I'm an IT Professional, geek and technology 'edge case'. I enjoy keeping up with the latest devices, technologies and news in the IT world. On this site I post some of those things I find most interesting. I hope you find them interesting as well.
Microsoft to Offer Free Anti-malware Software with Windows It's specifically designed to require few computing and connection resources to work with older machines and limited bandwidth in an effort to protect new users on inexpensive computers around the world. The company has also announced plans to end the Windows Live OneCare paid subscription security service.
Yang Steps Down As Yahoo CEO, Search For Successor Begins This was an unavoidable event, and in our opinion Yang took too long to step down. In May it was clear that Yang’s heart was no longer in it, and he reconfirmed that last month at the Web 2.0 Summit. Under his watch the company has lost tens of billions of dollars in market cap and thousands of former Yahoo employees (and hundreds of execs) are now gone.
TiVo, Domino’s team up to make us all fat Here's the deal: when a Domino's ad or product placement shows up, TiVo users can click through with their remote controls to order pizza, or can access an on-demand ordering screen through a TiVo menu. It's similar in theory to the deals that TiVo has with Fandango for movie ticket ordering or with Amazon.com for ordering products related to TV shows, except that you get a pizza.
Slydial Makes It Even Easier To Avoid Awkward Human Interaction a free service that lets you dial any mobile phone number and get directed straight to voicemail. It may sound counterintuitive, but it can be a godsend for avoiding awkward phone conversations – I’ve had it saved in my phone’s ‘Favorites’ menu since the service launched (though I’ve never used it, honest).
Firefox 3.1 gets tab tearing The latest Firefox 3.1 development release features the announced option for tab tearing: drag a tab out of its current window, and it is removed and opened on a new one, providing a more intuitive way to organize your web browsing.
Military launches video-sharing site for troops
After banning YouTube and other social Web sites on all overseas computers in May, citing bandwidth and security issues, the U.S. military on Tuesday launched an alternative video-sharing Web site for troops, their families, and supporters.The new site is called TroopTube and has a look and function very much like YouTube, with one major difference: a Pentagon employee screens each video upload for taste, copyright violations and national security issues.
Next version of Office heads to the browser
Microsoft will offer browser-based Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in two ways. For consumers, they will be offered via Microsoft’s Office Live Web site, while businesses will be able to offer browser-based Office capabilities through Microsoft’s SharePoint Server product.The company has been pushed into this arena by Google, which has been offering its free Google Apps programs for some time. In competing with Google, Microsoft is touting the ability to use Microsoft’s familiar user interface, as well as the fact that all of the document’s characteristics are preserved.
10 Best Tips for WordPress Optimization
This WordPress optimization guide is a collection of useful tips and tutorials on how to speed up your WordPress site.
Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD
Putting any old video file – like the DivX/Xvid-encoded videos you’ve downloaded with BitTorrent – onto a DVD to play on your TV can be a daunting task. There’s plenty of software that tackles this sort of thing for a price, but as a lover of open source software, free’s always my first choice.Luckily for all of us, authoring playable DVDs from just about any video file has gotten a lot easier in the open source community. This week I’m going to show you how to burn those downloaded TV shows to a DVD you can play in your living room using the free (as in speech), open source application, DVD Flick.
Chinese Doctors Officially Classify Symptoms of Internet Addiction
The Beijing Health Ministry is soon to adopt “internet addiction” as a disorder along with compulsive gambling and alcoholism in the official diagnostic manual. Doctor Tao Ran, who treats sufferers at Beijing’s Military General Hospital, says the threshold is around six hours a day and one of the following symptoms in the past three months: “yearning to get back online, mental or physical distress, irritation and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.” So, um, yeah, I’m addicted, along with ten percent of users under eighteen in China, according to a study cited by a state official.
Silicon Mountain Allio HDTV Has Built-in PC, Blu-ray, More
That new HD LCD TV is great, but you know it really needs? A DVD/Blu-ray player, for starters. Also, if you could toss in an Intel Core2Duo processor and a terabyte of storage, that would be nice. And while we’re at it, I’m going to need a wireless keyboard and mouse, plus a split-screen feature, so I can multi-task. Got all that? Good.
iPhone twice as reliable as BlackBerry? Dream on
I love my iPhone and have never felt tempted to return to the BlackBerry, but I was still rolling my eyes at TechCrunch’s report of the iPhone being “twice as reliable as the BlackBerry”. After all, my iPhone crashed in four different applications in a 45-minute period this afternoon.Of course, the referenced SquareTrade study covers hardware malfunctions, not software malfunctions. In this, perhaps it is true that the malfunction rate for Apple’s smartphones after one year is only 5.6 percent, while Research In Motion’s phones crap out 11.2 percent of the time.
But in day-to-day usage, I’ve found my iPhone software to be far less stable than the ugly-but-reliable BlackBerry software.
Google can now OCR all PDFs
Google has a new system that scans Acrobat PDFs on the web for words using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Similar to its process for using OCR to detect words in PDFs that have already been OCR processed, the new system will do the same for scanned documents posted online that haven’t yet undergone OCR.If you have scanned PDFs and are interested in having them converted into text, you can upload the images to your website and take advantage of this service.
Simply follow the instructions for how to use Google OCR from the Digital Inspiration website
Top 10 Things to Look Forward to in Windows 7
While the next iteration of the ubiquitous Microsoft desktop operating system, Windows 7, isn’t a dramatic overhaul of its predecessor Windows Vista, it does fix several sore spots and add a few welcome features. Rumor has it that Windows 7 will drop in the middle of next year, but last month Microsoft released a “preview” tester build of Windows 7. After living in the Windows 7 Preview for a week now, several features and niceties jumped out at me which promise to make Windows a better place to work come 2009. Let’s take a look.
