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Monday, March 31, 2008

Download new OpenOffice 2.4

OpenOffice recently launched a new version of their office suite. You can download OpenOffice 2.4 at the OpenOffice homepage. There are some new features in OO 2.4. Among all new features there are better support for pdf files, simpler print interface, simplified settings for spellcheck etc...

The Pirate Bay sued for 1.621.045 Euro by IFPI

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) demands the owners of The Pirate Bay to forfeit 1.621.045 Euro for violation of Swedish copyright laws. In addition to IFPI's claim the District Prosecutor HÄkan Rooswall sued The Pirate Bay for 1,2 millions sek (around 200.000 dollar). The Swedish AntipiratbyrÄn (Antipiracy Agency) and the MPA (not the MPAA) are expected to require indemnity from the men behind the torrent site The Pirate Bay. I recently wrote a post concerning the Japanese ISP ban of pirates. Yesterday I wrote a post about the end of TorrentSpy.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

The end of TorrentSpy.com

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Saturday, March 29, 2008

Adobe Photoshop Express online photo editor

You have probably already noticed it, but I will mention it anyway. Adobe last Thursday launched a new online photo editing service called Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express is not intended to be a professional image editing software like the famous desktop version. The Express version will be used for minor photo editing. It will also serve well as a service for sharing and showing digital photos. You will find Adobe Photoshop Express (beta) here.

YouTube statistics tool for your site

YouTube recently added a new tool that could be used to collect video clip statistic. The new tool will give users the opportunity to find out which video is the most popular and on what day visitors watched a specific video clip. Users may also have information about visitors geographical location. It will be possible to find out even how the visitors reached the site hosting the video clip. I think this tool will be very useful for site owners who want to suit their site to the visitors behavior. Read YouTube's blog post for further information on YouTube's new tool.

"Finally, we have some answers. Today we're releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time."

Things are happening at YouTube. Two weeks ago the video site launched a new application programming interface, API. Even more recently YouTube showed how to get high quality on video clips.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

iTunes and QuickTime update installs Safari for Windows

If you are using either Apple's iTunes or QuickTime then you will risk to auto-download Apple's new web browser Safari 3.1 for Windows. QuickTime and iTunes are using an auto-update tool to automatically download new software updates. This time the update tool will try to install the Safari browser along with the other updates. Users of the two programs therefore risk to install unwanted software at the moment they update iTunes and QuickTime. Mozilla CEO John Lilly complain that Apple's strategy borders on malware distribution habits. He also says that the behavior may effect people in the way that some won't trust auto-updates furthermore. Lilly said something important here, because it's very important to maintain the relationship between software users and the software companies. In any event, users should be aware of pre-checked options before installing new softwares and updates.

Fantasy Art 3D Wallpaper

There are a lot of sites where the visitors are able to download wallpapers to use as desktop backgrounds. I have a favorite site that has got a bunch of wonderful wallpapers. The site, Fantasy Art 3D Wallpaper, has got different themes as fantasy, sci-fi, nature a lot more. Most of the wallpapers are computer animated but the animations are so realistic that you almost cannot differentiate them from real photos. There is also a section which provides animated desktop applications. I don't want to have pointers, balls and other things moving around on my desktop, but some of the animations are actually really cool. Visit Fantasy Art 3D if you want to change the desktop background of you computer.

Friday, March 21, 2008

The Iraq war on YouTube

This week it is the 5th anniversary since the outbreak of the Iraq war. When the war began the video site YouTube didn't even exist. Today almost everybody are familiar with the site. There are many video clips that give us a picture of the war. You can for example watch the American first bomb raid against Baghdad. There is also a video clip that shows American soldiers on patrol in Baghdad. Another video clip shows still pictures of the war. A lot of people are negative to the Iraq war. Therefore you also can find antiwar clips on YouTube. USA use YouTube to spread war propaganda. The forces do have a channel at YouTube where the American forces publish their own video clips. A sad clip on YouTube describes the last letter of a soldier to his wife in US. The letter is performed as an opera song. One video clip has been shown about two million times. It is a video clip showing American soldiers during a street fight of Haifa.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Free Online Virus Scan with F-Secure, Panda Security and Trend Micro

Do you want to scan your computer for viruses? Then you may have to install an anti-virus program on your harddrive. I will suggest my visitors to use either AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition or avast! Home Edition. Avast do have some more functionalities than AVG, but I prefer the light-weight AVG anyway. If you don't want to install an anti-virus on your computer, then there are at least two free anti-virus online scanners. Both of these scanners are able to run in your browser, especially Internet Explorer. I don't really know if they also will work on Mozilla Firefox, maybe you have to use a plugin like IE Tab to get it run in Firefox. Well, visit F-Secure's homepage to run their online scanner. You will find the scanner at F-Secure Online Virus Scan. The second scanner is available at Trend Micro's homepage at the address Trend Micro HouseCall. As a last tip for today I will give you a link to Panda Security's homepage. Panda's scanner won't delete any threats but it will scan your computer for malware. Panda's online scan will be available at Panda ActiveScan with TruPrevent. I suggest that you run F-Secure Online Virus Scan and Trend Micro Housecall before you run Panda ActiveScan with TruePrevent because of Panda's restricted funcionality.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Japanese Internet providers block popular torrent site

TechCrunch published an article about Japanese ISPs upcoming block of a popular torrent site. Japanese Internet providers will probably block Internet users in Japan from using the filesharing site before both the United Kingdom and France take similar action. This got me thinking about the court case initiated by the Danish anti-piracy organization IFPI, which ruled that the Danish Internet provider DMT2 had to stop Danish Internet users from connecting to the torrent site named The Pirate Bay. The decision was an outcome of the former block of the Russian site ALLOFMP3. In the Danish case the spokesman of The Pirate Bay said that the decision prevented Danish people from downloading even legal material. The IFPI spokesman on the other hand defended the outcome of the Danish court by saying that almost all material on TPB is illegal and that the outcome of the Danish case will show the world that this kind of filesharing are undesirable. Time must show whether more countries will follow the Danish and Japanese example or if the pirates will find a way to avoid the action most recently taken by the Japanese ISPs.

The basics of Google search

Do you know how to use Google search in an efficient way? I will give you some advice concerning Google's search options. You probably already know several of my hints, but maybe there is still something for you to catch up on. The simplest way to limit the number of search results is to add more words into the text input field and then click the search button once again. One thing that I was unfamiliar with was that you can exclude a word by using a minus sign in front of a specific word. When using this method it is very important to have a blank space before the minus sign. If you are going to search for a phrase or quote then you shall use quotation marks before and after the phrase. Another useful tip is to limit the search to only one site. To achieve this you have to write the word site, followed by a colon and the domain name. For instance, if you are going to search for Britney Spears at perezhilton.com, then you must write Britney Spears site:perezhilton.com. Whenever you are looking for information belonging to a particular topic you probably would find the desirable information in one of Google's directories. Go to directory.google.com and choose your topic of interest before carrying out the search. Google also supply different methods to exclude a domain from search, to search only one single language and to find web pages related to other domains by links.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Turn your web browser into a virtual telescope with Google Sky

Diego Gavinowich loves coding and astronomy. Google saw the potential in the young man and asked him to code a standalone web application of Google Sky. The earlier version of Google Sky was a part of Google Earth program. Gavinowich new version only needs an Internet connection to be run. People around the world can search for planets, listen to podcasts, watch some beautiful Hubble Space Telescope images, or explore historical maps of the sky within any web browser. This will actually turn your web browser into a virtual telescope. Google Sky has tens of thousands of searchable objects and can show the sky in different lights as microwave, ultraviolet, x-ray or infrared. You can also watch famous images from the Hubble Space Telescope and find current positions of the planets. Watch the video below and learn how Google Sky works.

Friday, March 14, 2008

What is open source code?

You may have heard of open source, but what does it mean in computer programming? Open source is programming code that is available to everyone. You can read the open source code and also use it in your own applications. There are a couple of conditions needed to be imposed by any program written in open source code. The Open Source Definition states that open source code has to be freely redistributed. One shall also be able to read the real code. Not only the original code has to be free, even derived code shall be redistributed for free. You shall also respect the author of the original code and not exclude his or her name from further distributions. Neither private persons or companies can be stopped from using the code. If a program based on open source code is a part of another program, then the whole program has to be distributed according to open source. The open source license doesn't say that all programs included in an open source distribution has to be free. These conditions are written by Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond. The conditions constitute The Open Source Definition. There are several popular program made of open source code. Mozilla Firefox, Apache, Linux operating system are all made of open source code.

YouTube high quality videos

YouTube pronounced today that they in the future will provide high quality videos. YouTube users can set the settings to always show a link to an equally video in high quality if there is one available. This setting will affect all video categories on YouTube. People with low speed Internet connection aught to choose low quality to avoid all too long rendering time. YouTube provide a quality that will fit the most common connection speeds nowadays. The new effort to let users watch high quality videos will serve well with YouTube's new upload limit of 1GB.

Speed up your slow Windows Vista operating system

Many computer enthusiasts have experienced the slowness of Microsofts new operating system Windows Vista. To begin with, you shall not install Windows Vista on a computer with less than 2GB of random access memory (RAM). Otherwise your computer will not run at a comfortable speed, despite of what Microsofts specifications says. I installed Microsoft OS Windows Vista on one of my quite old PCs, a Pentium 4 1.50GHz, and it ran very slow. Windows XP however ran very smooth and easy on my old computer machine. There are however ways to speed up Windows Vista. You can use Microsofts new system called ReadBoost, the cleansing program Ccleaner, the Vista disk defragmenter tool or for experienced users even the program vLite, written by Dino Nuhagic.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Solid State Drives (SSD) between 80GB and 160GB

Intel Corporation will release Solid State Drives (SSD) with a capacity between 80GB to 160GB during 2008. Intel will provide both 1.8" and 2.5" drives. SSD deliver faster boot times, embedded code storage, rapid data access and low-power storage alternatives for laptops and notebooks. Intel's new drives will by the date of release probably have the largest storage capacity ever seen on SSD. SSD are still expensive to develop and manufacture so the market share for these neat drives won't be large in 2008.

YouTube will be as open as possible

YouTube pronounced that they will make their application programming interface (API) as open as possible. This will give all community members the possibility to customize YouTube videos and use it together with a community page or even with personal websites. YouTube also wants to integrate YouTube content into desktop applications, mobile devices, cameras and lots more. YouTube mentioned four new features that will give users the possibility to use YouTube everywhere.

* Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
* Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
* Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
* Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
* Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

YouTube says that this will give users almost endless possibilities to integrate YouTube content into other places on Internet. YouTube also provided some YouTube API Case Studies.

Welcome to Gnalk @ www.gnalk.com

This is my first blog post. You will further on find my blog at the address www.gnalk.com. I intend to write posts concerning computers and Internet in especial. Please, come back soon and check out my new posts. So long blogers!