Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on October 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

Special Blog Action Day Edition!

Blog Action Day is here! That’s right, today is Blog Action Day, the day that bloggers are encouraged to get one issue out there in the minds of all their readers.  This years topic is the environment, and the goal is for every blog to post one article about the environment today.  Given how important our environment is, we decided that we’d spend the entire day writing about it, particularly how the technology that we use affects the environment.  Today’s Microsoft Monday feature was put on the sidelines while we focus all of our attention on different things that all of us can do to help the environment and make this awesome planet a better place to live. To start the day off, we’re going to take a look at how much power your TV consumes. You might be surprised, so lets take a look!

When it comes to TVs, according to CNET, technology and size matter in terms of energy consumption. In general, the average plasma TV consumes much more energy than a rear-projection TV or an LCD or CRT TV. If we were to order the power consumption between the different technologies from high to low, plasma would top the list with an average of 328 watts, and the rear-projection TV would be next consuming  208 watts on average. If you want to consume the least amount of energy possible, you’ll want an LCD which consumes 193 watts on average, or a CRT TV which consumes 146 watts of power on average.

Taking this further, lets take a look at the power consumption of different types and sizes of TVs, and the estimated annual energy cost for each. This information comes from a guide that CNet put together with a comparison of 54 different TVs.

Annual Energy Costs Associated with Different TVs.

As part of CNet’s guide mentioned above, they calculated a “watts-per-square-inch” rating for the four major technologies used to make TV’s:

• Rear Projector: 0.14 watt per square inch
• LCD: 0.29 watt per square inch
• Plasma: 0.34 watt per square inch
• CRT: 0.34 watt per square inch

With Plasma TVs using a considerable amount of energy compared to some of the other technologies, it’s no surprise that these types of TVs are in danger of being banned in Australia. According to an Australian News Source (ABC News), there’s a growing demand for Plasma and LCD TVs, but many of them won’t meet the requirements should the Australian government implement a six-star rating system for energy efficiency. If this rating system get implemented, “all current plasma TVs and many LCDs could be removed from sale by 2011.”

So what does this mean for you? Well, it depends on the country you live in! Eventually I could see many more countries implementing an energy efficiency rating system to help as far as conservation goes like Australia is hoping to do. If other countries were to follow Australia’s steps, we could see  TV manufacturers developing energy efficient TVs to replace the current plasma and LCD options.

Considering it’s blog action day with a focus on the environment, now may be a great time to take a look at your other technology devices like a DVD player or your Xbox 360 or PS3 and determine if the power it consumes makes it a device worth keeping. And finally, if you’re TV shopping, consider purchasing an LCD TV over a Plasma TV.  Aside from the fact that plasmas consume more energy, they also don’t last as long as an LCD (based upon the lamp/backlight in the TV). When it comes to all of your tech toys and in particular, your TV, remember that the technology that it’s built upon, and the size of it do matter if you want to help the environment and save energy!

This article was written in part for Blog Action Day.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on November 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

Recently Stardock launched TweakVista version 1.01. We’ve written about it before (here and here), but just as a refresher, it’s described as “an enhancement application that helps users configure Windows Vista to meet their personal needs. The program has been designed to allow both casual, non-technical users to safely use it as well as contain a host of advanced features for power users to dig into the internals of Windows Vista.”

Here’s the thing about TweakVista — it doesn’t allow you to do anything that you can’t already do with Vista out of the box. What’s nice though is that everything is in one central location so that it’s easier to access  the settings you’d ever want to change. It also makes it easier to manage certain things versus doing it on your own, and does a great job of explaining them for those who aren’t familiar.

Today we’re going to give you a visual guide of what it’s all about. Take a look at the screenshots (click to enlarge them) to see what all TweakVista has to offer… it’s a lot! Please note that we used the full-featured version which costs $19.95. There is an awesome free version available that just lacks a few of the features for those of you who’d like to try before you buy, or who don’t need a full-featured version. At the end of this article, look for the instructions on entering our giveaway to receive one of two TweakVista licenses.

Start Up

From the Start Up menu you’ll be able to control just about everything to do with the start up process. You’ll be able to see which programs are set to run upon startup, and you’ll also  be able to disable some of those programs. TweakVista will monitor your computer’s startup, shutdown, and sleep performance which could help you identify if there are any problems.

Resources

Under this section you can identify the programs that are using the most amount of memory. No one likes a program that’s a memory-hog, so this will be helpful. It’ll also show you your process list. Certainly you can easily get this information without TweakVista, but it’s nice to have it all in one centralized location.

Services

This part of TweakVista will help you manage all of the services that come with Vista that you may or may not use. From here you can turn off the services that you don’t use like web folders, diagnostics, error reporting, and more.

Security

Security is an important part of any operating system. From here you can customize your security settings like enable UAC, or switch to the secure desktop to display elevation requests.

Display

Stardock describes this portion of TweakVista as: “Unleash the power of the Desktop Windows Manager, underlying Vista’s user interface.” From here you can do things like enable or disable the Flip 3D window switching.

Power

One of the best options here is the power cost analysis which estimates how much your annual cost is per year to run the computer as well as your carbon footprint.

Assessment

If you’re currently running Vista, you’re probably aware of the assessment feature which rates your computer. You get an overview of how your computer performs, but TweakVista breaks it down further and provides you with detailed information on what the assessments are based on.

Internet

Allows you to easily enable certain network features that aren’t enabled by default.

SMARTGuard

Information presented in the SMARTGuard section was provided by your hard drive.

Misc. Tweaks

Includes context menu handlers, environment variables, and the system restore feature to create a restore point.

–Giveaway–

We have two licenses of TweakVista to giveaway thanks to Stardock! If you are using Windows Vista or have plans of getting it in the future, go ahead and enter. All you have to do is leave a comment below, and we’ll choose two winners.  One winner will be randomly chosen from the first ten comments, and a second winner will be chosen from all entries(it can be someone from the first 10 as well). The sooner you enter, the better!

As always, only one entry per person and this giveaway is void where prohibited. Each winner will receive a license for TweakVista which is valued at $19.95. Please note that if you are selected as a winner, you’ll need to create an account (if you don’t already have one) over at Stardock, and then they’ll go ahead and add the copy of Tweak Vista to your account.

The contest will end tomorrow on Tuesday, November 20th at 12 PM central time and the winners will be announced shortly after. Please be sure to include your email address in the email field of the comment box because this is how we’ll contact you, should you be chosen as a winner.

Thanks to Stardock for sponsoring this giveaway!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on March 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

I am actually surprised at how many times I see people asking whether Firefox needs to have some sort of widget engine built-in. I think a lot of that stems from Opera having the built-in widget handler, so a lot of people think that Firefox is behind in the times as far as this goes.

One of the big reasons that Opera does have this feature is to allow people to add more to the browser since it is not extensible in other ways. For example, there is a widget for Opera that will retrieve and display the weather which is something an extension for Firefox already does. So it is kinda a tradeoff in some sense, but most people prefer to have extensions like Firefox offers over the widgets that Opera has.

Not only that, but you also have to keep in mind that widgets are all over the place already. Both Mac and Windows users can download the Yahoo! Widget Engine that is compatible with thousands of widgets users have already made. Well, Mac users already have a built-in widget system so they probably won’t need to use this and Vista users also have what are called gadgets and they too are the same thing. Widgets are very rapidly becoming more and more part of the operating system.

If you’re really a widget freak and you need to have them in Firefox, then you’ll want to checkout a service called YourMinis. It is yet another personalized homepage but I would say it is just as nice, if not better, than Netvibes. A few months back I started to tinker around with the service and have loved it ever since. What makes it unique?

One of the things I love the most about it is being able to see a view of all my tabs and actually drag-and-drop them from one tab to another. You can get to this view by using the little icon next to the Sign In/Sign Out links in the upper-right corner. It’s really just something you need to play with because you won’t realize quite how cool it is until you try it.

Yeah, I know it is just a website, so why bother mentioning it as a widget handler for Firefox? They actually offer an extension for Firefox that will let you overlay the YourMinis page onto any site that you are currently visiting. It makes the background semi-transparent so that you can still see the page that you were in the process of viewing (pictured to the right).

YourMinis definitely has its perks over a traditional gadget system. One of the biggest that comes to my mind is that your computer is not doing the bulk of the work, so your memory usage won’t be quite so high. In the past I have always been selective with the widgets I choose to use because each one will add more work to my computer. By using YourMinis, my computer can take it a little easier.

Not only that, but I’ll also have my widgets with me wherever I go, which I’m sure is huge for anyone that has more than one computer. It just makes some things so much easier, like checking my 6 different Gmail accounts from one convenient location. Or create a tab just for doing countdowns to upcoming events. With YourMinis you can create as many widgets as you want and you can even use their wonderfully designed feed reader to keep up on the latest news from around the Web.

There is one thing that I have found to be a little distracting with YourMinis though, and that is the load time for the widgets on your personalized page. I recommend creating multiple tabs and dividing up your different widgets, making sure to place only the most important ones on your main tab. Right now when I load the site it can take 15 to 20 seconds to completely load all 11 of my widgets, but after trimming them down to just 5 on my main tab it only takes about 5 seconds to load them.

So to answer the question that this article revolves around…no, Firefox does not need a widget system. I think a very limited number of people would actually use it, so it would hardly be worth the developers’ time to create a feature only a handful of people would use. Widgets are definitely making their way into everyone’s lives, but they don’t need to be built-in to the browser.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on June 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

Million Dollar Monday

Approximate Price: $27,000
We find more and more things to store on our computers as hard drive capacities continue to increase. Do you remember when computer games only took a few megabytes but now they take a few gigabytes! It isn’t a big deal because most desktop computers come standard with more than 100GB of disk space. Even with all of this space you will find yourself deleting files to clear up room if you are trying to store movies on your computer. That is where Kaleidescape saves the day.

Kaleidescape Server
It will be your media server and give you storage capacities up to 5.5TB! How much can you store with that much room? It will hold up to 825 DVD’s or 10,000 CD’s on the twelve 500GB disks that make this machine a media monster. If 5.5TB isn’t enough for you then you can network multiple servers together to give you the space you need.

If you didn’t want to shell out so much money initially then you can gradually expand your server to the 5.5TB. Kaleidescape makes this easy by using hot-swappable RAID drives which also provides a lot of reliability. If a drive fails then the server will not lose any of the movies or music because of having the RAID drives installed. Now you don’t have to worry about losing your database when that dreaded power outage occurs.

Kaleidescape Movie Player
The server is just for storing the movies and music so you have to have a way to get the media from the server. The movie player will let users retrieve music and movies from the Kaleidescape server and play them. Multiple people can be accessing the server at the same time to retrieve the movies from the server since they are only reading a file and not writing to it.

The movie player can be controlled by a Web-utility or by a remote control. It communicates with the server using an Ethernet cable. A big advantage of the movie player is that it can play either DVD movies or HD movies but the movies must be stored on the server because this does not have a DVD drive.

Kaleidescape Music Player
Okay, so you may think that having a music player is stupid if the movie player will already play music. You’re right in terms of playing music, but it also has the features of the Kaleidescape Reader (below) built into it. This means you can copy your DVD’s and CD’s to the server using this music player (the server doesn’t have a built-in media copier). It will take 8 minutes to copy a CD or 30 minutes to copy a DVD without compression.

Just like the movie player it can be controlled using a Web-utility or you can use a remote control. All you have to do is hook it up to the network via an Ethernet cable and you can start copying and playing music.

Kaleidescape Reader
If you don’t want to get the music player above then you can get the Kaleidescape Reader which will copy your DVD’s and CD’s to the server. This box doesn’t do anything other than read the CD or DVD and send it to the server.

It can copy a CD in 8 minutes or a DVD in 30 minutes which is also the same as the music player. The server will automatically add any media to the library that is copied over.
—–

The entire Kaleidescape System works seamlessly together so that you can get your entertainment no matter where you are in your house. They were clever when designing the whole system by making it all integrate together will little configuration needed.

Also, we hope you have enjoyed our first post in our daily CyberNotes.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on December 30, 2006 by CyberNet.

Weekend Warrior

With the increased availability of USB peripherals, there has also been an increase in travel sized USB peripherals for those times when you’re on the go. When you’re traveling, there’s nothing more annoying than bulky accessories that take up your space.  Below you’ll find a few USB devices that just might make your travels a bit easier, or lighter for that matter.

–USB Laptop Travel Kit–

Brand: CTA Digital
Price: $35.99

CTA Digital has put together a USB travel kit that’s small and compact with everything USB that you might need to make use of printers, digital cameras, external drives, you name it! Here’s what’s included in one compact case:

• Ethernet cable
• Retractable USB mouse
• Four prong attachments for USB connection
• Retractable USB cord
• Retractable USB ear bud headphones

– Ultra Mini USB 2.0 Travel 4-Port Hub –

Brand: Targus
Price:$24.99

You never know when you’ll need another USB Port.  Targus has created an Ultra Mini USB 2.0 travel hub with 4 ports.  The image above gives you a good idea on just how ‘ultra mini’ this hub is.  Measuring in at about half the size of a credit card, it is perfect for travel! The hub is covered with an aluminum mesh case and has a transfer rate of up to 480 Mbps. It comes with a y-cable which you’d plug into your laptop or desktop, and then you’d have 4 extra USB slots available. No drivers are required!

• Color: Black
• Size: 4.3 x 4.4 x 0.9 cm
• Weight: 28.4g

– AC Travel Charger (with USB Socket)

Brand: Proporta
Price: $18.95

This nifty device from Proporta allows you to charge most of your USB compatible devices from the standard AC wall power, and you can do it worldwide.  You’ll need your USB cable that you receive with iPods, Blackberries, etc., which then connects via USB to an AC charger. That means that you won’t need a slew of chargers when you travel! Instead you’ll only need the USB cables that come with all of your electronic toys. It will accept 100-240 volts AC and has click-in adaptors for around the world.

If you purchase the Proporta Essential Travel Bundle, you’ll also receive a car power supply which works the same way as the AC adapter. All you’ll need is your USB cable that came with the device you’re wanting to charge, and it will plug directly into the car supply. Price: $21.95

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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