install everything, look at the Download Helper article that I wrote a few weeks ago if you have troubles installing the Firefox add-on.
I'd like to point out three websites offering varied stuff to the professional as well as amateur web-designer and summarize their purpose and properties.
Global Pandora was a great service while it did last. Users from outside the United States where able to listen to Pandora, the Internet Radio that would create music stations based on artists or songs that you like. The Music Industry made the decision to block access to Pandora for all users from outside the United States although most users reported that they discovered new music that they found interesting and that the majority actually bought music they discovered at Pandora.
If you are looking for a Google-like search engine - in terms of simplicity and quality - when it comes to searching for, listening to and downloading mp3 music files from the Internet then mp3zy could be just what you are looking for. The interface is as basic as it can get, just a search mask that waits for user input and a search button.
Songbeat is a desktop music search, play and download software using Seeqpod technology. It scans the Internet for songs, stores information in its database and provides the user with fast working results once a search is initiated. The program could not be easier to use. Just enter an artist and results are displayed after several seconds.
Meemix reminds me a lot of Pandora. It's a music recommendation service that finds related artists and tracks from information that you enter. Once the first artist was found that you have entered additional artists and tracks are played once the song finishes or you click the next track button.
I like to convert my DVDs into avi format and put them on my XBOX hard drive or notebook hard drive to store them in a space saving manner. This means as well that I do not have to carry DVDs with me when on the road with my notebook. For that I was searching for a easy and fast method to convert a DVD movie into an avi file using xvid or divx as the codec.
If you thought that the HD war was over with the switch of Warner Studios from supporting both HD formats to just Blu-Ray then you might want to observe the market a little bit longer. The effect that Warner has left the HD DVD supporters will not be visible to consumers later this year when the contract expires (May 2008). From then on Warner will only release movies on DVD and Blu-Ray.
The Recent Documents are a comfort function in Office 2007 products such as Word 2007 or Excel 2007 that displays the last 17 documents that you have opened in the applications. You can open that menu when you click on the big - some say huge - Office icon button on the top left corner of the screen.
When I first reviewed Miro it was still known as the Democracy Player; a lot has changed since then and I decided to take a second look at Miro. The first question that I was asking myself was how I could classify Miro. Is it a video player, a videocast player, a way to play videos from video portals ? It's actually all of this although I would not use it for everything that I have just mentioned.
The album Ever Changing Times by Steve Lukather got a 2.2 out of 10 over at Komodo Rock which is one of the lowest scores ever. The reason why the album got that bad rating ? No, it's not the music, the lyrics, the artwork. It's a new form of protection to avoid leaks of the album to the Internet.
I would like to write about a subject that I have been investigating lately. I'm talking about links in general and how they should look like and how they should not look like. This is solely from a webmasters point of view so forgive me that I'm not taking the users into account here. Links play a important role in search engine rankings, they are probably the most deciding factor when it comes to search engine rankings.
Companies release new DVD writers all the time that have new functions and work better with certain type of media. They neglect DVD writers that they have produced before and it is quite common that those DVD writers will have problems with certain blank DVDs that have been newly produced.
It seems that more and more specialized websites appear that list videos from sites such as Youtube and Google Video. At the beginning websites that would post lists of tv shows and movies were the most common ones and they are still very popular. Other websites emerge now that only list anime, sports or music videos.
Fancast is a service by the cable provider Comcast who streams dozens of popular tv shows from Battlestar Galactica to The Office and The Unit free on their website. The service is available to viewers with a US IP only which means that everyone else will not be able to view the tv shows unless they hide their IP with a service like Hotspot Shield.
Finally we are seeing the long awaited progress in the Solid State Drives market. Ridata was the first company to announce three new 2.5" SATA Solid State Drives in 32-, 64-, and 128GB capacities that have read speeds of up to 170 MB / per second and write speeds of up to 105 MB / per second.
If you do not want to download music from Bittorrent you now have an alternative that might suite you better. You can use the Bitlet Bittorrent Applet to stream the music contained in the torrent to your computer. The applet phrase hints that Java - not Javascript - is required to stream the music from torrent files to your computer.
Did you recently purchase a DVD in store ? If so you must have noticed this wonderful reminder at the beginning that can't be skipped that downloading pirated films is stealing and a crime. I recently bought 24 season 4 on DVD which comes on seven DVDs and contains all the 24 episodes of this season.
It's only a few more months until I will make the final decision about the PC components that I will place in my new computer. I think I will finalize everything in the second quarter of 2008. But before I do that I list once again the components that I want to use in the new PC and hope to receive feedback if you think anything is missing or misplaced.
I could not sleep well yesterday evening because I was thinking about the Music Industry which was directly related to the article I wrote on that day. I was to tired to pen it down but I would like to try and recap my thoughts. We all know that album sales are down and that it will most likely stay that way. I thought about the reasons for this and came up with the following.
