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Shut down web page or Myspace annoyances
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Myspace is a great place to find people, however one thing rarely found on Myspace is restraint when building a profile page. Gaudy text, blinking animated gifs of toads shaking their rump, comment spam, and often a really annoying song playing on their music player.
The problem is even though your friend may have limited style, you still long to know BIGPIMPIN is doing this week. So how do you keep the fingernails down the chalkboard website from annoying you or worse yet crashing your browser. To the rescue comes SquareFree’s annoyance zapper.
Just install the bookmarks in the browser of your choice and when you see an annoying website click on the appropriate bookmarklet. Suddenly BIGPIMPIN’s website is free of its obnoxious content and you can have friends without style.
Ditto is the perfect companion to Copy and Paste
Make a unlimited amount of icons with ConvertIcon
We’ve reviewed a few favicon creators before but I omitted a obvious webpage that I often rely on for creating actual icons instead of just favicons. This webpage will take your standard image and convert it to a icn. icon file. It does a great job too and if you watch carefully you will often see one my icons appear in the recently created icons section. So go ahead make your own icons!
Be sure to upload a PNG file
Check it out
Joost, no match for SlingBox
If you listen to the hype coming from Joost you would think they are the first coming of TV on the internet, but the reality is that they are late and ill equipped for what end users want. Each time a new player enters the market we end up being let down by lack of selection or subpar video and this is no different with Joost. How is it that only Slingbox gets this right? After all, people already pay for satellite and cable, why would you settle for less with the content on the PC or Web?
Only YouTube seems to understand that the more unique content you have the better, which is why they are so successful, but why is it that these startups need to reinvent the wheel?
The funny thing is most broadcast TV executives are missing out on a huge demographic. Think about how many people are sitting at work catching the game or their soaps while working or on the road with their PDA or Windows Mobile device with a Slingbox now. These people want to watch the same content just in another place. We are no less addicted to TV we just want our TV now and where-ever we are internet style.
Joost does it’s best to cue up content from multiple providers, but we found the selections severely lacking. This of course is not Joost’s fault but the lack of cooperation from TV Studios probably stemming from a deep seated fear of new technology. They see players like Joost as something that they cannot control and are worried about enabling a possible competitor. Joost also suffers from a client that is both slow and hard for novice users to understand. There needs to be more options for how much screen real estate is taken up with Joost’s player. Compared to Slingbox’s software Joost doesn’t even compare. So why the hype? They simply are cashing in on two words “FREE” and “TV”, I imagine once people play with their impractical software for a while they will look towards alternatives, or write off TV on the internet as a gimmick entirely. This of course would be a shame.
Now there are some real alternatives out there to Slingbox like Orb which allows you to install software on your Windows Media Center equipped PC to place-shift your TV content to your PC. The downside to this is if you do not have a TV tuner or Windows Media Center you are going to shell out money for both and end up paying more than a standard Slingbox. There are also services like TiVoToGo which aim to beam your recorded broadcast to your PC with several limitations due to copy protection.
Update: Also don’t forget Pirate solutions such as TVU
The fact is though, no matter where you get your “internet” TV nothing beats Slingbox right now, because services like Joost are not able to acquire the types of channels and content that you already get through cable or satellite. The only thing we can see that may trump Slingbox in the future would be if your satellite or cable provider’s equipment came with a feature to place-shift, however the regulations governing cable companies make this very unlikely.
AwkwardTV hacks the AppleTV
The folks over at AwkwardTV project have found a way to boot the Apple TV from an external USB drive attached to it, without opening the Apple TV case or removing the internal hard disk.As his video shows, Apple TV is booting a modified system off the external drive.
The AwkwardTV project is now looking to build a bootable image for USB drives based on the Open Source Darwin kernel which will allow mounting and editing the internal hard disk, so that the various hacks, such as enabling SSH, can be made without opening the case.
WestN arranged for a torrent of the hi-res version of the video. You can find it right here.
