Friday, January 9, 2009

ScreenMask Hides Distractions

11:30PM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: ScreenMask is a small and portable application that allows you to mask off sections of your screen to minimize distractions or increase focus on a given area. Why would you want to mask your screen you ask? If you’re watching a video on the web and the site doesn’t allow full screen mode—or the full screen mode looks awful— you can mask away the web browser and site interface by highlighting only the actual video window. Alternately you might need to temporarily pay attention only to a portion of the screen such as a notification window, while doing work at your desk but preferring to not be distracted by other things going on at your computer. ScreenMask has the ability to change the colour the mask between navy blue and black, has a quick hide button, and the presets to allow you to save the three most common screens you use. ScreenMask is freeeware, Windows only. ScreenMask [via Freeware Home] More »

Eat Meat In Deck-Of-Cards Portions For A Healthier Earth

11:00PM Kevin Purdy | Reducing your environmental impact by diet doesn’t mean having to go entirely vegetarian. If you’re intrigued by climate change and “flexitarianism,” one meat-loving author says eating 3.1 ounces per day is just about right. In his (long) piece for Audobon Magazine, Mike Tidwell consults with researchers and crunches the numbers to suggest that eating enough meat to make up a deck of cards per day, with only half of it red meat, is an ideal goal for having a real impact. Your ability to get by on that amount, or beliefs in climate change’s importance, will certainly vary, but it’s a good guideline to use for gradually switching to a less-meat diet. A shorter summation of Tidwell’s findings is linked below. Photo by jslander. How Much Meat Should a Climate Change-Wary Flexitarian Eat? [Example Source via Example] More »

Sunday Evening Is The Web’s Rush Hour

10:30PM Kevin Purdy | Research firm Ofcom finds that the worst time for traffic congestion (in the U.K., at least) is 5-6pm on Sundays. Also weak bandwidth times: Right after school lets out, and from 9-10pm on weekdays. Maybe obvious to any home net user, but worth seeing in quantified chart form. [via Slashdot] More »

Extensive Walkthrough Of Windows 7’s Changes And Features

10:00PM Kevin Purdy | While all you early-adopters are waiting for the Windows 7 page to offer the official beta, check out the How-To Geek’s seriously extensive walkthrough of pretty much everything new there (and our best features run-down). More »

Five Things To Do This Weekend

4:30PM Angus Kidman | While I continue to hunt down new tech ideas at CES in Vegas, you can have an altogether more relaxing time of it and catch up with some of this week’s hints: Grab yourself a legitimate test copy of the Windows 7 beta Make some plans for the ideal home office Check if your budget allows too much for tech Get your Mac photos sorted with the new Picasa release Clean your toilet with Coke (no lie!) More »

How To Get In On The Limited Windows 7 Beta 1 Download

4:00PM Adam Pash | Everyone’s excited about the free Windows 7 Beta download Microsoft’s handing out tomorrow, but there’s a catch: it’s only available to the first 2.5 million downloaders. Here’s how to make sure you’re one of them. According to Wired—which pulled the details from this official Windows blog post—you’ll need to grab the download from a link on the Windows 7 page as soon as possible once Microsoft begins the release. To get a product key to use with the download, you’ll have to go through a registration process with Microsoft. Be sure to check out the full Wired post for a look at a few more possible gotchas. Then again, if you aren’t lucky enough to make the cut tomorrow, there’s always BitTorrent. How to Get Your Windows 7 Beta 1 on Friday [Wired] More »

US Travel Web Requirements Begin Next Week

3:33PM Angus Kidman | A quick reminder to anyone with an upcoming trip to the US that if you’re planning to travel on the visa waiver program (as most people do), you’ll need to have registered your trip details online prior to departure after next Monday (January 12). Our earlier discussion of the changes has all the fiddly details. More »

Shop Around When Renewing Your Anti-Virus Software

2:00PM Angus Kidman | If you’re happy with your current anti-virus software, then you probably don’t pay too much attention when the annual renewal notice comes in — but perhaps you should. Reader Regan writes in with a cautionary tale: My subscription to McAfee Security Centre recently expired; as a result I selected a McAfee link to renew my licence. I was then redirected to a Dell/McAfee branded site that wanted $129 for the licence renewal. Even navigating directly to the McAfee Website (or via Google) seemed to have the same result. However, I was able to access the McAfee Direct Download service (searched for it directly via Google) where I got the same software for $79 — and that covered three computers! When it comes to security software, I’m a great believer in the “if it hasn’t broken your PC, don’t change it” principle, but Regan’s tale demonstrates that a bit of comparison shopping before clicking that renewal link might be worth your time. If you’d prefer to stay in the free software universe, check out our top five anti-virus applications. More »

If The Cloud Is Too Slow For The US, What Hope Does Australia Have?

12:38PM Angus Kidman | Whenever I run into people who gush about the potential for cloud computing, I tend to think: “that’s all very well, but storing lots of stuff online isn’t very practical when you pay for everything you donwload and upload and the speeds are often still so abysmal.” Many of those people tend to be from the US, where uncapped home Internet access is still the norm (albeit under threat) and there’s a range of high-speed choices in major urban areas. Yet it seems that you don’t need to have Australia’s substandard broadband to be worried about that. At the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas earlier this week, analyst Tom Coughlin raised the same issue as a potential problem for US users as well: For ordinary users with ordinary bandwidth in the US, the cloud will be an augmentation of the storage they have at home. It may be different for other countries where they have better bandwidth. Honestly, if American users are worrying about cloud access, we should be full-scale panicking. Can you see your future in the cloud constrained by speed and access issues? Share your thoughts in the comments. More »