Month: July 2005

  • Web Color Schemes

    “Get inspired by these web-smart color schemes, taken from a variety of sources and updated regularly.”

    Return of Design via TSOB

  • mobiBLU DAH-1500: World's Smallest MP3 Player

    mobiBLU DAH-1500 “Super compact size (24mm*24mm*24mm) and weighs only 18 grams! A fully featured MP3/audio player that fits in the palm of your hand.”

    mobiBLU via /.

    Also features an OLED display, an FM radio, a built-in clock and a lithium-ion battery, which is charged when the device is plugged into a USB port. No Ogg support though.

  • DVD subtitling

    After having found out Night of The Living Dead and a bunch of other horror classics have become Public Domain I immediately began downloading them from the Internet Archive.

    PCstats.com offers a beginners guide to making DVD movies from video files using freely downloadable software, mainly IfoEdit. Because of MPEG-2 licencing issues, TMPEGEnc’s support for MPEG-2 encoding is limited, but luckily it’s not needed in the process: it’s only used to de-multiplex the mpeg file into separate video and audio files.

    I’d like to have Finnish subtitles for my DVD’s, so DVD.box.sk’s guide to converting SRT files to SUP format might come in handy at some point. Could try finding one of those amateur-made translations out there or try and make my own translation. The script would be useful for that, but I couldn’t find it on the Net.

  • USB Devices Can Crack Windows

    “Vulnerabilities in USB drivers for Windows could allow an attacker to take control of locked workstations using a specially programmed Universal Serial Bus device, according to an executive from SPI Dynamics, which discovered the security hole. The buffer-overflow vulnerabilities could enable an attacker to circumvent Windows security and gain administrative access to a user’s machine.”

    eWeek.com via /.

  • Popularity Contest

    Just plugged in Alex King’s Popularity Contest both here and on marginaali. A list of the most popular posts is in the sidebar.

    “Popularity Contest is a WordPress plugin that uses page views and feedback (comments, trackbacks, etc.) to determine how popular each of your posts are (in relation to each other).”

    “Popularity Contest Plugin (beta)”
    A. King via Pinseri

  • BBC opens TV listings for 'remix'

    “Developers and designers are being encouraged to come up with innovative ways of using TV and radio schedules by taking part in a BBC competition. The competition, announced at the Open Tech conference in London, has been organised by the BBC’s backstage.bbc.co.uk developer network.

    Backstage lets people remix the BBC’s content to make new applications. The latest content release is seven-day listings information for TV and radio, in a format called TV Anytime.”

    BBC
    some links added

    So, when’s YLE going to release their schedules like this?

  • ITviikko spreading FUD?

    ITviikko, one of the largest popular weekly IT publications in Finland, seems to really have a beef with open source software and anything non-microsoft.”

    joker.iki.fi

    I’ve noticed this too. It looks like they’re seizing every mention of every vulnerability or delay in OSS and try and make big headlines from them. If selling news is what they do, that’s somewhat understandable, but it’s not what I’d call quality journalism. To put it in perspective, the tabloids poking around every minor detail of celebrities’ lives do the same, and there are people who buy it, but I wouldn’t.

    Of course, they’d probably claim they’re just trying not to be biased, when reporting vulnerabilities of both OSS and proprietary software, but I’m not too keen to read up on every tiny vulnerability of proprietary software either. What matters is the severity of the vulnerability, who is affected (all users or just some of them – this is why the Greasemonkey vulnerability wasn’t big news IMO) and how soon can it be fixed.

    By these standards I believe the number of newsworthy OSS vulnerabilities would be significantly lower than it would be for example for Microsoft, as opposed to them being equal. If this is true, having equal coverage for them actually means the news source is biased.

  • NINJAM – Novel Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music

    “NINJAM is a program to allow people to make real music together via the Internet. Every participant can hear every other participant. Each user can also tweak their personal mix to his or her liking. NINJAM is cross-platform, with clients available for Mac OS X and Windows.”

    NINJAM via Creative Commons

    Some samples are available, all CC-licenced.

  • Blue Security fight fire with fire… or spam with spam

    “Israeli technology firm Blue Security has set up a scheme to batter spam websites with thousands of complaints. The plan is to fill order forms on spam websites offering pills, porn and penile health tonics with complaints about the products advertised for sale in junk messages. The plan has been criticised by other anti-spam workers who say it amounts to vigilantism.”

    BBC
    some links added

  • Drug dealers allegedly used Orkut

    “Ten people have been arrested in Brazil after authorities discovered them allegedly using Google’s online community site, Orkut, to sell drugs. The drugs ring was uncovered after police tapped phone calls and monitored online communications through Orkut.”

    BBC
    some links added