Category: Tech Miscellaneous

Interesting Links: 6.08.07

Haven’t had all that much time this past week to blog (considering I was in Atlanta for most of it). I leave for Mexico on Monday, and I have a busy weekend full of things I should have been doing for the past month so I doubt I’ll be able to blog before I leave.

Music site Last.fm bought by CBS

Music site Last.fm bought by CBS

Music site Last.fm bought by CBS Last.fm logo Last.fm connects users who share the same music tastes Social music site Last.fm has been bought by US media giant CBS Corporation for $280m (£140m), the largest-ever UK Web 2.0 acquisition.

This REALLY sucks. I think we all know that CBS will effectively destroy Last.fm. There is very little doubt that Last.fm won’t make enough money for CBS in its current form and therefore will undergo major changes that will promptly destroy the thriving community that has flourished there.
What a sad day. I guess it’s time to start looking for a new company/site similar to Last.fm because it’s only a matter of time before CBS destroys it.
Update: For whatever it’s worth, here is the letter I just sent to several people at CBS:

To Whom It Concerns,
On behalf of the millions of users of Last.FM, we beg you, please do not destroy the website and community we have all come to love. If you make significant changes to the currently thriving community you will see millions of your newly acquired customers/users leave in a mass exodus. This is coming from a long time dedicated Last.fm user, please do not destroy the site we have come to love.
Regards,
Justin

Random Cell Phone Pictures

Here are a few pictures (with brief descriptions) taken with my cell phone. (all but the last one with my LG VX 8600)
Rescued Baby Mice
Caption: these are the 3 baby mice I rescued at the office which promptly died while under the care of a veterinarian anyways…Well I tried
3 Dogs and a Bed
Caption: 3 dogs and a baby…err a bed. We puppy sat two cute black labs for a weekend and they got along pretty well with Chance, can’t you tell? 😛
Sunset 5.24.07
Caption: sunset this evening over at Webster Park. I thought it looked pretty nice, and I wanted to test out the camera on my Dash (geek confession).
Desktop and Laptop
Caption: I was sitting here the other night and it struck me… my laptop and my dual screens (on my desktop) kinda almost blended together in one large continuous wallpaper…so here is an image of this. Yes, insert geek here.

Death By Lawyer: 10 Cool Sites We Miss

Death By Lawyer: 10 Cool Sites We Miss

At the beginning, everyone thought everything on the Internet is going to be free, forever. Yeah, right. Right now, the net is being constantly monitored, people are getting arrested for even thinking about piracy, DRM is preventing us from sharing stuff with friends, and web sites and services are getting closed down on a daily basis.

Great review of some classic web sites. I know I remember the “good ol’ days” of Napster. I got into Napster literally when it took off so I watched that entire mess progress.

Adobe CS3 May Disable your Firewall

Hide your firewalls! Adobe’s CS3 may try to disable them:

If you are using the OS X firewall, and you’ve recently installed Creative Suite 3, you should probably be checking your firewall right about now. That’s because the Adobe Version Cue CS3 installer will shut off your firewall. More specifically, during the installation for Version Cue, the installer has to turn off the firewall in order to set up some TCP ports. These ports need to be open for communication to and from the Version Cue server, and the firewall would otherwise prevent the installer from tinkering with them. The problem occurs once Version Cue setup is done. Rather than turn the firewall back on at the end, the Version Cue installer inexplicably leaves it turned off, opening your Mac up to all sorts of nastiness. There’s no word on if it’s a bug or just a curious omission, but if you buy any of the affected versions of CS3 in the next few months, it would be a good idea to check your firewall after installation.

Wow, this is remarkably stupid on Adobe’s part. Sure, I understand having to temporarily disable the firewall during the setup/installation, but to leave the firewall turned off is just stupid and borderline negligent. That would be like a person installing a new front door which requires him to temporarily take apart the lock on the door, he then finishes installing the new front door, but intentionally does not reassemble the door lock. Adobe better fix this, and ASAP. P.S. this only applies to OS X users in case you didn’t read the above quote.

Picasa Slideshows: Too Little, Too Late

Picasa Slideshows released
Picasa web albums have finally released a embeddable slideshow widget. Nearly a year after Picasa web albums were introduced, they finally added a feature that almost every other online photo gallery in existence has had for years. It is typical of Google lately, too little in terms of features, too late. Anyways, here is an idea I came up with…I uploaded part of my folder that contains album art. The result is a mosaic of sorts that displays my eclectic mix of music tastes.

Halo 3 Beta User Guide

Halo 3 Beta User Guide
The official Halo 3 Beta User Guide contains a lot of interesting information for anyone interested or excited about Halo 3. For those of us too cheap to buy Crackdown ($60) just to get into the beta for a game we’ll then have to buy ($60), I will watch all the videos, read all the reviews, and read all the information I can get about Halo 3.

My Realistic Next Computer

I was bored (who woulda thunk?), and I got to playing around a bit at Newegg. Here is my public wish list for my realistic next computer. Sure, it isn’t the fastest processor available (more on this in a minute) and 2 GB of RAM isn’t all that huge any more (I’d eventually upgrade this to 4 GB). The 8800GTS isn’t the fastest video card currently available, but the 640 MB will definitely help out a great deal. The dual 20x DVD-RW drives aren’t the newest or the greatest high definition burners, but honestly the HD format is still too much of a mess right now to spend a large amount of money on something that could be useless in a year.
Just a quick note on the processor: It’s the Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 @ 2.13 GHz. It is widely held around the internet (after repeated examples time and time again) that this processor can easily reach 3 GHz + speeds with little or no effort. The Intel E660 is clocked at 2.4 GHz for $40 more than the E6420. So I can easily manage to save myself $40 by going with the cheaper processor and then just overclocking it. Not to mention that I still have my Koolance Exos-LT water cooling system…so I likely could push 3.2 or 3.4 out of the processor. 🙂
Overall, the theme here is …still plenty of speed (and for a while into the future), but at an affordable price. Check out the public wish list entitled “Realistic May 2007 Build”. I swear, a new build is like crack to a computer nerd…