Hasta La Gadget!

Jan 27

Using Google Voice to Find Your Phone, Hotmail Adds Push Support, and More

This article was written on September 06, 2010 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Angry Birds Beta Available for Android
One of the most popular iPhone games (and definitely a personal favorite of mine) is on its way to the Android platform.

YouTube Ads Turn Piracy into Revenue for Content Providers
Some content providers are apparently not requesting the takedown of copyrighted materials on YouTube, and instead are having ads displayed on the user-uploaded clips.

Amazon’s $0.99 TV Episode Pricing (to own, not rent) is a Steal?
Amazon’s TV episode pricing appears to be a bargain when you compare it to Apple’s newly announced $0.99 rental pricing.

Windows Phone 7 Released to Manufacturing
Microsoft has announced that the Windows Phone 7 OS is finalized, and that they will begin final integration with their partners’ hardware, software, and networks.

Roundup of Apple Announcements
Gizmodo provides a rundown on the new Apple TV, iPods, iTunes, and iOS announcements made by Apple last week.

The New Xbox 360 Controller
Microsoft is taking an interesting approach with their new Xbox 360 controller. It is a silver color with gray buttons (instead of the typical colored ones), and must be purchased with a $65 play and charge kit.

Cisco Patches Bug That Crashed 1% of the Internet
A critical bug in Cisco’s router software has been patched after causing an Internet blackout for approximately 1% of online users.

Gmail Tries to Tackle Email Overload with Priority Inbox
Google’s newest mail feature, called Priority Inbox, tries to automatically sort the content in your Inbox so that the most important stuff is near the top.

Hotmail Adds Exchange ActiveSync Support
Hotmail users are now able to get their email, calendar, and contacts pushed to their mobile device.

Microsoft Increasing Xbox Live Annual Membership by $10
The cost of an Xbox Live subscription will go from $49.99 to $59.99 on November 1st. You can, however, renew before then at a discounted 12-month price of $39.99.

Digg Goes Through Early Issues
Digg users expressed their dislike of the newly upgraded Digg by promoting a large number of stories from Reddit to the Digg front page.

Firefox 4.0 Feature Freeze Coming on September 10th
What does a feature freeze mean to you? Well, when Mozilla stops adding new features that means they’ll focus on bug fixes, performance, and stability. This is also the time that a lot of extension developers jump on board to make their extensions compatible.

AMD Will Retire ATI Brand Later This Year
After some research AMD has decided that they will be better off leaving the ATI brand behind, and labeling everything as an AMD product instead.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

Facebook Adds Remote Logout Feature
A new feature in Facebook lets you view your recent activity and kill a session you may have left open on another machine.

Move iTunes 10 Buttons Back to the Top on a Mac
Running a simple command in the terminal will let Mac users move the open, close, and minimize buttons back to the top bar in iTunes 10.

Conference Call Up To 10 People with Skype 5 Beta
The most recent beta version of Skype 5 will let you video chat with up to 10 people simultaneously.

Google Storage Can Be a Lifetime Backup Solution
Lifehacker noticed that when you buy additional Google storage and let your plan expire, your data will still remain available in a read-only state.

Using Google Voice to Find Your Phone
With the recent addition of free computer-to-phone calling to Gmail you can actually call your own cellphone to try and locate it.

Microsoft Releases Fix for Critical Flaw Found in 100+ Popular Apps
Microsoft has posted a “FixIt” solution for a vulnerability that can be exposed for certain applications that load DLLs in an insecure way. Affected apps (that have been reported) include Notepad++, uTorrent, Foxit Reader, VLC, Office 2007, Opera, Firefox, and many other popular apps.

FilerFrog Adds Useful Context Menu Entries to Windows Explorer
With FilerFrog you can organize, rename, split/join, or encrypt/decrypt files all from the context menu in Windows Explorer. You can also manipulate images.

Analyze a Chrome Extension Before Installing It
A new Chrome extension called Extension Gallery Inspector is actually able to analyze other extensions to see what kind of things they are doing under-the-hood.

Awesome Guide to Windows 7 Media Center
If you haven’t used Media Center before I highly recommend you at least skim through this guide. It has some tips on helpful add-ons like Boxee, and also demonstrates how you can edit a show.

New Textbook Torrent Site Launches
A new site, called TorrentMyBooks.com, is making textbooks available for free. Most of what’s on the site is illegal, but the BitTorrent network isn’t exactly known for the amount of legal material it holds.

Enable GPU Acceleration in Chromium Builds
You can enable GPU acceleration for rendering pages in Chromium builds by using a special flag when starting up the browser..