Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

Recent tech news:

• First Blu-ray Disc / DVD hybrid announced
  It sure took long enough to happen, but one of HD DVD's biggest benefits has finally made it over to the Blu-ray side. Yep, we're talking about a Blu-ray / DVD hybrid disc, with a single-layer of Blu on one side and a standard DVD on the other. Not surprisingly, the action's going down first in Japan, with Code Blue emergency helicopter doctor Blu-ray BOX (yes, seriously) as the first hybrid title. There's no word on when (or if) this technology will make it to US soil, but the sooner the better

This is awesome! Both my desk at work and my desk at home have dual screen setups. Unfortunately, from the conference room or the couch I’m at a disadvantage… I’ve only got my 1920 x 1280 laptop screen (how any of us ever made it on 800 x 600 I don’t know).

Thanks to Lenovo, I won’t have to go multi-monitor-less at remote locations much longer. Their new W700ds Thinkpad comes standard with a 17″ main screen and a 10.6″ secondary pull out screen. Battery life is bound to really suffer but this is still a pretty cool breakthrough.

What do you think about it?

Update: Engadget posted some additional info.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Firefox Tops Business Security Risk List
  The list this year expanded to include 12 applications, up from 10 last year, due to the increase in vulnerabilities and the popularity of applications such as Skype and Yahoo! Assistant that are often used by employees within an enterprise.

  Five of the top 12 applications with known vulnerabilities include:

  - Mozilla Firefox, versions 2.x and 3.x
  - Adobe Acrobat, versions 8.1.2 and 8.1.1
  - Microsoft Windows Live (MSN) Messenger, versions 4.7 and 5.1
  - Apple iTunes, versions 3.2 and 3.1.2
  - Skype, version 3.5.0.248

• YouTube Finally Embraces HD
  YouTube has just launched a new portion of its site dedicated to HD content, allowing users to easily browse through what is now the largest archive of high definition content on the web. The move has been a long time coming - in the last few weeks the site has been gradually building up to a large scale HD launch with the introduction of a 16:9 video player and the ability to watch HD on selected videos, but until this point it has been difficult to separate the HD content from videos encoded at YouTube’s normal resolution.

In recent tech news:

• Comcast expands ultra-fast Internet service
  Comcast Corp. says its new ultra-high-speed Internet service will be coming over the next several weeks to Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore and Ft. Wayne, Ind.

  Comcast says the next-generation Docsis 3.0 technology will include some of the fastest speeds available today, including a tier with download speeds of up to 50 megabits per second.

• SMS Text Messaging for Gchat
• Pastebud Brings Copy and Paste to the iPhone
  Pastebud, a bookmarklet/webapp combo that works around the lack of a copy or paste function in the iPhone and iPod touch, has just gone live. And it's surprisingly elegant and painless, with a few small hitches.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Microsoft warns of new Windows bug, says attacks under way
  On the same day that Microsoft Corp. released its biggest batch of security patches in more than five years, the company also warned Windows users of a critical bug that it didn't get around to fixing.

  In an advisory posted yesterday, Microsoft said that "limited and targeted" attacks are in progress by hackers exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in the WordPad Text Converter, a tool included with all versions of Windows. The flawed converter handles Microsoft Word 97 files on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4), XP SP2, Server 2003 SP1 and SP2.

• Hidden feature turns iPhone into TV gaming device
  Though largely demonstrative, the game uses the iPhone's accelerometer for input and steering while routing the game's video through a video-out cable to the TV. Freeverse noted that the program ran best on the second-generation iPod touch, which includes a 532MHz processor compared to the iPhone and iPhone 3G's 412MHz chip.