Hulu has added Hulu Plus Chromecast support to its iPhone app, allowing users of Apple’s smartphone to control playback of the on-demand video service through the compact media adapter. Hulu Plus first made an appearance on Google’s streaming dongle at the start of the month, but was only available on the iPad version of the […]
This article was written on November 16, 2011 by CyberNet.
Google Voice is a great service for having a single phone number ring multiple phones, plus you also get unlimited text messaging for free. A deal like that is pretty hard to beat, but iOS users aren’t able to get the integrated experience without jailbreaking their iPhone. There are some apps, however, that try to make using Google Voice a little more seamless.
The commonality I found between most iOS Google Voice apps is that since there is no public API for Google Voice many of them can feel sluggish if you don’t have a good network connection. This is because they are essentially loading and parsing the desktop version of the Google Voice site with each operation. When you’re trying to send or receive a simple text message the last thing you want to do is wait a minute for the app to finish what it’s doing.
The developer of Think Messenger ($2.99 on iTunes) and Think Dialer ($1.99 on iTunes) decided to take a different route. Instead of using the desktop version he went with the mobile version, which meant everything would be a lot faster, but some limitations would also be imposed. The speed improvements over some of the other apps like GV Mobile+ is rather noticeable to me. It even feels faster than the official Google Voice app released by Google themselves.
You may be wondering why there are two apps instead of just one, but I think that’s what makes me love this integration even more than the others. By separating out the calling and SMS text messaging it feels more like the native iPhone experience, and overall the apps feel a lot more polished than the others I’ve bought. The only thing that feels a little out of place is that the voicemail retrieval is done through the Think Messenger app, which I suspect is because the Think Dialer does not yet support push notifications. With Think Messenger you get native push notifications without any subscription fees, and it works very well.
Think Messenger Screenshots
Think Dialer Screenshots
Think Messenger Homepage ($2.99 on iTunes – Universal iPad/iPhone app)
Think Dialer Homepage ($1.99 on iTunes)
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
This article was written on May 01, 2012 by CyberNet.
Yesterday we covered how to install new skins in XBMC, and today we are going to show you how you can customize the backgrounds skins use for each of the entries on the main home screen menu. When I hover over the movies menu, for example, mine will rotate through over a dozen photos that I downloaded of my favorite movies. You can tweak these settings directly from the XBMC interface, but I actually found it to be faster to change the settings in the appropriate configuration file. So I’ll show you both methods and you can pick the one you find to work better.
If you are looking for somewhere to get images for your favorite TV shows and movies, I recommend heading over to TheTVDB or TheMovieDB. Each has a vast selection of 1920×1080 backgrounds that can easily be downloaded to your machine.
In XBMC navigate to Settings -> Skin, and there should be an option related to backgrounds or backdrops depending on the skin you are using. Select the menu item you want to modify, and then choose whether you want to set it to a single background image or multiple images:
Now just save the settings, go back to the home screen, and you should see that the changes have already taken effect.
If you are updating all of the various menu items it might be faster if you work directly in the guisettings.xml configuration file. Before making any changes to this particular file make sure you close out of XBMC first. After that go ahead and navigate to your profile folder:
And then open up the guisettings.xml file.
Now you need to know what to look for. There is a lot of data crammed in the guisettings.xml file, and the setting names will change based upon the skin you are using. I’m going to provide the names you need for the Confluence skin (the default skin) as well as the Aeon MQ 3.
The portions of the XML file we will be looking for are going to be in this format:
<setting type=”string” name=”SKIN_MENU_ID“>FILE_OR_FOLDER_PATH</setting>
The SKIN_MENU_ID is what you’ll search for in the guisettings.xml file, and the exact name will depend on the background image you’re looking to modify:
Confluence Theme:
Aeon MQ 3 Theme:
Once you’ve found the one you want to update, then you need to put in the FILE_OR_FOLDER_PATH. As you might guess that is the path to a single image or multiple images (if a folder is provided). You can use files that are stored locally on the computer or any one of the remote protocols that XBMC supports, such as SMB, FTP or AFP. Here are some examples of what the paths might look like:
After you’re done making your changes you should save the file, and then start up XBMC. You’ll see the result of your hard work:
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
This article was written on April 04, 2006 by CyberNet.
There has been a lot of talk about how to optimize Firefox to run the most efficiently. CNet’s most recent article goes through some helpful tips but doesn’t jump into many details. Here I am going to explain which extensions have memory leaks or will slow down Firefox’s performance.
First, before I dive into the main topic there are a few things that you should change in your Firefox settings if you really want to optimize this. Just follow this tutorial that I put together.
Okay, now let’s talk about the extensions. This is the point that you may want to turn your head because I am about to bring some truth to some of the most popular extensions.
That is about it for the most popular Firefox extensions that have been tested. Another important thing to do is upgrade to Firefox 1.5.0.1 if you haven’t already. This build has fixed two memory leaks that were very common: leak when selecting and leak from global scope polluter. The latest trunk also has a long list of memory leak fixes so keep your eyes peeled for a new release of Firefox.
UPDATE: It appears that in the Digg posting of this article that the author of ForecastFox made a comment:
We know Forecastfox 0.8.5 has some memory leaks. We are planning on doing a full leak analysis for 1.0. In the mean time, I’ve been actively working on resolving some of the leaks, and I think I’ve made some good progress for our 0.9 release.
Also, while the current build of IE Tab is up to 1.0.8 there is no mention that they fixed the memory leaks in this updated build.
UPDATE 2: Tracy wrote in and said that a good alternative to ForecastFox is Weather Watcher. I didn’t even think of mentioning that but this is the software that I run on my computer. It is not an extension for Firefox but takes very little RAM and is FREE!
Firefox Extensions With Issues
Firefox Memory Usage Thread
Reducing Firefox Memory Usage
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
This article was written on January 24, 2012 by CyberNet.
HDR is the process of combining multiple photos with the hope that the resulting image is clear in both the light and dark areas. Getting good free HDR software that is capable of merging the photos together can be a little tricky since there are a lot of things it has to take into account, such as perfectly aligning each image.
Picturenaut is a free HDR app for Windows that has done a wonderful job with my photos. The program has been in the works for over 4 years, and you can tell that a lot of sweat has been put into making it. Merging your images will generally take just a few seconds, and with the settings available you are able to tweak the resulting photo to look exactly how you want it to.
Here are some of the high-level features offered by Picturenaut:
Picturenaut Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)
[Images used for HDR example are from Wikipedia]
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
This article was written on March 22, 2011 by CyberNet.
I’ve been getting at least a dozen emails a day asking when the CyberSearch extension would be getting updated for Firefox 4, but I have some bad news for everyone. Our extension was made possible thanks to Google’s Web Search API, but they deprecated it back in November 2010 in favor of a new JSON Custom Search API. From a developer’s point of view this kind of thing happens all the time… old technologies are replaced with new technologies. Generally these improvements are for the better, but in this case they put some restrictions in place for anyone using the new API:
Usage is free for all users, up to 100 queries per day. […] Any usage beyond the free usage quota will fail if you are not signed up for billing. Once you have enabled billing, you will be billed for all requests at the rate of $5 per 1000 queries, for up to 10,000 queries per day. If you need additional quota, please request additional quota from the console.
The CyberSearch extension basically performs a query every time you pause for a second while typing in the Firefox address bar. I’d estimate that the 100-query limit they are imposing will be hit by our extension every second given that there are over 80k daily users. So it would likely cost us thousands of dollars a day to keep this running… assuming Google would even approve a rate limit as high as what we’d need. Since we don’t make any money off the extension you can see how that isn’t really feasible.
So why is CyberSearch still (intermittently) working for some people? Google’s blog post from last November says that they are in the process of phasing out the older APIs, and as a result they are “tightening up the enforcement of the rate limits” as time goes on. Unfortunately that means you will likely see the extension inconsistently working, and that has been the root cause of 99% of bug reports being submitted to us. In my tests about half of all requests being made would return an error saying the extension exceeded the rate limit quota.
Thanks to everyone who provided support and troubleshooting during the development of CyberSearch! It was a fun ride, but unless Google changes their policy this will have to be the end of the road.
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
Though the event continues to be called “Editor’s Day”, this week we had an extended stay with NVIDIA in Montreal, learning about the company’s newest in gaming development and hardware innovation. The biggest news of the event was surely the unveiling of G-Sync, a hardware module made by NVIDIA to be planted in the backs […]
In an effort to expand the understanding the public has of the developer program NVIDIA has in GameWorks, this week they’ve taken the stage with showings of a couple of new (or otherwise newly branded) technologies called FLEX and Flame Works. With FLEX, you’re working with a newly collected set of unified GPU PhysX – […]
On August 16, Google rolled out an update for its Google+ app for IOS, bringing with it Hangouts and Drive media access. Today another update has rolled out, this time bringing more features to the Hangouts portion of the service, among them being the ability to view animated GIFs and make voice calls to phones. […]
This week we’ve heard quite a bit about NVIDIA’s aim to bring details on their GameWorks development and optimization program to the public, amongst these such high-powered features as OptiX. What Optix represents is an SDK (a software development kit) for the creators of next generation’s games – games like Destiny from the developers at […]
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