Remember that Photosynth tech preview that drew quite a bit of attention? Well, now the BBC has released a collection of Photosynth virtual tours to go along with their ‘How We Built Britain’ TV show. The portal to a variety of Photosynth virtual tours is available here. The screen shot above is me checking out the 11th century Ely Cathedral. There are a total of 6 virtual tours to take. This is cool stuff.

The trend of the Nintendo Wii outselling the Sony PS3 is not limited to the US market as was reported on this site earlier. The numbers in Japan are a little bit worse for the former king of the console market, Sony. Sony managed to sell 45,321 units of the PS3 while Nintendo sold 251,794 units of the Wii in May, 2007. This is 5 to 1 ratio, which is similar to the 4 to 1 ratio in US.

While the consoles sell for significantly different prices, a real concern is the growing gap in the number of units in homes. The console makers also get a piece of the pie when games for their respective consoles are sold. With Sony so far putting up a stinker in terms of numbers, it stands to reason that there will be significantly less games sold for the PS3. This doubles the need for Sony to get the PS3 into homes.

If talking to my family and friends accounts for anything, Sony has a real problem on their hands. The PS3 is considered over priced, while the Wii offers a better gaming experience with the innovative controller. I can’t think of too many people that are interested in purchasing a PS3.

Source: Reuters

Amp’d Mobile has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. While this may come as shocking to many, including myself, it gets even stranger in my opinion.

Apparently, Amp’d owes more than $100 million to creditors, and is having a difficult time coming up with the money. A large part of the problem is their own customers. Amp’d saw significant growth in their user base when they started advertising on MTV late last year. A large portion of these customers chose an 18 month service contract. There is nothing unusual there. What is unusal to me, is that 80,000 of their customers didn’t end up paying. That is nearly half of their 175,000 subscribers.

It is the fact that nearly 50% of their subscribers failed to pay that is really surprising to me. I’ve never heard of anything like that before. I guess time will tell if Amp’d manages to survive their own customers.

I was looking around for an alternative for Outlook as my email and information client, and happened upon a version of Evolution compiled for windows. Google doesn’t specifically show how to configure Evolution, so I decided to look for examples myself. When I was looking around for information on how to configure it for pop access to Gmail, I found numerous conflicting examples of how to do it. I finally figured it out, and decided I would share my knowledge with the readers of this blog. I figure screen shots should be about as good a way as any to quickly show what needs to be set. I will only show the meaty bits of the account wizard. All you have to do is replace “mister-x” with your account name.

Keep reading →

The Yoggie Pico is a security suite for a Windows PC contained in a USB Flash drive. The hardware details of the Yoggie Pico include 128MB of RAM and Flash memory, and a 520MHz Intel XScale CPU. In other words, it is almost a tiny computer. It comes with software that will protect from phishing, viruses, and offer firewall protection for your computer. Apparently, it works by acting as network driver, routing all your network activity through itself, thus filtering and protecting all network activity.

One main usage of the Yoggie Pico would be to attach it to your laptop, where it could provide you with a fine layer of protection whenever you use your laptop at a Wi-Fi hotspot. The built in CPU can help reduce the strain of your laptop CPU.

Not surprisingly, the Yoggie Pico is running a customized version of Linux. It sells for $179.00.

Source: Everything USB

Face recognition software, like may things in the technology realm, continues to get better. It is to the point that now, according to the results of a recent contest, that machines can outperform most humans at recognizing faces. The Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2006 and the Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE) 2006 showed that the ability of computers to recognize faces has increased ten fold since 2002, and one hundred fold since 1995. The results are due mainly to the increase in image resolution and better recognition algorithms according to Jonathon Phillips. Jonathon Phillips is the program manager for the NIST tests and lead author of the agency’s report.

A part of the success of the software is the ability to look at certain features of the face that do not change over time. This includes the curves of the eye sockets, nose, and chin. This has the benefit of better recognition in adverse lighting conditions. The software can better recognize the shapes of these areas far better in bad lighting, as they stand out better.

Source: Technology Review

Mozilla Lightning is a calendar add-on for the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail application. Mozilla Lightning, more accurately, is an integration of Mozilla Sunbird, a stand-alone calendar, and the Thunderbird e-mail application. The integration of the calendar makes Thunderbird into more of a PIM(Personal Information Manager) than a standard e-mail application.

Lightning offers the usual assortment of features one would expect. These include making recurring appointments, easily adding regional holidays, setting appointments, etc. However, it doesn’t yet integrate as well as one would hope with Thunderbird. One thing that is still on the agenda for the Lightning development team is better integration of the calendar with Thunderbird contacts. The Lightning team admits that it is still in the development phase, so the lack of tight integration can be understood.

The Thunderbird e-mail client is actually quite good. It has many excellent features, and integrates very easily with Gmail.

If your looking for a PIM that will not break the bank, and don’t mind it not being fully integrated yet, give Mozilla Lightning a try. At the very least, it is a project to keep an eye on as it matures.

IPCop is a Linux distribution that is designed with the specific purpose of acting as a firewall/gateway to improve your security. It is loaded with features to accomplish this, yet IPCop does this in as straight forward a way as I can imagine. OK, now what the heck can you do with this you may be asking. The answer is simple. In fact, the IPCop FAQ says it best:

IPCop lets you take an old PC and convert it into an appliance that will.

1. Secure your home network from the internet.
2. Improve the performance of web browsers (by keeping frequently used information)

Te get IPCop working, all you need is an old(or new) PC, a few supported network cards, and a switch if you plan on protecting more than one PC with it. It supports some wireless configurations as well. The ISO is only around a 40MB download, and once you boot from it, it is very easy to install and configure.

The main configuration is done from an intuitive web interface. You simply go to a specific web address, log in, and you are greeted with a host of options to set it up. There are some samples of the interface at the IPCop site. From this interface you can configure openings to your PC for gaming or file sharing, logging of security events, set up Snort for added security, monitor traffic and hardware statistics, and a horde of other settings.

Security updates are as simple as downloading a small file, then using the IPCop web interface to install the update. After this, you may have to reboot the machine. Backing up your configuration is just as simple. You can choose to save the configuration to a floppy stored in the IPCop computer itself, or downloading a backup to your PC.

This could also be a good option for people who are looking into learning Linux administration. Since it is so easy to install on an old PC, darn near anyone could do it. Once installed, configure SSH access, log in via SSH and start learning with any number of information sites on the internet. Since it is open source, everything is available for you to examine and learn from.

I’ve been using IPCop for years to take care of my home network. It is one of those things that works so well that you forget it is even there. It just works. IPCop is, IMHO, one of those gems that is produced by an enthusiastic and professional open source community.

Google’s latest offering, Google Gears, is making quite the buzz, and deservedly so. Much of the talk is centered around the technology itself. Google Gears is an open sourced framework for creating off-line web applications. Basically, it is a plug-in to web browsers which will allow the sharing and storing of local and remote data. You could create a text document in your web browser, and it will save on your computer and on the internet, at Google Docs for example. Now, you may be saying “big deal”, well it is a big deal. Before this, if you were to create a document at Google Docs and have your internet connection die before you saved your data, you could lose your data. With Google Gears, your document can be stored locally and be shared automatically with Google Docs.

Google Gears manages to offer this feature by a combination of javascript, a local database, and other technology. What you create in the browser can be stored automatically in the database. Now, the example of Google Docs isn’t implemented yet, it was only an example. However, you get the idea of what the technology offers. Since it is open source, we can expect plenty of people to start developing for it.

You may still be saying “big deal!”. Now comes the area that Google is downplaying. Since so many people that have bought and use Microsoft’s cash cow only use the more basic features, they may finally figure out that they don’t need to pay hundreds of dollars for something that they can get for free. Not only is it free, it has the intrinsic ability to provide a local copy of your files and one available over the internet from anywhere in the world. This ability to have an automatic back-up of your files available from anywhere in the world with internet access can’t be stressed enough. If people finally figure this out and start making the switch, we may see a dramatic drop in the price of Microsoft Office.

Google Gears is available for Firefox 1.5+ and IE6+. It is still and early beta, and doesn’t offer too many uses yet. We will see if the web responds by taking this technology and running with it.

Source: ZDNet Blog

Mozilla is funding Democracy Player to the tune of $100,000. This is a nice boost for the open source streaming media player.

Democracy Player, soon to be “Miro”, is a media player with many uses. It plays many file types, allows you to subscribe to an play video blog and podcasts, supports downloading and storing videos from YouTube and similar sources, supports Hi-Def in full screen, and doubles as a BitTorrent application. You can, of course, organize your media into your own library. All this in an open source program, from a non-profit organization.

Democracy Player already uses some Mozilla technology under the hood, but also has a similar mission as Mozilla. Democracy Player is intended “to promotes choice and innovation on the Internet.”

Source: Ars Technica