Hasta La Gadget!

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

Fun Friday

For the ultimate way to express creativity, some geeks turn to unique, weird, crazy (whatever you’d like to call it) case modifications for their desktop computers. There are some pretty amazing modifications out there, and today’s Fun Friday article will include some of the interesting mods I have come across. 

Coffee Anyone?

Source

Microwave PC

Source: Engadget “Your PC and Hot Pockets, together at last.”

A Newspaper Box?

Source

Bugged Out

Source

The Ultimate Flight Simulator

Source

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on March 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

Way back in September of 2006, we wrote about a site called Blogmusik.net. The service used an iPod-like interface which acted as your own personal jukebox to stream music that you selected over the Internet. It was simple and provided decent music for free. That was the last that we mentioned it though, and to be honest, we had forgotten about it. Fast forward to today when we decided to take a look at a music-streaming service called Deezer. To our surprise, we learned that Deezer was formerly known as Blogmusik.net. Today we’ll be taking a look at Deezer, what it is, and everything that it offers.

What is Deezer

Deezer is based in France and is an on-demand music service.  If you’re familiar with IMEEM, in some ways, it is similar to that. Part of the service incorporates music news, and a community of users, and of course listening to music of your choosing. One of the things that users seem to like best is that it’s not limited only to the United States like some music services out there. In all, there are 16 different countries where the service can be used. If you’re wondering if your country is one of them, just go to www.deezer.com and in the top right corner, look for your country’s flag or just look in the screenshot below.

Is it legal?

Before we get into the ins and outs of the service, many of you are probably wondering whether it’s legal or not. From what we understand, it is completely legal. They’re based in France and pay fees to the French equivalent of the RIAA and therefore, according to the French Government, they are complying with copyright laws.

Free Registration

Registration is free and will allow you to add songs to a playlist. You can still listen to music without registering, you just won’t be able to access any other areas of the site. Registration requires only a valid email address and general info like name and country.

Creating a Profile

Deezer is as much about socializing as it is about music.  Users can create a profile with photos, preferences as well as musical styles.  You can add friends, invite friends by importing your contact list, and search for members. Just like Facebook and MySpace, Deezer provides a spot where a user can update their status like “Ashley is ______.” They include a message center so that other users can easily send you messages.

Searching for Music

Deezer is all about finding music that you like, so searching is important.  You can search for music that they might have in their database by entering a tile of a song or the artist. I entered the search term “Lifehouse” and received a big long list of songs from the group.  You can also browse their catalog by artist.

Playing Songs

After you’ve searched for a song and you click the play button, it will start playing. The player appears in the upper right corner and that’s where you can pause a song or move on to the next track if you’re playing from a play list. In the player section, you’ll see a place where you can rate a song or download it. Clicking download will bring up your two options to either download from iTunes or Amazon. By clicking the “blog” link you’ll be given the code necessary so that you can embed the player on your blog or personal website.

Radio/SMARTRADIO

Not only can you search for songs and listen to them on-demand, you can also listen to a variety of different radio “stations.” They even have a SMARTRADIO which is tailored to your tastes.  If they play a song that you don’t like, you’ll just tell them and then the system will learn and improve.

Other Features

• Add Your MP3s
  Under the “My MP3s” section you will be able to add your MP3s.  Deezer will allow you to store as many of them as you would like and then they’ll be accessible once you log in. This could serve as a great back-up solution or give you access to your library of music when you’re away from your home computer.
• View the Top Artists and Albums
  Under the “Top” section you will be able to find the top artists and songs in four different countries including the UK, France, the United States and Germany. For example, I clicked on the United States and found that Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis is one of the current top songs. In The UK it’s Wow by Kylie Minogue.
• View Friends’ Playlists
  Once you add friends, you’ll be able to view their playlists
• Music fades out…
  One song will fade out and the next song on the list fades in which makes for nice transitions between songs
• Great Flash interface
• View the latest Music related news under the “News” section

Give Deezer a try and let us know what you think. You’ll probably come across a few songs that they won’t have available and at times the load time can be a little on the slow side, but I think you’ll find that it’s a pretty decent service.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on September 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

I’ve come across a lot of great feed readers before, but I don’t believe any of them match up to a new one that I was introduced to by Pieter in the CyberNet Forum. It’s called Newzie (Windows-only), and it has a strong focus on making feed reading as easy as possible. I wasn’t quite sure how good this would perform when I first started using it, but I quickly fell in love with the features it offered.

Many of you may consider discarding this post simply because you’re content with the desktop feed reader that you’re currently using, or maybe all of your feeds are on an online reader. Newzie has things that I’ve never seen before in a feed reader, and I can guarantee that some of them are sure to impress you. So at the very least scroll through the article and checkout the screenshots…you won’t be disappointed.

Oh, and I should mention that the interface definitely reminds me of iTunes!

Click to Enlarge

–Feed Organization–

One of the most unique things with Newzie are the various methods available to organize your feeds. Of course it has the standard tree view that most desktop feed readers have, and you can create as many folders and subfolders as you would like.

More uniquely, however, is the time-sorted view that shows the most recently updated feeds first. It groups feeds in update intervals, such as 30-minutes to 1-hour, so that you can view the most recent news first.

There are also a few "folders" that are created by default which can be used for temporary storage. These are the "My Favorites" and "My Readings," and together they let you breeze through all of your feeds quickly. You can then come back to the news of interest when you have more time.

–Viewing Feeds–

In terms of feed viewing there are three different modes available:

• Report View – This is often referred to the "River of News" view because it shows one story after another in their entirety. If it becomes hard to read that way you can always contract the posts, and then expand them as needed.

  

• List View (Top) – This is similar to what you’ll see in an email application with a subject-only view above the content of the posts.

  

• List View (Side) – This is also like an email application, but the list is placed on the side of the content. Widescreen users would probably prefer to use this method.

  

And don’t worry about the oversized buttons located at the top of the application. I originally thought it was a huge waste of space, and then I saw a button that collapsed the header down to almost nothing:

–Quick Read–

Newzie makes it extremely easy to scan your feeds without actually having to read them. One of the ways it does this is with its unique hover window that is displayed when your cursor rests over a feed in the sidebar. It shows you how many unread posts there are in that particular feed, when the last article was written, the last time it checked for updates, and the titles of the last 5 articles. I love when tooltips like this are actually made useful.

–News Bar–

This is like a stock ticker, but for your news. Anytime you hover over the News Bar, it will pause so that you have time to take action on the item(s) that are currently scrolling across.

–Today Panel–

There is a highly configurable Today Panel available in Newzie for those of you that don’t like the News Bar. This isn’t quite as compact, but it can show more information.

–Search & Filters–

There are several more advanced search features included with Newzie that help make it so great. Besides being able to search your feeds for text, you can also filter your subscriptions in using special commands that have been created. Here are some examples:

• title:cybernet – Searches the title of feeds for matches.
• updated<5day – Finds feeds updated in a specific period of time.
• priority>60 – Finds feeds that are within the specified priority interval.

More information on how these work as well as more examples can be found in the Newzie help file.

–Monitor Sites, too–

Just when you thought Newzie already did everything, it goes and does even more! Not only can it aggregate all of your feeds into one central location, but it can also check websites to see if there have been any changes made.

There are several different options for choosing how the websites are monitored, such as looking for the addition of keywords, text being inserted, hyperlinks being added, or new images appearing. Or you can just go the old fashion route of monitoring every aspect of the website to see if it changes.

When you view a site that has been changed, Newzie will automatically highlight the changed portions so that you don’t have to try and figure out what’s new. Now how cool is that?

–Stats–

Newzie tracks what you read and how many items it brings in each day. It then puts it all together in a pretty bar graph so that you can realize just how addicted you are to the feeds (obviously my stats aren’t all that extravagant in the screenshot since I started with a fresh profile for the review):

–And More–

I think that I touched on almost everything that Newzie can do, but there are still some other things that might appeal to you. For the sake of being thorough I’ve included those additional features here:

• I found it to be one of the fastest-updating feed readers available (in terms of checking feeds for new content).
• Browse your feed items in a slideshow fashion. This is cool, but not something I can see myself using.
• Minimize to the System Tray
• Keyboard shortcut customization
• Assign priorities to feeds
• Change the rendering engine (uses IE by default)
• Setup keyword watches on your feeds
• You can monitor IE favorites for new feeds
• You can add feeds from a Bloglines account

Some of you may still prefer the online feed readers such as Bloglines or Google Reader, but I have to say that this is hands-down the best desktop feed reader that I’ve used. It’s packed with features and focuses heavily on making reading feeds an effortless process. I highly recommend this desktop feed reader to all the news junkies out there!

Newzie Homepage

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on February 04, 2008 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

The Windows System Restore functionality has been around since the days of Windows ME, and it was pretty rough around the edges. At that time I remember having issues with it storing viruses into the restore points that it created, and it made cleaning up other people’s computers a pain because you had to wipe out all of their restore points.

System Restore has come a long way in Windows XP, and even further in Windows Vista. Ashley has shown us how System Restore can now be used for restoring individual files and folders in some versions of Vista, and that is an incredibly powerful feature to have. I’ve also shown how System Restore stacks up against the Last Known Good Configuration feature, and today we’re going to demonstrate how to get the most out of System Restore.

–How it Works–

Windows is good about automatically creating restore points which is wonderful since a large majority of computer users would never touch the feature otherwise. Users can create restore points on-demand, and later on we’ll show you how to make a shortcut for quickly creating restore points.

Aside from manually creating restore points Windows will create them when [via Wikipedia]:

• A piece of software is installed
• Windows Update installs new updates to Windows
• The user installs a driver that is not digitally signed by Windows Hardware Quality Labs
• 24 hours has passed

If you ever run into a problem on your machine the restore points might come to the rescue. In Windows XP you’ll still have to bootup into Windows before being able to roll back to a restore point, but Vista users can do it straight from the installation disc (or with the recovery disc). Rolling back to a previous restore point will replace newly modified system files with older copies. The Registry and drivers will also be taken back to the time of the restore point. Generally all of user’s documents will remain untouched.

–Shortcut for On-Demand Restore Points–

You can manually create restore points by opening the System Restore wizard at any time. The problem is that this can get rather tedious if you have to do it frequently, but we’ve got your back. As it turns out there is a quick Visual Basic script that you can whip up to create a restore point anytime you click on it. Here’s how:

1. Open Notepad and enter in these two lines of code:

   rp = "Scripted Restore Point by " & WScript.ScriptName
GetObject(”winmgmts:\\.\root\default:Systemrestore”).CreateRestorePoint rp, 0, 100

   

2. Save the file as restorepoint.vbs
3. Vista Users Only: Vista users need to create a shortcut to the script that was just saved. This can be done by right-clicking on the desktop, and then choosing New -> Shortcut. In the box enter:

   wscript.exe "C:\path to script\restorepoint.vbs"

   Where “path to script” is the location of the script. Complete the shortcut wizard, and when you run the shortcut right-click on it and select the Run as Administrator option.

–Changing the Restore Point Interval–

By default the System Restore automatically creates restore points every 24 hours. This value can be modified, but you want to be careful not to set it too low. At an interval of 24 hours System Restore will likely be able to hold restore points for a week or more. If you have it create restore points, for example, every hour you would only be able to access a a day or so worth of restore points. Take this into consideration before continuing.

To change the Restore Point interval you’ll need to dive into the Registry to modify a value, or you can use this simple tool created by Vista4Beginners. Once you download the program you can immediately start using it. It’s very simple, and you just have to specify the interval at which you want the restore points to be created:

If you’re a Registry buff and want to do the editing manually here’s the info you’ll need:

1. Open the Registry editor and navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\SystemRestore
2. Find the value RPGlobalInterval and set it to whatever interval you would like. By default the value is 86,400 (seconds), which is equal to 24 hours.
3. There are also some other values you can freely modify if you wish:
• RPLifeInterval – This is the maximum life of a restore point. The value is specified in seconds, and by default it is set to a very large amount (equals about 136 years). If you set it to 2,592,000 restore points older than 30 days will automatically be deleted. Remember, old restore points are deleted to make room for new ones, so adjusting this probably isn’t necessary.
• RPSessionInterval – This value is specified in seconds, and it only slightly differs from the value in Step 2. A restore point will be created at the interval that you specify here, except this is in terms of computer usage. For example, setting this to 43,200 would force a restore point to be created every 12 hours that you use the computer.

Now you should have your System Restore setup the way you want it! Just make sure you give it some love and attention, because it will be your best friend when you’re in a bind.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on October 14, 2006 by CyberNet.

Weekend Warrior

I don’t know about you, but I am always looking for some good blogs to add to my feed or my list of bookmarks as the not to miss, “must reads.”  In fact, sometimes I find that blogs have more accurate or up-to-date information than a newspaper or other online news sources.  So in keeping with the weekend traveling theme, I went out to find some of the best travel blogs out there. In the process, I came across TravelPod which is a rather large collection of travel blogs including blogs for just about every country or island possible! It was released in 1997 and is a great way to gather some tips, tricks, and photos of your travel destinations.

One of the first things you will notice when you go to TravelPod after clicking on destinations is the map of the Earth that is clickable.  By clicking on a country, state, island, etc., you’re able to view the blogs that have been submitted for that particular location.  People post everything from past experiences, maps, photos, thoughts, and some even post live updates while they are on their trip.

After viewing the large map of the Earth, I decided to pick a location to see just how TravelPod works.  I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, so I clicked on Australia. From there, I was taken to the results page with all of my information.  They use tags for things such as popular cities or tourist attractions so that if you’re only interested in a particular place, you can narrow your search results.

The results that it pulls up shows thumbnails of  travel blog photos that have an Australia tag to them.  It will also pull up a search box so that you can search for deals on airfare, hotels, and cars.  Additionally, they include videos and MP3 Podcasts that might be beneficial in planning a trip. Then they give you the list of travel blogs available for the area.For Australia, the list was lengthy so I had a good choice in what I wanted to read.  I narrowed my search to Canberra, the nations capital and got equally impressive results. The blogs were all unique and generally gave me a good idea of what to expect, or at least some interesting or funny traveling stories. The smaller countries or less traveled destinations typically have a smaller search results.

There are other features that you can expect from TravelPod such as an active forums that’s updated regularly.  There are topics such as travel tips, “how to”, and general travel information. They also provide a tab specifically for finding tours that you might want to take while you’re visiting a certain destinations, as well as a search for hostels, and information on travel insurance (hey, ya never know what can happen while you’re away from home!).

If you’re looking for some great advice, they have a list of top travelers that’s updated daily.  This is calculated based upon the number of visitors to their blog, number of forum posts, number of photos, and number of entries to TravelPod.

 I always like to know exactly where I’m going and what I’ll be doing while I’m traveling.  I like to call it being prepared.  TravelPod is a great resource for finding pictures and blogs that pertain to the specific location that you’re traveling to.  They receive visitors from those who have travel blogs just as much as they do from people who are looking for some good advice on a destination.

You don’t need a membership to browse the website or the blogs, although a membership is free anyways.  They offer unlimited uploads of photos, and will notify up to 500 friends and family members of updates to your blog.  They’ve changed a lot since 1997 when it all began! If you’d like to check it out, visit www.travelpod.com Even if you’re not interested in actually visiting some of these locations, you can certainly just look!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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