Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on July 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

We added avatar support to the site yesterday for those of you who have accounts through MyBlogLog or Gravatar, but many of you expressed interested in creating an avatar without needing to use those services. For that reason registered users will receive the option to specify a URL for their avatar!

To take advantage of this option just login to your account and visit the Options page. A little bit down the page you’ll see a section for avatars that looks something like this:

It will show your current avatar off to the right (whether it be with MyBlogLog or Gravatar), and once you enter in a valid URL of an image you’ll be able to use your own avatar. Here are some things that you should know about the avatar system:

• Order of priorities given to avatars: Custom URL are looked at first, then MyBlogLog avatars, and then Gravatars.
• Any avatar URL that you specify will be verified to see if it exists, and we’ll check to see if it is an image. It will also make sure that each side of the image is smaller than 75 pixels which will help keep our page loading times fast.
• All avatars are 48 pixels in size, any that are larger or smaller will be stretched to be 48 pixels by 48 pixels. If you want your avatar to look the best you should use an image that is a square.
• You can also use images from our forum. The easiest way to do that is to right-click on your avatar image, and copy the image address to the clipboard. Then just paste it in the avatar box on the Options page.
• Changing your avatars will also modify what is shown on all previous comments that you’ve made.

Hopefully we’ll see some more of your avatars in the comments!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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Likely being mindful of the ever-watchful eye of the European Union, Microsoft’s announced its Euro version of Windows 7, affectionately and officially dubbed Windows 7 E, will not come packaged with Internet Explorer, or any other browser for that matter. Of course that’s not the whole story, as OEMs will be provided free copies of IE8 to bundle themselves alongside / instead of other browser options, and consumers can pick up their own copies via CD, FTP, or retail channels. This is undoubtedly in response to the antitrust cases the EU keeps throwing Microsoft’s way, and while we wouldn’t be surprised to see it end up on almost every European computer sold, we do wonder if this will at all speed up IE’s already rapidly diminishing share in the war of web browsers.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Windows 7 E coming to Europe without Internet Explorer originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A teardown of the newly introduced Amazon Kindle DX shows an e-book reader with many replaceable parts that make it service-friendly for its users.

Amazon launched the Kindle DX, a large size e-reader with a 9.7-inch screen and features such as auto rotate from portrait to landscape mode a few weeks ago. Priced at $489, the Kindle DX started shipping June 10. Wired.com’s review of the Kindle DX suggests the larger screen makes it more readable than the Kindle 2 but the device isn’t wallet friendly.

It didn’t take long for the technicians at Rapid Repair to take the Kindle apart. Despite its iPod-like back plate and construction, opening up the Kindle is easy. A few screws and a grey plastic bezel is all that holds it in place.

Kindle DX has a 3.7V Lithium Polymer battery with a 1530mAh rating. A few more steps and the device’s innards lay bare to show off processor chips from Samsung and a wireless card.

The best part about the process is how clearly the text continues to be visible on the display. It proves why bi-stable displays, such as used in e-book readers, score over LCDs. Though they have lower brighness when compared to LCDs, bistable displays can retain the image on the screen until the image is refreshed and even when there is no power.

For a detailed how-to on taking the Kindle DX apart, head over to the Rapid Repair site.

Photo: Kindle DX stripped/Rapid Repair

This article was written on December 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’m not sure how many of you have used the free GOOG-411 service before, but I’ve used it over a dozen times since its release. The speed and accuracy of the automated system is rather astounding, and the fact that you don’t have to pay $1.25 just to get a phone number is what really catches people’s attention.

Have you ever thought to yourself “how is Google benefiting from offering the service for free?” You may think that they are planing some sort of advertising system, but as it turns out Google themselves are actually skeptical about its profitability. Their real investment for the system is in the speech-to-text model, where they essentially turn all of the GOOG-411 users into lab monkeys:

Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we’re trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

That snippet was yanked from an InfoWorld interview with Google’s Marissa Mayer. As you can see the data that they are able to collect should play a huge roll in speech-to-text conversion for videos on YouTube. With that they would not only be better at filtering out copyrighted content, but they would also be able to show ads related to the content of the video.

So now that you know the true purpose behind GOOG-411, do you mind being a lab monkey?

InfoWorld Interview [via Google Blogoscoped]

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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