TechThisOut!

To: Sony

I hereby announce that I will not purchase any Sony products from this point until the company ends it’s new “copy protected CD” policy that prevents me from playing my legally purchased CD’s on legally purchased equipment. This includes all media, or hardware made by Sony.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

I’m not sure if any of you have heard anything of this protection, but it is extremely annoying! I’m also not sure if this will get us anywhere, but show your opinions by signing. I did. Sign by clicking here.

Please, if you sign it because you saw it on here, please note our site, techthisout.net, in your comments left while signing. Thanks!

- Devious

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Today is the launch date of Nintendo’s Wi-Fi site. It has everything we need to know about Nintendo Wi-Fi like Wireless Hotspot locations, Router recommendations, and of couse the all the details on the wireless games such as Mario Kart and Tony Hawk!

Enjoy!
- Devious

read more | digg story

According to a new proposal being considered by a suburb of New York City, any business or home office with an open wireless connection but no separate server to fend off Internet attacks would be violating the law.

Hah! Can’t wait to see if this actually passes through.

Either way, Enjoy!
- Devious

read more | digg story

Google has updated their Adsense service and now pays publishers for referrals. Google now pays $1 for each Firefox download with the Google Toolbar installed.

read more | digg story

IBM announced Thursday the creation of a type of light that might eventually replace the use of electricity in electronic components. Read the link for more information.

- Devious

read more | digg story

Found this hilarious article over at Sillicon Valley Sleuth. I read it myeslf and it is absolutely hilarious. Enjoy.

Yahoo engineers apparently couldn’t help themselves. The beta of the new Yahoo Maps for a short while listed “The Dude’s Fish Store” at 1600 Amphiteatre Parkway in Mountain View, CA.

The address is better known as the headquarters for Yahoo’s competitor Google.

Yahoo claimed to have further information (screenshot here) about the store, listing hours of operation (only open in summer) and an assortment of fish, hamsters, gold fish, snakes and spiders. Languages spoken are German and Russian.

The store even has a basic website (site here, screenshot here) featuring a picture of a collection of cheeses and claiming that “Our fish NEVER die!”. The link page offers a link to the “Bestest page” (Google) and Stanford University.

“Need directions? Go to Google Maps”, the site claims, with the link leading to a Yahoo map instead.

The phone number listed is for guy named Ruben Suterwitz (or that’s what it sounds like on his voicemail). His voicemail gives the option to get assistance, forwarding callers to the Google front desk.

There are several hints pointing to a Google prank. The search engine’s co-founder Sergey Brin was born in Russia and both he and his buddy Larry Page were students at Stanford when they founded the company.

The ‘fish store’s’ website by the way lists a different address on Middlefield Road. Nothing is listed at that address.

And the foolishness at Yahoo doesn’t stop with the alleged fish store. The Yahoo Local information on Google itself points to the website of Google Belgium (screenshot here). One of the two comments claim that the company has a “great cafeteria”.

UPDATE: The information on the fish shop has been removed by Yahoo. The screenshot for the Local listing comes from the Google Desktop cache, causing it to look less than perfect.

While searching through Digg, I found a really cool site that can show you any website as if you were color blind.

Want to give it a try? go here: http://colorfilter.wickline.org/.

I’m not color blind, and I’ve definitely never wondered what it is, but hey, still a nifty link to check out!

Unfortunately, this is the top article on digg.com as I compose this, so it is getting a large volume of visitors. I can’t get to it, yet. Hopefully the volume of visitors will die down soon so we can all check it out.

Enjoy for now!
-Devious

For all of you email and thunderbird users, Mozilla.org released Thunderbird 1.5 RC1 recently.

Here’s whats new in Thunderbird 1.5 RC1:

* Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Thunderbird may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
* Sort address autocomplete results by how often you send e-mail to each recipient.
* Spell check as you type.
* Saved Search Folders can now search across multiple accounts.
* Built in phishing detector to help protect users against email scams.
* Podcasting and other RSS Improvements.
* Deleting attachments from messages.
* Integration with server side spam filtering.
* Reply and forward actions for message filters.
* Kerberos Authentication.
* Auto save as draft for mail composition.
* Message aging.
* Filters for Global Inbox.
* Improvements to product usability including redesigned options interface, and SMTP server management.
* Many security enhancements.

Look’s like a good release!

For more information and download link for this release, visit the official thunderbird site.

Update: Thanks to a commentor, John Haller, who has uploaded a “portable thunderbird“, you can now try this without altering your normal profile. Enjoy, and Thanks John!
- Devious

I’ve installed a pluggin called the Ultimate Tagging Warrior. It is a category system that can surpass the possibilities of categories. I can tag things on the fly, and organize the postings better.

This shouldn’t affect visitors to much, but it makes my job a lot easier!

If you go to the archives page, you can see all the tags, and how popular each one is. The bigger, thicker, and bolder a tag name is, the more posting it has in it. Pretty cool!

Enjoy.
-Devious

Here’s a fun thing to play around with, if you’re bored at 3am. Most Sony digital cameras start saving photos with the following name “DSC00001.JPG” and a lot of people take these photos and upload them to the web, where the all-knowing, all-seeing Google later catalogs all of them. So by clicking this link you can see the first photo taken by someone with their new camera or newly formatted card for some cameras, this is what it looks like when thousands of Sony cameras lose their photo-virginity.

Here’s some filenames for various other cameras:

IMG_0001.JPG is the equivalent for Canon cameras.
CIMG0001.jpg is the equivalent for Casio cameras.
imgp0001.jpg is the equivalent for Pentax cameras.
000_0001.jpg is the equivalent for Kodak cameras.
PICT0001.JPG is the equivalent for Konica cameras.
DSCF0001.JPG is the equivalent for Fuji cameras.
DSCN0001.jpg is the equivalent for Nikon cameras.
DSC00001.JPG is the equivalent for Sony cameras.

Oh, and using DSC as a search string in P2P programs also works great for turning up things on peoples hard drives they they didnt know they were sharing.

Enjoy!
-Devious