A few months ago, over at CenterNetworks, Allen reviewed the Web 2.0 tool ikordo. From Allen’s review, I was intrigued. I decided to try it out for myself and recommended it to a few of my colleagues.

I tested it pretty thoroughly at the beginning to make sure it did everything it was supposed to. The application never balked at any of my tests. I then decided to use it in real life. I set up a meeting through ikordo and let it do the rest. I ran into a handful of small issues, but the meeting still got scheduled successfully.

(more…)

Found this pretty groovy visual traceroute tool today. It’s called YouGetSignal and lets you do a trace route to any server and watch it load on a Google Map - you can do it from your machine or from the YouGetSignal server. I did a routing and it’s interesting to watch it move around in weird directions. Of course many times the physical location does not match the actual location of the machine.

(more…)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that the idiots that spam blog comment areas must work day jobs. I noticed a huge upwards trend in the amount of spam we receive on this particular blog during the winter holiday break, and have noticed spikes each weekend afterwards.

During weekdays, we seem to receive somewhere around 30-50 spam comments each day. However, on the weekends, that number triples or even quadruples. It is a very strange phenomenon.

I am curious, though, why they even bother spamming sites such as this one, since the comments have to be approved by an administrator before they are published. You would think they would eventually learn that their comments are not getting through our filters, and just quit posting altogether. I guess that’s just too much to hope for, though.

My advice for photo restoration is to know what your final product will be before you start working on it that way you know what you need to do to throughout your editing process. Of course, that can go for any project, but knowing what you are doing it for in this case can be extremely helpful.

(more…)

For those of you that have installed Office 2007 on your computers, you’ve probably noticed a big problem in the new Outlook.

In previous versions of Outlook, HTML-formatted e-mail messages used the Internet Explorer print dialog, while text-only messages used the print dialog written for Outlook. The print dialog that’s been written for Outlook only gives you three options when choosing which pages to print: all, even or odd.

(more…)

This year, there were some really cool gadgets revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year. The new products ranged from sunglasses that are actually television monitors (ala Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation) to 150-inch plasma screen televison sets. Some cool new computer-related gadgets were unveiled, including the first 16-inch laptop that allows an actual 16:9 ratio, as opposed to the standard 16:10 ratio found on most widescreen monitors and a new massive curved monitor for hardcore gamers allowing a 2,800×900 pixel display.

In addition, some cool new peripherals for the Nintendo Wii were unveiled by Nyko and CTA Digital.

You can find complete coverage of CES 2008 over at CNET.com.

Microsoft is offering a neat spin on its second-generation Zune digital media players. If you pop on over to zuneoriginals.net, you can order your very own customized Zune.

You can choose from over 100 different designs to have them etch onto the back of your player and you can add up to five lines of text.

On top of that, the customization is completely free. I’m not sure how long Zune Originals will be offering that deal; I’m not even sure if it’s a limited-time offer or not. All I know is, when you design your custom Zune, all of the customization options say “waived” where the price should be, and the total price of the player is the same as it would be without any customization.

The image to the right is the one I worked up quickly for this post. Hopefully I’ll be able to get my hands on one of my own, soon.

It’s probably still a little bit premature to say this, but it looks like the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is on its last legs. Now, in addition to Disney and obviously Sony, Warner Bros. has decided to back the Blu-Ray format.

The real question is, though, will the general public catch on any time soon? With Blu-Ray players going for $400 and up, and the advent of Web-broadcast movies, will we continue to collect movies in physical formats? Or will the DVD go the way of the audio CD and become simply a back-up method of collecting videos?

What do you think?

For those of you that keep your fingers on the pulse of television, this is probably extremely old news. For me, however, this is a new revelation.

NBC is working on producing a new made-for-TV movie based on the Knight Rider series. This time around, KITT will be inside the body of a brand new Mustang Shelby GT (this particular model is still apparently a concept, and has not been released to the general public, yet). David Hasselhoff will be reprising his role as Michael Knight.

Really, though, who cares whether “The Hoff” is going to be in the show or not? The real star of the show was William Daniels; the voice of KITT. For those of you that have not seen the show, you may also know him as the venerable Mr. Feeny from ABC’s hit “TGIF” show “Boy Meets World”.

(more…)