OpenDNS’s PhishTank just made their stats for November public and the results are great. There have been over 93,000 votes by PhishTank users to validate 9,628 phishes out of 18,130 phishes submitted. PhishTank, which I covered thoroughly on their October 2nd launch, is a free community where anyone can submit, verify, track and share phishing data. Developers love PhishTank Continue Reading »

I didn’t mean to scare the Nike+ iPod toters out there but an interesting article on Wired explores the vulnerabilities of the high-tech shoe accessory. I first introduced you to the Nike+ system back in May, ahead of its July launch date. Back then it was a neat idea to be able to track your running status and pace all within the friendly iPod experience and interface. The Nike+ RFID device in the sole of your shoe presents a not-so-friendly, nefarious use. Continue Reading »

The Official Google Blog reported last night that they will stop accepting new questions for Google Answers later this week. Google Answers has been around for 4 years and has remained relatively primitive compared to the successful Yahoo! Answers. The Google blog also states that more than 800 people have used worked on getting the answers for Google Answers over the years. That’s it? I would be shutting it down too. But at least they’ve realized this and are cutting their losses.

Last Friday I partook in the Black Friday sales frenzy and purchased a 4GB SanDisk Micro Cruzer USB flash drive for $60. It seemed like a great deal compared to the retail price of $99. This drive was U3 Enabled, a term I had heard a few times before but that I was overall clueless about. U3 is an LLC backed by SanDisk and M-Systems that created a specification Continue Reading »

Just in time for the holidays, Apple has released 3 new Get a Mac advertisements. There is “Sales Pitch” where the PC tries to sell itself with sales gimicks. “Meant for Work” displays an overworked PC trying to keep up with kids listening to music and blogging. “Gift Exchange” depicts the Mac and PC swapping gifts, including an iPhoto-created photo book. Some of these are actually funny. In addition to the ads, Apple retail stores have gotten into the holiday spirit with new employee t-shirts featuring catchy slogans like “Give now. Borrow later.“.

Ifrogz, the producer of many iPod accessories including customizable silicone cases, which I reviewed a few months ago, has a new product out: their niche Tadpole line of cases for the iPod Video. The Tadpole is the first case I have seen that is anything like this - you can immediately tell that it was designed with children in mind Continue Reading »

Blackboard, maker of e-learning solutions used by many universities, is offering three $25,000 grants to institutions that currently use Blackboard products or services. Faculty and staff of these institutions are encouraged to apply for the Greenhouse Grant with a proposal to “successfully develop and deploy initiatives that promote best practices in the adoption of Internet technology in the educational environment.” The entry deadline is February 6, 2007, with the application found in this PDF.

10 Minute Mail provides disposable email addresses for anyone. As expected, the email addresses expire after 10 minutes of their creation. That’s more than enough time to sign up for some shady website, receive the confirmation email and click the link typically found in confirmation emails. If necessary, you can even reply to emails.

An article published on The Times reports that parents and teachers are trying to get UK schools to take down their wireless networks for a health risk. You gotta be kidding me. Apparently, “low levels of microwave radiation emitted by the transmitters could be harmful, causing loss of concentration, headaches, fatigue, memory and behavioural problems and possibly cancer in the long term.” Continue Reading »

Think twice next time you mount a .dmg file in OS X as it is possible for someone to craft a corrupt disk image allowing even unprivileged users to exploit the system. The vulnerability, which has been rated as highly critical by Secunia, is even worse when you take into account that, by default, Safari automatically mounts downloaded disk images.

Flickr recently rolled out three new features on the insanely popular photo sharing site. There’s the guest pass feature which lets you show private photosets to non-flickr users with unique URLs. Flickr has revamped their mobile site, accessible at m.flickr.com. Unfortunately, it only works for users with Yahoo! ID logins. The final feature is a pretty damn cool Camera Finder that lets you sort cameras used on Flickr by number of photos taken and such. Continue Reading »

As you may have picked up on with my Black Friday article, I am definitely a fan of pursuing great deals, especially when it comes to electronics. When you think of deal sites and communities, Slick Deals and Fat Wallet probably come to mind first - and rightfully so with Slick Deals having over 140,000 members by itself. Dealighted.com is a relatively new service that aids the deal hunter by aggregating all of the deals in one central location. Continue Reading »

By definition, a Universal Binary (when talking about OS X applications) refers to an application that is compatible with both the Intel and PowerPC processor architectures. Therefore, each UB application is a little bit larger to support each architecture. Xslimmer is a unique shareware (cheap too) application that removes the excess fat from your UB’s depending on what architecture you’re running. Continue Reading »

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that marks the first shopping day of the Christmas season, is only a few days away. Black Fridays are known for chaotic shopping experiences with overcrowded stores offering highly discounted products catering to deal seekers. If you’re looking to score some gadgets for yourself or gifts for others on Black Friday, it is best to prepare ahead of time. Continue Reading »

Nope, that’s not a typo for Flock. There is a web service called Fleck that has been building a web annotation tool for about a year. Essentially, Fleck adds another layer to the web thus allowing you to add information instead of just consume it. Ideally you would use Fleck to note things as you saw them. For example, a web designer might leave a note for himself/herself on Sitethrive Continue Reading »

When you think of a DSLR camera, some clunky and expensive professional camera usually comes to mind, right? Nikon is breaking that misconception with their new D40 camera - Nikon’s smallest and most affordable DSLR to date. It has a generous 2.5-inch LCD display and 6.1 megapixel CCD sensor with 3 point focusing. The D40 will run you 6 C-notes.

For the bulk of this rainy day I have been packing up and getting ready to move a few blocks down the road. This would be our third townhouse since August. We’re moving into the one we always wanted but the last tenants had extended their lease so we were put into a smaller, temporary townhouse. That townhouse Continue Reading »

Everyone wants to be like John C. Dvorak (play along.. I’m going somewhere with this). You know why? Because as his catch phrase goes, he gets no spam. Enterto has an email service that claims to be completely spamless. I’ll be exploring that claim in this paid review post (Enterto found me through ReviewMe). Continue Reading »

It wasn’t long ago that I was talking with my roommate about how it was only a matter of time before someone was able to get the HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 working with an ordinary PC. Well that day was today and surprisingly it was my friend Dan at UNEASYsilence that was able to pull it off. All it took was finding it right Windows drivers and an HD-DVD compatible DVD player application. The HD-DVD add-on will run you $199 compared to set top HD-DVD boxes that cost $500 and up.

I don’t often talk about gaming on this site but with all of the buzz surrounding the Nintendo Wii, I couldn’t avoid it. Nintendo’s next-gen Wii gaming console has been the center of attention for everyone from Yahoo!, who made a site dedicated to the Wii, all the way to Comedy Central’s South Park, that had 2 hilarious episodes based around waiting for the Wii to come out. Continue Reading »

ReviewMe is a new service catering to blog publishers and advertisers that launched tonight. ReviewMe is a service that takes the power of blogs to heart. Any blogger can become a member on the site and list their blog. ReviewMe automatically checks a number of factors such as Technorati rank, Alexa rank and number of subscribers to come up with a price for advertisers. Continue Reading »

Havi Hoffman, my hiring manager from Yahoo!, has written up a post on Yodel Anecdotal about this past Monday’s Time Capsule Camp. There were about 70 of us and the day began with a scavenger hunt in downtown Palo Alto. We were split up into 8 or so groups, each with a mobile phone and camera. We were given Continue Reading »

When Google updated their Reader not too long ago, I started using it full-time instead of NewsFire. I’m always using my browser, so why not have my feeds in it too? That was also my argument for using online office suites like Google Docs; everything pretty much revolves around the browser for me. As such, I thought I’d let you know about the unofficial Google Reader notifier created by a reader. Version 0.38 is out and bug-free. Congrats to troelsbay - his Google Reader notifier has been mentioned on many sites already.

It was not too long ago that Apple updated the MacBook Pros with Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Today they have done the same with the regular MacBooks. Each MacBook now sports a Core 2 Duo processor, either at 1.83 or 2.0 GHz. The Core 2 Duo processor upgrade makes the MacBooks up to 25% faster than their Core Duo MacBook predecessors. Continue Reading »

I just came back from dinner with David and Allison from OpenDNS and they gave me the scoop on a new feature that launches today. OpenDNS accounts give users more control over their online experience - allowing them to manage settings on different networks. This will come in handy if you like running OpenDNS Continue Reading »

Thanks to all of those who voted for me and helped spread the word about the recent scholarship for student bloggers. I did not take first place but I received 2nd place and $1000 will be going to Georgia Tech. Thanks to Daniel Kovach for holding this scholarship. Congrats to Shelly Batts for also winning $1000 and of course to Stephen Yellin for taking home the big $5k. Continue Reading »

Have you ever been on a PC and had the secret desire to run all of those cool OS X dashboard widgets you see all the Mac bloggers talking about? Me neither, but Widgetop is a web service that allows users to do just that, regardless of what system they’re running. It lets users arrange and run actual OS X widgets on a customizable dashboard called widgetop. Continue Reading »

On Sunday I’ll be flying out to Sunnyvale (first class, courtesy of Yahoo!) to help out with Yahoo’s Time Capsule Camp which takes place on Monday November 6th. I blogged about this event a while back, looking for participants to join us. Basically it is a day long event at Yahoo’s HQ where roughly 100 people will be taking part in a series of activities to create various forms of media Continue Reading »

With the rapid growth of the web and businesses flocking to pursue online services, it’s no wonder that uptime is of utmost importance. Downtime on mission critical servers can cost businesses money, annoy users and lose customers. Enter Pingdom. Pingdom is a subscription service that offers site monitoring, Continue Reading »

Google has released a mobile Java application that dramatically speeds up Gmail. The unique helper application resides on the user’s J2ME-enabled mobile phone and adds usability improvements to the Gmail interface alongside speed enhancements. The most powerful feature of the application for me is the ability to make email attachments mobile-friendly - for example, it would dynamically resize an image for displaying on the Continue Reading »

Okay that title might be a little ambitious but I truly believe that 281 is different from most WordPress themes. 281 is a joint project between myself and Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising. Neil approached me a while back and we started talking about how there was really no strong WordPress theme that combined slick minimalist aesthetics, speed and search engine optimization. That’s exactly what 281 promises to be. Continue Reading »