The shorts for Tuesday 3rd October 2006 are:

• PSM3 Magazine get their hands on the PS3 – Fast, quiet, heavy and a dust magnet (above) [link] [video]
• Zune Wireless basically worthless – You can’t connect to the internet via it’s WiFi or sync to your computer via its WiFi [link]
• Microsoft Unbox Zune for CBS’ camera with blatant marketing speak – “brown is the new black is the new white” [link]
• DVD Jon has reverse engineered Apple’s FairPlay technology and is licensing it to companies [link]

Today’s shorts for 21 September 2006.

• USBCell provides a rechargeable NiMH battery in the shape of an AA battery to use in normal devices (above) [link]
• Office 2007 details revealed for Mac, including new UI, with the ‘ribbon’ from Office 2007 for Window [link]
• Microsoft steals Zune P2P idea from WeedShare? [link]
• Apple sells 125,000 movies on the iTunes store within the first week of its launch [link]
• iTV has Hard-Drive, well according to Disney’s Iger, the answer is yes! [link]

The shorts for Thursday June 29, 2006.

• LAPD to trial GPS darts, like in the moves (above) [link]
• Apple replacing some MacBook’s with the colour defect [link]
• MacWorld’s 23 things we want in Leopard [link]

The Shorts for June 28th 2006:

• Rubik’s Cube Solving Robot with video (above) [link]
• 8 Invaluable Wordpress Plugins analysed [link]
• DIY: Build your own pong game [link]

Today’s short links are:

• Green fliud found oozing from the backside of a number of G5’s (above) [link]
• 600 PowerMac G5’s used to digitally re-encode and master the Ultimate DVD Collection of James Bond [link]
• Hilarious recording of an AOL user trying to cancel the account which he doesn’t use, but the rep tries to say that he used yesterday [link] [mirror] [mp3 mirror]

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Your dreams have come true. There is a cure for the whine that requires no programs to run and persists between reboots. It requires the editing of one file. Please attempt this only if you understand what you are doing. I take no responsibility for your actions.
Here are the steps:
1. Find the file: -> System -> Library -> Extensions -> IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext
[...]
With this method the only change is to the throttling matrix retaining all the code of the kernel extension relating to the MBP otherwise.

This seems to be working for some people but not for others. Remeber to backup IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext, as some users have reported that this ‘fix’ has decreased their battery life by an hour or more.

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As a long-time Apple and UNIX user/programmer, I never aspired to work at Microsoft. Then my wife got a job at Microsoft, so I needed to leave Caltech/JPL to work in Seattle. I didn’t actually apply to Microsoft — a friend of ours who worked there circulated my résumé and Microsoft responded rapidly and set up a last-minute interview. Although I had five other offers, Microsoft made the best impression.

I’ve been working at Microsoft since October, 1999 as a full-time Software Design Engineer. Four products I’ve worked on have shipped, two more are in beta, and I’ve also “consulted” for many other teams across the company, thereby influencing directly and indirectly a large number of Microsoft’s products. Between my experience and my wife’s, I think I’ve gotten a pretty solid feel for what it’s like to work in a product group at Microsoft.

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Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) is a very popular device and has sold a few million units, but when compared to Apple’s iPod, the PSP lacks storage space. Luckily, the PSP has a built in WiFi card to make up for this disadvantage. With a few simple steps, all of which are included in this tutorial, anyone can stream any non-copyright music from their iTunes library to their PSP.

The 5-Step Setup Procedure:
1) Download iTunes-PSP-Server.exe and save it to your desktop.
2) Disable any firewalls and/or keep port 8080 open.
3) Launch iTunes and then click on the iTunes-PSP-Server after.
4) In IE/Firefox open the page “http://localhost:8080″
5) Setup is complete if an “iTunes RSS Server” page appeared.

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Everyone asks about new products. When is the new PowerBook going to come out? Is Apple every going to release a PDA? When I answer that I don’t know, I’ve actually been called a liar. Bluntly. Sadly, it’s not even a rare occurrence. The truth is, no one in the store knows anything. Sometimes we have vague notions that something might be coming out, but the notions are, indeed, vague. Vague as in, “Something’s going to happen,” not as in “New PowerBooks, but I don’t know the specs. We find out about new products when you walk into the store and ask for them.

“Hey, do you have the new MacBook Pros yet?”

Arrrru? What the hell is a MacBook Pro?

This is not exaggeration, and is all too common. Apple not only shields its product roadmap from the public, but also from all public-facing employees. And nearly all non-facing employees. The litmus test is “Are you actively involved on the project or the project’s marketing and rollout?” If the answer is “No,” then you are generally left clueless.

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It’s not that I’m mulling over a platform switch—rather, this XP overload is part of Macworld Lab’s efforts to see how Microsoft’s operating system performs on Apple hardware now that software exists that enables you to boot into XP on an Intel-based Mac. With the help from our sister publication, PC World, we’ve been running the WorldBench 5 real-word benchmark suite on all of our Intel systems to gauge cross-platform performance. Even with Boot Camp, it still takes a couple of hours to set these systems up. But once running, they’ve been very stable. Here are some WorldBench 5 results, compared to three computers recently tested by PC World.
[Results:] As you can see, the Macs running Windows gave these PCs a run for their money, with the 2.16GHz MacBook Pro turning in the fastest scores on three of the five individual tests. The build-to-order MacBook configuration also tied the 2.16GHz HP Compaq in the sixth test, involving Roxio VideoWave.

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I don’t know what a typical college campus is like. Everything I’ve experienced at Georgia Tech is apparently not normal for a university lacking “tech” in the title. I’ve compiled a few things I’ve noticed around school for your enjoyment on this slow news day. Here we go. You’d be surprised at how much I’m not exaggerating.

This is pretty funny and interesting. We don’t see much of this at our high school, as our tech support is quite unfriendly! We have some evil people there, (and some nice ones too), but they don’t like you sniffing around, even if you know what you’re doing!

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Most of you will have at least one friend who is obsessed with the web stats program. That may very well be me. If you want to have some fun with said friend, read on.
It turns out that someone had copied the source code of my Google Maps housing project and was hosting it on their own website, but forgot to remove my Analytics references. Whenever someone hit the page on their site, it would thus register as a hit in my analytics.
But what really interested me was how easily you could scew a websites statistics by simply adding a couple lines of javascript to the source code of your own site. If your website generated enough traffic, you could effectively render a target websites Analytics meaningless.
Want to scew the statistics of a friends website, how about a competitor? Look up their source code, plug it into your website header and laugh. But don’t worry you could run multiple accounts, and hit them both on each page. That way you can keep your stats flowing just like normal.

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AppZapper 1.3 was released today. The uninstaller Apple forgot has teamed up with MacZOT.com to run a special promotion for the release of their latest version featuring the new QuickZap™
AppZapper 1.3 is FREE! (or will be if we get at least 259 bloggers to mention it)
For each blog that posts a link to MacZOT.com, they’ll drop the price for everybody by $0.05
Our goal is to give away 1,000 copies of AppZapper to Mac users around the world. So, every Blog entry will be worth about $50.00 to the community.
Once they reach at least 259, AppZapper will be priced at $0.00 (FREE) to everybody who registers at MacZOT.com or sends a simple email to BlogZOT@maczot.com after the time it becomes FREE.

I already have AppZapper (it’s a great program), and for those who don’t have it, it really is a program that Apple forgot to give with the Mac. I use it all the time, and it’s FUN

MacZOT.com | AppZapper Website

Microsoft Connect, home of Microsoft’s betas including Vista has some interesting CSS values. The first line in the .css is commented “fix for the IE 1px-off margin error”, followed by a value called “.StupidIEMarginHack “. [digg]

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Awhile back I posted about the new search results interface Google was supposedly testing. I can definitely confirm that today. This blog post describes how to set a new cookie in Firefox that will force Google to display the new results page for you. Since the instructions are a little off (and took me some fiddling to make them to work), here’s my version:[...] In the comments reader Whosawhatsis has posted an easier way to accomplish the same thing without installing any extensions. Try that first. [Download Squad]

Worked for me (in Safari and Firefox)!

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You can’t get more simple than the Galvanic Skin Response [GSR] sensor. It is just a cut 9V LEGO motor wire and some aluminum foil wrapped around your fingers with tape. I was inspired by talks by Mindfest panelists Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich who talked about using this type of sensor. The theory is that; the more relaxed you are the dryer your skin is and so the higher the skin’s electrical resistance. When you are under stress your hand sweats and then the resistance goes down.

This is really cool. Now anyone can make their own lie detector for not much money (assuming you already have a LEGO mindstorms kit). Nice hack!
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