Archive for: September 5, 2007

Hewlett-Packard and Dave Networks are teaming up for an Internet TV venture that will debut exclusively on HP consumer notebooks.

Next.TV will be unveiled later this month as a Web update on HP consumer notebooks shipping with Microsoft Vista, and will be accessible via the HP QuickPlay button. By early 2008, all consumer notebooks will come pre-installed with the updated HP QuickPlay and Next.TV.

Though Next.TV will initially launch solely with HP, there will be a downloadable version for non-HP PCs by year's end, said Rex Wong, CEO of Dave Networks. A Mac version is not yet available. Programming will be supported by targeted advertisements.

Next.TV has brokered content deals with a majority of the major broadcasters and cable providers and will debut with approximately 50 channels, Wong said. We're not yet allowed to say exactly what providers will feature their programming on Next.TV, but we got a sneak peek on Wednesday and it appears that there will be plenty of selections to help us procrastinate at work ... I mean, relax after a tough day.

Click over to pcmag.com for more details on Next.TV.

If you're like me, you spend way too much money on takeout because you don't know what to make with the ingredients you have at home, even with a fully stocked pantry. Snacksby can help. The service is a community-powered recipe-sharing site; you can search by ingredient or keyword, and there's a convenient widget on the front page to help you find recipes in the site's database using only the ingredients you enter. In other words, type in what you have in your pantry, and Snacksby will return recipes using those ingredients.

Sometimes I stand in front of my fridge after grocery shopping and realize I have nothing to eat. It's not because the fridge isn't full; it's because I bought a lot of base ingredients and just can't think of what to make with them. I can go to some of my favorite food sites, like Open Source Food, for recommendations, but I may not want to search for delicious recipes so much as I want to know what I can make with the stuff I just bought or already have lying around.

At Snacksby, I can type in the ingredients I want to use or have in my pantry, and the search widget will run through the recipes submitted to the site by members to see if it can find anything that matches the ingredients I typed in. It's not always a perfect match--sometimes the resulting suggestions have some of the ingredients I have but also others I might be ...

The Bank of India's web site was seriously hacked last week. Researchers from Sunbelt Software discovered the hack, and Roger Thompson of Exploit Prevention Labs dug into it more deeply. Roger created a fascinating short movie demonstrating just what happens when you log into a compromised web site without adequate protection. It's definitely worth a look: click here to view.

So, fraudulent sites posing as your bank aren't the only worry. Even the real-for-true bank site itself can be dangerous if hackers get their hooks into it. Be sure to keep your operating system, browser, and security software 100% up-to-date!

If you followed my advice and took at look at the new Google Earth and Sky, Google has a surprise in store for you. Once you're finished browsing the heavens and checking out all of your favorite constellations, you can come back to earth and try your hand at the Google flight simulator that's built into the new version. Press Ctrl+Alt+A (Command+Option+A in MacOS) to activate the simulator, and you'll find out that flying a plane is harder than it looks.

Once you activate the simulator, you can choose your aircraft and the airport where you'd like to start your flight. You have two choices of aircraft, an F-16 jet or an SR-22 propeller plane. You can either start your flight in the air over the part of the world you're currently looking at, or choose from over a dozen airports around the world.

That's where the easy part ends. People who love flight simulators won't have a problem with Google's version, but if you've never played before, it might be a bit difficult. Google's provided a number of key commands that will help you get off the ground and fly smoothly. Even so, keeping your plane in the air can be a bit tricky if you're like me and are used to videogame airplanes that don't stall and can do physically impossible acrobatics. Still, I managed to take off and at least start my flight before spiraling out of control into the San Francisco suburbs.

The simulator uses inverse controls, like most flight simulators, so ...

Realtek HD Audio Driver support all of Realtek HD Audio Codec in Vista WinXP Win2000 Win2003

1 Vista WHQL Supporting ALC882 ALC883 ALC885 ALC888 ALC861VD ALC660 ALC662 ALC260
ALC262 ALC267 ALC268
2 Windows 2000 XP WHQL Supporting ALC880 ALC882 ALC883 ALC885 ALC888 ALC861VC ALC861VD
ALC660 ALC662 ALC260 ALC262 ALC267 ALC268
3 HDMI Device WHQL Support ATI HDMI Devices
4 OS Supporting Microsoft WindowsXP Widnows2000 Vista x86 x64
5 Pack with Microsoft High Definition Audio UAAV1 0a 5013
6 Add Fix

1 Customization
For New Architecture
1 Customization
CPL
1 Customization

Realtek HD Audio Driver support all of Realtek HD Audio Codec in Vista WinXP Win2000 Win2003

1 Vista WHQL Supporting ALC882 ALC883 ALC885 ALC888 ALC861VD ALC660 ALC662 ALC260
ALC262 ALC267 ALC268
2 Windows 2000 XP WHQL Supporting ALC880 ALC882 ALC883 ALC885 ALC888 ALC861VC ALC861VD
ALC660 ALC662 ALC260 ALC262 ALC267 ALC268
3 HDMI Device WHQL Support ATI HDMI Devices
4 OS Supporting Microsoft WindowsXP Widnows2000 Vista x86 x64
5 Pack with Microsoft High Definition Audio UAAV1 0a 5013
6 Add Fix

1 Customization
For New Architecture
1 Customization
CPL
1 Customization

WinRAR is a 32 bit version of RAR the powerful archive manager RAR files can normally compress files up to 10 percent more than ZIP or ARJ files It provides complete support of RAR and ZIP files unpacks 7Z ACE ARJ BZ2 CAB GZ ISO JAR LZH TAR UUE Z Among WinRAR features are strong compression volumes encryption self extracting modules backup facilities

First up in Stevey J's big "The Beat Goes On" announcement: a brand new iTunes, shipping tonight. The big news here is the inclusion of ringtones for the iPhone. Users will have over half a million songs to choose from, at a cost of $.99 over the price of the standard track.

By plugging their iPhone into their PC, users can create custom ring tones, using up to 30 of any part of the selected tracks. And of course different songs can be assigned to different users.

More live coverage of the event over at Gearlog.

[Image via Engadget].

Microsoft continues to trickle out the updates to their Windows Live Suite. The big news this time out is the introduction of a unified installer, another push on the company's part to get users, who have likely begun looking toward other online apps as alternatives to areas in which Microsoft has traditionally been dominant (*cough* Google Docs), to adopt the various components of the sweet as a single package.

The update includes a slew of other more incremental updates to the beta apps. Live Gallery, the suite's newly introduced photo sharing app, is in "broad public beta," as of today. The app can automatically organize images imported from digital cameras into events, based on date and time. It can also stitch together panoramic images using smaller pictures. Various color adjustment and cropping tools have also been updated.

The blogging app, Live Writer (which the Microsoft representative assured me was, in fact, not a threat to Google Docs), now supports image uploading, printing, and the ability to publish images to Picassa. Other newly introduced features include justified text, image alignment, a password saver, and the ability to insert Soapbox videos into blog posts.

Live Mail also gets a couple of bumps, including a customizable tool bar and improvements to photomail, contacts, and spell-check

More info on the announcement can be found on the Windows Live Wire blog.

EditGrid may be the best web-delivered spreadsheet I've seen--and yes, that includes Google Spreadsheets and Zoho. Today, its maker, the Hong Kong-based Team and Concepts (TnC), has just launched an iPhone version at IT | Redux's Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. As its name implies the conference is a seedbed for browser-based office apps, and when I went last year there was a great feeling of being in the midst of exciting new happenings in tech land.

TnC claims 80 percent of the functionality found in traditional spreadsheets for EditGrid, but the beauty of webware spreadsheet programs is that they let multiple users (to whom you can assign varying permission levels) update the same spreadsheet remotely and simultaneously. EditGrid calls the feature Real-Time Update (RTU), but the same thing is possible in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Another key advantage is that you can connect spreadsheet cells to web services, and the cells are dynamically updated with things like the price of a stock, the temperature in Tangiers, or any other live, changing value that a service exists for. You enter these using EditGrid's Remote Data dialog. When I met with TnC founder David Lee last week, he demoed a spreadsheet with live links to both the Hang Seng and Dow Jones indexes, pulling in stock prices and calculating currency exchanges so that you could compare prices for the same stock round the clock as one market closed and another opened.

The new iPhone version of EditGrid pares down the app for use with the PDA's limited processing power and display real estate. It offers three levels of operation: ...

Navigationally challenged Boost Mobile subscribers will get some assistance this week with the launch of a GPS navigation service that will give users turn-by-turn walking or driving directions directly from their phones.

Subscribers can punch in exact locations or get information about the closest movie theatre, club, mall or restaurant based on location. Users get a week of free service to start and can then opt for unlimited routes for $1.99 a day, $3.99 per week, $9.99 per month or $24.99 for three months. The service will also point users in the direction of Boost Mobile "re-boost" locations free of charge.

Mapping for Boost Navigator will be powered by Telmap, an Israeli mobile mapping company. Customers must have GPS and Java-enabled iDEN handsets to access the service. You can download it at www.boostlive.com or text NAV to BOOST (26678).

Navigator will expand to CDMA handsets in September and will be preloaded on all Boost Mobile handsets by October, according to Boost.

"Boost Navigator not only provides the answer to 'Where you at' but also 'Where you're going,'" said Craig Thole, director of value added services for Boost Mobile. Well, Craig, "where you're going" is not really a question, but I get the jist of what you're saying. Let's hope the Boost Mobile directions are a bit easier to understand.

Rumors about the fabled G-Phone might begin anew with reports Wednesday that Google has filed a patent application for a mobile phone payments system.

The service, dubbed GPay, would use text messages to authenticate payments, pull money from a user's account and deposit it into that of the seller.

Google's announcement earlier this summer that it wants to bid in the upcoming 700 megahertz spectrum auction prompted speculation that the search engine giant was considering an Internet-enabled mobile phone to rival Apple's iPhone. Information Week speculates that Google could offer transaction fee discounts in exchange for merchant advertising, but concludes that the effort is not likely to take off without a Google-backed mobile device.

Several of Google's Web-based applications, like Google Maps and Gmail, have already been formatted to work on mobile phones, and Google has a mobile version of its Google Checkout online payment system.

The GPay patent was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in February 2006, but was only made public last week.