If you have ever searched for that new song you can’t get enough of on Google, you’ll have noticed that often times imeem, a social music community, will be among the first results. You can generally find full-length songs on imeem, which is great for hearing an entire track before purchasing it somewhere like iTunes that has paltry 30-second song previews. However, Continue Reading »

The NY Times has an in-depth article detailing an until now secretive 41-person startup in California with big plans. Vudu Inc will go head-to-head with other set-top boxes, such as the Apple TV, with their media device that instantly plays movies over the Internet, on TVs. Continue Reading »

For the past 2 months, I have been visiting a new social bookmarking site called Startup News, a product of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator. Startup News is exemplary proof that small-scale, niche social bookmarking sites can work exceedingly well. As you might expect, Startup News is limited to Continue Reading »

Earlier this week while working on a group project with a server we all shared, a relatively large CSS file was accidentally overwritten. We had been coding non-stop for a few days and hadn’t backed anything up. It would have been a major setback considering our project was due soon. Fortunately after a few minutes of ferocious searching, I came up Continue Reading »

Every year, TIME magazine creates a list that showcases the most influential people who shape our world. Only 100 people can make the cut and TIME recently unveiled a list of 200 people from which the top 100 will be narrowed down. Go out and vote for people you deem worthy. As of this writing, the top 10 people are Continue Reading »

As I mentioned a few days ago, the best way to get your name out there is by having an online presence and setting up a website for yourself. So you’ve bought a domain for yourself, now what? Now you need to go on a quest to find reliable web hosting. If it’s your first time with a website and you just want to test the water, there is no reason to go all out with Continue Reading »

Dear Google Docs & Spreadsheets Team,

I am an active Google Docs user. I have been around since the Writely days and know everything there is to know about using Google Docs. For me, the collaborative writing feature is top-notch and I have given you many new users due to this feature alone. Whenever I have to form a group for some class or another, the first thing I do is set everyone up with Google Docs and Continue Reading »

OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch just let me know about a new OpenDNS feature launching tomorrow simply called shortcuts. Similar to how your browser has bookmarks, OpenDNS shortcuts let you pair a word with a URL so that when you type that word in your address bar, you’re taken to that website. These shortcuts work Continue Reading »

The blog MacApper has posted an “exclusive” review of an OS X application by Panic Inc. called Coda that is purported to be released Monday. I do think that something will be released, especially since Cabel from Panic was looking for beta testers a while back. From what I read, Continue Reading »

Spam is a daily hassle for anyone that relies on sifting through their inbox to keep track of things. I know that when I was at Yahoo, my inbox received probably a hundred emails a day, from mailing lists to emails from others in my group. Fortunately, Yahoo had some strong spam Continue Reading »

Thunderbird version 2.0 has been released today. As MacWorld reports, Thunderbird 2 adds message tagging, improved searching, as well as enhanced spam and phishing protection.

Glenn Wolsey published an interesting interview with the owner of the largest iTunes music collection. The owner of that collection, Will Friedwald, maintains a massive archive of 849 GB of music equating to 172,150 tracks. It would take roughly Continue Reading »

One of the most common things web coders run into is the need to parse some type of XML file. Many web services return API calls in XML format, so it’s just handy to know how to parse these results quickly. With PHP4 you usually have to rely on some large parsing library to get the Continue Reading »

Netvibes, the extremely popular web service that allows users to have customizable news aggregation startpages, announced a new service at their Web 2.0 Expo afterparty in San Francisco. Netvibes Universe is the name of this new service and there will be two forms of it - personal and branded. Personal Universes Continue Reading »

Late last night I got rather bored and decided to investigate Netflix and their “Watch Now” feature that was announced in January. Netflix says they are slowly rolling this service out until June 2007 when every account should have it. I had a Netflix account back in 2005 but I reinstated my Continue Reading »

Every year the SANS Institute compiles a list of the top 20 Internet security attack targets and details vulnerabilities that certain pieces of software should be patched for. But how do you know if your computer is at risk? Norton won’t help you here; you aren’t dealing with viruses. SANS recommends using a vulnerability scanner. Continue Reading »

Entrepreneur magazine Inc recently published an article entitled “Start a Blog, Get Discovered” that explores the great benefits of having an online presence. The article followed a financial analyst who had a casual blog on the side that eventually landed him a large book deal. That analyst isn’t Continue Reading »

Samsung is among the first of several manufacturers working on getting LED backlit LCD displays to consumers. They have announced a new 24-inch display sporting some impressive features. Current LCD displays rely on bulky, power hungry and heat emitting fluorescent bulbs to lighten up the Continue Reading »

Sonos, a company that creates high-end audio systems, sent me a Sonos Digital Music System to test drive over the next month. I can already tell you what I think of this system, but I won’t spoil it until I write a thorough review later on. First off, the Sonos system is composed of several Continue Reading »

I’ve been informed by Thomas Ford at Opera that we will see the next version of the popular commercial browser released tomorrow. Opera 9.2 brings in an innovative new feature called Speed Dial. Speed Dial lets you easily access (up to) your 9 bookmarked and most frequently visited Continue Reading »

This past week I finally got fed up with Firefox’s continual memory leaks and sluggish behavior. I had enjoyed the unparalleled expansion capabilities that Firefox held, but it’s not stable enough for me. My computer is on all the time, I avoid reboots when possible (as of this writing my computer has been up for 19 days) and even restarting Firefox alone became a challenge with dozens of tabs open. Continue Reading »

After some legal troubles with AOL, the ever popular open source instant messenger (formerly) known as Gaim will now be called Pidgin. This is rather unfortunate news; the name Pidgin just isn’t the same. Gaim has always been my instant messenger application of choice on Linux and Windows (I use Adium, which is based off of libgaim, which is now called libpurple, on OS X). Continue Reading »

All interesting stories, at least on my campus, start out “So I was Googling myself..”, and this news snippet is no exception. So I was Googling myself today and noticed that I am now the second result (at least in the US) for a “paul” search on Google.com, passing up Paul McCartney. I think that’s the highest I’ll be able to go considering the first spot is Continue Reading »

Aside from EMI announcing DRM-free music on the iTunes store, there have been other tech news pieces making waves this week. Most recently, Google updated their Maps offering to include something called MyMaps. MyMaps allows users to annotate Continue Reading »

Those avoiding hacking their Apple TV to add functionality don’t have much of an excuse as of today. Apparently, you can hack the little media device without even opening it. While technically that means your warranty is still valid, I’m Continue Reading »

This week we pick up where I left off about two weeks ago regarding my MacBook lemon situation. I took it to the Apple store in Houston (during my spring break) where they claimed they would be able to do the following in-house without the need to ship it off: replace the discolored case (2nd discoloring), replace the backlight inverter Continue Reading »

April 2nd 2007. Remember that date as the day DRM died, well at least started to die. It appears as though Steve Jobs’ call to abolish DRM was heard by someone at EMI, who will begin selling DRM-free music on the iTunes Store. Continue Reading »

Skilled Apple TV tinkerers have been able to get Mac OS X, in its full and uninhibited form, running on an Apple TV. I think this is essentially the tipping point for Apple TV sales as the functionality went from great to infinite in less than a week from when I reported that the Apple TV could be modified to play just about any video file type. Continue Reading »