Hasta La Gadget!

It’s not like anyone could predict the media streamer war that would erupt in 2010, but it looks like Western Digital’s taking things pretty seriously. The company has just issued a somewhat major overhaul for its WD TV Live Plus and WD TV Live media players, adding Facebook support while also giving US-based users the ability to instantly rent or purchase movies via Blockbuster on Demand. Post-firmware update, users will also be able to tap into Deezer (an on-demand music service), Flingo (another internet TV portal) and AccuWeather (a place that “forecasts” what’s happening in our “atmosphere”). Potentially more important than all of that, however, is the addition of USB wireless keyboard support — simply plug in a USB wireless dongle that ships with most every wireless keyboard out there, and you’ll be free to update your Facebook status or search for “Bed Intruder Song” through YouTube, all from the comfort of your sofa. Huzzah!

Continue reading WD TV Live media players gain Blockbuster on Demand, USB wireless keyboard support

WD TV Live media players gain Blockbuster on Demand, USB wireless keyboard support originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Nov 2010 02:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on February 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

We’ve never really said much about StumbleUpon, but it’s one of my favorite browser add-ons and helps me find new websites that I might like in different categories like computers or travel. At times it’s addicting because there are so many websites out there that I’d never know existed were it not for StumbleUpon. By clicking a thumbs up or thumbs down, I can rate sites that I visit, and StumbleUpon will use that information to find websites that match my preferences.

StumbleUpon can be downloaded for either Internet Explorer or Firefox, and besides using it to find new websites, you can actually use it to find videos, or even pictures and games. They also add in the social networking by allowing users able to create lists of friends to share sites and communicate with.They’re already up to Version 3.0 which is hard to believe. I just made the upgrade, and now it’s better than ever. From their changelog, here are the latest changes:

• Avatars on the ‘Send to’ menu and on shared notes.
• Drag and drop toolbar placement.
• Configurable channel buttons.
• Channel indicator on the stumble button.
• New icon set.
• Toggle button configuration via the options dialog.
• Several search/tag configurations to cater to power users.
• Compatibility with the IE Tab extension.
• Fix for a bug where buttons are spaced too far apart on OSX.
• Probably workaround for the issue where the toolbar cannot connect at the beginning of a browser session, causing a spurious ‘server is down’ message.
• Fix for a bug where rating a page thumb-down when the page is new to StumbleUpon was displaying a generic error message. New behavior is to display an explanatory dialog.
• Final phase of migration to hashed passwords for users who upgraded from versions older than 2.85.

StumbleUpon has already made the move to cater to Wii fans by creating an interface specifically designed for the Wii’s Opera browser. Now Wii fans can use the browser to search for their favorite videos to watch using StumbleVideo. According to Webware, they say that there’s a possibility that StumbleUpon would like to bring their services to other wireless—enabled TV Boxes like Apple TV?

You can view the Firefox Changelog here where you’ll also find the download.

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Hey look, a chart with the iPad on top. Aren’t statistics fun? And yet, this chart may not mean quite what you think it does. The Nielsen Company presented a cadre of individuals with a list of nice, shiny gadgets and let them cross off anything and everything they’d like to buy in the next six months, and 31 percent of kids 6-12 picked the iPad as one of them. That doesn’t mean these youngsters wanted the iPad any more than a game console, mind you, it just means more of them picked the tablet than any other single game console on the list. Also, it turns out that the iPad was the only tablet PC available, so it could well have served as a proxy vote for other slates — Galaxy Tab, anyone? The survey results also don’t factor in ownership, so if the Xbox 360’s low on the buy list, it could be because respondents already have one… but we suppose this is the definitive proof we’ve been searching for that e-readers are on the outs in the 12-and-under crowd. Jeff Bezos is crying over his evening oatmeal right now. After the break, see what the same chart looks like for teenagers and adults. (Hint: they aren’t all that hot on handhelds.)

Continue reading Nielsen: 31 percent of kids want an iPad, other stuff

Nielsen: 31 percent of kids want an iPad, other stuff originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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

It’s been nearly two months since Mozilla originally announced that they were going to help Thunderbird "spread its wings," and it looks like we finally have a result of the talks. Mozilla has decided to branch Thunderbird off into its own subsidiary, and it will be started with $3 million in seed money that has been provided by the Mozilla Foundation.

Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s CEO, says that this move will help them improve the email client:

The result is that Mozilla is launching a new effort to improve email and internet communications. We will increase our investment and focus on our current email client — Thunderbird — and on innovations in the email and communications areas. We are doing so by creating a new organization with this as its sole focus and committing resources to this organization. The new organization doesn’t have a name yet, so I’ll call it MailCo here. MailCo will be part of the Mozilla Foundation and will serve the public benefit mission of the Mozilla Foundation.

What will the new organization do exactly? Here’s a few things it hopes to accomplish:

• Take care of Thunderbird users
• Move Thunderbird forward to provide better, deeper email solutions
• Create a better user experience for a range of Internet communications — how does / should email work with IM, RSS, VoIP, SMS, site-specific email, etc?
• Spark the types of community involvement and innovation that we’ve seen around web "browsing" and Firefox.

The interesting thing in Mitchell’s article is that she was extremely careful this time around to shed some light on the positive things, and seemed to stray away from the things that could cause some concern. One of the things that came to my mind is what’s going to happen after the initial $3 million in seed money is gone? Where are they going to get their funding from then? Firefox is a goldmine when it comes to the integrated search box, but Thunderbird doesn’t really have the same revenue sources as a browser.

Don’t expect to see anything out of the ordinary for a little while since the three current developers will continue to work on Thunderbird 2 patches as well as the future Thunderbird 3. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this move truly is to make Thunderbird better, and here’s hoping that MailCo can sustain itself!

Sources: Mozilla Press Release, GigaOM & Mozilla Links

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This article was written on February 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Many of you have probably become quite familiar with Foxit Reader by this point because of the speed and simplicity that it offers over the classic Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you haven’t tried it then you’re really missing out on a speedy little PDF reader that doesn’t even require installation, which means you can easily take it with you for use on any computer.

I’ve been using Foxit for quite some time now and switching to Adobe would feel like taking a step backwards. One thing that I always thought would make Foxit a little better was removing that advertisement in the upper-right corner of the window. It is nothing too obtrusive but I have seen “cracks” available to remove that ad. The thing that always struck me as interesting was the option in the View menu to remove the advertisement. Periodically I would remove the advertisement from Foxit using the option, but it would always reappear right after I restart the program.

Just a few days ago in the forum Richard pointed out (and blogged about) how to remove the Foxit Reader advertisement permanently without needing a crack. All you have to do is start Foxit, uncheck the Advertisement option from the View menu, close Foxit, and after you do that a total of 5 times the ad won’t show up anymore.

I was quite surprised to see that the trick really worked! After 5 times the ad stopped showing up even though I could always go into the View menu to re-enable it incase I start going through ad withdrawals. I was never so bothered by the ad that I needed to find a way to remove it, but it is nice knowing how to get rid of it now.

Thanks for telling us about this Richard!

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