CyberNet

Microsoft Office 2008 SP1 Download

Ryan — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:41:02 +0000

Mac only
Interestingly enough Microsoft has released Office 2008 Service Pack 1 today for Macs. What’s interesting about that? Well, it is one of the fastest turnarounds for a Service Pack that I’ve ever seen. The suite of applications was just released back in January 2008, and here we are four months later with a Service Pack. Office 2007 for Windows didn’t see it’s first Service Pack for nearly a year after the consumer launch.

The press release issued by Microsoft said that the “velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what [they] saw after the launch of Office 2004.” To help celebrate they decided to give us a glimpse of what the future holds for the next version of Mac Office. Drumroll please… VBA support! That’s right, but you’ll likely be waiting a few years before we see a new Mac Office pop out of the Microsoft bat cave.

What’s really interesting is the timing of the VBA announcement. It was just last week that OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta was released with some early stages of VBA support, and it’s almost as if Microsoft was afraid that users might start looking to OpenOffice.org to pick up where Microsoft left off. That might not be the case, but that was the first thing that popped into my mind.

At any rate Office 2008 SP1 is out, and ready for you to download. The list of features and improvements can be found below, but the 180MB download doesn’t bring anything too earth shattering.

Get Office 2008 SP1 for Mac (180MB)

Microsoft Office Excel

(more…)

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Dell Cuts XPS Desktops to Boost Alienware Sales

Ashley — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:32:29 +0000

Bad news for gamers who relied on Dell’s XPS line of computers to power their favorite games. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dell will soon start the process of phasing out its XPS line of desktop game machines. The reason? Well, if you’ll recall, back in March of 2006, Dell acquired Alienware known for their high-end gaming systems. The Wall Street Journal says that Dell’s XPS computers were eating into the sales of Alienware computers, thus they had to do something about it.

At this point there has been no word on what will happen to the XPS line of laptops, but we imagine they’ll be sticking around for a while. Serious gamers usually go for the desktop computers over the laptops, so the XPS laptops really aren’t a threat to Alienware. One commenter over at Engadget made a good point saying that they believed Alienware should focus on the performance desktops while Dell should focus on the performance laptops which would work out nicely.

Dell hopes that this move will reinvigorate Alienware’s line of gaming machines, but will also help them in the bigger scheme of things. Right now they’re fallen behind HP in sales and they are also “struggling to achieve profits in consumer PCs.” Alienware is expected to launch some redesigned systems as a result of Dells move to drop their line of XPS computers.

To think, it wasn’t that long ago that Dell busted out the liquid cooled PC with their XPS 720 H2C computer. Now its already on its way out the door. On the bright side, maybe we’ll see Dell putting the XPS desktops on clearance and people will be able to get themselves a great deal on a computer?

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Flock 1.2 Beta Includes Digg Integration

Ryan — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:07:01 +0000

Win; Mac; Linux
Flock 1.2 Beta is now available, and as hard as it is to believe this version is even more social. This Beta makes it possible to keep up with your friends’ activity on Digg or Pownce, and get AOL email notifications instantly as new messages come crawling in.

Below are two screenshots of what the Digg integration looks like. On the left is what appears in My World, which is your personalized homepage. Here you’ll see your friends’ activities from all of the social networks including Digg. Pictured on the right is the People sidebar, and it shows stories that were recently submitted and Dugg by your friends. There’s also a handy little search box at the bottom that makes it easy to search through your Digg friends.

Curious what services Flock supports? The list continues to grow at a steady pace, and right now it includes:

People: Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Twitter, and YouTube
Media Sharing: Photobucket, Picasa, Piczo, Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, and Typepad WordPress.com, and Xanga
Online Favorites: Del.icio.us and Magnolia
Webmail: AOL Mail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail.

Flock is truly becoming a shining point of Web 2.0 services, and to help attract new users the Flock team has also started to assemble how-to videos on using Flock 1.2. Here are the six that they have put together thus far:

Once Flock gets updated with Firefox 3 I think it will become an even better browser. Hopefully that will help out on the performance side a bit, because even in Flock 1.2 I still see it eating up too much of my precious memory.

Flock 1.2 Beta

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HBO Arrives on iTunes with Higher Prices

Ashley — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:58:48 +0000

Rumor had it that HBO shows would be appearing at the iTunes store soon. This was yesterday and now today, sure enough, HBO has made it’s grand entrance. The official Press Release from Apple explains that programs like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood, and Rome, Flight of the Conchords and The Wire. The interesting part about this whole thing is that Apple must have decided to ease up on their price restrictions because different HBO shows cost different prices.

Typically shows are priced at $1.99 per episode, but certain HBO shows are priced at $2.99 per episode.

The Sopranos - $2.99
Deadwood - $2.99
Rome - $2.99
The Wire - $1.99
Sex and The City - $1.99
Flight of the Conchords - $1.99

Now it leaves us wondering what other HBO shows will be added to the list and if other television networks will be interested in putting their shows on iTunes knowing they may have some flexibility in the pricing?

Thanks for the tip Omar!

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Google Reader Updated for iPhone

Ryan — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:31:00 +0000

Google has always been pretty good about catering to iPhone users, and the Reader team is kicking it up a notch with a new AJAXy interface (pictured to the right). Other good news is that it’s not only supposed to work with the iPhone, but any mobile device that has an advanced browser. You can even use it in your desktop browser if you feel so inclined (ex. works in Firefox).

To use the new version you need to point your browser specifically to google.com/reader/i/, because they’re not going to automatically redirect you since it’s still in Beta (of course). I’ve been using the new interface this morning and I have to say that it’s a nice improvement over the previous version. The ability to quickly star an item is very much welcomed, and when you tap on an item it expands in place.

The whole Google Reader experience on the iPhone now feels much more like it does on the desktop. I’ve noticed that it will take a few extra taps/clicks to do some of the same things that you could on the Google Reader mobile interface, but I think it’s worth it in the long run. The only bad thing that I have to say about the new service is that the initial load time is much longer than it was.

I’m guessing this step was taken to help compete with Newsgator, who has had an AJAX-driven iPhone feed reader for nearly a year. Newsgator also has the benefit of full synchronization with their desktop feed readers, which are freely available for both Windows and Mac.

Gotta love the (free) things that competition brings.

[via jkOnTheRun]

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A Look at Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope

Ashley — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:20:48 +0000

A lot of hype has surrounded Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope right from the start, especially after we learned that it made Robert Scoble cry. Back in February he took a trip to Microsoft and saw it in action. He was under embargo and couldn’t explain what it was that he saw, but he did say that it was life changing and it was something that had an emotional impact on him. A couple of weeks later when we learned that the WorldWide Telescope was in fact what Scoble was referring to, the pressure was on for Microsoft to deliver. Late last night they did deliver and the WorldWide Telescope has been released into it’s “Spring Beta” and is available for download here.

My very first impression when I started it after installing it was that in some ways, the interface reminds me of Windows Media Player with the drop-down menus at the top. The next thing I noticed was just how complex it is, in a good way. There is so much information available, it’s unbelievable and there are many, many features.

The best way to get a hang of everything is to just start exploring. Click on the different drop-down menus to see what kinds of things you can click on and just have fun. I haven’t spent more than 20 minutes playing around with everything, but in that time I saw a lot of really amazing images. You can choose which telescopes you’d like to look through, and you can even switch between different light wavelengths. There are also guided tours available, complete with narration.

In the official press release from Microsoft, they quote Bill Gates saying:

“The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe.

By combining terabytes of incredible imagery and data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all that information, the WorldWide Telescope opens the door to new ways to see and experience the wonders of space. Our hope is that it will inspire young people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest to better understand the universe.”

I don’t know about you, but I would have loved to have tools like the WorldWide Telescope and Google Sky available while I was in school to learn about the universe. For both kids and adults alike, these tools provide us with a great opportunity to see what’s out there.

Check out Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope… (just note that the download is Windows only)

Thanks for the tip Change and Silviu!

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Daily Downloads: XBMC, Flock, and More

Ryan — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:50:50 +0000

Welcome to Daily Downloads brought to you by CyberNet! Each weekday we bring you software updates for widely used programs, and it’s safe to assume that all the software we list is freeware (we’ll try to note the paid-only programs).

As you browse the Internet during the day, feel free to post the software updates you come across in the comments below so that we can include them the following day!

–Stable Releases–

The software listed here have all been officially released by the developers.

BurnAware 1.3 [Homepage] [Mirror] [Review]
Operating System: Windows only
Type of Application: CD/DVD/Blu-ray burner
Changes: Bug fixes
Glary Utilities 2.5.2 [Homepage] [Mirror] [Review]
Operating System: Windows only
Type of Application: Computer cleanup
Changes: N/A
Opera Mini 4.1 [Homepage] [Changelog] [Review]
Operating System: Mobile devices
Type of Application: Mobile web browser
Changes: 50% faster, automatically suggest URL completions, save websites for offline viewing, and more.

–Pre-Releases (Alpha, Beta, etc…)–

The software listed here are pre-releases that may not be ready for everyday usage.

Flock 1.2 [Homepage] [Changelog] [Mirror] [Review]
Operating System: Windows; Mac; Linux
Release: Beta
Type of Application: Social web browser
Changes: Digg, Pownce, and AOL Mail features
UltraVNC 1.0.4 [Homepage] [Changelog] [Mirror]
Operating System: Windows only
Release: Release Candidate 16
Type of Application: Screen sharing
Changes: Bug fixes
XBMC 0.5 [Homepage] [Changelog]
Operating System: Mac only
Release: Beta 2
Type of Application: Media center
Changes: Bug fixes

–Release Calendar–

May 13 - Fedora 9
Late May - Firefox 3 RC1 [Review] ^NEW
June - iPhone 2.0 Software [Review]
June - Firefox 3.0 [Review]
June 12 - Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 1
June 19 - openSUSE 11.0
Mid 2008 - Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 [Review]
September 2 - OpenOffice.org 3.0 [Review]
October 30 - Ubuntu 8.10
2009 - Windows Mobile 7 [Review]
2009 - Paint.NET 4.00 [Review]
2010 - Windows 7 [Review]

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CyberNotes: Get the Best eBay Deals

Ryan — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:00:10 +0000

Time Saving Tuesday

I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten some really tremendous deals on eBay before. The general consensus that I’ve found when talking with people, however, is that they normally make impulse purchases before they take the time to see if they are getting a real bargain. Today we’re going to walk you through a 5 step process that can save you a lot of money in the end.

Ashley and myself ran an eBay business for over a year, and it was quite an interesting experience. From it we found ourselves knowing more about eBay than we ever wanted to, and now our friends always poke and prod us for tips on how they can get the most out of the online marketplace.

1. Search eBay

The first thing that you’ll obviously want to do is search eBay to see what kind of prices they have. Don’t get sucked into the low-priced auctions… no, you’re not going to get a $1,500 laptop for $25. Many people wait until the last minute to bid (a.k.a. sniping), and we’re going to show you the best way to do that as well.

What may prove to be helpful is to checkout the completed listings. On the search page you’ll notice the “Completed listings only” checkbox which will show only those listings that have already ended. If the item you’re looking for is rather common then there should be a fair amount of listings that have already completed, and with those you should be able to get a rough idea of what future listings will realistically sell for.

When sifting through the completed listings be sure to also watch for people who are constantly relisting the same item… especially if it never sells. That’s normally an indication that they really want to get rid of it or they have a bunch that they need to unload. In situations like those you might be able to bargain with them even if all you may get is the shipping fee waived.

Believe it or not eBay actually has their own Deal Finder search engine. When you perform a search on there it will only show items that have zero bids, less than 4 hours left, no reserve price, and free/fixed price shipping. So it is actually different than the regular eBay search engine, and can be beneficial for finding those gems that no one else has come across.

2. Search for Misspellings

Ahhh, we’ve all been criticized at one point or another for not proofreading the things that we write. Well, here’s where you can really benefit from the mistakes that others make. Maybe it’s poor typing skills, a genuine mistake, or maybe they are just in a rush to get a listing done. Whatever it is there are quite a few people out there who like to misspell words in their listings.

(more…)

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New MacBook Pro’s Today? Um, no.

Ryan — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:58:36 +0000

This morning I woke up and saw that we had received a tip from someone pointing to this article by the Inquirer. It caught my attention because it was talking about a new set of upgrades to Apple’s MacBook Pro line of computers. As the day went on we received a few more tips on this, and a few of them linked to some gadget websites who had also written about it. But when I went to visit some of the articles they pretty much disappeared into a black hole.

This was all pretty confusing to me, and maybe you’ll understand why after reading this snippet from the Inquirer:

Apple has quietly updated its Macbook Pro laptop range while no-one was looking. There wasn’t even a press release.

The new versions which come in five fruity flavours ranging from a 15 incher with a 2.4Ghz Intel dual core Penryn processor, up to a 17-incher with 2.6GHz under the bonnet.

All come with the usual Apple bells, whistles, software and gorgeousness, but the most interesting new addition comes in the form of Multitouch, previously only seen on the bank-balance-battering Macbook Air.

My initial instinct was to check the date on the article, but it was indeed written today. As you might recall this aforementioned MacBook Pro upgrade actually came back in February 2008… nearly 3-months ago. Hmmm, and they said that there was no press release? Guess they must have glanced over it.

CrunchGear and Gizmodo wrote about the story, and instead of providing an update they both just yanked the articles all together possibly hoping that no one saw them. Although Gizmodo has managed to scrape together 12 Diggs thus far on their non-existent article. Neither of their articles linked to any source, but I think it’s safe to assume that it all of this came from the Inquirer’s write-up.

We’re all human and make mistakes, but I guess I’m just in awe that this news has slipped by so many gadget-loving geeks. I wasn’t originally going to cover this story, but I wanted to keep everyone informed in the event that you saw these articles in your feed reader. And since the gadget sites didn’t provide an update you might assume that these are the new models you’ve been waiting for.

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Google’s Friend Connect Simplifies Being Social on the Web

Ashley — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:31:36 +0000

At the center of Google’s efforts to help sites become more social is Google Friend Connect. It’s brand new from Google and will help just about any site become social. A preview release will be available tonight at www.google.com/friendconnect. Speaking to TechCrunch, David Glazer, an engineer at Google explains that the purpose of Friend Connect is to “give users a shortcut to connections they’ve built-up somewhere else.” As Google points out in their official press release, this helps smaller sites “grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.”

One of the biggest hassles we face as the Internet becomes more social is creating new profiles and lists of friends everywhere we go. Friend Connect would help alleviate that hassle and in the process, help out the smaller sites that want to add social features. For site owners, Google hopes to help them increase their traffic, increase engagement, and do all of this with less work. Adding social elements to any site can be a costly process involving planning and programming, so this would really save site owners time and money.

Ultimately what Friend Connect will allow people to do is sign-in under an account of their choice whether it is Facebook, Google Talk, Orkut, hi5, or Plaxo (more to come in the future) and then any friends that they have listed under their account who also happen to be a member of a “smaller site” they’re on will be made available for interaction. For example, say that you already have a Facebook account. If you came across a site, maybe a musician’s site like Ingrid Michaelson who is taking advantage of Friend Connect, you could sign-in to Ingrid’s social service (it involves iLike) using your Facebook account. If any of your friends on Facebook also happen to be involved on Ingrid’s site, you would be able to interact with them.

I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see this really take-off because it would allow for easier interaction with others on sites across the web. Going back to Google Engineer David Glazer, he wraps all of this up really well by saying:

“Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

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Open Office 2007 Documents in OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta

Ryan — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:04:36 +0000

There has been a lot of buzz in the last week regarding OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta. Some people are excited with the new features that it brings to the table, while others are a little disappointed that the interface didn’t get much of a facelift. No matter which way you look at it, this will be a huge release since milestones like this only occur once every three years for OpenOffice.org.

Of all the new things OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta there are two features that people really seem to be focusing on. The first is the native Mac OS X support which is something that has been highly anticipated. I haven’t really heard much complaining about this.

The other highly sought after feature is compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007’s new XML document formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). This is obviously something that could greatly ease the Office 2007 to OpenOffice.org transition for users… assuming it works well. Here’s what PC World had to say about it:

As an experiment, I saved a simple Word 2003 document in Word 2007 format. Office 2007 opened it just fine, but OpenOffice.org Writer only got as far as the first two lines of the text; instead of skipping the next line, the rest was truncated. An Excel 2007 template fared no better. OpenOffice.org Calc preserved labels, numbers, and formulae; macros, embedded graphics, and page layout options disappeared. A plain .xlsx file created with the same template yielded identical results.

Ars Technica also noticed that the importing generally worked, but the documents would need a little tender love and care in the formatting department. As for my experience with OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta converting Office 2007 documents I would say that it was decent, but definitely needs some fine tuning. Here are the results from my tests, along with how much time it would likely take to correct any issues:

Note: All files used for these tests are my own files that I had created using Office 2007 at some point over the last year. So these are real-world examples of what people might go through.

Test: Three different Word (.docx) files that were mostly just paragraphs and bullets
Result: Some extra line breaks seemed to appear randomly.
Estimated time to fix: 1 minute
Test: One Word (.docx) file that was a resume (extensive use of tables)
Result: Nearly perfect… only one incorrect indentation.
Estimated time to fix: Few seconds
Test: One Word (.docx) file that was an 84-page report, and included a dynamic table of contents. There were also a lot of images placed throughout the document.
Result: Many formatting issues, and several blank pages were inserted throughout the document causing the table of contents to be significantly thrown off. Cover page was completely mutilated, and several portions of the document would be unreadable if left unfixed.
Estimated time to fix: Hours
Test: One Excel (.xlsx) file that was a basic spreadsheet with columns and rows being summed.
Result: Everything imported fine except the custom background color, and once I changed the background color it looked like it should.
Estimated time to fix: Few seconds
Test: One PowerPoint (.pptx) file that was 25 slides long, and included clipart.
Result: Most of the formatting and clipart were properly preserved during the import process, but my presentation theme was missing. This was easily remedied by choosing an included OpenOffice.org slide theme. However, all custom shapes and animations were absent which could take a lot of time to add.
Estimated time to fix: 1 hour

So those were the tests that I performed to see how well the Office 2007 import process worked in OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta, and generally it wasn’t too bad. As it stands right now you’ll likely need to adjust the formatting of any documents that you import, which could really take a lot of time depending on the amount of advanced formatting options that you’ve used. I believe PowerPoint files would be the biggest obstacle for this reason.

I’m guessing that the OpenOffice.org team will polish this feature up before the final version of the suite is released, but it’s probably difficult for them to account for all of the vastly different layouts that people will be trying to import. This feature will end up being useful when opening Office 2007 files that other people are sending to you, but even with some tweaks by the development team it will probably be more trouble than it’s worth. We’ll have to hold out until the final release of the suite before we make that judgement call though.

Thanks to Kiltboy for the tip!

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RIM Boldly Announces the New BlackBerry 9000

Ashley — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:46:47 +0000

The highly anticipated new BlackBerry has been Boldly announced and is said to be available this Summer exclusively from AT&T in the U.S. with other carrier versions coming soon. It’s called the BlackBerry Bold (a.k.a. BlackBerry 9000) and it sure is slick. The Mobile Phone/Smartphone market is a hot place to be right now and the competition is fierce! The arrival of this new BlackBerry Bold makes it even more competitive with a handful of enticing new features which include:

Improved display with better screen resolution - it’s twice the resolution of the Curve model and brings it to the same resolution offered on the iPhone (480×320)
Glossy metallic look
GPS is “enhanced and assisted”
Exchangeable back leather plates in different colors will be offered
Increase in internal memory
Price is estimated to be between $300 and $400
802.11a/b/g wireless capability

In some ways it is similar to the Curve (e.g., camera capable of capturing video) and previous BlackBerry models (with the QWERTY kebyoard and trackball), but RIM managed to make the BlackBerry Bold jam-packed with new features that consumers are sure to love.

The new website for the BlackBerry Bold is now live at www.blackberrybold.com where you see 360 degree views and checkout all of its features…

Competition in the Mobile Market…

It’s interesting to see how competition is changing and affecting the mobile market. In March Apple announced their $100 million iFund to support the development of the iPhone and iPod Touch Applications and now RIM is expected to announce a $150 million fund to invest in companies that are creating software for their devices. Had Apple not offered such an option, would RIM have made this move?

And speaking of competition, it looks like Sprint may be having a hard time with customers leaving to checkout what their competitors have to offer. During the first quarter of 2008, they saw 1.09 million subscribers walk away and now they are left with 52.8 million remaining subscribers. At this point they say they are “re-working” their strategy and they’re also hoping that the Samsung Instinct (an iPhone Competitor which hasn’t hit the stores yet) will help out their business.

Like we said earlier, the competition is fierce right now in the mobile market and it’ll probably only continue…

Sources: AP , Engadget, Gizmodo

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Firefox 3 Nearing Completion

Ryan — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:25:04 +0000

Development on the Firefox 3 browser is finally starting to wrap up. It’s been a year and a half since Firefox 2 was released to the public, and by the end of May Firefox 3 will have entered the Release Candidate stages. This is all preparation for what looks to be a June 2008 launch of the long awaited Firefox 3 browser.

Mozilla has been fortunate enough to have over 1.2 million users test out pre-release versions of Firefox 3. With a test base that large it’s expected that Mozilla will deliver a top-notch browser, and I strongly believe that they are doing just that. I’ve been running nightly builds of Firefox 3 since before it hit the Alpha stage, and the progress I’ve seen is rather remarkable.

There are quite a few notable features in this release, but the thing that really takes the cake are the performance enhancements. As I’ve already shown the memory usage of Firefox 3 is much better than it was with Firefox 2, and even beats out most of the mainstream browsers. It’s nice to see that Mozilla didn’t compromise performance for the sake of adding spiffy new features.

It’s likely that there will be other Release Candidates available before the final version is pushed out the door, which is something Mozilla wanted to make clear:

If no new showstopper issues are found in RC1 it will become Firefox 3 final. If we find any critical issues we will continue to release new Release Candidates until we are ready for final ship.

All of this also means that there won’t be many changes between what you see now and what’s available in the final version. If you hate the new theme(s) or were expecting new features… sorry, at this point everything is pretty much carved in stone. Bug fixes are pretty much the only changes permitted from here on out.

Thanks to Change for the tip!

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YouTube Mistakenly Blocked on Windows Live Messenger

Ashley — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:57:07 +0000

In what turned out to be a simple coincidence, over the weekend, Windows Live Messenger users reported that they were unable to send YouTube links to their contacts. The screenshot below from I Started Something shows that when a user tried to send any type of link with “youtube.com” in it, the message failed to be delivered. We say this in the past tense because it has been fixed, but as you can imagine, people started complaining and wondering if Microsoft was intentionally doing this because Google is one of their biggest competitors, and YouTube is owned by Google.

Eventually Microsoft responded about the issue yesterday and explained why it had happened because there were all kinds of off-the-wall explanations that people outside of Microsoft came up with. One of the major themes of explanations that people came up with was that Microsoft was trying to undermine Google. Now wouldn’t that be somethin’ if Microsoft actually tried to do that! The explanation from Microsoft actually sounds legitimate which leaves us to believe that it was simply a coincidence that YouTube happened to be a domain that Windows Live Messenger was blocking.

About the explanation…

In a nutshell, Microsoft explained that what happened was Messenger was incorrectly blocking some legitimate IP addresses. They have a blocking system in place to help prevent harmful things like malware from being sent on to Messenger users, and this process is managed by a 3rd party, one of their partners. In determining whether a URL is harmful, they look at factors like how many times a URL is sent, or how many accounts the URL is sent from. If the automatic system from their 3rd party determines that a URL is harmful, then they can block either a URL or an entire domain — in this case, YouTube.

It makes sense, but Microsoft would be wise to go back to their 3rd party and work on creating a more comprehensive white-list of domains that shouldn’t ever be blocked, e.g., YouTube.

Thanks for the tip Yanksy!

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Daily Downloads: Transmission, Weather Watcher, TagScanner, and More

Ryan — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:04:48 +0000

As you browse the Internet during the day, feel free to post the software updates you come across in the comments below so that we can include them the following day!

–Stable Releases–

The software listed here have all been officially released by the developers.

Notepad++ 4.9.2 [Homepage] [Changelog] [Mirror] [Review]
Operating System: Windows only
Type of Application: Text editor
Changes: Bug fixes, and a new “save a copy as” feature
Parallels 3.0.5600 [Homepage] [Changelog]
Operating System: Mac only
Cost: $79.99
Type of Application: Virtualization
Changes: Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1 support, and other bug fixes
TagScanner 5.0.521 [Homepage] [Changelog] [Mirror] [Review]
Operating System: Windows only
Type of Application: Bulk edit music tags
Changes: Bug fixes and improvements
Transmission 1.20 [Homepage] [Changelog]
Operating System: Mac; Linux
Type of Application: BitTorrent client
Changes: Faster UPnP mapping, ability to reset global statistics, and bug fixes

–Pre-Releases (Alpha, Beta, etc…)–

The software listed here are pre-releases that may not be ready for everyday usage.

Foobar2000 0.9.5.3 [Homepage] [Changelog] [Mirror]
Operating System: Windows only
Release: Beta 1
Type of Application: Media player
Changes: Startup notification when some of loaded components are known not to cooperate correctly with this version of foobar2000, bug fixes, and more
MediaMonkey 3.0.3.1170 [Homepage] [Changelog] [Mirror] [Review]
Operating System: Windows only
Release: Release Candidate 6
Type of Application: Media manager
Changes: Bug fixes
Opera 9.5.9981 [Homepage] [Changelog] [Review]
Operating System: Windows; Mac; Linux
Release: Beta
Type of Application: Web browser
Changes: Uses PGO to speed up JavaScript, and bug fixes
Weather Watcher Live 6.0 [Homepage] [Changelog] [Review]
Operating System: Windows only
Release: Beta
Type of Application: Weather monitor
Changes: Bug fixes

–Release Calendar–

May 13 - Fedora 9
June - iPhone 2.0 Software [Review]
June - Firefox 3.0 [Review]
June 12 - Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 1
June 19 - openSUSE 11.0
Mid 2008 - Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 [Review]
September 2 - OpenOffice.org 3.0 [Review]
October 30 - Ubuntu 8.10
2009 - Windows Mobile 7 [Review]
2009 - Paint.NET 4.00 [Review]
2010 - Windows 7 [Review]

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CyberNotes: Apple Front Row vs. Windows Media Center

Ashley — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:00:56 +0000

Microsoft/Mac Monday

Today we’re taking a look at Apple’s Front Row vs. Windows Media Center. We’re not really sure if Front Row can be compared to Media Center because right now, they serve different purposes. Front Row is more of an interface for controlling the media already on your computer while Media Center will do that in addition to recording television shows. They’re both media hubs though, so we thought it would be interesting to see how they compared.

Before we dive in, we thought we’d first mention the fact that while we may be using MacBook Pro computers for our everyday use, we do have a PC dedicated to running Vista’s Media Center. It has 3 tuners and enables us to record 3 shows simultaneously, and was one of the best investments we’ve made.

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Helpful Tip: Use a Remote External Drive for Time Machine Backups

Ryan — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:23:28 +0000

Mac only
Ashley and I have been getting acquainted with our new MacBook Pro’s over the last few weeks, and things are going pretty well. I really wanted to get an external hard drive so that I could do Time Machine backups, but I didn’t want to fork out an arm and a leg for one. A few days ago I managed to “come across” a clearanced 300GB external drive at a local store for $27, and I just couldn’t pass up the deal.

Unfortunately they didn’t have another one so that both Ashley and myself could utilize the Time Machine backups, and from what I had heard previously the only way to to wirelessly do backups was with (of course) an Apple Time Capsule. As it turns out you can do backups wirelessly as long as the target hard drive is hooked up to another Mac computer.

The first thing I had to do was pull up Finder and navigate to the external Time Machine hard drive on the remote computer:

I knew that the Time Machine hard drive was mounted and ready once it showed the little “eject” symbol next to its name. Then I jumped over to the Time Machine preferences where I could select the drive I wanted to use to perform the backups. Since the remote drive was mounted I was able to see it in the list, and it had the remote computer’s name in parenthesis after it:

I selected that drive and the backup was off and running. What I ended up doing, however, was connecting the external drive directly to both computers for the initial backup because it can take awhile the first time through. After that, however, the backups are performed hourly and only the changes are synchronized which is much more suitable for a wireless connection. So this actually works out pretty well.

And no, you don’t have to go manually mount the Time Machine drive in order for your backups to run. I thought that you might have to do that, but once you’ve established the remote drive you want to use it will automatically make the connection whenever necessary. Neat, huh?

I’m still not a huge fan of the whole “spacey” interface for browsing your Time Machine backups, but that’s okay because they can still be browsed through Finder.

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Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

Ashley — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:00:10 +0000

Sunday’s Summary

What was going on this week at CyberNet News and Learn Firefox? Here’s your chance to catch-up if you missed something!

Monday: Vista and Leopard Search Features Compared
Tuesday: Hot Corners in Windows
Wednesday: Create Your Own Smart Bookmarks in Firefox 3
Thursday: How to Measure Items on Your Screen
Friday:CyberNotes: The Best Piece of Advice…
Saturday: CyberNotes: View and Share Panoramic Images at Panoye

FlagTab - Color code your Firefox tabs, and easily see which tabs are related.

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