Category: Technology

Remember the fancy keyboard I was on about before Christmas? The optimus, with a button for EVERYTHING? Well, the fancy keyboard, just got a fancy release date too… February 1st of this year 😀 (cheer’s Sean) Good things come in small packages eh?

If you missed my first post, check the link above or see more on the Optimus keyboard…. it looks pretty sweet!

Ooooh, a blog post with a picture in it! Now there’s a change!

Anyway… the Dutch government edged ahead of the Irish government in terms of technology for the new year as they’ve launched DigiiD, their plan to get everyone into the country under the one ID for all public related services (passport, welfare) etc. I’m not exactly up on reading Dutch but if you want to have a go, check out the official website here.

Dell are playing with fire… and hopefully they won’t get burned. Their research reckons that 40% of PC users are in it for gaming… interesting figure. I got a price from Dell just over 12 months ago for a gaming machine at €1800 ex VAT and went off and built myself one for about 30% of the total cost, but thats getting away from it.

They’ve launched their new gaming monster, the XPS 600 Renegade (photo courtesy of Newsgab). It looks savage. It boasts 4… yes, 4 GPUs (graphics processing units) providing three times the resolution of high-def XBOX games.

It looks snazzy, prob gonna cost an arm and a leg if it comes in a brochure to the office although, and again according to Dell, their current XPS600 (not Renegade) is one of the leading machines for PC gamers. It’s nice and colourful tho…. 😉

You might remember posts coming up to the end of 2005 which looked at my debate over a new mobile, the Hewlett Packard HW6515…. well, it got into a fight with the Treo 650. I’m still letting the 6515 win out, but the phone has changed places on my list of priorities for 2006.

Irregardless of that fact, we’ve been talking around the office about the new Treo 700. Palm recently established a Dublin base to concentrate of the development of the Palm OS and new applications for it – now, along comes the brand-spanking-new 700 and its running Windows, the first Palm mobile to do so.

They say that they’re going to continue to release new mobiles with new Palm OSs – so why the change? Are they giving into demand and forsaking what they’ve developed and stood for todate? It’s their phone, their hardware, their technology, their OS – so why now?

It’s on sale from this morning on by the way…. 😉

An interesting discussion was had in work on Friday morning about the developments and customisation of keyboards for computer application, gaming, general PC usage…

On a trawl of the web, this little beauty was turned up. Should be released some time in 2006…..

The keyboard of the future?

You might not know the name of Claria as a corporation or business in the US but for anyone who has ever had problems with adware/spyware, you will surely be familiar with names like ‘PrecisionTime’, ‘Weatherscope’ and any of the Gator products that you “have” to install in order to get your favourite freeware to work….

Anyway, we (we being Event Ireland) share our building with another Irish company, EMG Control Systems, who use a good number of PCs in their line of work, one of which houses a lot of important day-to-day items, one which must also be connected to the ‘net at all times.

So joy would have it this morning when it turned out that the machine was riddled with spyware, actually riddled to the stage where there are files everywhere and anywhere that simply don’t belong, running applications that do no good, causing all kinds of user discomforts.

Queue Microsoft AntiSpyware (still Beta as far as I know) which picks up the same 19/20 spyware changes every time, after it insists that it has cleaned them, removed them, deleted them, and rebooted…. yet they always come back! So it was no surprise to me that I read this only after I had gone through the emergency repair of Windows 2000 as the hard drive would no longer boot due to certain spyware activity…

Less than a week after published reports of acquisition talks between Microsoft Corp. and the Redwood City, Calif.-based distributor of the controversial Gator ad-serving software, security researchers have discovered that Microsoft has quietly downgraded its Claria detections.

Anti-spyware activist Eric L. Howes, who serves as a consultant to Sunbelt Software, discovered the default changes during a recent test that included four Claria applications: Dashbar, Gator, PrecisionTime and Weatherscope.

So Microsoft fancies itself buying out a company who knowingly serves up ads and “free” ad-based software which quietly gathers statistics on all your goings on, and then plays down the spyware threat in their own software, that was originally designed to wipe out the activity of the company that they’re buying….?

Oh please….

I consider 3.5″ Floppy Drives old technology. The disks for them are majorly small in capacity, they are suspect irrepairable damage if you leave them in the drive too long, or accidentally snap the top off them, or leave them sitting on your speakers…..

They have been replaced over the years by flash drives, usb memory sticks, portable hard drives, firewire drives – hell, even your iPod and other MP3 players can store whatever data you need.

I’ve been building computers for myself and friends over the past 2 years and never once added a floppy drive to a machine. I order laptops for people regularly, never one adding a floppy drive. I’ve got a drive installed on a machine at home for the past 4 years and can proudly say that its never been used, and never will.

So I find myself in disgust yesterday that I was forced into buying a portable floppy drive in order to get a license for an application. Sure, you pay loads of money to get the cds, and you pay out more money to get the support. But when you want to move the application to a new machine, you have to send the license to floppy disk using a special license-moving facility, and the disk acts as a key to install your new application.

Of course when your new machine doesn’t have a floppy drive, your fancy expensive application has nowhere to go and nowhere around it.

Considering the last company I worked for has drawers and drawers and drawers of floppy disks archiving their material I guess it can’t be written off just yet!

Apple and TiVo are teaming up in the US!

Well…. sort of.

TiVo Inc. is expanding its video recording service so users will be able to transfer recorded TV shows onto Apple Computer’s iPods, according to an Associated Press report. By adding support for the MPEG-4 video format, TiVo hopes to capitalise on the immense popularity of Apple iPods.

TiVo automatically finds and digitally records up to 300 hours of programming you want—your favorite show, every Coppola movie, home improvement programs, Dora cartoons, whatever you choose—all while you’re out living life. Plus, pause, rewind and slo-mo live TV.

Two downsides to this?

No TiVo in Ireland…. and no video iPod for Ken! Though I’m working on the latter…

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You’ll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors.

We believe that web analytics should be simple and sophisticated at the same time. We’ve designed Google Analytics to have enterprise level capabilities and yet still be accessible to anyone who wants to improve their marketing and site design. Google Analytics delivers all the features you’d expect from a high-end web analytics offering, and provides timesaving AdWords integration features.

If you have an AdWords account, you can use Google Analytics directly from the AdWords interface. Google Analytics is the only product that can automatically provide AdWords ROI metrics, without you having to import cost data or add tracking information to keywords. Of course, Google Analytics tracks all of your non-AdWords initiatives as well.

I’ve just signed up for a dedicated AdWords account for my blog to begin testing both features but from running through the interface it seems like Google have yet again come up with another winner. The installation of the tracker is simple – a little copy and pasting of a few lines of JavaScript into your head tags and away you go.

Best feature? It doesn’t cost you a penny…. Check Out Google Analytics

A new company called Revver is trying to change the fact that most online videos (those submitted by the lightsabre wielding fans of this world, amongst others) don’t make money by attaching advertising to the videos and giving the creators a cut of the profits.

The technology, which also tracks the content as it is shared across the Web, is not limited to amateurs. Major media companies, which are just beginning to experiment with offering TV shows and movies online, are also looking for ways to distribute across peer-to-peer networks while avoiding piracy.

Revver is the brainchild of Ian Clarke, the man behind the Freenet file-sharing network; Steven Starr, a former Hollywood agent and co-creator of MTV’s “The State;” and Oliver Luckett, who recently spearheaded the Norman Lear “Declare Yourself” voter registration campaign.

It is also backed by the same venture capital company that bankrolled Internet phone provider Skype Technologies SA, which eBay recently acquired for $2.6 billion. (These guys are sewing up…!)

People wanting to use Revver upload their videos for free to the company’s Web servers. Revver than attaches a static ad to the end of the video.

It also attaches a “RevTag,” which keeps track of how often the video is viewed no matter where it ends up. People can leave their video on the Revver site, post it on their own Web site, e-mail it to friends and even download it to a portable device.

Revver says it will split the ad revenue evenly with content creators.

Should seem some interesting times ahead. This article is available in full through Yahoo news and is available by clicking here.