Netvibes Coriander beautifies the start page

Netvibes has announced a few colorful updates to their online service. The Coriander release brings with it improvements from numerous suggestions.

First off, Netvibes Coriander gets an improved RSS experience. Even though we really didn't think the old version was bad, Netvibes now has the ability to use multimedia content from blogs and news feeds without ever leaving the page. Listen to podcasts, view videos, and play games right on the start page.

Sharing customized Netvibes content is now pretty simple to do. Click on the arrow in your content feed window and choose whether you want to share the feed, module or widget via email, IM, or even drop it on a blog or website with some HTML code.

Maps now have a new search module in the Coriander release. Craigslist was brought on board in the first round of changes, and now there is a Map Comparison Search module that can be added to pages.

The final addition to the mix is the new personalization feature. Users can add a subtle touch to the Netvibes interface by changing colors of the module windows.

Google Fun - Personalized homepage hacks

Google recently launched their beautified personalized homepage themes. These themes provide a nice contrast to the once boring whiteness of the traditional Google layout. But lurking deep inside the XML there stands some interesting tidbits. The "Easter Eggs" that Marissa Mayer hinted about not that long ago are scattered about the themes, and appear at certain time specific interval. Two decimal places past Pi (3.14) as a matter of fact, will see a new skin overlay appear at 3:14 AM local time on top of your selected theme, and stay there for one minute.

The XML files for the overlays can be found here, with the time changes noted inside:

• Beach
• Bus Stop
• Cityscape
• Sweet Dreams
• Tea House
• Wintetrscape

For instance, here is a snapshot of good old Nessy:

Who wants to see more Easter Eggs in Google? I do!

[via Tony Ruscoe]

15 Hidden Mac OS X command line hacks

As you know, under the hood of that friendly Mac OS X system you're using lies the heart of a Unix machine, and the ultra powerful command-line that goes with it. For first time command line users it's a strange and mysterious place where dragons be, but long time users know the command line can help you get things done in ways you just can't work within the GUI. It's also a place to tweak settings not accessible from the GUI layers above.

Mac OS X Tips put together a really useful list of 15 hidden things you can change at the command line. From un-hiding icons to changing annoying defaults in iTunes, this list surely has some scratch for a nagging itch you have.

[via Del.icio.us]

Travel locally with 71miles

The definitive weekend trip guide has arrived. 71miles is an online destination focused entirely on local travel, providing users comprehensive reviews, trip notes, recommendations as well as narrated videos by local experts.

71miles has currently launched reviews of the San Francisco Bay area, as well as other Northern California hotspots, and will soon release reviews for the Washington DC Metro area.

Launching with virtually no money at all, 71miles merged many API's together making use of WordPress, and the Google Maps API. The whole site is built on the WordPress platform, and might be one of the most innovative uses of the WP blog framework ever created. So innovative that the creator of WorkPress has even said he thinks it is the coolest use of the Wordpress framework he's seen. That's saying a lot!

By the way, this isn't just another web 2.0 name that means nothing at all, 71 miles comes from a statistic which shows most trips take place within 71 miles from your home.

VMware Fusion Beta 2 available

VMware's desktop virtualization application for Mac OS X, codename Fusion (seriously, what isn't Fusion these days?), has hit Beta 2 and with it a handful of new features to boast: experimental 3D acceleration for Windows XP SP2 & DirectX 8.1, Vista support, improved networking, 64-bit OS support on Core 2 Duo Macs, and a slew of other improvements.

Having tested the first beta release, I can indeed say that this update is much faster and more stable. I don't know if I would give up Parallels for it, but the two are a close match. In fact, it almost seems like VMware Fusion is less processor intensive on my Core Duo iMac than Parallels is, but without any formal testing I'm just going to chalk that up to first impressions. Like Parallels, it allows custom screen resolutions for your Windows virtual machine after you install the VMware Tools, and also has drag-and-drop copying from Mac OS X to Windows, both cool features that I certainly appreciate. If you are interested in testing it out, you can sign-up and download VMware Fusion Beta 2 for free.

Vista's Bitlocker vs. OS X's FileVault, a duel to the death

Lifehacker organized a battle royale between the two common desktop drive encryption schemes available on Mac and Windows. It's a head to head that's a long time coming, although it may not be a fair fight until Leopard makes its appearance.

In one corner, the lightweight FileVault with its home directory encryption designed to keep your files reasonably safe without too much intrusion. In the other corner stands Bit Locker, the 800lb gorilla of whole drive encryption; a roach motel for data.. once it goes in, it doesn't come out (unless you have the key).

The verdict? Gina says, "I'd choose BitLocker - simply for the total-lockdown factor." Adding, "Yes, the annoying repartitioning rigamarole and cost of Vista Ultimate or Enterprise suck, but a thief ain't gonna come close to anything on that drive, no matter where it's stored, and I like it that way."

Start your own job board with JobCoin

Isn't everyone in the Web 2.0 blog-o-sphere starting a job board?
JobCoin takes just moments to set up and get running, and provides website owners an extremely easy solution to jumping on the bandwagon starting your own job board . Site owners set their job ad rate, and JobCoin skims 30% off the top for providing their unique platform.

JobCoin doesn't recommend charging for postings unless you have at least 2 million page views, but it doesn't hurt to experiment if you have a dedicated audience.

Setting up the actual job board service is simple, open a free account and drop in a single line of HTML code into any page on your website where you want the listings to appear. HTML or CSS code can be customized as you please so it fits in with your websites design. With other job posting locations demanding in upwards of $300 per listing, you might have a possible money making machine on your hands.

Skype beta adds business ratings

In what seems like a rather odd move, Skype has incorporated a sort of phone book into Skype 3.1 beta. The thing is, there aren't that many listings in the phone book right now. Thats' because the new Skypefind feature is really more of a social business rating tool than a business finding tool.

You can search, create, review, or modify listings created by other Skype users. The idea is that you can add your favorite local restaurants, retailers, or other businesses to spread the word. As the database grows, Skype users will easily be able to search for highly recommended places to eat, drink, or be merry. Of course, you can dial any recommended listing using Skypeout by clicking on a call phone icon.

Right now, if you type restaurant into Skypefind, you get only 11 listings. And if you want to find a restaurant in Philadelphia, you're out of luck. Personally, I would have been happier if Skype had first acquired a large database of businesses and then let users rank those services. Having a Skype411 button would be a lot more useful to me than Skypefind.

[via GigaOM]

Eric S. Raymond divorces Fedora

After thirteen years of not-so marital bliss, Eric S. Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, is calling it quits on his partnership with Red Hat/Fedora. The final straw came after he spent 4 hours working on what should have been a routine upgrade only to have his entire system rendered unusable. In a scathing open letter posted on various Linux websites and mailing lists, Raymond lays bare his anger and frustration with what he claims is Fedora's "failure of vision which will condemn Fedora to a shrinking niche in the future."

As if that wasn't enough, Raymond goes one step farther by quickly rebounding with Ubuntu, an open source OS which he indicates has risen and addressed the challenges which Fedora never was able to.

Dell and Linux - the people's choice

In addition to the sweeping changes in Dell's upper management ranks to help right its slide in sales, Dell is reaching out to consumers for input on products and services at a website called Idea Storm.

So far, the suggestion getting the most votes is the one that offers one of the 3 top free Linux versions pre-installed on all Dell PCs.

The second vote getter is having Open Office, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office pre-installed on your machine. My favorite idea on the list, though, was saying no to foreign tech support! What do our readers think of the people's choice so far?

Google Images restores old design

A few weeks ago Google went and changed its design for Google images by cleaning up all that annoying extra data on the screen that you don't need, like the image size and the website where it's located. You could still see that information, but only by scrolling your mouse over the image.

Generally, this made Google Images much less useful. If there are multiple versions of the same image available, it's nice to know which one is the largest at a glance, for example. Or if you're looking for images of a rock band, you might want to know which ones come from the band's official web site.

Now, less than a month after rolling out its site redesign, it looks like Google's reverted back to the older, more informative version of Google images. It's nice to see Google reacting to negative response from users, if in fact that's what they're doing. It's always possible this is just a glitch, or that a new interface could be on its way next week.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Hacking Vista to allow concurrent sessions

Microsoft seems to have left out from Windows Vista the ability to log in to your PC without logging out another user. While this was something that was technically only supported on earlier Windows Server products, there was an easy hack that allowed you to replace a dll file in Windows XP.

Okay, so why is this important? Well, if you want to access files on your computer, or install updates, or pretty much do anything while someone else is using your computer, tough. For example, say a family member's watching a movie using Vista's media center functionality in the living room, but you need access to the computer? You're pretty much out of luck.

On the other hand, if you could login from a remote computer without logging off the first user, one user could continue to use the media center while the other user performs tasks in the background.

Well, as tends to happen when Microsoft leaves a useful feature out of their operating systems, the user community finds a way to enable it. The fine folks at The Green Button are have found a way to enable concurrent sessions. Alan Cook at Missing Remote has written up a nice tutorial explaining how to install the hack.

Video editing for beginners: Movavi

While Mac users have iMovie, Windows folks have a less straightforward choice when it comes to novice video editing software. That's the gap Movavi hopes to fill, with its promise of an all-in-one video post-production suite for capturing, converting, editing, and distributing video over the web or for your iPod. Broken up into six miniature applications for each step of the post-production process, Movavi's list of touted features are pretty simplistic and no-frills, but for users looking for the most basic video editing solution, Movavi might fulfill that need for a price of $59. Intermediate or advanced editors need not bother. Check out the full list of features here, and give the demo a quick spin.

Outlook on the Desktop

Outlook on the Desktop is a free application built on .Net by Michael Scriv. It allows you to pick any one of the main Outlook views (Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, etc), and display it directly on your desktop. The display is shown in a mildly opaque way, so that you can still see your desktop wallpaper (or in my case, icons) beneath the Outlook display. However, the coolest part of this utility is the fact that the view on your desktop is active; you can double click on a day if you're viewing the calendar, and up pops the standard appointment creation dialog.

It seems like there have been a number of recent attempts to set free the personal management information you've got locked away in Microsoft Outlook and expose it on the desktop of your computer. I personally have two problems with this. First, I almost never have all of my running applications minimized so I rarely see my desktop. Second, over the past 6 months I have been unable to reduce the number of icons on my desktop to the point where I can actually see the wallpaper I have set, never mind trying to read something displayed there.

If you're looking for an Outlook widget type of utility on steroids, Outlook on the Desktop may be just the ticket.

[Thanks Kevin!]

Digg adopts Open ID

Recently, AOL and Microsoft signed on in support of Open ID. Now social news juggernaut Digg has announced plans to join the party, declaring it will adopt the decentralized digital identity platform later this year. Digg founder Kevin Rose made the announcement earlier this week at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.

OpenID is a system that allows you to have one username and password for every site you visit. That username and password is actually a secure personal URL that stores your personal information and allows you to control what information you share with websites. Other services that have announced their adoption of OpenID include Yahoo, Wikipedia, and LiveJournal.

[via TechCrunch]

iTunes helps uncover a musical mystery hoax

Joyce Hatto was described as one of the best classical pianists in the world shortly before she died last year. She put out over a hundred recordings, but had stopped performing live decades ago. So maybe it shouldn't be that big a surprise that some listeners questioned whether she was actually recording the songs herself.

And then something funny happened. A music critic for Gramophone Magazine went and popped one of her CDs in his computer for a listen recently. And wouldn't you know it, his music player found what appeared to be the correct information for the CD: only instead of Joyce Hatto, it listed Lászlo Simon as the performer.

You see, many music management programs, including iTunes figure out what CD you're listening to by examining the length, order, and number of tracks on a disc and then comparing that data with an online database. Sure, it's theoretically possible that the music critic found a rare instance where two artists recorded two CDs where tracks had exactly the same lengths. But the thing is, several of Hatto's CDs seem to have been copied. Audio company Pristine Audio is conducting an analysis of the original recordings versus the "fake" recordings, and you can listen to the results.

Of course, Hatto's husband, who runs the record label that distributes her work claims that he has no idea why there are similarities between Hatto's CDs and those by other artists. He insists that he will hire his own sound engineer to conduct a full examination of the recordings.


[via New Scientist]

Microsoft to follow Vista with Vienna in 2009

I'll believe it when I see it, but Microsoft is planning a late 2009 release date for the next version of Windows, codenamed Vienna. That would be just two and a half years after the launch of Vista, which in turn was released more than 5 years after Windows XP.

Many of the upgrades that were planned for Vista had been put on hold when it became clear that the most important item for Microsoft to focus on was security. Therefore Vienna will feature a new file system and a new user interface (no more start menus or toolbars), which had originally been intended for Vista.

Most significantly, Vienna will break backward compatibility with many existing Windows programs. While that will probably make it easier for Microsoft to hit it's projected release date, I can't imagine too many folks will be happy about the need to upgrade almost all of their existing software. That said, it's possible that Vienna could include some sort of virtualization layer that would allow you to run older programs. Heck, if you can run Windows applications on Linux using Wine, why not run Windows programs on Windows?

[via Engadget]

Wikipedia NOT on the verge of shutting down

Contrary to popular rumor, it looks like Wikipedia will not have to shut down in three months if it doesn't raise enough money. Dozens of blogs and technology websites have spent the past few days reporting that Wikimedia Foundation chairwoman Florence Devouard said at the LIFT07 conference that Wikipedia "might disappear" if money is not raised.

But Laurent Haug, the founder of LIFT, went back and looked at his actual transcript of Devouard's statements. Basically, Haug asked Devouard how much cash was on hand to run Wikipedia's servers, and she replied three months.

Devouard also pointed out that the foundation is making plans for Wikipedia two years in advance, so there's no expectation that the money's going to dry up entirely. The overall point that was being made was simply that it costs more to run Wikipedia the more popular it gets, and as with any foundation, it's important to continue raising money as you go along.

[via Scobleizer]

Super Mario Bros 3: Crazy Firefox theme of the day

When it comes to Firefox themes it can be hit or miss, but this one takes the cake. This Super Mario Brothers 3 theme is very detailed, taking a little bit of everything that is familiar from your favorite Mario games.

Normally I don't really like tinkering with my theme, because the colors are such a stark contrast to the web page you are viewing and the buttons are usually some crazy weird new symbol that will take you some getting use to. But this theme has a light color to it, so navigating around the web is easier on the eyes.

This theme has all of the pull-down menus and pop-up menus changed to match the idea behind the Super Mario Brother games. My favorite part about this theme is that all of the slide bars are warp pipes. And then, once you get your theme installed and set, you gotta play the flash Super Mario Brothers game!

Frengo: post Myspace messages from your phone

The website Frengo that is known for their mobile games has just launched a service allowing users to post bulletins and leave comments for friends on MySpace from any mobile phone with text messaging enabled.

In order to sign up for the service you have to first shell out your MySpace username and password as well as your cell phone number to the company. I have an old MySpace account that I don't use, so I signed up under that account just to see what Frengo was all about.

Once you're signed up posting bulletins is pretty easy. You text your bulletin message prefaced by the phrase "MYSPACE bulletin" and like magic it shows up as a bulletin on the site sent out to all your friends with a friendly "Frengo" logo on it just to make sure everyone knows where it came from.

I had some serious issues with the comments feature. In order to send comments you have to know the URL of your friends MySpace page off the top of your head. MySpace doesn't require you to customize your URL so for some people this could be a random string of numbers, for others it's their name or some sort of catch phrase. Unless you pay a lot of attention to the address bar when your surfing MySpace chances are you don't have any idea what the URL is for anyone you would want to post a comment to, and remembering them all is hardly worth it .

[via Mashable]

VodPod's multi-video embeddable player

Although VodPod has been around since at least December of last year, I have not stumbled upon the video sharing site until today, after they recently launched a brand new widget that allows users to embed multiple videos in a single player. Quite frankly, this is pretty awesome. Using VodPod's service, not only can you leech videos from other websites such as YouTube, Google Video, blip.tv, and others, you can host these videos under custom collections, or 'pods', on the Vodpod website.

Using their new blog badge feature, you can then create a totally separate, self-contained video player including these same videos from multiple sources. Meta craziness! So, you know those folks who love to post a billion YouTube videos to a single webpage, essentially making navigation of said site something of a chore? Well, forget about that now. These multi-video embeddable players automatically update when users add new videos to their pod. In addition to the multi-video player, Vodpod introduced a similarly useful customizable sidebar widget and bookmarklet for instant video adding. Anyway, I'm very satisfied with what I see at VodPod so far, to say the least. To get an idea of what these "pods" and multi-video widgets look like, check out my own personal pod, which I whipped up this morning. And here's a sample of the embeddable widget in action, posted on a Wordpress blog.

Yahoo Pipes launches--but what is it ?

There has been lots of buzz around Yahoo and their newly launched Pipes beta. So what is it? Plain and simple, it's an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Pipes can be used to create RSS feeds that are a lot more useful and powerful than any other feed reader. Pipes is a Yahoo!-hosted service that enables the user to remix feeds that create data mashups with a visual approach. The Pipes tool allows users that have basically no skills or technical experience with web data to combine sources and develop new web services that they can share with others. With the tool, users connect pipe segments, like Yahoo! searches, Flickr feeds, and Google Base items, creating a complex application within minutes. Tutorials on how to use Pipes are currently not online, but are expected to be in a few days. There is a Yahoo! discussion forum open to users that wish to discuss Pipes with other early adopters. TechCrunch, GigaOM, and John Battelle all have blurbs about the service that you can check out.

MacTheRipper: Rip DVDs in OS X

MacTheRipper is a DVD extractor for OSX designed to extract the video off of a commercial DVD onto your hard drive free of copy protection and region codes.

MacTheRipper has actually been around for awhile. The application's first release was in March of 2004, and now three years later they are beta testing version 3 and offering version 2.6.6 up for download. The application is a pretty no-frills DVD ripper that really just allows you to get video files onto your hard drive, not do anything with them once you get them there; for that you'll need some sort of additional software depending on what your plans are.

Here at Download Squad we don't support anyone doing anything illegal, and neither do the folks at MacTheRipper. The MacTheRipper site makes a point of letting you know that Mac is "intended to backup DVDs you have legally purchased for personal use. Any copyright-infringing activity you choose to perpetrate using this application is illegal, immoral, and beyond our control."

A similar option for Windows users is RipIt4Me.

Is a Zune Phone in the works?

Rumor has it that Microsoft may be planning the release of a Zune phone in May 2007 before the much anticipated iPhone hits the shelves.

Microsoft filed papers on Monday with the FCC for a wireless device to be used for "consumer broadband access and networking." The unnamed device mentioned in Microsoft's FCC paperwork is planning to use 4G technology. Most networks are barely at 3G currently, however Sprint/Nextel announced plans in August to build their own 4G Network based on IEEE 802.16e WiMax standard with the exact same specs mentioned in Microsoft's FCC filing.

Internet buzz is booming, with several people connecting the FCC filing and Sprints press release together to build suspicions of a Zune phone.

With this particular technology a WiMax-enabled Zune Phone could emerge with download speeds near 2Mbps and the ability to seamlessly share music with people from coast to coast.

No doubt it would be a pretty spectacular phone, now all we have to do is find out if it's real.

[via CrunchGear]