Saturday, October 11, 2008
Communicate
YouTube Gets Full-Length Episodes of Star Trek, MacGyver
8:14AM Gina Trapani | YouTube is now offering 15 50-minute episodes of classic TV shows including Star Trek, MacGyver, and Beverly Hills, 90210 with “prominent new ads.” Coupled with YouTube’s newly-launched theatre view, this looks like an easy way to wile away a weekend. [via] More »
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Integrate Launchy With Wget
8:00AM Adam Pash | Reader Justin writes in with a clever idea for quickly launching downloads with the popular command-line download manager, wget. His method: Make wget available to Launchy, then pass the URL of the file you want to download to wget through Launchy. Here’s how it works: More »
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Touchless Adds Multi-Touch To Your PC With Your Webcam
7:00AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Microsoft Office Labs has released an open source multi-touch application framework called Touchless that uses your webcam as the input. Right now the Touchless Demo lets you play with four proof-of-concept ideas: Draw, Image, Snake, and Defend. The first is a free-form drawing application, while Image is an image manipulation utility that allows you to zoom in or out and move around on a map with marker gestures. The other two are games (Snake is exactly like the classic, and Defend is up to four-person Pong). To set up a marker that Touchless tracks, just grab something colorful, click Add A New Marker, then draw a circle around the object. From there on out, Touchless will monitor that marker wherever it is in the shot. Right now the application is a little clunky, but as a proof-of-concept it’s not bad (and it’s fun to play with). Before long multi-touch may not be limited to people who can afford several thousand dollar equipment, after all. Touchless [Microsoft Office Labs via TechCrunch] More »
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Yahoo Calendar Beta On Track To Challenge Google Cal
6:51AM Gina Trapani | Tester invites started going out to the dramatically-overhauled new Yahoo Calendar beta, and we were one of the lucky ones to give it a spin. The new look and feel brings YCal into 2008 (finally!) with a dynamic interface including drag and drop events, Flickr integration, multiple calendar subscriptions and—gasp!—a built-in to-do list. For too long, YCal has looked like it was stuck in 1998, even though it launched way earlier than Google Calendar or other flashy web-based calendar tools, so we’re thrilled to see it get back in the game. Let’s take a look at the new YCal beta in action; a full screenshot and a quick screencast are yours below. More »
Work
InSSIDer Detects Wireless Networks
6:01AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Free applicaiton inSSIDer scans networks within reach of your computer’s Wi-Fi antenna, tracks signal strength over time, and determines their security settings (included whether or not they’re password-protected). Previously mentioned NetStumbler has long been a favourite for this sort of functionality, but it doesn’t work well with Vista or 64-bit XP. inSSIDer, on the other hand, works like a charm on both Vista and XP, and it’s open-source to boot. This must-have for hunting down Wi-Fi networks on the road is free, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0. inSSIDer [MetaGeek via Download Squad] More »
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Lifehacker Confessions: The Tips And Tricks I’m Not Using
3:10AM Kevin Purdy | Reading Lifehacker can inspire you to reboot your computer habits, your workflow, your workspace, and even your home life. Believe me, I should know. About a year ago, I was a messy-desked, easily-distracted reporter who relished his lunch-break reading of Lifehacker’s RSS feed. I asked to write a few posts, lucked into a real gig, and can now tell the story of becoming a task-minded guru who gets things done with the right software. That’s not a true story, though. Inspired by an appearance by PostSecret founder Frank Warren here in Buffalo last night, I’ve decided to skip the authoritative “we” voice this afternoon and share my semi-secret Lifehacker failings and confessions. Read on to see what I’m not exactly getting done the right way, and offer up your own productivity penance. Photo by allaboutgeorge. More »
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Adium Updates To 1.3.2, Fixes Bugs
2:50AM Adam Pash | Popular open-source chat application Adium has released a small update packed with bug fixes, including better support for MSN Messenger, status updates, and more. If you’re on OS X and you’re not using Adium, it may be time you grab the latest and check out what makes Adium one of the five best instant messengers. More »
Work
OpenOffice.org 3.0 Final On A Server Near You
2:30AM Adam Pash | If our first look at OpenOffice.org 3.0 has you salivating for the official download of this free Microsoft Office replacement, the final release has already been pushed to a mirror near you (like this one). Expect an official release announcement on Monday. [via Ghacks] More »
Fix
GPass Boosts Browsing Privacy, Circumvents Censorship And Filters
2:00AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Free application GPass helps you bypass censorship and blocked web sites by tunneling network traffic through encrypted proxy servers. After you install GPass, launching an application using the proxy is as simple as double-clicking the app from inside the GPass interface. GPass will launch the program with all the necessary tunneling in place. GPass is easy to use, and requires no setup on your part unless you want to do a little tweaking. It’s also impressively fast for a proxy—it appears to choose the proxy server with the quickest response rate when it starts up. We’ve mentioned other tools for accessing blocked web sites with previously mentioned Hotspot Shield—whether they’re blocked by location or by a corporate filter—but GPass looks like an excellent ad-free alternative. If you give it a try, let’s hear how it worked for you in the comments. GPass [via gHacks] More »
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