ArsTechnica has the scoop on a new feature Microsoft recently added into builds of Windows Vista. The new feature, called Previous Versions, is enabled for users with the System Protection setting enabled. Previous Versions is similar to System Restore points but on a per file and per folder scale. It shadows copies of files whenever they’re edited, allowing the user to revert to several previous versions Continue Reading »

Hack A Day featured a reader that was intuitive enough to think that the green LED that’s on when you’re not using your mouse is just wasting power. Yeah the power LED is a bit of a usability-inspired indicator to see if your mouse works, but who needs that little gem when you can reclaim up to 4% of your juice? Mr. Sripracha shows how to disassemble the Continue Reading »

The last computer peripheral I need to replaced before having a complete Apple setup was my mouse. For many years, I have been extremely fond of Logitech mice. Ergonomics, performance and features - Logitech mice have it all. When the MX1000 was released, I was the first guy in my dorm to get one and have never regretted the purchase. The Continue Reading »

Today I took another full-day outing with Bryan Veloso and Phil Freo. We had just planned to go superkarting (think fast go-karts) but one thing led to the next and we went all over the San Jose/Palo Alto area. I’ll let the pictures do the talking this time.. but after lunch at Oakridge Mall and then superkarting in Continue Reading »

Sorry for the almost 2 hours of downtime earlier today. Apparently a generator caught fire in the datacenter (the Garland building in LA) where (mt) servers live. Actually, it wasn’t just Media Temple. It seems as though DreamHost also runs its servers out of the same datacenter. A friend hosted at DreamHost told me that the building had a Continue Reading »

After lingering in a non-existent then beta phase for what seemed like an eternity, Flip4Mac has been released as a Universal Binary. As most people know, Microsoft has never been fond of supporting Mac users, so when Intel processors were introduced to the Mac, Microsoft could care less about getting its outdated Windows Media Player software running. Microsoft then stopped producing WMP for the Mac and made a deal with Flip4Mac to offer their windows media Continue Reading »

At a press release (which I was invited to, but couldn’t attend) at Santa Clara Intel HQ this morning, Intel CEO Paul Otellini outlined the new processors. The Conroe-based E6700, E6600, E6400 and E6300 Core 2 Duo processors rounded-off the desktop line while a Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 made its debut. In addition, Intel launched their Merom-based Continue Reading »

If you’re looking to expose some detail on any of your photos and have Photoshop, check out these easy tips. I’ve been using the first one, unmask sharpen, for a long time, but more recently with some stuff at work and it makes a huge difference. It seems to add fine detail to images and lessen the appearance of blurryness. Open up an image in Photoshop and navigate to Filter » Sharpen » Unsharp Mask. In the window that pops up, set the amount to 100%, radius to 0.5 pixels and keep the threshold at 0 levels. Continue Reading »

This past weekend I talked about a great little application called Todos. While many passed it off as a novelty application with little use, thousands flocked to its unique approach as an application finder and launcher. The screen capture that Chris Messina put in his flickr photostream received over 10,000 hits in only a few days. Simultaneously, TUAW, TAB, digg and other sites picked up on Todos. It became an incredibly popular application seemingly overnight. Continue Reading »

Allyn Edmonds has a very impressive list of over 100 web-based RSS readers. He mentions a bit about each aggregator as well. I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a comprehensive list of aggregators. Nice work Allyn. Particularly, I enjoyed Feed Rinse, a feed filtering service, and My AOL. Haha, yeah I was kidding about the AOL one.

Browsing through my iTunes library yesterday, I realized something. I buy a lot of music. Using my peers and college friends as an example, I am one of the few people that actually purchases music anymore. It’s really an appalling concept these days - everyone’s a pirate. Right now you’re probably laughing at me, thinking something along the lines of “this guy’s a nut… paying for music, pshh.” Well, I’ll tell you why I pay for music. Continue Reading »

As Technorati founder David Sifry explains, the popular blog and tag search engine Technorati turned 3 years old today. Sifry and crew pulled off an amazing redesign which IMO increases usability a ton. I might have to update my previous article now. There are tons of new features so go check it out.

Yup, you’ve guessed it. It’s time for another meme. Mr. Olthuis has so generously tagged me to participate in the top 5 social media tools meme. This was actually in good time because I had been pondering such a post about sites that I couldn’t live or blog without. Let the meme begin. Continue Reading »

Several people have asked me how I created the header image in my sidebar, so I figured I would make a post out of it. Most of the stuff is easy to do, the only area of contention being the creation of the shape layer. To start out, find an image or color of your choice and crop it to a respectable size. In Photoshop make a Continue Reading »

Strolling through my flickr feeds I landed upon the photo below in Chris Messina’s photostream. It’s from an innovative little application called Todos. Todos, which means “all of them” in Spanish, displays a window showing each icon for every application on your Mac. Clicking on an application’s icon launches it. Todos is essentially a glorified launcher. Download it. Continue Reading »

Being surrounded by technical genius at work everyday, I was bound to pick up a few pieces of wisdom. Working on some top secret stuff for Yahoo!, I quickly learned that every website or blog that Yahoo! dishes out must comply with the graded browser support theory. The project I am working on must abide by “A-grade” browser support as do other Yahoo! sites. A-grade support unfortunately Continue Reading »

Earlier last week Icy Dock had contacted me about a review opportunity but being in California away from all my computers, I directed them to roommate-zilla. Icy Dock sent Chris one of their newer internal hard drive enclosures and as usual Chris put the product through its paces, delivering a top-notch review.

Yesterday’s shocking news of YouTube’s alteration to their policy (MySpace had a similar thing going on until they recently made it more friendly) stated that YouTube pretty much owns anything you upload. It’s no surprise that people have been fleeing to find new, rights-friendly alternatives. Motionbox has a few things YouTube doesn’t - design and an advanced flash player with a film-strip. Continue Reading »

After exchanging a few design words with Mike Rundle, jet-setter and 9rules designer extraordinaire, I’ve spent most of the evening tweaking my sidebar. Since the recent realignment, I had always felt uneasy about the composure and structure of the sidebar area. Mike assured me that text-align:right; was not working. In addition to aligning text to the left, I split up the main menu into 2 columns Continue Reading »

Uncrate has posted a simple list of 10 items that can help you pimp your new MacBook. I was a little disappointed that many dealt with the same concept - eg, several cases were displayed. I also can’t say that Windows XP is “pimping” anything. But the list did mention the Invisible Shield, which I recently took for a test drive. Continue Reading »

To deal with the influx of new members that joined 9rules in Round Four, the 9rules crew just decided to go ahead and completely revamp the site. One of the main problems with the last design regarded usability concerns surrounding communities. The focal point of the redesign, codenamed Phoenix, is the communities section with notes. Notes is a new feature that allows 9rules members and readers alike to discuss posts and news items in every community. Hurry up and Continue Reading »

Today AOL launched a new product, AIM Pro, that takes the AIM protocol and merges it with the WebEx business suite. With AIM Pro, AOL is taking advantage of the fact that many businesses use some form of instant messaging to communicate. The new product is advertisement-free, features encrypted conversations as well as Outlook integration and audio/video conferencing capabilities. Continue Reading »

ArsTechnica relays the news that Apple stores have begun carrying the Parallels virtualization software. Recently, Apple even went so far as to remove mentions of Boot Camp from its advertisements. It seems like Apple is beginning to downplay the in-house Boot Camp in exchange for Parallels. Continue Reading »

As hinted at earlier, it has been confirmed that we will see a second generation iPod Nano at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this August. In addition to a metal housing, the Nano is expected to come in more colors than just white and black. It seems that Apple is going the way of the successful iPod Mini. The new Nanos Continue Reading »

Hot off the press, Think Secret reports that at WWDC starting on August 7th, Steve Jobs will announce that iTunes will soon have movie rentals. Currently Apple has sealed the deal with such movie studios as Universal, Warner Brothers, Paramount and Walt Disney with more on the way. The rentals will come in the form of downloads with digital rights management Continue Reading »

Dennis at MacsimumNews speculates about something that has been running in my mind a lot recently, the next Apple Cinema Displays. The current trend with every new Intel Mac has been integrated iSight (except Mac Mini) and Front Row with a remote control. The only computer left to receive an Intelizing is the PowerMac, which is Continue Reading »

It’s not often that I find a widget for OS X’s dashboard that I want to talk about. More often than not, the widgets I find are time wasters rather than helpful or even productive tools. Enter iClip lite 2. It’s a free widget that follows in the path of the highly successful iClip application. The iClip lite is a powerful widget that lets you keep track of and manage multiple items in your clipboard. Continue Reading »

Twttr is a unique service by Odeo that takes a stab at on-the-go socializing. You know how your messenger (whichever service you use) lets you have status/away messages? Well twttr not only lets you have real live status messages while you’re out, but you can find out what your friends are doing as well as share thoughts Continue Reading »

For the past month I’ve been testing out an Invisible Shield by Shield Zone on my MacBook. Shield Zone’s products are simple, protective pieces of clear film. Shield Zone makes Invisible Shields for just about every gadget out there, in fact I just applied one on my Motorola Q. Anyhow, this post is about the MacBook shield. I originally decided to check out the shield when I had heard about the notorious discoloration defect on the MacBooks. Continue Reading »

Fellow Yahoo! intern Richard Crowley takes a look at the Mozilla XUL-based Songbird music player. I did a little mini review of Songbird several months ago, but it seems to have matured in the Mac release. Did I mention he custom-coded the entire backend of his site? No WordPress or Movable Type in sight.

Minic Rivera over at The Blogging Times has a nice feature on his blog where he takes prominent bloggers and asks them why they blog. In the past he has posed this question to people like Craig Newmark of Craiglist. Minic asked me the same question recently, so go check it out.

A company in China has successfully reverse engineered the Skype protocol. The unnamed company has created a client that is capable of communicating on the VOIP phone solution. They plan to roll out a 100% Skype-compatible client and release the source code for licensing. This will cause a terrible situation for Skype if this program gains any traction. But I must say that it’s about time Skype has some competition. Continue Reading »

Thanks to Kevin, I just found out about Newshutch. Once I signed up for an account and logged in for the first time, I knew Newshutch was not like any other online RSS aggregator I have ever used. First off, it has the hands-down most amazing design, slick interface and JS effects. Yes, it’s all AJAX-ified and the coders knew what they were doing because it is FAST. Much faster than FeedLounge, which is also AJAX enabled. With Newshutch there are no page loads, it’s all done gracefully live in real time and switching Continue Reading »

After a hot tip from one of its developers, I discovered Preloadr. Preloadr fully utilizes the Flickr API to bring you unparalleled photo manipulation capabilities. The coolest part is that you don’t even have to make an account, just login to flickr and it does the rest. It automatically loads up the photos in your photoset and give you the ability to do everything from crop them to adjusting graduation, adding layers and text! When you’re done editing an image, Preloadr uploads the photo to Flickr in place of the original. This tool is great for Continue Reading »

A new web application for social media users just hit the e-block. Commentful is a simple and useful service that lets social media users keep track of comments on a variety of publishing platforms. The attraction of Commentful is that you don’t have to be a blogger to use it - you don’t even have to leave comments to use the service. It can help you monitor conversations on everything from a WordPress blog to Digg and Flickr. Continue Reading »

Earlier in the month I wrote a post, SEO 101, that dealt with the basics that comprise search engine optimization. I mentioned how I learned a lot from the Pronet Advertising blog and applied what I learned about SEO to my blog. At the time I only had limited traffic results to compare. Now that Google and other search engines have had time to react to the changes, I’ve begun to realize the full effects of my SEO work. Continue Reading »

Mozilla’s browser market share keeps on rising as Firefox is the browser of choice for over 15 percent of those in the United States. Internet Explorer usage fell by a steady 2 percent, but still remains at a near 80% market share. However, most intriguing is the fact that a whopping 39% of web users in Germany surf with Firefox. BetaNews has more interesting stats. Speaking of which, go get the just released Firefox 2.0 Beta 1.

If you’ve been anywhere near the blogosphere this morning, you’ve no doubt seen the fuss about Dell’s new corporate blog, One2One. Dell litters the blog with video clips discussing their new products and services, quick del.icio.us and digg bookmark links (which is getting really old btw) and the ugliest blog design since that kid down the street started blogging. Continue Reading »

Over the past few weeks I have been receiving spam comments from one spammer in Abu Dhabi. The comments were not picked up by Akismet, nor did Akismet learn to recognize them as spam after I flagged them as such. Yesterday I started receiving tons (a few every minute) of the same spam with the guy leaving links to his splog. At first I disabled comments on the current post but then he started spamming huge comments all over the place. Unfortunately WordPress does not currently possess the ability to ban a commenter based Continue Reading »

After rediscovering Pukka, the simple OS X app for del.icio.us bookmarking, on Derek’s top 10 OS X apps to supplement blogging article I decided to give del.icio.us another shot. I have had a del.icio.us account for as long as I can remember, but never really got engaged in it. Bookmarking to del.icio.us via Flock, the del.icio.us bookmarklet or Firefox extension is alright, but something about Pukka makes it fun. It’s got a nice icon and it makes a sound when you bookmark urls… it’s the little things that count. It can also handle multiple del.icio.us accounts as well Continue Reading »

Taking a note from the now discontinued iPod Mini, the next iteration of the popular Apple iPod Nano music player may feature a metal housing. AppleInsider discloses that Apple has been experimenting with new anodized casings that are sure to lessen the Nano’s affinity towards scratches. In addition, it might just have 8GB of storage.

Thanks to Anthony Deloso at The Skinny, PaulStamatiou.com readers now have a Yahoo! Widget Engine (formerly Konfabulator) compatible widget. Similar to the widget I created for OS X users, Anthony’s creation extracts the latest headlines from my blog and displays them in a nice looking interface. Yahoo! has widget engines for both Mac and Windows platforms, so there’s no need to worry about compatibility issues. Although, I might add that for some reason the widget only worked on one out of two computers I tested it on. Continue Reading »

With the recent release of the release candidate for Mozilla’s first beta of Firefox 2.0, CyberNet Tech news has written a piece showing you how to tweak this latest Firefox release. The easy to follow article covers things like enabling the built-in session restore feature, altering the default behavior of tab scrolling (when you have many tabs open, it lets you scroll horizontally Continue Reading »

I purchased pstam.com today. Now it’s easier to type in my url. I won’t be changing anything around here. The primary domain will still be PaulStamatiou.com, the new domain just points to this site. So please continue linking with the primary domain. The new one is just to ease the spelling conundrum.

The ZDNet Google blog has the scoop on a few new features that gmail users can expect to see. Users will gain the ability to delete all spam messages at once as well as the ability to create filters and apply them to existing message, which will prove indispensable to me.

If you’re reading this in your favorite RSS aggregator, now might be a good time to visit the site. Stemming from what appeared to be boredom, I took the liberty (and 8 hours) to “realign” around here. The goal with this design was to have a lightweight, minimal and accessible design. I had started to get the feeling that the old design was a slight mixture of ugly and not user friendly. Hopefully this one solves all of those problems or makes them easier to tolerate. Continue Reading »

After having spent a decent amount of time at Yahoo! so far, I’ve learned to avoid odd stares and confrontation by following this simple rule of thumb: Always look around before loading up Google in your browser. There are some queries in Google that I know provide certain results. Like if I search for something, I know what I’m looking for is going to be the third link. Not that Yahoos don’t like Google or anything.. I mean a good deal of my co-workers use gmail.

From the this-would-have-come-in-handy-last-semester department comes an awesome tip from Microsoft themselves. It shows how you can create a log file in notepad that automatically adds the time and date stamp everytime it’s opened. Had I known about this earlier in the semester this would have been extremely useful when creating notes in classes. To play along, simply open up notepad and on the first line type in .LOG. Save and close the notepad file. Next time you open it, you’ll be greeted with a nice stamp in the form of 7:33 AM 7/7/2006.

Every Mac user’s favorite and feature-filled FTP client, Transmit, has been recently updated. Be sure to fetch the dmg for yourself. Also, Panic’s newsgroups client, Unison, went through an upgrade last week. You might remember Transmit from my review back in February. It’s not free but it is absolutely worth every cent. By far one of the best FTP clients I’ve ever used, on any operating system. Oh and Continue Reading »

Qusers, the seemingly definitive resource for all things Motorola Q, has posted a comprehensive review of the invisible shield. The shield is a high-quality scratch protector applied to the front and back of the Q. The results are great for those looking into protection for their Q. This is great news as I ordered one for my Q yesterday after being Continue Reading »

Online auction giant eBay has started banning sellers from using Google’s new Checkout payment service. EBay’s justification stems from its Accepted Payments policy which states that a payment service must have a proven, reliable and safe track record for dealing with finances. Realistically, this is likely eBay trying to protect its old buddy PayPal which has been an eBay must since the start. Is eBay really fostering a monopoly and shunning all PayPal competition? Continue Reading »

Someone over at the TAZ Forums has posted a stellar article for achieving a tip-top setup of the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. Similar to my Ubuntu for novices article, this post extensively details the steps for properly updating Ubuntu, setting up vital drivers, running Xgl and more. Continue Reading »

I love my traffic. I spend a good portion of my time just watching traffic pour in with my mint stats tracker. Up until now I have pretty much exhausted every avenue for gathering traffic except SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the delicate art of optimizing your website so as to be search engine friendly. Through the application of several rules of SEO thumb, one can gain a higher ranking in search engines and gain more indexed pages. Currently, search engines provide this site around a third of its traffic but that’s mostly people searching for my misspelled name to find my domain (I really need to get paul.com). That equates to anywhere from 600 to 1000 hits just from search engines everyday. Continue Reading »

IntelliAdmin explores a service released by Microsoft that can help your computer shutdown faster. The User Profile Hive Cleanup service discussed cleans up user profiles and therefore helps reclaim and distribute system resources once a task is closed. Continue Reading »

Over the past month or two, I’ve been jumping around from feed reader to feed reader. I used to be a faithful FeedLounge user but a mixture of me getting a MacBook which will keep me mobile and aggravation at the fact that FeedLounge does not update frequently and doesn’t support favicons (in addition to some overall sluggishness) has gotten me running for other choices. I was originally drawn to Continue Reading »

9ruler Derek Punsalan has written a great post about the plugins that keep his blog running in tip-top shape. I for one learned about some very cool plugins I’ve never heard of before. Check it out.

If you currently have a Media Temple hosting account, you are eligible to apply for a beta test for the upcoming (gs). The grid server is the new name of the Shared Server v6.0 which will have some impressive features such as the ability to run PHP 4 and 5 simultaneously as well as Ruby on Rails support.

It’s about time somebody attempted to dethrone the Treo 650 and 700 from the top spot for smartphones. Motorola has recently unleashed their Q smartphone and at first glance it definitely seems like the Treo-killer. The Q’s amazing aesthetics, RAZR-thin form factor and crisp screen make it direct Treo and BlackBerry competition. Continue Reading »

When it comes to the gadget-minded geek there are many items that are deemed as essential. Obviously a computer comes first on this list, but there are more, somewhat obscure items that they might not have even known they needed. Feel free to leave a comment and mention what gadget you can’t live without. Continue Reading »