Windows XP users can now have one more feature Macs have had for a long time - Expose! Otaku Software’s TopDesk lets you use hot keys, mouse hotspots or floating desktop buttons to view and sort all of your open application windows, easily navigating to the one you are searching for. TopDesk Continue Reading »

Similar to the 802.11n spec, Wireless USB (UWB, Ultra-Wideband) has been in talks for a very long time. Belkin has created one of the first wireless USB hubs, your typical four port contraption, set to be out this spring. The difference is that this hub is powered by Ultra-Wideband wireless technology allowing the user to plugin a USB dongle into a remote computer and access all of the devices attached to the hub. Continue Reading »

I know I have been talking about the new Intel Macs a lot recently, but it seems as though someone over at Neosmart.net has compiled a set of instructions that might work for dual-booting XP on an Intel Mac. The instructions haven’t been tested as the author does not have access to an Intel Mac but they look very promising. To bypass the BIOS limitation, Continue Reading »

I had seen Gigabyte’s i-RAM when it was displayed at Computex Taiwan last year and now Gigabyte has started supplying it North American consumers. i-RAM is a PCI card that has four slots for DDR SDRAM memory sticks and can be used as a hard drive once connected to the motherboard via a SATA cable. The gain with i-RAM is incredible speed compared to any traditional hard drive or even your WD Raptor hard drive. Since it is seen as a normal Serial-ATA hard drive to your motherboard’s BIOS, you can actually RAID two or more of them. There are, however, several drawbacks. The RAM slots are tilted so they don’t interfere with nearby expansion cards and therefore the i-RAM won’t work with certain DDR sticks with heatspreaders. Also, i-RAM keeps the memory Continue Reading »

A known bug in a Microsoft driver that controls USB 2.0 functions in the Core Duo 945 GM chipset can quickly drain notebook battery power once a USB 2.0 device is connected. Tom’s Hardware uncovered this problem, which Microsoft has kept secret until they can find a fix, when reviewing several Intel Core Duo and ATi X1600 based notebooks. I am not sure if this affects the MacBook Continue Reading »

You have probably noticed the quick social bookmarks at the bottom of each post. I’ve had these around for a while now and have shown you the code to do the same in Customizing K2: Part 3. Kirk Montgomery has taken this and created a fantastic WordPress plugin to easily add this functionality to your blog. The plugin, Continue Reading »

I’ve found it very hard recently to get through two classes, at most, without wondering how many emails I have received (20-40/day is the norm) or if there are any new comments here. After looking at Blackberry and Treo solutions, I decided a PDA is the best and most cost effective. A Treo 700W would run ~$70/month! Campus is drenched in Wi-Fi so a Wi-Fi enabled PDA is the best solution. I had looked at the Windows Mobile powered ones but I won’t buy a Microsoft product so I quickly went to looking at Palms, the Apples of the PDA market. I’ve gone ahead and ordered Continue Reading »

A guy named Colin from Houston is holding a contest for someone to come up with a way to dual-boot Windows XP on an Apple MacBook Pro. Donations to the site have brought the prize money to over $4,000 so far. Colin apparently has a MacBook Pro on the way and told his boss that it would replace his IBM desktop. Continue Reading »

It seems as though Darice has tagged me, so I must embark on a journey that is the list of four things. By the way, this is one of those hip new blog community activities. Continue Reading »

Part 1 and Part 2 were swell but Part 3 has a penchant for being naughty. If this is your first time reading one of these tutorials, you should go back and read or skim over the first two. These tutorials deal with the popular K2 theme/mod for WordPress as developed by Michael Heilemann and Chris J. Davis. Get ready to leave comments if you don’t understand something or if I made a mistake as I’m watching the Rose Bowl simultaneously (yes, I started writing this a long time ago). Continue Reading »

I just wanted to follow-up on my article from last week and say that the IEEE has approved the 802.11n wireless spec. This will allow for potential wireless transmission throughput of 600 megabits per second. It’s amazing how it is possible to come so close to gigabit ethernet without the cable. 802.11n also makes it possible for n-enabled devices such as access points and routers to operate at greater Continue Reading »

Every once in a while, someone would ask me what feeds I subscribe to as they have the same interests as I do. No need to ask me anymore. Today I unleash Agg (taken down since this was posted), which is short for aggregator, which wouldn’t fit in the menu bar. It is served by the lovely open source Gregarius web-based and AJAX-powered feed aggregator. Continue Reading »

So you’re in the middle of History 2112 and are typing notes like crazy because your professor talks a million words per minute. Unfortunately for you there are 30 minutes left in class but your PowerBook only has 15 minutes of juice left. What to do? The first one should be obvious - lowering the brightness on your screen. This can save major battery life. Disabling AirPort wireless and BlueTooth are also big helpers. Continue Reading »

Windows Vienna is the codename for the operating system that comes after Microsoft’s Windows Vista. I’m not yet sure why Microsoft is worrying about the OS after Vista, when Vista isn’t anywhere near getting out the door. This information comes from Neowin.net where they discuss how this info was discovered from famous Microsoft blogger, Robert Scoble. Apparently Scoble replied to a thread on Channel 9, an MSDN related site, regarding a Continue Reading »

When I had written my Ubuntu for novices how to, one of the resources I recommended was an Ubuntu guide website. However, that website was outdated with info for Ubuntu 5.04. Another website has come along and created a similar guide, in the form of a wiki, for support with Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10. Continue Reading »

In the hardcore computer performance and gaming community, there is an underlying test to see how good your computer is; the 3DMark benchmark. Futuremark has been making this Gamer’s Benchmark for many years and it is just about the most undisputed benchmark for computer speed. 3DMark06 was just released as reported by ExtremeTech, and it includes all the requisite pixel shader, CPU and other miscellaneous benchmarks to bring your latest machine to its knees. The reason 3DMark has been so popular is because of its scoring and ranking system. Users can compare their computer to similar systems and see how well they stand up. Continue Reading »

If you’ve passed by digg during the last few hours you’ve seen the incredibly popular OSX 10.4.3 on your PC post. From the comments it appears as though this works. Some one has even tracked down the appropriate torrent, prepatched for SSE2 (OS X x86 requires an SSE3 instruction-set enabled processor, such as a Prescott Core Intel) alongside ATi video acceleration and Rosetta translation in the comments. I can’t verify if everything works, but it seems to be thorough so there’s no reason it shouldn’t work. If you attempt this and Continue Reading »

I’ve always wondered who all these people are that have subscribed to my feed. There’s anywhere from 600 to 900 of you but I still only see comments from the same 50-odd people. Now’s your time to shine, lurkers! Just pop a comment here, no reason to be shy. Let us know who you are, where you’re from, what you do, whatever. Continue Reading »

Okay maybe Microsoft isn’t out to kill Craigslist per se but their new Windows Live Expo, which is now in a closed beta test, aims to do exactly what Craigslist does only better. Microsoft describes Live Expo as the following: Continue Reading »

Anyone that’s used a Mac for even a week will have heard of a fantastic little app called Delicious Library. It lets you catalog all of your DVDs, CDs, Games, Books, whatever and keep track of who borrows them from you. You can type in the name of your media and search for it or type in the ISBN manually or let your iSight scan it in. Up until now, Windows users had no piece of software that could even compare. Now there is an answer. Continue Reading »

Zach over at Dopamine Addict has a good K2 modification tutorial. I’ve covered some of the things in my tutorials, but there are some nifty things he goes over that you could find useful. For example, a header that spans the entire page as well as Continue Reading »

It seems as though Google has silently launched it’s Music Search. Right now it is a no frills almost blank Google page. When you search for things you will find several categories of results: by Artist, by Song and by Album. It looks like Google has some work ahead of itself for Music Search. It’s not terribly accurate and doesn’t have any idea of smaller bands. Go ahead Continue Reading »

Tickr is a simple application for Mac OS X that sits on your desktop and scrolls through the Flickr images it finds given tags you supply it. It reminds me of Slide, which never really caught on that well in my mind. If you are a little bored this app is Continue Reading »

I came across this article on Popular Mechanics entitled 15 New Tech Concepts You’ll Need to Know In 2006. It serves as a great basic guide for emerging technologies but I wanted to add a few concepts it left out.

High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP): Think of it as DRM for your display. Microsoft will be supporting this technology into the upcoming Vista operating system and others may follow as well. This is how Continue Reading »

If all goes well with the Joint Proposal team working on establishing 802.11n next week, we will see very promising Wi-Fi products in the near future. 802.11n marks the fourth largely used 802.11 specification, after 802.11a, b and g. So what’s so different about this new n spec you say? Well first off if uses a different technique for transmitting and receiving data via multiple streams, dubbed MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output). Keep in mind that 802.11b permits a throughput of 11 megabits/sec while 802.11g Continue Reading »

Mozilla has released version 1.5 of the widely used email application, Thunderbird. Mozilla, creator of the insanely popular Firefox browser, has pioneered an automated update system, in-line spell checking and several other features into this version of Thunderbird. Download it here.

I hadn’t realized that AMD had introduced the last chip, the FX-60, to inhabit Socket 939 until conversation over lunch with my friend Chris Morrell. The FX line has always been AMD’s high-performance, price-is-no-limit processor line and the latest and last chip is no exception. The equivalent of the FX-60 on the regular AMD line is the Athlon 64 X2 5200+, which Continue Reading »

Earlier today Apple released two Macs, the MacBook Pro and iMac, that both feature Intel processors. Unlike the previous IBM Gx series of chips that couldn’t feasibly run Microsoft Windows, the new Macs can actually run Windows. Obviously, Apple will not sell Macs with Windows loaded on them, but sources say that nothing is stopping an advanced user from loading Windows on their new Intel Mac. Older Macs utilized an Continue Reading »

At MacWorld 2006, the new PowerBooks MacBooks and iMacs were released. Both are powered by Intel processors alongside DDR2 RAM and have integrated iSight cameras (new for the MacBook). Take a look at the new goods at the Apple Store and have your credit card near by. No word on an Intel Mac Mini, which was widely thought to be Continue Reading »

The last chance to nominate your favorite blogs for the 2006 Bloggie awards is from now until 10:00 PM EST January 10th. Check out my previous Bloggies post for more info. A nomination for PaulStamatiou.com can fit into any or all of the following submission categories: Best Teen Weblog, Best New Weblog, Best Computers or Technology Weblog or Best Writing of a Weblog. Thanks!

TUAW has coverage of Adobe announcement of a new program called Lightroom at MacWorld 2006. Adobe plans direct competition with Apple’s image editing program Aperture that features impressive RAW image editing and an easy workplace for batch photo tweaking. Where Aperture fails Lightroom excels. Aperture is notorious Continue Reading »

Remember how I talked about Google’s plans to release a software pack called Pack? Well Bryan Veloso has put together a seemingly accurate description of what Google Pack is, in the form of his ever hilarious plays. Check it out.

Winter break is coming to an end and I’ll be flying back to Atlanta tomorrow. I will be taking a much more hectic workload this semester so I’ll see how that affects my post frequency. Worst comes to worst, I’ll have the weekends to catch up on posts. I still have several great posts in mind, as well as finishing up my K2 Customization tutorials. For those of you interested, I’ll be taking Continue Reading »

I just found a great site called MacGrab that lets you enter a simple contest every 4 minutes and have the opportunity of winning two great mac applications; AppZapper and Menuet. Once you give it your email and name it will start a timer, but you need to stay by your computer because it will ask you whether you want to have a chance at winning AppZapper or Menuet. Continue Reading »

9ruler Brian Benzinger has written an extensive review of the currently invite-only news website, Newsvine, that plans to be the next generation of how we get news. It is kind of like digg meets CNN. I just got an invite yesterday and have been having lots of fun with it. Hopefully, the community that forms around Newsvine will be more mature than digg’s and comments will actually be comments and not flames. I really like how Newsvine gives each user a place to seed articles or write posts, very innovative. If you are using Newsvine you can Continue Reading »

ZDNet has come up with a list of the top ten things that Apple might unveil at MacWorld. It covers everything from Intel Macs to the next version of OS X.

The Inquirer talks about a new Lexar USB stick that features eInk (also referred to as ePaper) to display drive usage. This comes straight out of the I can’t believe they didn’t think of that earlier category. Unlike a conventional LCD, eInk requires absolutely no electricity to retain and display its current value. So your USB stick will always show you how Continue Reading »

We’ve been hearing about Dell planning on making a massive 30 inch LCD for a while now, but it’s actually come true. Anandtech has a few pictures of the screen from the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show. Apple will need to be careful; the 30″ Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP widescreen LCD features a new, sleek design and higher a contrast ratio and lower response time (11ms grey to grey) than available on the 30″ Apple Cinema Display. Similar to the Apple solution, the 3007WFP also utilizes a gigantic WQXGA (2560 x 1600) resolution requiring a Continue Reading »

According to ArsTechnica, Google will launch a video download service that integrates with Google Video Search that will presumably allow for paid downloads of popular television shows, as iTunes currently offers. Google will also release a bundle of online applications from antivirus software, instant messaging clients to media players in an application suite dubbed Continue Reading »

Macworld seems to think that we will see the launch of the first Intel based Apple notebook within a week. If that wasn’t enough to get you excited, this notebook may feature a solid-state flash memory cache used to speed up booting by storing vital system files in there. The flash memory used will likely be based on NAND chips utilizing Continue Reading »

Today I explore the whole “You don’t need to defrag” situation regarding Macs. Technically, OS X is supposed to take care of everything with a journaled filesystem and system maintenance when the computer is idle, but my system has become awfully slow recently. I decided to check out iDefrag from Coriolis Systems after having heard about Continue Reading »

If you’re anything like me, you just spent your last bit of cash on a wicked gaming mouse and didn’t leave any money for a mouse pad. Typically you would just game without one, but over time those teflon feet on your mouse will fill with gunk, get scratched up and your mouse won’t glide as smoothly as it did in its infancy. Enter the waxpaper mouse pad. For the cost of pretty much nothing, you can have the smoothest gliding mouse/mouse pad combo known to man. Let’s begin the fabrication.

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The 2006 Bloggie awards are coming around soon and you have the opportunity of nominating your favorite bloggers up until January 10th (yeah, I know… not much time left). It would mean a lot to me if everyone (or mostly everyone) visited the Bloggie awards site and nominated Continue Reading »

Tom’s Hardware has an amazingly comprehensive BIOS guide that covers everything from the basics to hardcore tweaking. This guide rivals my old favorite BIOS optimization guide over at Adrian’s Rojak Pot. For PC’s, a BIOS is a small CMOS chip on the motherboard that controls the very basic, low-level functions associated with configuring your PC’s hardware settings. BIOS is an acronym for Continue Reading »

Western Digital plans to unveil the 3rd generation of the popular, high-performance Serial-ATA Raptor hard drive as reported by DarkVision Hardware. I personally own the 1st (single platter, 36.7GB) and 2nd (two platter, 73.4GB) generation Raptors, which run at 10,000RPM compared to the more common 7,200RPM hard drives. The latest addition to the Raptor line will hold 150GB and is still aimed at the server and gamer market. This drive features a doubled Continue Reading »

This guide is a follow up to my series of Azureus articles that dealt with configuring and setting up the popular BitTorrent client. Now, I will discuss how you can share any file by creating and seeding a torrent. There are a number of reasons why using a torrent is more viable than simply serving the file yourself. Bandwidth costs will pretty much be eliminated as users individually serve pieces of the file themselves. Azureus will aid us in creating the torrent due to its compatibility with many different operating systems.

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David informed me about a great site that lets you easily create chicklet buttons for easy reader syndication with services like MyYahoo, Bloglines and many many more. It also lets you do the same for social bookmarking services. It’d definitely worth a look. Link.

Starting tomorrow, you will see some new things around 9rules.com, the blog network and community I am affiliated with. I don’t think I can say too much at this point, but all of the 9rulers have been waiting a long time for this. You will be able Continue Reading »

The Howto Forge has a detailed article explaining how to setup a wireless hotspot on a LinkSys WRT54G router. You may recall from a previous post that these particular LinkSys routers are well known for their ability to run various Linux based alternative firmwares. This how to is a perfect example of these LinkSys routers can be Continue Reading »

You may have noticed a bit of text and some icons following each post (on their full page, not on the frontpage). I’ve implemented an easy way for readers to bookmark any of my articles via del.icio.us and digg. I picked up the idea from Mr. Veloso, who has executed the same thing quite well on his site. For either of these social bookmarking links to work, you will need Continue Reading »