NowITWorks.net

This new book highlights the top 128 places any certified geek should visit-

“The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive by John Graham-Cumming takes a journey through the places where inventions and discoveries were made. Visit the world’s largest science museum in Munich or see Leonardo da Vinci’s last home in France.

For a real-life adventure to some of the places on the list, here is an article by Anne B. McDonald of PC World.

To order this book from Amazon: click here.

Frank Rose of Wired Magazine Online has some thoughts on it too – he wrote a great article about Hulu pulling some older episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” after feeling pressure from the powers that be, also known as the people who control the cash.

Read the whole article here: Hulu, a Victim of Its Own Success?

To those of us that live in the future and use Vista, (yes, I’m an optimist!) I wanted to share some of the Sidebar Gadgets that I have found the most useful since the time of release. I recently went through an update check on them all so they should be current.  I get most of my gadgets from http://thehobbylounge.com. Please note that you have to register to download.

 
So- what’s in the rar?*

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If you have a Windows Mobile device, chances are you are less than happy with the mobile browsing experience that IE gives you. It’s pretty bad – there is no Flash Player, pictures take forever to upload (if you can see them at all), and did I mention how sl-ow it is? Well fret no more!

Skyfire has just released their new beta browser and I think I’m in love. It’s fantastic – you can watch videos, listen to music, check your social networking sites or whatever you need from the internet that you couldn’t previously get on your phone. No longer is the IPhone the lone purveyor of  YouTube on the go! No longer is Active X and Flash the bane of your mobile experience!

If you have a Windows or Symbian (Nokia) phone, you owe it to yourself to download this as soon as you have a chance.

http://www.skyfire.com/

I give this 4 out of 4 lightsabers.

(Image source: Wikipedia Lightsaber Collection)

I was tooling around this weekend trying to find a media center that can play Divx, Xvid, H.264, .MKV, etc  video files and I finally found a winner. Windows Media Center does not like any of these formats, though Divx and Xvid will be available with Windows 7 edition.

The XBMC Media Center is an Open source little bit of wonder. It comes in a Windows, Linux, or Mac client and can do pretty much everything you would wish for out of an open source media center. (BluRay support is not quite there yet)

http://xbmc.org/

It’s an 80 meg exe, and pretty lightweight. It ran great on my wife’s old laptop, and streams music and video from other networked devices like a champ. You can also use a Windows Media Center Remote and Transceiver, though it takes a good amount of work.

Even though the Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld ads were almost immediately deemed confusing, ineffective and worse yet – unfunny, it appears they did manage to at least get people’s attention. However, the new hot rumor running rampant on the internet is that Seinfeld was fired and Microsoft is now panicking to push out their next step. Other “sources” from within Microsoft are insisting it’s all part of a multi-phase ad campaign and they are simply moving on to the next phase.

But with the new “I’m a PC” ads, it looks like they scrambled to put something together that doesn’t really set or match the tone of the original commercials/message. To make matters worse, the new commercial opens with a John-Hodgman look-a-like saying “I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype.” They paid over $300 million for the Seinfeld ads and this was the best they could do? A swipe at the competition?

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Samurize is a robust and versatile utility you can use to embed information on your desktop. You can have everything from a stylized clock to RAM to CPU statistics, an embedded text file to controls for your media player of choice.

The program creates .INI files which are used as configuration, displaying your chosen information on the desktop. You can create and edit these configurations from the Config Editor, which gives you a desktop template for you to play with. You can add system meters, pictures and text to your hearts content, placing them wherever you want.

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Guys like me who use ‘multiple browsers’ as tools throughout any given work day start to salivate when a new browser is available to the general public – and especially from a provider like Google. I ‘googled’ all over and could not find the download on Tuesday. I was able to get it installed late last week and so far I’m impressed.

My first thought is, “Where are my bookmarks?” Every browser I’ve ever used has had a ‘bookmarks’ or ‘favorites’ drop down at the top of the screen, but not in Chrome. In Chrome, it’s all about what YOU are going to do next. After launching Chrome, it dumps you into your own personal Web Portal complete with tiled screen shots of your most visited pages, a bookmark toolbar, recent bookmarks, a history search, and most importantly, an address bar.

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