37Signals has finally lauched the long-talked about Calendar for their Backpack application. However, the Calendar is only available to paying subscribers. Just taking a look at some of the features of the Calendar, it may convince many to upgrade to at least the $5/month plan. Read more »

Two of my favorite cartoons in recent history are The Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain. Both shows were wacky enough for kids to enjoy, but had enough double entendre and obscure cultural references to make it a cult classic among high school and college kids as well. The ending to each episode of Pinky and the Brain, with Brain posing the question “Pinky, Are you pondering what I’m pondering?” was always a great way to wrap up an episode. Well, I was flipping through the channels tonight at home and caught the tail end of a commercial adveritising DVD sets of both series. The Animaniacs DVD Set contains 25 Read more »

A few weeks ago I wrote about a problem I have been having on my new MacBookPro. Whenever I would open VLC or Audacity, the Audio Output Format would change from the normal 44100.0 Hz to 96000.0 Hz. This would cause audio in Flash files to not work, especially in Flash Video files. To check this, go to Applications > Utilities > Audio Midi Setup. I have posted about this problem here, also pushing it to Digg, as well as posting numerous times on the Apple Discussion Boards, but to no avail. Upgrading to 10.4.7 didn’t seem to resolve the issue either. Daryl Rosin commented in the post that he Read more »

Google has released version 4 of its Google Desktop application. At the same time, it has also come out of beta. Google Desktop gives you easy access to information on your computer and from the web. It’s a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed, and more. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails and bookmarks. It makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google. Google Desktop doesn’t just help you search your computer; Read more »

Google launched Picasa Web Albums this morning. An invite-only service for the time being, it is basically a photo sharing site on par with Flickr, minus all the social networking, tagging, etc. I will say that I haven’t had any reason to use Picasa. All of my photos are stored on my MacBookPro, and I use iPhoto and the most excellent FlickrExport plugin to share those photos via my Flickr account. At first, I thought you actually had to be a Picasa user (on the PC) to use the service, but I was able to upload photos from my Mac without any problem. I was under the impression that this Read more »

Google has added a Web Albums feature to its free photo editor, Picasa. Picasa Web Albums is Picasa’s newest feature, designed to help users post and share their photos quickly and easily on the web. The service is offered by invitation only on a first come, first serve basis for the time being. Web Albums includes 250 MB of photo storage and is upgradeable to 6 GB of storage for $25 a year. By comarison, Flickr – an obvious competitor to this service – offers 20MB on its free account and unlimited storage for $25 a year. Being a Mac user, I have never had an occasion to use something Read more »

Beta, that is. After almost a year of developer releases, the folks at Flock have finally released a public beta of their browser, which builds social networking features on top of a Firefox codebase. For this release, and for at least the next year or so, we are primarily focused on supporting the social dimension of the web, and on bringing information closer to the user. Right now this includes a heavy emphasis on the photo experience (from upload through discovery to notification), RSS support, dramatic improvements to the search box (including a new take on favorites), and blogging. Read more »

With the latest build release of Opera 9, the browser has switched back to using the blue RSS icon rather than the feed icon that Firefox started using, followed by IE7. It has actually become the “standard” icon for showing that RSS feeds are available. So why did Opera decide not to use it? Regarding the old RSS icon: Mozilla would like us (and other users of it) to sign an agreement on the use of the feeds icon. We fully respect their rights to the icon and will not use it as long as this isn’t sorted out. It is odd that they have decided not to use an Read more »

Gervase Markham is talking up the decision by Mozilla to not support Windows 98 and ME in their release of Firefox 3 in 2007. This comes after the decision by Microsoft to stop critical support for 9x operating systems on July 11, 2006. The decision has caused quite a backlash, many bringing up the point that it leaves users who might not can upgrade to a newer OS with limited browser options, namely Internet Explorer. It will also leave users of older operating systems without a good, secure browser that conintues to improve. Internet Explorer 7 will only be available for XP and Vista, and at some point Microsoft will Read more »

Ars Technica is reporting that the PS2 is outselling the XBox. Since the release of the Xbox 360, Microsoft has averaged 246,000 console sales each month in the US, while the PS2 has seen an average of 473,000 units—a number bolstered by an estimated 1.5 million sales in December alone. Leaving out December, Sony’s average drops to 302,000 per month, still outpacing the Xbox 360 by a healthy margin. I think this is somewhat skewed, seeing as how the PS2 is a few years old and selling at a price well below that of the Xbox 360. Read more »