Howtos, Rants, and Reviews

Google Wave Extension Library Now Active

willburns1 — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:35:00 GMT

Google Wave is great for a lot of things but being able to an extension to your Wave makes the wave just that much more useful. Wave extension are elements that can be embeded and added to a wave that can add things like maps, video conferencing, iframes, and much more. It is by far one of the most powerful features of Google Wave

Before now in order to add an extension you had to know the specific URL where the extension was hosted. Google has added a new extensions section to Wave and it plays host to several new and old extensions that you can install right from there. Once you install them you can add them to a Wave right from the edit toolbar. This is much easier than having to keep a Wave with gadget and extension URLs in them. Now they are all there when you need them.

Google Wave is still under development and they are starting to release features slowly and it's shaping up to be a very useful web application. Recently they added email updates so that when someone sends you a new Wave you can get an email notification of the Wave which is a great feature. I don't login to Wave that often so if and when someone shares a Wave with me I'll know about it.

Photo Magician - Batch Resizes and Optimizes Quality for Free - Windows

willburns1 — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:29:00 GMT

Many photo management programs have features that will resize and optimize photos so they fit your needs. Sometimes though you don't want to go through the hassle of adding photos to these type of programs just so you can turn out smaller versions of the photos. This is where having a program like Photo Magician will come in handy.

Photo Magician is a lightweight program weighing in at just under 1MB that can resize and reduce quality of many images at once. With a easy drag and drop interface it couldn't be easier. The program also has several preset for devices like the iPhone, Zune, DS, PSP, so you don't even need to know what size photos those devices take to optimize your photos for them.

The Software is free and can be downloaded here. You will need the .Net framework if you are running something other than Vista or Windows 7, who already have it. Check it out and stop wasting time on your images.

VIA Download Squad

Manually Configuring Your Xbox Networking Setting to get a Static IP

willburns1 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:51:00 GMT

I made a video not too long ago on how to fix connection problems in Xbox Live. You forwarded ports to your Xbox so the you could obtain a open NAT type and be able to play with anyone. This works very well but your Xbox needs to have the same IP address for this to work. The best way is to reserve the IP in the router and I showed you how to do that in the video link above. The other way to do this is to manually configure your Xbox with an IP address so the router doesn't change it. This what I show you how to do in this video.

After doing a little research I discovered that it's important to give your xbox an IP outside of the DHCP Range, which is usually 100-149 on consumer routers, but could be different for your router. The screen shot above shows you what it looks like on the main Linksys setup page. If you give it a number outside this range the router will not give out your IP to any other device. So you would want something like 192.168.1.150 or 192.168.1.151 and so on.

Steam Announced Several Titles to come to Mac in the Spring

willburns1 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:24:00 GMT

Everyone is excited that Steam has decided to port over some of their games to Mac. Everyone has been talking about it and I couldn't be happier. Not all the titles will make it over to Mac at least not for a while, but Steam has announced several big titles that will be coming to Mac Including Portal, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Left 4 dead, Left 4 Dead 2, and Team Fortress 2. These are some of there best games in my opinion so I couldn't be happier to hear it.

I am a big fan of Left 4 Dead so when I read that both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 would both be coming to Mac I was really excited. I was reading an article about the announcement on Macworld and the writer was asking the question why? Why now, why start making games for Mac's now? Sure they have started to become more popular but not that noticeable when it comes down to percentages. Frankly I just don't care, I am glad that Steam is trying to reach out to Mac users.

I had a thought as to why Steam would come to Macs. If they have a couple good games and the social network to put it together on the Mac it could become really popular for Mac users. With a large percentage of Mac users playing their games it could start to add up especially if they move with Macs as they become more popular. They could one day be the only way to play good games on a Mac.

How to Silence the Facebook Screaming - Hide unwanted posts and applications on Facebook

willburns1 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:26:00 GMT

My wife is always complaining to me “I can't stand reading this person's updates on Facebook”, or “I am so tired of people asking for help in Farmville”. So I thought that perhaps other people might find it useful to block those annoying post in the news stream, which is quite simple and I will show you how.

There are several things you can do in the news stream. You can block people which will prevent them from showing up in your news stream at all. This is handy for those people you still want to drop in on every once in a while but don't want to hear every little thing that's going on with them.

The other is hiding applications, which allows you to hide all posts by an application no matter who is posting through it, you won't have to read about it. This is great because once you start hiding applications your news stream starts to become useful again and full of actual posts and not nonsense game requests, and horoscopes.

To hide people or applications all you have to do is hit the little hide button next to the post. If the post is from an application you will be given a choice whether or not to hide the application or the person. If you choose the application you will not receive anymore post from that application no matter who posts them. If you choose the person no more of that person's post will appear in your news feed not just their application posts. If the post is not from an application Facebook will confirm that you want to hide that person's posts.

If at some point you want to unhide applications or people all you have to do is click the “Edit Options” button at the bottom of your news feed. It will show you a list of all your hidden applications and people and you can choose to add them back to your news feed.

You can always use Facebook lite which doesn't have any applications and is a simpler broken down version of Facebook. You can login to Facebook lite at lite.facebook.com

I hope this helps and I hope it brings a little bit of life back into your Facebook experience.

Google Maps Now Helps you Plan your Bike Route

willburns1 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:51:00 GMT

This has got to one of the most requested features of Google Maps, a full functioning bike layer for the popular Google Maps online map program. The Layer allows you to get directions to and from locations using bike friendly roads and bike trails. You can turn on the bike layer under the more menu and explore your local area for bike friendly streets and bike trails.

The ability to find and plan a bike routes on biker friendly roads comes in handy for the export and novice cyclist. I am not an avid biker but sometimes I like to take the old bike out for a ride and it's nice to know what roads near me have bike lanes or bike trails.

After checking out the new Google Maps new layer I discovered that there were a lot of cyclist friendly roads in my area. I even found a bike trail not far from my house. I was really excited and now I want to plan some routes and get out there and do them

Checkout the new Layer at Google Maps

iCalShare - Find Calendars of Holidays, Events, and More

willburns1 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:55:00 GMT

iCal is great for keeping your life on a schedule. There is so much you can do with ical including subscribing to calendars that can make you aware of events, holidays, and even your favorite sports teams schedules. The problem is where do you find these calendars so you don't have to manual input all those dates, times, and information.

Well one place you might want to look is iCalShare. It's a website that allows you to subscribe to different ical calendars. All the calendars are submitted by the user base and you can find calendars not on the site and upload them so everyone can benefit from them.

There are a lot of really useful calendars on the site and installing them is just a click away. If you don't find the calendar you want or need take the time to find it somewhere and add it to the site. It will make the site more useful and will benefit the community.

iCalShare VIA Macworld

AllMyapps - Get free and paid apps and install them all at once

willburns1 — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:45:00 GMT

Allmyapps is a website that is going to be a kind of iTunes for applications. You make purchases and get free applications and then you can install and reinstall them all at once. It's a rather handy little website especially if you are a big fan of free software and do a lot of fresh windows installs.

The website is just starting out so most of there 200 software titles are all free anyway, but in the future you will be able to purchase software and have it in a central location so you can install it onto your computer.

All the downloads are malware-free and up-to-date and like a said most of them are free right now. Allmyapps does have some pretty cool features that some of their competitors don't have. Like the one click installing and the bundle download that allows you to install your apps offline with one install.

Allmyapps have a lot of slack to pickup from software download giants like CNET's Download.com, Ninite, and Softonic. I have a feeling that Allmyapps is going to do very well. I can see it being a one stop shop for installing software for fresh installs of Window and Linux. It would save you so much time going to all the different websites downloading and installing their applications. All you have to do is select the applications and hit the install button and the website takes care of the rest.

The new version of the website is in beta, which you can get into by going to Techcrunch's article and clicking the link and entering their invitation code.

AllMyApps

Superbar - Add status indicators to your Windows 7 Taskbar

willburns1 — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:00:00 GMT

Here is something for all you Windows 7 people out there, it's status indicators for your various system resources. There are five of them showing you your, battery level, volume, disk space, CPU, and memory. They sit there right in the Windows taskbar informing you of there status.

The indicators will change color to indicate something is wrong or perhaps that your volume is muted. They also feature a progress bar like look to further notate the devices status.

These little apps are free and us about 6MB of memory each. Download them here.

VIA Download Squad

CrashPlan - Affordable Online Backup System

willburns1 — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:57:00 GMT

I run an backup of all my files on to an external hard drive attached to my computer. What if you experienced some kind of natural disaster like a flood, earthquake, power surge, or fire. Then your computer and all your files would be ruined. There is also a possibility that both your computer and your backup could both die at the same time what would you do them? Well the simple answer is to backup all your files to a remote location. That way if anything were to happen to your computer or the structure that houses your computer all will not be lost.

There are many ways to backup your files online but I think CrashPlan is one of the simplest and most affordable ways of doing that. You have several options when it comes to CrashPlan. You can backup to a local drive, backup to a remote machine, or backup to their online servers. Backing up online is slow because of bandwidth issues, and could take weeks and restoring a large amount of data could take days. Backing up to a local drive is fast but it too could be affected by the same natural disaster as the original files. You can also backup to a remote machine that way the transfer is fast and both the computer and the backup are not in the same location.

The basic version of the software is free, but there pro version called CrashPlan+ for $60. The main difference is that the basic version backs up every hour and only stores the most recent version of the file where as CrashPlan+ will backup every 15 minutes if you want and store multiple version of the same file. The software is cross-platform and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The online backup plans are very affordable and offer unlimited storage. Individual unlimited plans for one year is $54, which is $4.50 a month, 2 years is $ 99, and 3 years is $125. The 3 year plan comes out at $3.47 a month which is hard to beat anywhere on the internet.

If you have been thinking about starting a backup system for your computer this is a great place to start. Checkout CrashPlan.

CrashPlan Online Backup

TotalFinder - Add Tabs and other features to Finder

willburns1 — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:25:00 GMT

Finder is the application on the Mac used to find your files and folders on your computer. Though it's full of some great features it also is lacking in others. There have been many applications out there that have tried to replace finder or make finder better like Path Finder and the do a pretty good job of it. Though applications like Path finder are good, I am so cheap and don't want to spend the $40 on a license. So I found a little application called TotalFinder and it has some great features that make Finder just that much better.

The main feature that I like about TotalFinder is that you can have tabs in the native finder. TotalFinder will actually change the way Finder operates which allows you to use the native finder application rather than an alternative application like Path Finder. The tabs look much like google chrome tabs which can be opened and closed with keyboard shortcuts just like the browser. You can even drag a folder to the tab bar and have the folder come a new tab. Switching between tabs is natural with the same shortcuts as a web browser and they are spring loaded so if you drag a file and wait the tab will automatically be selected and brought to the front.

Other than the Tab mode you can also add a dual-panel mode, have a global Finder hot-key, stop finder from creating .DS_Store files, and show folders always on top. There are a couple of other interesting features like the ability to show hidden files among others.

TotalFinder is a free application that is currently in Alpha test. Because it actually changes the way your finder operates you might have to uninstall it if a Mac update breaks the application. Uninstalling it is easy so no harm done and is worth it to get those added features.

TotalFinder Website

Steam Rumored to come to Mac

willburns1 — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:39:00 GMT

Steam, a popular online gaming website and platform, might be coming to Mac. Steam is a website where you can download and play all of Steams releases. You can join the steam community, and play and chat with friends, create and join matches all on steams dedicated servers. The rumor of Steam coming to Mac all started when a beta version of the Steam client had files in it for a Mac version. These files were mostly just icons and such that looked liked like Mac icons and had “osx” in the name. Pretty convincing evidence if you ask me.

Other than the Mac looking files it looks like the steam client has changed it;s stores rendering engine to Webkit, which is used in Safari, the Mac, and the iphone. So with all this evidence it's only a matter of time before we see an actual official announcement on the subject.

This could be huge for Mac users that want that Windows gaming experience without duel booting their computers. The only question is which titles will be available for Mac. It might be asking too much to have all their titles ported over to the Mac, but I think there will be at least a handful of them that will make it. Perhaps after it catches on we will see all future releases from Steam come to the Mac.

Get Thousands of Free AudioBooks at BooksShouldbeFree.com

willburns1 — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:25:00 GMT

There are tons of places to get free audio books online, but most of them really don't want to give audiobooks away they want to lure you in with the idea of free audiobooks provide a couple and then sell you the others. BooksShouldbeFree.com allows you to access thousands of audiobooks that are in the public domain. It's great for long trips and times where you just don't feel like reading.

All the books are in the public domain so you can download a zip file with the recordings or you can access it through an iTunes podcast so you can download the book a chapter at a time as you progress through it. The website also provides a way to comment on the recordings so that you can gain insight into the recording's quality.

If you are in need of some free audiobooks checkout booksshouldbefree.com VIA LifeHacker

I want a Chameleon. Why? Because they are Awesome!

willburns1 — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:52:00 GMT

I know this is a little bit out of the ordinary for this blog but I found this interesting so I thought you might as well. I was in a pet store the other day, which is always a bad thing because it gets you thinking you need another pet, and I saw that they had chameleons there. I was fascinated by these little guys hanging onto their branches with their three toed zygodactylous feet and looking around with their globular eyes.

I want one, but after reading about how much care they require I might be rethinking my pet choice. An adult Chameleon requires a 3 foot by 3 foot by 4 foot enclosure. That's a pretty big space for a caged pet. They also don't drink water from a bowl so you have to drip water into the cage or mist the cage twice daily so the Chameleon will have water. They eat crickets, meal worms, super worms, wax worms, wax moths, non infesting roaches and more. A website I read was saying that you need to dust the food with calcium and vitamin D supplements so that your Chameleon doesn't suffer from an overdose of vitamin A, which chameleons are prone too apparently.

The article was also saying that they require a source of UV light, and heated stones to lay on at different temperatures so they can properly regulate their body temperature. Something else that I didn't know was that chameleons can become stressed very easily and for this reason can't be handled unless necessary. If they become too stressed they could get sick or even die.

All in all I think it would be an awesome pet to have and most definitely something out of the ordinary. They are one of the more exotic reptile pets that you can own and come with a lot of responsibility. They are beautiful and interesting creatures and I would love to have own one at some point.

Let me know what you think about Chameleons and other Reptiles in the comment section below.

More About Chameleons

Puniz indexes music, download the video and add to iTunes = Free Music

willburns1 — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:37:00 GMT

I wrote a post about how to record your system audio to get music for free and this is along the same lines. Puniz indexes music from all over the web. Most of the music is attached a video and all you have to do to add it to itunes is save the video as an MP3 and then add it to itunes. It's free music perfect for getting those popular singles and pop songs that you don't want to purchase the whole album for.

Puniz allows you to search by song, artist, or keyword to find the song you want. When you click on a song you are sent to a page where you can listen to the song and download the video. I downloaded some songs opened the video in quicktime and exported it as a AiFF file added it to itunes and then converted the song to an MP3. It's a quick and easy way of finding songs and with a little bit of work can get into a format that iTunes will be happy with.

Puniz Website VIA Lifehacker