Tech News

Your Cable TV is probably one of the most expensive portions of your monthly expenses I know that mine is.  But with these tough economic times we are all tightening up the belt as they say and trying to reduce as many expenses as possible.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to watch movies online legally?  I know you can find a lot of illegal places to download movies, but honestly I have never had the stomach for risking my personal pennies by using torrents to download movies.  Here are some free places to watch movies online.

Everyone is trying to unblock websites like Myspace.com or Facebook.com since so many jobs are blocking those sites. Unfortunately you will find that most jobs and schools will block the latest sites that prevent censorship.  One website has begun to use a new method for unblocking websites by hosting a decentralized network that allows multiple people to host nodes that others can use as proxies from inside of their browsers and then get around the censorship that your school or job might be forcing on you.

The biggest failure yet for Apple has been the introduction and the subsequent horrible release of the mobile me email platform.  For some reason Apple has yet to give this service the full over haul that it desperately needs.  Mobile me promises so much.  They offer you full push email, push calendar and online storage.  This includes a full photo gallery.  The problem is there are so many bugs.  Sure some people have not had any issues with the software but that is a very small percentage.

  Probably one of the most asked questions that I get is how you can find a person by name address or phone number.  You see the website's advertised all over the Internet but you can still use a number of free website's to find a person online. With a little but of effort you can find out the information that you need.  Now you are not always going to find a person on line.  The chances of you successfully doing it are mainly based on how much they are on the grid.  For example finding your young school teacher or coworker is going to be a much easier prospect then finding your 80 year old grandmother.

Bittorent is a revolutionary program and protocol and it has really allowed people to trade files and other content like videos faster then before.  The problem is the entire process can be slow.  This isn't the fault Bittorent.  Sometimes it is caused by your ISP filtering Bittorent protocol.  Unfortunately there isn't much to do if they are making your Bittorent connection slower intentionally.  But the other times it is because the amount of people sharing the file is too low.  This is known as having to little seeders for a torrent.  Fortunately you can find more seeders for torrents pretty easily.

You have been on the Internet for a while using the same username.  Something unique and you spent hours thinking it up.  Then you go on to a website like myspace.com or flickr and you realize that someone else is using it!  Man that is so annoying.  Don't you just wish there was a way for you to see if your username was being used by any one else?  But how?  There are hundreds of social sites out there, it would be impossible to check the usernames on all of them.  Well not any more, a new web tool allows you to check the usernames of hundreds of sites.

No one can argue that Google has been putting allot behind Gmail these days.  With the additions of Google Tasks and also remote calendar and contacts syncing with Apple, you can see Google is attempting to bring an entire suite of productivity apps to the consumer.  One thing that I have always wanted is a way to have my entire GMail inbox on my desktop but not have to use a third party email software program like Outlook.  Well now you can have GMail loaded on your desktop using a GMail Gadget for the Google Desktop Suite.

Google is giving the whole SMS through Gmail thing a second try. The  Gmail Labs feature that lets people send text messages to people's mobile phones was originally taken off of line because Google was not able to figure out some of the issues with the SMS gateway they were using.  "A few weeks back, we ran into a few snags when we first started rolling this out, but starting today you can turn on text messaging for chat," said Leo Dirac, a Google product manager, in a blog post Wednesday.

I know that most people arent really lining up to care about this but Google Chrome has finally come out of beta.  Now why is that really a big deal? Well thats because it seems like Google never takes anything out of beta. So why are they starting now. Also what is Google"s plan for this browser?  I really like potential for spyware protection and security but what else?

Google is continuing to attempt to improve its many productivity applications with features that are commonly found in a desktop equivalent. The most recent improvement in this initiative are the additions of task generation inside of Gmail. The only problem is most users don't know how to turn on the task feature inside of Gmail. I'm not exactly sure why Google didn't enable the feature by default but turning on the task list features is easy and using the new task lists for creating to do items is absolutely wonderful.

Right now huge amount of focus is on how the pending auto industry bailout will affect the automotive industry in the United States. One thing is for sure that the auto industry bailout will have huge implications for the IT industry that supports the big three automakers. This will be one of the first times that the industry will be receiving such large financial to help and along with that amount of public money a number of rather large requirements are being asked of them. These rules for stringent oversight and some actual quantification of results and productivity gains will be some of the key factors driving the increase in IT usage and capital expenditures. In an economy doing as poorly as the one we're currently experiencing this influx of money will greatly help the faltering IT industry.

Well that is supposedly the rumor that Wal-Mart will be offering the iPhone with a storage capacity of 4 GB for $99. If you remember correctly Apple had decided to phase out the 4 GB model when converting a phone over to the new 3G edition of the iPhone. Information doesn't come from a specific company site and comes from a rumor posted to the boy genius report website.

I'm not sure if anyone else feels this way but this year has really taken a lot out of me. I normally don't write many things of a personal nature on either one of my websites because frankly I don't think most people want to hear about it, but I felt like I wanted to get this down since hopefully it would give me a bit of perspective seeing it on the screen. The end of the year is always extremely busy time for me. Probably the only time of the year that truly feels hard to keep up with both work and family life. But this year even with all the stress and strain I have to be grateful that I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that seems to be weathering the storm. But some of my friends haven't been so fortunate.

In a rare turn of events analysts are predicting the possibility the Apple could run out of their hugely popular IPod music player Now normally this could be assumed to be a good thing. Especially if it was caused solely by an extremely high demand for IPods. Unfortunately it is believed that Apple could have chosen to reduce the overall production of the device in case holiday sales didn't meet expectations. Amazon recently announced similar disappointing news about the Amazon Kindle EBook reader which has almost completely sold out.

Everyone is wondering what is actually new in the Windows Vista Service Pack 2 update that is being made available for download to the general public shortly.  Frankly that is the same question that a lot of technology geeks were wondering about the platform as well.  Details have been rather sketch about the latest update to the Windows Vista Operating system.  Being that Vista has been plagued by problems from it's rocky inception people are waiting in earnest for any updates to the operating system that might improve many bugs that are currently found in the OS.