Category: General Web/Tech

  • Manual Trackbacks

    Sometime over the last 2 or 3 days trackback pings stopped working for me. I didn’t notice until today. I think the hexblog may have been the first one to choke the queue, but I’ve spent the evening going back and sending trackbacks manually. There’s a manual pinger at http://www.aylwardfamily.com/content/tbping.asp which is tedious for a couple dozen entries, but it does work.

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  • Google Video Player?

    There’s a zdnet article that seems to indicate that Google may be close to releasing a standalone video player. Currently videos.google.com uses a plugin that’s called google video viewer. The above article gives some interesting information and a good bit of speculation. The speculation is that they will release vlc (video lan client) in a modified form to allow pay-per-view video.

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  • The Google PC and OS

    Rumors have been around for some time about Google launching Google OS, an Operating System to compete with Microsoft Windows. Well…. now the rumors are circulating around the Google PC (with Google OS). The Latimes.com is reporting that Google has been meeting with people from Wal-Mart (and others) to distribute a cheap pc. This would be a Google PC running something other than Windows – Google OS….

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  • On Demand book publishing – iUniverse

    The last entry in this series I looked at lulu.com which offers on-demand book publishing for those looking to publish their own book. The level of entry at lulu.com is nothing, no setup fee and they take fixed cost plus 20% of your profit which all told is not a bad deal.

    This time around I’m looking at iUniverse.com which is backed by Barnes & Noble. They do charge to get started. The cheapest of their packages is $299 for those that aren’t interested in distribution of their work. (Just making it available through the iUniverse.com store.)

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  • Some Sony news

    You had to know we couldn’t make it to the end of the year without another story about the Sony DRM rootkit…. I noticed last night that the sunbelt blog had mention of a proposed settlement in their legal troubles in the wake of the XCP copy protection DRM rootkit MESS. *(Mediamax is not quite forgotten either.)

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  • WordPress 2.0 is now released

    I saw an article at Barrapunto that WordPress 2.0 is now available. I went over to the WordPress site and found indeed it is released. (No mention in their blog yet of it.) Here’s the Gaceta Digital Article that Barrapunto “found”

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  • Tracking Santa Claus online

    In the spirit of the day before Christmas, I’ve come across a couple links to help you track Santa Claus’ progress around the world. First up the Google Blog points out that you can track Santa with their Google Earth software. They have a link here that will open in Google Earth –UPDATE Christmas 2006–This years link for the Google KML is here. (if installed. Google Earth is a free download and requires hardware video acceleration. The other link is a web browser based tracker… Norad has been doing this for a few years, this years version is at this link. (Flashplayer required.)

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  • Book Publishing in small quantities or on demand lulu.com

    This may be the first in a series of several profiles looking at different ways to get published online. The internet has been a disruptive technology for so many industries. Book publishing is one of those. Used to you would submit a manuscript to publishers shopping around for someone to take your work. These days it can be as simple as going online and shopping between several publishers, uploading your book (or calendar, pictures or other content) and then letting them take care of the publishing details, selling, printing on demand and you haven’t had to deal with a rejection letter yet….

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  • Yahoo Search Shortcuts

    I haven’t used yahoo search too much in quite a while, but there is an interesting post in their search blog about Yahoo Shortcuts. An example is typing in !ebay lamps takes you to ebay.com and searches for lamps. (Part of me is asking, why not just go to ebay and search for lamps??? – but there are some interesting uses for this within a toolbar – I can imagine it would get you there a step or two more quickly.)

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  • Top 10 spyware tricks of 2005

    You can tell we’re in the last 10-12 days of the year when we start seeing all sorts of year end retrospectives, year’s in review, countdowns of the top ___ of ___year ending___. Well, spyware has seen a banner year in many respects and Suzi at Spyware Confidential has a rundown of the top 10 tricks used in 2005.

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