Technology Gadgets Food Toys Fun and Games

Hey, if you're reading this you've made it to the end of another work week! Congrats, it's fun time.

This is the last week of Winter! Spring officially starts next Saturday.

Don't forget to set your clocks ahead an hour Saturday night (the official time is 2am) if you happen to be awake and up for some watch/clock/microwave/car radio changing.

I'm relaxing this eve with the Wii and Kareoke Revolution ... W00T! See you all on Monday -

Have a fine weekend!

Rob

Link: http://www.sleazeroxx.com/news10/0312mea.shtml

Osh tipped me off to this news - apparently Mr. Loaf is about to release #4 - and he will do anything for music...

but not that.

His new album, Hang Cool Teddy Bear, whose title was taken from a line in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, is 13 tracks of classic Meat Loaf, primed and ready for the 21st century. More than four decades into his career, the man and his voice are as big, bold and relevant as ever. The album features a hot producer, a slew of impressive guest appearances, ranging from guitar god Steve Vai to actor Hugh Laurie, and of course, Meat Loaf's signature pipes!

You all should know by now the language is Not Worksafe eh?

Link: http://www.google.com/reader/play

Don't need to install anything - (tho you might want to block the myriad cookies) - Google takes a bunch of RSS feeds, mashes em up and gives you a fun, time wasting slideshow of the web.

I apologize to your boss in advance.

Link: http://www.ghacks.net/2010/03/11/pdf-ocr-turns-pdf-documents-into-text/

Nice bit 'o free software to convert pdf's to text.

Don't even ask what I was thinking when I did this...... always meant to upload it.

Link: http://xkcd.com/712/

All you Tolkien geeks (myself included) will get a chuckle here - *note helps to have read the Silmarillion.

Link: http://www.symnym.com

Got this from a comment, thought I'd pass it along

Symnym uses linguistic data and artificial intelligence to create interesting domain name suggestions based off of two words describing your business, service, or product. I've been working on it for awhile - still have a ways to go, but it already produces some pretty cool names.

What's cool is that it suggests names based on what you enter - checks if the domains are available and then presents the results in list form. Very cool.

Link: http://www.betanews.com/article/Second-thoughts-about-Google-Buzz/1268321089

Personally, I stopped using it for anything about 3 days in. It's just not all that - proving that even the big players on the net can make mistakes.

So it's been a few weeks since Google Buzz launched, and because I'm a good little geek-soldier who eats his own (figurative) dog food, I've invested lots of time to learn how it works and, more importantly, how it can work for me. Although I'm doing my best to be an optimist, I can't seem to warm up to Buzz. Yes, folks, I think I'm falling out of like with Google's new social media darling service.

Or, to be blunt, Google Buzz sucks.

Link: http://freemusicarchive.org/

And you thought bittorent was the only way to get music ? Oh noes,

this site is full of tunes - from old timey piano roll music right on up to electronic.

We surpassed the 18,000 mp3 milestone this week. That's nearly 4 times as much free quality audio as when we launched the FMA less than a year ago

Link: http://sites.google.com/site/greengnomeoe/frontpage

Want to confuse the Linux heads and Windows users while using an alternative Desktop and still using all your Windows apps?

Now you can -

GreenGnome is a free, modern desktop environment for Windows XP. Written completely from scratch, it aims to become the first Windows like operative system and follow the Windows architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Unixlike based system (as GNU/Linux).

Link: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/03/11/googles-blogger-users-can-now-customize-their-designs

And provides you with a bunch of ready made ones. Now all of you using Blogger can truly customize your site to whatever you want.

Link: http://www.yumsugar.com/Buena-Vista-Cafes-Method-Making-Classic-Irish-Coffee-7695717

You'll find this handy, what with St. Patty's day coming up.

Sorry, I just had to.....

Love when they return to the studio to see the look on the newscasters face.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001AS4NQS?ie=UTF8&tag=gadge05-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001AS4NQS

Perfect for killing things that take phantom power when they're off ( TV / Game Machine / Adapters )

The price is right too - $22.95

Technical Details

* The Remote Controlled Switch Sockets are ideal for the remote operation of many electrical devices including lamps appliances tools and more
* It even works outside!

Link: http://www.stereomood.com/

Might be a good accompaniment to work on a Friday eh?

Link: http://nerdapproved.com/gaming/operation-family-guy-edition/

This would actually make this game fun again.

features 5 custom sounds:

Peter: “Ssssss! Aaaaaaahhhh!”
Peter in Pain (crying, screaming, shouting “Oww!”
Peter Yelling “Ow, Ow, ow! Get it off, get it off!”
Peter farting
Peter yelling in fright

Cool!

Link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=13135

It's not huge - but at the price range you can certainly put one to the test as a proof of concept or a "how much faster will my rig be with a SSD" kinda thing.

OCZ has unleashed a bargain-basement priced 32GB solid state drive in their Onyx series, still maintaining decent read and write speeds.

Priced somewhere in the sub-$100 market, the 32GB Onyx SSD packs in 64MB of onboard cache and TRIM support within that 2.5-inch frame. Read and write speeds are set at 125MB/sec and 70MB/sec, respectively.

Link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10467340-52.html

Very cool - it's far more accurate than the Wii's and uses light - so the camera tracks it in 3 dimensions - making for a hella cool game play mechanic.

If Soul Calibur puts out a game for this controller a lot of living room furniture is going to die inadvertently

Get ready to laugh yourself to the end of the day....

Link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=822

Ever have a hard drive fail? Sure, who hasn't ... oddly there's a high failure rate on certain physical areas of the drive platter and no one seems to know why.

You’d think that after 50 years and many billions sold, disk drives would be well understood. And you’d be wrong. Take the case of the outer-track errors.

Thanks to zoned bit recording the bit density of each track is roughly constant across the disk. But more errors occur in the outer tracks - and on some drives on the inner tracks too. What could be going on?

Link: http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1802364

I just couldn't resist reading this whole thing - funny.

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/191098/hp_touts_flash_as_killer_app_against_apples_ipad.html

If you've ever tried to browse the web with flash uninstalled then you know HP has more than a point here. - What's even cooler? It runs Windows 7 - which means instead of being tied down to an app store controlled by style Nazis - you can install whatever the heck you want.

Way to go HP.

Link: http://mashable.com/2010/03/09/hulu-nfl-network/

Just in case some of you are suffering from Football withdrawl - don't forget all the cool stuff heading over to Hulu....

eight shows and highlights from every team in the National Football League. The network has been adding new content to the site ever since, and this week Hulu has posted an impressive 400 hours of NFL-related videos.

Fierce Online Video reports that Hulu plans to add 600 more hours before the next football season starts.

Link: http://visualrecipes.com/

Sometimes you need a little more help on a recipe - and this site sure does that. I don't know if you need this kinda info on every recipe? Still, it's kinda cool and back in the day when I had a cooking website this is the way I'd do it.

Link: http://thefreewarejunkie.com/2009/10/pc-world-reviews-free-antivirus.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ConfessionsOfAFreewareJunkie+%28confessions+of+a+freeware+junkie...%29

In the latest issue of PC World, they review the top free Antivirus solutions available including (but not limited to) Avira, AVG, Avast!, Comodo and others.

Not surprisingly, Avira comes out on top.

Good read, second place was taken by Avast. The article runs down the hows and whys each got ranked where it did.

It's kinda making me wonder if I should switch my personal rigs protection off AVG.

Copied almost shot-for-shot from the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" video - This geeky homage will get your blood pumping today.

Link: http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/hard-drive-manufacturers-to-stop-supporting-windows-xp-and-dos-by-2012-20100310/

If you plan on using Windows XP your choice of hard drive models will be thinning soon (2012)

Essentially, what it comes down to is that hard drives keep on getting faster and more efficient… but their evolution is shackled by the need to support a 512 byte sector size. Windows Vista and Windows 7 are free of that burden, but XP and DOS are insistent upon it.

Link: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/lifelock-accused-of-running-con-operation/

Did you fall for that whole Lifelock sham? If you did, you at least have one thing coming - some money back.

The FTC said that Lifelock, which advertises itself as “#1 In Identity Theft Protection,” engaged in false advertising by promising customers that if they signed up with its service their personal information would become useless to thieves.

“In truth, the protection they provided left such a large hole … that you could drive that truck through it,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, referring to a Lifelock TV ad showing a truck painted with the CEO’s Social Security number driving around city streets.

A very interesting read even if you didn't sign up. Turns out that due to unsafe data practices you actually put your credit at greater risk by using them.

Link: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/10yearsafter/all/1

Wired takes us for a spin down memory lane - back to the days of immensely stupid decisions, insane venture capitol and just plain bad decisions. I kinda miss those days.

Either you like Google or you don't - but no matter which way you go this video sure makes it's point.

THE BEAST FILE: GOOGLE from Hungry Beast on Vimeo.

Link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/location_sharing_is_coming_to_facebook_-_how_will_users_react.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

Sometime soon you (if you want) will be able to let Facbook plot your every move using your GPS enabled smartphone. Personally I don't think this is a good idea for so many reasons. I mean besides the obvious - (being robbed while your out of the house), there's plenty of other times when you don't want eveyone to know exactly where you are.

Still, you know a bunch of people will turn it on not even thinking of the consequences, then call in sick to work and get fired cus their boss finds out they are at the beach all day.

Sigh.

Hank pointed this one out - and I'm not sure if it's entirely legal to do this but it sure would be rewarding to use.