Aug 05

Growing Up Geek: Dana Wollman

Posted in: feature, Features, Today's Chili

Until now, I had conveniently forgotten that I collected Magic Cards. Not just collected, mind you, but hoarded — a feverish obsession harking back to an earlier yen for stickers, pogs, and Happy Meals. While some kids played Truth or Dare in the back of the bus to I.S. 228, I kept my collection at the ready, wrapped with care in a rubber band. I’m not sure who I intended to show them to, save for a handful of guys who used to stake out a row in the front, but if I happened to have something good, I wanted to brag a little. At thirteen, I challenged a certain boy to a game, thinking that was all the hint I needed to drop. He beat me handily, and I never admitted my crush.

Let’s just say I’ve evolved since then. I remember as little about mana as Peter Pan did about owning Rufio in a dissing contest. I seem to have kicked my shyness habit — so much so that my coworkers have taken to calling me “Brass Knuckles.” And while I haven’t had to suffer dating for awhile, I like to think I’ve stepped up my game.

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Growing Up Geek: Dana Wollman originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aug 04

New Winamp 5.5 Easter Egg

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on November 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

Winamp 5.5 has all kinds of great new features, but one of my favorite things is the new Bento skin that it includes. It’s not only slick, but also very functional. Pieter over in our forum posted a cool Easter Egg that involves the Bento skin, and I think you’re going to like what you see.

The process of activating the Easter Egg isn’t new, but the result is different than it used to be. Here’s how you activate it:

  1. Give Winamp’s main window focus.
  2. Press the following keys: N, U, L, Escape, L, Escape, S, O, F, T.

Pressing the Escape key is necessary because the “Open File” dialog box pops up after pressing the “L” key. Here’s an alternate way to do it:

  1. Give Winamp’s main window focus.
  2. Press and hold the Shift and Control keys, then type : N, U, L, L, S, O, F, T.

In older versions of Winamp it would add “IT REALLY WHIPS THE LLAMA’S ASS!” to the title bar of the application (as seen in this screenshot), but if you’re using Winamp 5.5 with the Bento skin you’ll see something a little different. Whenever you play a song the transparency of the skin will “throb” in and out. Here’s what it looked like at one point while playing a song:

Winamp Transparent 

It can really make you go crazy after a little while, but it is cool nonetheless. The player will return to normal when you restart the program, so there is no need for you to frantically trying to disable the Easter Egg. ;)

I was also glad to see that one of my favorite Easter Egg’s still exists in the program. Pull up the Winamp Preferences and go to Input -> Nullsoft Vorbis Decoder and then press the About button at the bottom. Start clicking the little fish as fast as you can with your mouse and see how many RPM’s you can get:

Winamp Spin the Fish

You gotta love Easter Egg’s. :D

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Aug 03

Get More File Previews in Vista’s Windows Explorer

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Software, Today's Chili, Windows Vista

This article was written on April 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

PreviewConfig Late last year I highlighted what I believed to be the 5 best features in Vista that often don’t get any recognition. Among those features I talked about the file previews in the new Windows Explorer, which can be opened by going to Organize -> Layout -> Preview Pane. This gives you the opportunity to view the content of the file without needing to open an additional application. It’s quite clever actually.

The only problem that I’ve found with it is that you’ll often need to have a third-party application installed to get previews for certain types of files. For example, you won’t be able to preview PDF’s without a program such as Adobe Reader installed. And no Microsoft Office will mean that you can’t preview your Office documents. It would have been much better if more preview handlers were included out-of-the-box, but maybe we can makeup for Vista’s shortcomings.

The How-To Geek scrounged up a free program that will ease some of the burden, but only after he walks through the daunting steps to configure the preview handler manually. The free app is called PreviewConfig (no install needed), and it can be used to associate some additional file extensions as plain-text or media. There are quite a few areas where this would be beneficial, such as a CSS (cascading style sheet) file which is really just a text file with a special extension. With PreviewConfig you could associate that with being plain-text so that a preview will be available. Similarly you can find media extensions that do not have a preview available, but they have to be playable in Windows Media Player.

PreviewConfig Homepage [via The How-To Geek]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Jul 31

WebRunner Becomes Prism – Roll Your Own WebApp

Posted in: Features, Newly Released, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on October 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

Mozilla Prism
Click to Enlarge

Do you remember the WebRunner browser that we wrote about last week? It was created by Mozilla as a way for websites, such as Google Reader, to provide a standalone application for their users. That way people don’t have to keep their main browser open all of the time if all they want to do is read news on Google Reader, or browse Facebook.

At the time shortcuts (called a WebApp) had to be downloaded for each of the sites that you wanted to use with WebRunner, or you could create your own which was slightly complicated. Now WebRunner has been moved to a Mozilla Labs project, and it was renamed to Prism.

There are two really great things that were introduced with the release of Prism: a create your own WebApp GUI, and inline spell checking. In the screenshot above you can see what the GUI looks like when you run Prism for the first time. It asks you for details on creating your own WebApp, and takes just seconds to do.

Tip: Enabling the location bar does not mean you’ll be able to type an address into it. The location bar is a read-only bar that accepts no input, so it doesn’t serve any purpose other than telling you what site you are currently on.

And spell checking! Oh how I love the inline spell checking. It is arguably Firefox’s best feature, and now you can use it in Prism. This is great news for anyone who wants to use Prism for writing emails. Not to mention Prism’s extremely low memory footprint, which means it will be friendly on your system’s resources.

I believe that Prism really has a great future, and it will be interesting to see if offline support ever finds its way into the project. That would really make it even more superb!

Prism Homepage [via Mark Finkle]
Kudos to RangingTrip for the tip!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Jul 29

Growing Up Geek: Brian Heater

Posted in: feature, Features, Today's Chili

That’s me above, on the left. I’m Robin, reaping all of the benefits of fighting supervillians on the mean streets of Gotham, without the whole thing about watching my parents brutally murdered by a mob boss. All things considered, life was pretty good, growing up in the East Bay in the ’80s, save for the fact that my cousin was somehow promoted to the role of Batman – most likely because he was visiting from afar (and maybe brought his own costume up from Southern California). And then there’s the whole holding hands thing — I can pretty much guarantee that ended the moment the photographer parent put the camera down. I mean, Arkham Asylum isn’t going to patrol itself.

Despite early photographic evidence to the contrary — and a few select themed birthday parties — I was never really a DC Comics kid growing up. I’d chalk a fair amount of that up to the fact that, so far as these photo albums indicate, I didn’t arrive on a rocketship from an exploding homeland, and was never independently wealthy, as the poor tailoring job on the Robin suit can attest.

Continue reading Growing Up Geek: Brian Heater

Growing Up Geek: Brian Heater originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 28

Dell Streak 10 Pro vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1… fight!

Posted in: 10-inch, Android, dual-core, Features, hands-on, honeycomb, launch, NVIDIA, official, samsung, slate, streak, tablet, tegra 2, Tegra2, Today's Chili

Why look at this! Samsung’s very own Galaxy Tab 10.1 decided to stop by in Beijing to greet Dell’s latest tablet. As mentioned in our hands-on post, it’s clear that the Streak 10 Pro would need to go on a little diet to match the Korean tablet’s lovely figure and weight, though the latter won’t be released in the country until some time next month. Also, there’s no doubt that Sammy will continue to ask for a premium price in exchange for the better display and portability, so our wallets will be the final judge. For now, just enjoy our quick and dirty comparison photos in the gallery below. You’re welcome.

Update: It appears that some of our readers are missing the point: the 16GB WiFi Galaxy Tab 10.1 is being sold for $499 in the US, and it’ll most likely be more expensive in China; whereas the Streak 10 Pro is priced at just ¥2,999 ($465). So again, you get what you pay for.

Gallery: Dell Streak 10 Pro vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1… fight!

Dell Streak 10 Pro vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1… fight! originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jul 2011 01:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 28

Dell Streak 10 Pro tablet makes global debut in China, we go hands-on (update: video!)

Posted in: 10-inch, Android, dual-core, Features, hands-on, honeycomb, launch, NVIDIA, official, slate, streak, tablet, tegra 2, Tegra2, Today's Chili, video

There’s a Chinese saying that will suit most of our Western readers here: “quenching thirst by gazing at plums.” Oh yes, we’re talking about Dell’s Streak 10 Pro alright. Just as promised, said US company has skipped its home country to debut its first 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet in China (ka-ching!), and we happened to be at the Beijing press event for some intimate hands-on time. To be honest, you won’t be needing many imaginary plums for this Android’s rather mundane specs: it’s equipped with the oh-so-familiar 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 T20 chip, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 1,280 x 800 LCD (with Corning’s Gorilla Glass), 5 megapixel camera and 2 megapixel camera back and front, and regular-size SDHC expansion. That said, Chinese buyers can grab this 16GB WiFi tablet plus 2GB of cloud storage for just ¥2,999 ($465) a pop — a slightly more attractive price compared to its competitors. Check out our impressions after the break.

Update: Hands-on video added after the break.

Gallery: Dell Streak 10 Pro launch event and hands-on

Gallery: Dell Streak 10 Pro press shots

Continue reading Dell Streak 10 Pro tablet makes global debut in China, we go hands-on (update: video!)

Dell Streak 10 Pro tablet makes global debut in China, we go hands-on (update: video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jul 2011 01:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 27

WordPress 2.6 Utilizes Google Gears for Better Performance

Posted in: Features, Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on June 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

wordpress google gears.pngWhen WordPress 2.5 was released earlier this year the development team spent a lot of time focusing on the commonly overlooked administration area. Anyone running their own WordPress blog knows how much time you spend on the backside of things, and so this update was very much appreciated. WordPress 2.6 is due out in mid-July 2008, and with it comes even more new features for blog administrators!

What kind of new things will WordPress 2.6 bring? For starters it will have early support for Google Gears. You might be thinking that since it supports Google Gears authors will be able to write articles offline that can be published later on, but that’s not the case at all. Instead, WordPress 2.6 utilizes Google Gears to increase the online performance for administrators, and it does this by downloading frequently used images and static files onto your computer via Google Gears. That way when you’re navigating around the administration area of your blog it won’t need to load the JavaScript files or images since they’ll already be on your machine. This is therefore supposed to increase the responsiveness of the online interface.

One of the other more interesting features WordPress 2.6 will have is a post revision history. This will save copies of your posts as changes are made to them, and you’ll be able to restore a post back to any of the states available. Plus WordPress will even highlight the changes for you, which is especially handy if you have multiple authors working on a blog. This is all very reminiscent of how Wikipedia handles revisions.

Those are two of my favorite features in the upcoming WordPress 2.6, but you can expect to see some other new stuff as well:

  • A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
  • A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
  • Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
  • Built-in word counting in the post editor
  • The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
  • The ability to relocate your content directory
  • The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
  • Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
  • Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
  • and more…

All of this is currently available in the WordPress 2.6 Beta, or you can wait for the final release of the content management software which is due in mid-July.

WordPress 2.6 Features [via ReadWriteWeb]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Jul 25

ASUS Eee Pad SL101 slides through the FCC, still misses promised May release

Posted in: Android, ASUS, Features, gingerbread, honeycomb, Release Date, slider, tablet, tablet pc, TabletPc, Today's Chili, uk, us


Sure, it’s not unusual for gadgets to miss their shipping targets, suffering months-long delays as they jump through the varies hoops necessary before a release. Fortunately, ASUS can now check FCC approval off the Eee Pad Slider’s to do list, with the Honeycomb QWERTY tablet receiving a green light from the feds late last week. ASUS has already confirmed August availability in the UK (after previously promising a May ship date), so we can only hope that the same timeframe applies stateside as well. We’re also curious to see whether or not ASUS was able to use this unexpected delay to beef up supplies, so the Slide doesn’t suffer a hangup similar to that of its Transformer cousin. The company has yet to confirm Slider pricing in the U.S., though we imagine those details will be revealed along with a shipping date within the next few weeks.

ASUS Eee Pad SL101 slides through the FCC, still misses promised May release originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 25

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 beta brings iCloud support, no bug fixes

Posted in: Apple, cloud, Features, ios, Mac, operating system, OperatingSystem, os, os x, OsX, Today's Chili

We know what you’re thinking: Mac OS X Lion (10.7) has been out for nearly a week, so why have we yet to hear anything about Snow Lion? Patience friends, Apple will roar soon enough — but for now, 10.7.2 will have to do. Apple released the beta update to developers over the weekend, eschewing any acknowledgment of 10.7.1, or correcting any of the bugs that have popped up over the last week. Instead, Lion’s pending second update (build 11C26) is required for testing the operating system with iCloud — a feature notably absent in the public version of the OS released last week. The new System Preferences iCloud module enables granular management of select features, letting you choose which accounts and services to sync. Full iCloud support is coming in the fall with the release of iOS 5, so it’s probably safe to assume that Apple plans to patch some of those bugs in the meantime — any day now, we hope.

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 beta brings iCloud support, no bug fixes originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jul 2011 08:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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