Posted by Joe on April 30, 2008 ·
Recuva is a free utility that will recover deleted files for you. This even includes pictures deleted from digital cameras and songs from many MP3 players. It isn’t always possible to recover deleted files, but Recuva is a great tool to have handy if you need to try. Give Recuva a try.
Recuva is brought to us by the folks behind CCleaner, the awesome file cleaner and system optimization utility.
Posted by Joe on April 29, 2008 ·
From TVOverNet.com: TheWB.com will Play Full Episodes of Friends and Smallville
The KidsWB.com site mentioned in the linked post is also very cool, with more content to be added in May.
Link: TheWB.com
Posted by Joe on April 28, 2008 ·
The Amazon Kindle ebook reader is now in stock and ready to ship, just in time for those economic stimulus rebates people started getting today. It looks like Amazon may have resolved the supply issues that have kept the device so hard to get. The kindle is $399.00 with free Two-Day shipping.
Posted by Joe on April 28, 2008 ·
Student tries Pringles found in 30 year old time capsule: “It tastes like Pringles with an added 30 years,” he said. “I ate something older than me.”
Posted by Joe on April 28, 2008 ·
Gom Player is a nice looking skinnable media player that includes lots of codecs, even handling DVD playback. The free program has a nicer interface than the capable VLC, and playback seems a little smoother. Gom also has some very cool features, like capturing frames from video files and starting playback before files are finished downloading. The Gom player will even try to play broken AVI files, ignoring bad frames and a bad or missing index.
Check out Gom Player
Update: If Gom crashes opening a DVD, try installing DScaler MPEG Filters. This solved the problem for me.
Posted by Joe on April 28, 2008 ·
The NY Times writes about tv shows on the web: Golden Years of Television Find New Life on the Web
It’s a good excuse to post a list of some of the great “full episode” content sources available now. The list includes web sites that feature at least some full-length TV. It’s by no means complete.
Hulu.com
In2TV.com
Veoh.com
Joost.com
NBC.com
CBS.com
ABC.com
Fox.com
CW.com
Discovery
USA Network
MTV.com
ABC Family
tv.yahoo.com
TNT.com
TBS.com
AOL
The N
Sci Fi
Lifetime
CMT
TV Food Network
TVLand.com
Cartoon Network
TurboNick
Disney Channel
4kidstv
I’d like to develop [...]
Posted by Joe on April 28, 2008 ·
From the Washington Post: When Young Teachers Go Wild on the Web
Note to teachers — if you teach elementary kids in a public school, bragging about sleeping with hookers on Facebook will come back to haunt you. The same goes for teaching developmentally challenged kids and having “you’re a retard” displayed.
Posted by Joe on April 28, 2008 ·
Apple updated the iMac line today with faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors and more powerful graphics.
The new 20-inch 2.66 GHz iMac, for a suggested retail price of $1,499 (US), includes:
* 20-inch widescreen LCD display;
* 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 1066 MHz front-side bus;
* 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 4GB;
* 320GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
* a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
* ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB GDDR3 memory;
* built-in iSight video camera;
* built-in [...]
Posted by Joe on April 27, 2008 ·
More of this, please: Single Mother Gets RIAA Suit Dismissed, Sues Them Right Back
Posted by Joe on April 26, 2008 ·
Not exactly a criminal mastermind:
A Kirksville, MO. man was arrested on Thursday for trying to boost a $517 Viore (yeah) LCD television by swapping the UPC tag with one from a $3.16 bottle of water.
Posted by Joe on April 26, 2008 ·
So! You think your death kick can match my breathing technique!
More Uncle Earl
Posted by Joe on April 25, 2008 ·
Great name for a band: Black market bacon dogs
Posted by Joe on April 22, 2008 ·
The latest version of popular Linux distribution Ubuntu (8.04 — Hardy Heron) will include the Wubi installer, which makes it possible to install Ubuntu from within Windows. Even better, there’s no scary repartitioning of the hard drive. The Linux file system is installed as a disk image on top of the Windows NTFS system. Read more about Wubi on Linux.com.
It’s not a new idea — the Slackware distribution included something superficially similar called UMSDOS back in the mid 90′s. The Linux file system was represented by a bunch of MS-DOS directories under a directory [...]
Posted by Joe on April 22, 2008 ·
If you use Outlook Express to access Hotmail, this is for you:
As a valued customer, we want to provide advanced notice that as of June 30, 2008, Microsoft is disabling the DAV protocol and you will no longer be able to access your Hotmail Inbox via Outlook Express. As an alternative, we recommend that you download Windows Live Mail, a free desktop e-mail client that has the familiarity of Outlook Express and much more.
I guess I always thought Hotmail connectivity was via IMAP, which many email clients can accommodate. Apparently not; Hotmail and Outlook Express actually use a protocol called [...]
Posted by Joe on April 22, 2008 ·
The Flip video camera is a huge success, and that’s at least partly because it’s so simple and easy to understand. The Flip doesn’t try to do everything; rather it tries to be a competent if basic video recorder — and nothing else. To see just how competent the $150 Flip camcorder is, check out this straight-up comparison to a $3,200 Canon XH-A1 HD camcorder. The comparison videos were taken at the same time, with the little Flip duct-taped to the side of the big Canon.
While no one is saying that a high-end video camera can be replaced in all cases by a Flip, the reality [...]
Posted by Joe on April 22, 2008 ·
The folks at PETA are planning to sponsor a million dollar x-prize for vat grown meat. As appetizing as eating animal tissue cultured in a test tube sounds, I think I’ll stick with more traditional sources. Although the soy protein “Chik’n Nuggets” from MorningStar Farms my daughter likes aren’t bad at all.
Posted by Joe on April 22, 2008 ·
Windows XP SP3: “A quick, painless upgrade”.
Posted by Joe on April 21, 2008 ·
Microsoft’s new sponsored edition of Works has been caught in the wild. The application features a square ad in the lower right corner on all screens. Since this application suite has traditionally been “given away” on new computers without ads, it seems like a step in the wrong direction. If you can’t afford or don’t need Microsoft Office just go download the OpenOffice.org suite, or get the AbiWord word processor and the Gnumeric spreadsheet. Or if you’re ready for cloud computing, give Google Docs a try.
Posted by Joe on April 21, 2008 ·
Dr. Who fans are recreating lost episodes of the show from the 60′s, using the surviving soundtracks combined with clever animation — or in some cases photo mashups. The original tapes were destroyed at some point by the BBC.
Read more at Wired.
Here’s a good example:
Posted by Joe on April 7, 2008 ·
What a well designed content-oriented web site looks like:
The Atlantic
Lots of white space, big fonts, easy navigation, and ads that are prominent without getting in the way. This site is all about the content, with no distractions. The design is so nice, The Atlantic can even be forgiven for calling its bloggers “voices” in the navigation menu.
Posted by Joe on April 7, 2008 ·
Pizza.com sold last week for $2.6 million. Is it 1999 again?
Posted by Joe on April 7, 2008 ·
From USA Today: The Charleton Heston film guide
I loved Planet of the Apes, but nothing beats Soylent Green and Heston’s famous closing line, “Soylent Green is people!”
Posted by Joe on April 7, 2008 ·
Coming soon to Europe: phones on a plane
Posted by Joe on April 7, 2008 ·
In the world of “professional” journalism, three of anything makes a trend worthy of a reporter’s attention. The latest example is found in the New York Time’s Technology section: In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop
I especially liked this unintentionally hilarious bit from the article:
“I haven’t died yet,†said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds [...]
Posted by Joe on April 4, 2008 ·
Is Starbuck a frackin’ Cylon? Katee Sackhoff answers that question in an Amazon Wire interview.