Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 20, 2006 by CyberNet.

Google Reader is undoubtedly my favorite online RSS feed reader but I am still in awe that Google hasn’t made a notifier for it and their Calendar. Of course a Firefox extension, called the Google Reader Toolkit, has finally popped up that will notify you when there are unread items in your Reader. It isn’t quite as extensive as I would have liked to see (a listing of the new items in a slider window would be nice) but I guess I can’t really complain when it is free. If you do decide to use this extension it is important for you to know that it is not compatible with the Gmail Manager Firefox extension.

The other tool that I have for you is a Greasemonkey script that will pull up the actual website in Google Reader instead of showing the text from the feed. This can be especially useful if you have a lot of sites in your Reader that do not supply the full feed. To use this you’ll have to be viewing Google Reader in the “List View” and not the expanded view. This makes sense because if you used this in the expanded view it would take forever to load all of the feed items. It would be cool if this script didn’t actually replace the feed content and instead offered a link that you could click to open the site within the current view, but it is great nonetheless.

I hope more and more people continue to develop tools that make Google Reader even more useful and most of all I would love to see synchronization capabilities for RSS desktop software. That kind of stuff probably won’t start to become prominent until more people realize what feeds actually are but it looks like the world is slowly warming up to the idea.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

Microsoft Works 9 without ads

Many of us look down at Microsoft Works, and for good reason. It’s a stripped down office suite that doesn’t hold a candle to Microsoft Office or any of the open source/freeware alternatives. It costs PC manufacturers next to nothing to bundle Microsoft Works with new computers, and that’s often why it is included.

Unfortunately I don’t think it is going away anytime soon. As expected Microsoft has begun offering an ad-supported version called Works SE 9.0, where SE stands for Sponsored Edition. They believe that they can make more money by providing an ad-supported version than they currently receive directly from the manufacturers, and the manufacturers are therefore not charged a dime for distributing it.

Microsoft is currently running this program in five countries: The United States, France, Canada, Poland, and the United Kingdom. You can’t download Works SE 9.0 as a standalone program, but if you look close enough you might start to see which manufacturers have jumped on board. Even Sony’s $3,200 Laptop includes the ad-sponsored version:

Microsoft Works SE 9.0 w/ 60-Day Trial Version of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007

It will be interesting to see how this pans out for Microsoft. If they make enough money from it then we might see more of their products following a similar route in the future.

[via CNet]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 02, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
Looking back at how Twitter has evolved I can’t help but be amazed by not only it’s popularity, but also the various services it is used for. I’ve seen ways to track packages using Twitter, add events to your calendar, manage your todo list, check balances on your accounts, and all sorts of other things. It’s crazy.

Now we can take it one step further. With the free app called TweetMyPC you’ll be able to remotely control several different aspects of your computer without any complicated setup process. There’s nothing you have to configure on your router because this simply goes out to Twitter to check for new messages that you’ve posted. Piece of cake.

So what can you do with this? Here are some of my favorites:

• You can shutdown, lock, hibernate, or put the machine in standby.
• Get a screenshot of your computer screen, and have it posted to Twitpic so that it can easily be viewed.
• View and kill running processes.
• Download files so that they are there when you get home. Perfect for large files like, well, the Windows 7 Release Candidate download that weighs in at several gigabytes.
• Get a list of files inside of a directory on the computer.
• Have it email you a document on your computer by providing the path. This only works with Gmail at the moment.
• Custom commands will let you create any command you want, and associate it with any executable on your machine. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to work with batch files or command line arguments, which would be super sweet.

I think this could become an app that is widely used by a lot of the Twitter geeks out there. Once it is able to execute batch files and accept command line arguments this will become a must-have app for me. Because that means I can put my computer to work from the comfort of my phone.

TweetMyPC Homepage [via gHacks]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

Leaked images of Windows Vista 5361 have made it to the Web, and with the release of the April CTP on Monday (April 17th) many people are wondering if this is the build that will get released. Vista 5361 was compiled on April 5, 2006 which would make it about the right delay for a CTP (approximately 2 – 3 weeks normally).

This build will primarily contain performance and underlying tweaks that won’t visibly be noticeable but I am sure we will be able to tell a difference in speed. Each build up until now I have noticed that the speed of my computer’s startup and launching programs has been gradually increasing.

Also, if you take a look at the Internet Explorer 7 screenshot then you will notice that it says “Internet Explorer 7+”. This is starting quite a buzz on the Internet because there has been no information on what the “7+” will mean.

I wouldn’t expect to see the new security features that have been announced for quite some time. This means that those people who will not be able to pass the Genuine Advantage test should still be able to use the Aero interface. These features probably won’t get implemented until after the last public build is released, just so that the hackers don’t get a head start on cracking it.

View The Screenshot Gallery For Vista 5361

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 30, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
If you are a Windows Media Center user the chances are pretty good that you’ve already heard of My Channel Logos. With this beautiful addition to Media Center you’ll see logos for each of the channels when viewing the television guide. It’s one of the most popular add-ons for Windows Media Center, and the developer has done a great job of keeping it up-to-date.

It gets better though. The developer of My Channel Logos also has a second tool that he whipped up, but will probably be of interest to a much smaller subset of people. TunerSalad is a one-click solution for doubling the number of allowed tuners (analog cable, CableCARD, ATSC, NTSC, ClearQAM, DVB-T) from 4 to 8.

I’m guessing there are only a handful of people out there that actually need support for more than 4 tuners. At this point a lot more of you are probably streaming or downloading shows rather than recording them directly from a cable/satellite/antenna source. Well, I guess you have the option to bump it up should you need to go that route.

TunerSalad Homepage (Windows 7 only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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