“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.

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

 
So- what’s in the rar?*

Digital Clock – nice clock gadget, with many different options.

Egg Timer – basically, a timer in the shape of an egg. Useful for getting people out of the office, tell them your time is limited and set the egg timer!

EmptySpace – allows you to customize your sidebar by putting empty space between gadgets.

GadgetSpacer – same as above.

iStat battery – this is a useful battery status gadget for laptops.

iStat wireless – also very useful for laptops.

Multimeter – very handy gadget for showing CPU and memory usage. Several versions are available. The Q version is for Quad Core. The 2.10 version is much more advanced than the prior.

NetworkMeterv2.3 – good for network usage. 

PackageMapping-1.3 – find out where your packages are. The site this is pulled from is packagemapping .com. This uses google maps to pinpoint where the item is. Highly recommended.

PaperClip – clipboard collection.

Server-ping – real time ping status for up to 5 machines! Make sure to enable use LED in the options. It’s possible to monitor up to 50  with the pro version.

UptimeMeterV1.5 – self-explanatory

(*Editor’s note – rar is  a proprietary archive file format that supports data compression, error recovery, and file spanning. Source: Wikipedia)

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)

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.

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?

Don’t get me wrong- it’s a better commercial than the Seinfeld spots but it’s not as effective as if I had seen it with a clean frame of mind. Instead, I’m sitting here wondering what the possible phases Microsoft could have planned since these first two don’t seem like they intertwine at all.

Which leads to the question – even if no one likes these commercials, does the fact that everyone is talking about them, mean they are effective? In my opinion, other than reminding everyone that Microsoft is alive and well, I can’t seem to recognize a call to action. There’s not even a mention of Vista in the second phase.

No one will really know until there’s been more time to measure the results but ask yourself this – are you any more inclined to try Vista (against public opinion, outcry and perception) based on Jerry Seinfeld buying discount shoes or Eva Longoria sitting poolside?

I’ll withhold final judgment until I’ve seen everything but so far I’m not convinced…

You can read more here, here and here.

Share your opinion in the comments -all are welcome!

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.

At first glance, the configuration editor can seem a bit daunting. After all, you can do so much but you start with nothing. Luckily, the Samurize web site offers plenty of pre-made configurations for download, which usually take only a minimal amount of tweaking to fit your needs, as well as some handy tutorials on making your own configurations.

I use Samurize as a replacement for the Windows Vista Sidebar, mainly because of its comparatively low memory use and the fact that it is much more customizable. You can see in the above screen shot the different stats I have readily available; a system clock in both digital and analog, CPU and RAM meters, a hard drive space indicator, battery life bar, bandwidth usage stats, and a to-do list which I edit using an external text file.

You can download Samurize but be sure to check out their other downloads and head over to Deviant Art for some great configuration ideas.

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.

It’s quite clear that Google is focused on creating a personal web browser. Upon first launching Chrome, you begin to build your own personal web portal.

I believe that Chrome will do for Web Browsing the same as Gmail has done for free web based email. When I first used Gmail, I said, “How do I create sub-folders, this stinks?!” Gmail is now the only free web based email service that I use. That’s right – no more Yahoo or ATT mail for this guy here! While I don’t quite think I’ll stop using IE or Firefox for business use, I do think that I’ll do my personal web surfing with Chrome for the time being to get a feel for how it’s going to develop. I recommend downloading it and giving it a shot!