tech brain farts.com: May 2006

The Pirate Bay Raided: Exclusive Interview

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Rickard Falkvinge, head of the Swedish Pirate Party talks with WiredFire about today's raid and what really happened.

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GMail Downgraded, No Longer Cracks PDFs

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

"Gmail has crippled its "View as HTML" functionality so as to comply with Adobe's PDF copy-control scheme."

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Free Password Recovery Software

Last week I found an archive with some important documents on my hard disk, but it was password protected. Unfortunately, I didn't remember the password, so I tried to find a good software to recover the password even if that meant brute-force attack.Elcomsoft has many programs for password recovery that have many great features and are free for personal (non-commercial) use.

Replacing The Desktop: What's Missing In Web 2.0?

Web applications replacing the desktop? Here are two problems we need to solve before that can happen. Problem 1: Offline Access. Problem 2: Encrypted, Searchable Storage.

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Microsoft Office 2007 Beta FREE DOWNLOAD

Monday, May 29, 2006

It’s been four years since the last Office release, but new Office 2007 has a FREE Beta available for download at Microsoft.ca. The software has an expiration date of February 1, 2007. Once it expires, it will continue to work in a reduced functionality mode.

List of Universal Binaries for Intel (and PPC) Mac OS X

Friday, May 26, 2006

A nice list for all you new MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini owners that are wanting to run native programs. Make sure you bookmark to check for updates!

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Frogger in Flash

Paul Neave has been working on a Flash version of Frogger for some months now. It has been up for some time, but is now finished, and now (like most of his games) has a worldwide high-score list.

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DivX 6.5 features first official player for Mac

DivX Inc. has announced the release of DivX 6.5 for the Mac. The new version of the video conversion and playback software features the first â??officialâ?? release of DivX for Mac player, which lets Mac users watch DivX-encoded video either in a Web browser or from the desktop

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New EASY Pandora Hack Converts tunes to DRM-Free MP3s

Using firefox and a small java program, your pandora tunes will be converted to unprotected mp3 files as you listen. Even better, they are tagged and titled correctly and placed into folders with the band name. Even I can do this.

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Coming Soon: XBOX 360 Modchips

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Team Xecuter thought that those hackers shouldn\'t be the only ones to be able to play backup games for the XBOX 360 game console, and has announced that the group is very close to releasing a first generation mod-chip for XBOX 360.

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What is a DMZ?

Explaination of what a DMZ is and the purpose for them as well as information on different types of DMZ designs for beginner to intermediate security professionals or just people interested in learning more about network security.

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HOWTO: Secure Firefox/IM/email from anywhere with PuTTY

Monday, May 22, 2006

Quick, step-by-step HOWTO to set up secure, encrypted tunnels for web browsing, instant messaging, and email from anywhere. No need to set up a VPN. Great for working from hotels and coffee shops!

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Free Stock Photos, Images and Textures

Lots of great photos.

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Salt Manipulated into Amazing Patterns by Sound

Video of salt being manipulated into some awesome patterns by an escalating sound frequency. It's kind of hard to explain, but this is really cool.

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Photos of 100 Rooms; each 100 Square Feet in Size; Hong Kong Public Housing

"100 x 100"..... photographs of residents in their flats in hong kong's oldest public housing estate: 100 rooms, each 100 square feet in size. Is this a hint of things to come once the World becomes REALLY overpopulated?

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Mac OS X: What Are All Those Processes?

Have you ever looked at Activity Monitor and wondered what all those background processes are? This website has a nice list of each background process or dameon, and tells you exactly what it does. It's always important to know what's going on inside your computer.

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Afraid Of Re-installing Windows XP?

This site has a very useful tutorial if you have an old and slow XP machine with hundreds of programs and you want to re-install. This site will show you how to save your old partition in a virtual machine, and have a nice, new install of Windows.

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Fast OS Switching on Black MacBook (video)

New black MacBook running Ubuntu, WinXP, and MacOS all at the same time! This is the ultimate setup!

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Microsoft throws a wrench at xbox360 modchippers

A pop-on modchip for the DVD drive firmware hack was possible and in the works, Microsoft fixed that by coating the firmware chip on all sides with epoxy - the pictures do the talking. The leads needed for the firmware otherwise are all over - making modchips quite hard to make.

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MacBook - CNET First Look Video

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Michelle Thatcher reviews Apples new MacBook (White, 2.0 Intel Core Duo) notebook computer.

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Mac OS X 10.4.7 Details

The forthcoming update to Mac OS X 10.4 will deliver improvements to the company's Mail.app and Safari Web browser applications. This will be the seventh maintenance and security update to Mac OS X Tiger since Apple first shipped the software last April. Early builds of the update have patched "over 60" significant issues.

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Miller Beer to be first to use High Tech (Cold Can) Technology

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Lowers Temp. by 30Â° Fahrenheit in just three minutes.

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Google make 12 cents for every search you perform!

...and that's a lot of cash considering;

"Americans alone did more than 2.7 billion searches via Google in January 2006"

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Download Google Videos As AVI Files

You can download Google Videos as AVI without additional programs or extensions.

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SkypeOut now FREE for US & Canada!

Monday, May 15, 2006

Yes. It is really very, very free. Thereâ??s no prepayment, no minimum use, no subscription, no monthly fee, no nothing. You just download and install Skype and then you start calling. Both the caller and the number called must be in either the US or Canada. There are no strings attached.

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Wine 0.9.13 Released

the latest version of Wine, which includes numerous bug fixes, and direct3d fixes.

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Most Dangerous Search Words Revealed

There is one phrase which, if you type into any search engine will expose your PC to shed-loads of spam, according to a new report.

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Is Google The New Microsoft?

In a few short years, Google has turned from a simple and popular company into a complicated and controversial one. In depth article by the Economist.

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IT is the Most Stressful Profession

IT experts are more likely to suffer from stress than any other professional, according to the survey.

A staggering 97 percent of people working in IT claim to find their life at work stressful on a daily basis.

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Why We Trust Google... Should We?

"The level of advance trust we put in Google is incredibly high. Iâ??m not sure another company could just come and say: I read your emails; Iâ??m watching your surfing behavior; Iâ??m checking where you click and what you search for... and Iâ??ll save all that data till 2038. And just what Iâ??ll do with all that data is none of your business."

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The Myth, Reality & Future of Web 2.0

The discussion flared up when Josh Koppleman, a well known angel investor, wrote that many of the Web 2.0 companies that were cropping up were targeting a niche audience. He found that many were me-too or forgettable permutations of some of the more established players such as Flickr, You Tube or Digg.

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How The Da Vinci Code Doesn't Work - from HowStuffWorks

In this article, you'll learn what happened when HowStuffWorks took a close, hard look at "The Da Vinci Code" and how it uses science, technology, art and history.

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you thought you've pirated everything huh?How to Pirate a Vinyl Record

a easy How to Pirate a Vinyl Record

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BBC talks with Frank Abagnale about Social Engineering

Friday, May 12, 2006

"Is technology driving the old-school conman into extinction?" Frank Abagnale should know; the 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can was based on him.

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New Gmail Feature: Gmail Pictures

Gmail Pictures (which isn't yet available) will be rolled out to accounts slowly very very soon. It lets users choose avatars for their email conversations with people, almost like avatars in instant messengers.

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Interviewing Web Developers - 20 Good Questions to Ask

Thursday, May 11, 2006

A list of 20 good (and somewhat common) questions to ask when conducting a job interview for a web developer. The list doesn't focus on one particular development language and was intended to be useful for all spheres of web development, and benefit both interviewers and interviewees (know what to expect!)

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Google Trend

New Google Labs Product, "See what the world is searching for."

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Key Isolation Features in Mac OS X

Apple built OS X with security in mind. As part of that central security theme, OS X has been designed using three key isolation features: System Isolation, User Isolation, Memory and Application Isolation

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Tool to See if Your Site is Penalized at Google

The tool extracts link information from your site and checks the URLs against Google to see if you've had pages penalized or banned in the index.

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Internet on Cellphones Will be Next Tech Battleground

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

The push by the world's biggest Internet search firms to dominate what customers see when they turn on their cellphones has accelerated in recent months with Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. all striking deals with service providers and others in the cellphone industry.

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Microsoft Live Messenger Launches

The beta of the successor to MSN Messenger launched just moments ago. It allow easy file transfers based on Foldershare technology and has expanded VOIP, video, and customization features.

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Google News Cloud

NewsCloud is a site experiment that fetches news from Google News, tries to find tags related to each news and presents a tag cloud of the daily news. During the news process, there's no human intervention. All tags are discovered automatically from Google News by text analysis. The pages are served statically, and are generated every hour.

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SecureDVD -- Live DVD with 10 Linux Distros -- Torrent now available!

The 10 best security Linux distributions from a previous digg post are now on one multiboot Live DVD. The new thing is that the torrent is now available for download. Linux diggers rejoice!

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Apple's Intel Mac mini sales strong; being purchased as "Media Centers"

Apple Computer's new line of Intel-based Macs remain strong sellers this month, with "solid" demand for not only the company's iMac and MacBook Pro offerings but also the Mac mini, according to a new research note from UBS Investment Research

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How to Rip DVDs to Small AVI or MPG Formatted Files

An easy to follow tutorial for those who do not know how to rip DVDs to a more "usable" file format.

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Hack Attack: Automatically download your favorite TV shows

Instead, of hunting for new torrents each week and firing up your bittorent client to download them, automate your downloads! Lifehacker shows you how to set up and automate BitTorrent downloads so that you can quit your weekly search for torrents.

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Hackers turn attention to Apple

Hackers are increasingly focusing on Apple's Mac OS X, and the number of newly discovered vulnerabilities has surged. Such a switch could mean big implications for Apple's user base, which has traditionally not had to concern itself too much over security.

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Hackers turn attention to Apple

Hackers are increasingly focusing on Apple's Mac OS X, and the number of newly discovered vulnerabilities has surged. Such a switch could mean big implications for Apple's user base, which has traditionally not had to concern itself too much over security.

read more | digg story

High Tech Ticket Unveiled for World Cup '06 to Fight Scalping

Monday, May 08, 2006

The rules are that legally purchased tickets, with unique identification codes contained on individual chips, can be transferred only among relatives or in connection with hardship cases, not excluding assorted events of mass destruction like epidemics, earthquakes, natural catastrophes and acts of war.

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Online To Do Lists Compared

Techcrunch reviews and compares online to-do list services.

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Great Resource: Printable Maps of U.S.

The National Atlas has prepared reference and outline maps of the United States that you can print or use online.

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Release Dates for Upcoming Movies/DVDs/Books/CDs/Games

This is a cool website that shows what new products are coming out each week. They have an email reminder service to let you know when things are coming out. It's nice to have all this information in one place. Digg!

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Using VMware Player to test linux distributions

VMware (http://www.vmware.com) is a company specialized in virtualization technology, providing software to run an operating system (guest) inside another (host). A few months ago VMware released VMware Player, a free virtual machine player which you can use to run prebuilt virtual OSs.

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The Ultimate Web Developer's Handbook - now redesigned

The Web Developer's Handbook is an extensive resource for web site developers with information on CSS, Ajax, Web 2.0, Design, XHTML, Accessibility, SEO and related topics. Now finally redesigned.

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PS3 Dev Units Pic

An American spy was kind enough to hook up with a couple of photos showing off the PS3 development kits as they've never been seen publicly before. Also, note all of the USB and dip-switches on the units

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First ABC, Now CBS announces that it will ALSO offer shows online!

Friday, May 05, 2006

This time, CBS has joined the party by unveiling a service called "innertube"â??an ad-supported video channel available directly from their web site.

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Windows Tip: Rename Multiple Files with One Click

Picture this: You've dumped all those arcanely named photos from your camera to your PC. But rather than leave them with names like IMG0484.jpg, you'd like them to have descriptive titles like VacationToParis1.jpg. Here's the easy way to rename files in bulk!

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Web Will Run Out of Addresses by 2012

"the Web will be out of IPv4 addresses. It may be time to consider migrating to IPv6"

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Dvorak: Eight signs that Microsoft is dead in the water

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

There is virtually nothing exciting that is coming out of Microsoft. Sure, they will keep making money, but all of its attempts to enter other markets have failed. Vista and the new Office keep getting delayed and scaled back. Now the company is focusing all its energy on trying to attack Google.

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Top 10 Most Fuel-Efficient Cars for 2006

Monday, May 01, 2006

Hybrid vehicles take top 3 spots but are not the only option. Article with photos and links.

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ABC Launches Free Online Episode Streaming

Starting today, you can stream episodes of ABC's LOST, Desperate Housewives, Commander in Chief, and Alias for free at ABC.com. The ad-supported episodes will be available for at least a two-month trial period.

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The Counterattack On Google

"How Yahoo and MSN are scrambling to slow its search-ad juggernaut"

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Google Calendar Tips

Here is a great listing of tips for Google Calendar from Stop Design

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Ultimate Web Designers Resource

Has XHTML, PHP, FLASH, AJAX and many more resources. Definitely worth a look at this site.

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The Truth about Advertising on the Web

A look at just about every type of advertising you could cram into a webpage, with analysis of which ones work or don't work, and why. One of said analyses is pretty surprising.

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The Best Way to Search Flickr

With this website, you can view Flickr photos in an aesthetic environment.

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Another Way To Get Free Music

MyBloop is a free online storage site."With MyBloop.com, the world can share files for free without storage limits." This also means its a gold mine for music. Instructions for getting the music are listed under the first comment, due to digg.com character limits.

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Wyaworks - App Builder for Non-Coders

Wyaworks is a new start-up company that aims at making it easy for the average person to build useful web-applications. Its first app, Wyacracker allows users to "build simple web forms and publish them on websites or via email".

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