2006 January

This shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. For years people have been using the Internet to buy up pre-written essays and term papers on various topics. Before that, many term papers services advertised in print publications like Rolling Stone. But outsourcing your actual homework to India? Turns out the popular coding-for-hire website, Rent A Coder [...]

Jimmy Daniels of RealTechNews writes:
In an article I posted about the Thump 2 sunglasses from Oakley, Julie from Oakley offered to send me a pair for review, and I just finished posting it on my site here.
More about the Oakley Thump 2 Here
[tags]mp3,realtechnews,jimmy daniels,oakley,thump[/tags]

Maybe I’m old and jaded, or just too old to do more than stare at a new online service called “inSPOT” that lets you notify sex partners by an anonymous and very edgy-looking e-mail greeting card, to let them know that oh by the way, I have an STD.

Not all of the sites we cover here are warped and weird in an offbeat sense. Sometimes we have fun ones, and funny ones, and some cute ones. Today’s site is one of the last ones: a great resource for e-mails.
Called Baby Animalz, this site is a collection of cute and funny baby animals. Since [...]

Jimmy Daniels of RealTechNews writes:
Just read this on Boing Boing, IOCell has created a USB flash drive with an embedded antivirus engine on it. It makes sure there are no viruses, spyware, adware or any other malicious software on the files on the drive, and also does a scan on any system you plug it [...]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
As we reported earlier, the 6.0.2 release of Apple’s iTunes software was criticized because the “Mini Store”, which shows albums and tracks for sale by the current artist when a song is played (not from a playlist but by selecting and playing it), sends data back to a 3rd party … [...]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
I’ve been to Africa for a photo safari, and let me tell you, though it was beautiful, it was also exhausting. Virtually everyone got sick (and not with a cold), the roads … well, don’t complain about anything around here. Imagine driving on the shoulder because the center of [...]

Call them thumb drives, flash drives, or key chain drives. I think key chain is fitting in this instance, because here is a simple gadget that does three things at once: It lets you connect your keychain drive to an FM transmitter and play your MP3 music files in your car - with no batteries [...]

This is a bit stalker-y for my tastes, but I do love technical work-arounds. Case in point: how to see if someone is set to invisible mode in Yahoo! Messenger.
Why: Because we can.
Why Not: Because it helps to take a hint.
Read more about finding invisible Yahoo! Messenger users here.

Chief Gizmateer, of RealTechNews writes:
We recently covered Samsung’s OLED displays from the CES show, and just noticed that Toshiba is set to launch televisions with a display type that rivals plasma sets. The flat-panel technology is called surface-conduction electron emitter display (SED). Toshiba has been working with Canon on this technology; Canon provided the electron-emission [...]

Speaking of warped sites, have you seen the latest one about the soon-to-be-homeless Michael Jackson? It is so weird and warped that I just had to set it up for today, since his loans are coming due. So read on…
This site is The Michael Jackson Gallery. I have looked at this site for a while [...]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
Despite not one, but two different Dell executives speaking about the possibility of AMD CPUs in Dell PCs (Michael Dell and a week later, Kevin Rollins), Josh Claman, UK head of Dell said there’s no deal with AMD in the works, that it’s still just a rumor, and that people need [...]

We don’t usually cover high tech timepieces, but after the interest in the 39 megapixel Hassleblad digital camera that costs more than a BMW, we figured, why not? So here’s a look at an odd and very different new timepiece: the Cabestan.
Read More on the $220,000 Cabestan Wristwatch Here.
[tags]realtechnews,alice hill,wristwatch,jean francois ruchonnet,vianney halter[/tags]

Not sure how this is useful, but I guess if you want to track trends, this is an easy way to do that. Of course, I had to see how RealTechNews was doing in the Technorati universe. Cool idea but not sure what it really means.
Read More About “Technorati Launches New Charting Feature” Here
[tags]technorati,realtechnews,alice hill,hits,blogs,charting[/tags]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
LiveCDs (bootable self-contained CDs) are great. I have some utility CDs that I use for image recovery like this, and I also love the LiveCDs that they produce for Linux installations, so that I can test compatibility without having to install software on the hard drive.
At ShmooCon last [...]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
Bangladesh has ordered phone companies to eliminate free late evening calls from their cellular phone plans. The government states that the unlimited minutes corrupt its youth, impacting studies while changing the behavior of young people.
Read More About Free Evening Cellular Calls in Bangladesh Here
[tags]government,realtechnews,cell phones,michael santo,cellular[/tags]

A new start-up called Indeed.com melds job hunting with instant messaging. Simply pick key words like a particular job title and field and the bot will find a match for you and IM you the result.
Read More about Indeed.com Here.
[tags]realtechnews,alice hill,job hunting,indeed.com[/tags]

Most people who visit this blog often know I travel a lot, and that means checking in and out of a lot of hotel rooms. Between the horror stories I could tell of sheets full of body hair, and non-smoking rooms with cigar smoke blasting through the bathroom vent, and on and on, it just [...]

Today the mainstream operating systems are Windows XP and Macintosh OS X. There are variations to those operating systems, and arguments could be made that Linux is becoming a major player. But in the good old days of computers, there was another system, one that is worthy of a look at, especially by this site, [...]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
With all the attention focused on Vista, not many eyes are on XP (with the exception of security vulnerabilities, of course). Aside from keeping up with Patch Tuesday and AutoPatcher (covered in David’s article here) I’m not really paying attention to specific dates for anything XP-related. I had been [...]