Wired @ Home

My first taste of online TV was Joost which is now in public beta, but it wasn't the best and so I deleted it. Now that it's in public beta, it is much better with clearer video, more TV and a more organized menu. The reason for the major update is there is much more competition now from major players like NBC and Fox who have released offerings from there own network and on other new sites. This whole chain reaction all started when NBC threw away its contract with Apple and it's one-price model. Now NBC has a deal with Amazon's UnBox to show programs from all of its networks on one cool location. UnBox now has 2600 current and past shows in its arsenal. UnBox is a creative way to offer cost-effective TV shows and movies in a fun, interactive website. It costs around 99 cents for a show like The Office and currently they are running a promotion for movies at the same price, 99 cents.

But that's not all NBC did, they also recently launchd NBC on NBC.com which just completed beta testing. At first, the TV shows they will offer on NBC Direct, will be downloaded to your hard drive, be ad-supported, and expire 7 days after the original airing. All the downloads will have DRM on it, but it's a small price to pay for quality programs that you missed or wanted to see again. The quality of UnBox and NBC Direct will be approxiametely the same with DVD-like resolution and 2.5 megabits/s. Future plans for NBC Direct include HD videos, free on demand, subscription, and download-to-own.

NBC still hasn't stopped there and has partnered with Fox to offer a website called Hulu (which is in private beta). Hulu is a great attempt to increase people's attention to free online viewing of TV shows. It has great navigation, a large selection of programs that last for a full 5 weeks, and simple design that makes it easy to use. It does however lack in video quality but definitly watchable. My only warning is it is currently not available for people outside the US and the shows are only streamed.

GPS systems have slowly been making there way into cars and I have participated in that trend while I was in England and France. We had the opportunity to rent a GPS for the duration of our rental or get my mom secondary insurance. Guess what my dad chose.

We had the pleasure of using a TomTom and today, I have the pleasure of reviewing the newest addition to there lineup, the TomTom GO 720, a high end GPS that will rival any commerical GPS out there. Portable GPS systems have two major advantages over the in-car navigation system. In-car systems may have wicked multimedia centers but they are more expensive (up to 10x if you go for a cheap portable GPS) and they aren't portable. Since this is a high-end model offered by TomTom, it comes with a hefty price tag of $500US, but again, nothing compared to a base $2000 in-car system. It offers much of the basic features you'd find on a regular portable GPS that include text-to-speech and clear 3-D images. But it also comes with a large screen and it can play audio files through your car's speakers. The GO 720 gave accurate directions on screen despite being late with voice directions. When planning a route, they give you the fastest, but they also suggest other routes that are scenic, don't include tolls, avoid highways, etc. Another neat feature that wasn't on my model is a warning that lets you know you are going over the speed limit. This works in conjunction with another warning you can turn on, to notify you that your speed is above a preset level. This definitly comes in handy when you are going to new place as it makes the job much easier and puts your mind at ease. It saves you time and I can vouch for that many times as we didn't have to look at the map, print out directions, or scan through a portable map in the car. Go to TomTom to get the detailed specs or purchase it from Best Buy Canada for an extra $100 (ripoff!).

Personally, storage is not an issue in my world, but over the last few years, there has been an onslaught of websites dedicated to sending larger files and storing files online. There are two major services that are currently offering online storage and now Microsoft has introduced SkyDrive which is in beta and only available to users with Microsoft accounts (Live, Hotmail, Msn). It supports 500mb of storage but there is a limit of 5mb per file. Once the beta stage finishes it will be open to everybody where it then will truly be up there with the big boys, XDrive and MediaMax. Currently, XDrive and MediaMax are the frontrunners as they both offer key advantages over SkyDrive. XDrive though allows you to stream audio files and Streamload offers automated backup and synchronization between two computers. A plus though from SkyDrive is it allows you to upload files to a private, public, or shared folder on the network. Therefore it's perfect for sending Word files, images over to someone halfway across the world, where they can always access it. Anybody can view your public folders but only your invites can access your shared folders. Go to SkyDrive to sign up yourself.

This product has been a long time coming. I personally heard about Microsoft Surface a year 6 months ago and boy have I been excited. I wouldn't buy it though until I had a family and had some sort of purpose for it. Currently there isn't a point to owning a product such as this when you can't use it to its fill potential. The Microsoft Surface has been getting the most attention thus far but it's not the only company working on a surface computer. Mitsubishi is developing a similar tabletop computer called the DiamondTouch. Both operate differently. The Microsoft Surface is capable of delivering images via a rear-projection delivered to the surface of the table from inside while at the same time, tracking your finger movements with a series of infrared cameras. DiamondTouch projects the image from atop and uses a similar technology that is used on laptop touchpads, to track your finger movements. The drawback to the DiamondTouch's design is that it creates shadows when you touch the screen. Don't expect these PC's in your living room by the next holiday season though, but look out for the Surface in cellular stores, hotel, casino, or any other retail store that would benefit from them, all by this year. By 2010, Microsoft expects them to be in conference rooms around the globe, and by 2012 you can expect them as a stocking gift. Mitsubihi's version though is still a research product and I do believe it will be scrapped or greatly modified due to its late unveiling and outdated technology.

This is a new series starting today that will cover up to three cool downloads that will either make your life easier or just be a nice add-on.

Stop Your Web Indulgence

Everyone who surfs the web knows that they have a weak spot where they spend too much time on a particular topic such as celebrity news, or for me it's spending too much time promoting my wonderful website. A company who partnered with Firefox has developed an add-on called MeeTimer that will calculate all the time you've spent on a website for up to a year. Once Firefox restarts go to Tools--MeeTimer--Options and reconfigure the options to your liking.

The drawback to this add-on is you have to manually go to a site and right-click the Firefox tray icon and select Discourage Me. The add-on though provides a huge amount of stats, but mainly the timer is great and the ability to warn you if you've viewed a site for too long.

PC Energy Tracker

Windows XP has an included tool within Power Options that works and is integrated with Local Cooling, a utility developed by UniBlue. Vista users don't be discouraged though as it works perfectly fine on my computer. It works in the background and you can maximize it whenever you are on the computer. It's basically software that will tell you exactly how much you've saved if you close down your computer a little bit ealier or put it to sleep. You set exactly what those times are, for example, turning off your monitor in 45min.

As you can see my power use is pretty high in my opinion and so I will make changes to reduce that. Compared to other people though I believe it actually is low. The drawback is that the program actually takes control of your computer to shut down your computer when you say it should, like 45min. If you only want it to control your monitor then you can set the values to everything else to 0. Once this program is installed you can register at Local Cooling and it will keep track of your power usage and you can compare yourself to businesses and individuals who also have this utility.

Keep Track of Your Bandwidth

If your ISP providor caps your bandwidth for each ISP then this tool is for you. Some ISP providors have been known to stop the amount of data you move to and from your computer (download and upload). BitMeter II is a free utility that will calculate how much bandwidth you've used per month. You'll need to know your monthly limit though as that is how it will notify you when you've used a customizable percentage of that bandwidth. Right when you install the tool, BitMeter II will start tracking your download and upload speeds and put it all on spreadsheets, graphs, and charts which come in handy down the road. On top of this, BitMeter II includes a calculator that estimates how long a download will take. This isn't a biggie as Vista has that included and I believe XP does to.

Computers are ever evolving pieces of machinary with new products that go inside it everyday. For example, DDR3 RAM just came out and new LED technology is helping make laptops more efficient. Well now 3 more standards are going to enter out computers. Larger hard drives, faster internet, and larger system bus.

Many people, including me, don't know that the system bus limits overall performance as your PC's data flow goes through the system bus and if its not big enough, you get a bottleneck, much like when the 404 turns into the DVP. Currently the standard is PCI 2.3 which offers a data transfer rate of 5.2 gigabits per second which is a lot at first glance but the next generation is called PCI 3.0. This hardware will have a data transfer rate of 8 gigabits per second. Not only will PCI 3.0 allow for higher GPU performance (A special processor dedicated to calculating the graphics in a game. A GPU allows for better looking console games and takes the load off of the CPU during gameplay), but it also allows the system bus to power graphic cards directly instead of going through a seperate power line. The downfall is, you'll need a 3.3V card to use it instead of a 5V or 3.3V. Don't worry though, as these graphic cards (PCI 3.0) will be out in 2010 with the specs debuting in 2009.

When George S. was working for Much Music, back about 6 or 7 years ago, he had to specially order a 1TB hard drive to hold all his music. Back then, that was rarity, but now companies are going to be offering 5TB hard drives.To get something this big without sacrificing space a technique called Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and a similar technology called Thermally Assited Magnetic Recording (TAMR) uses lasers to heat the surface of the hard drive which makes it possible to pack a Terabyte into a square inch of the drives surface. This doubles the standard as a 2 inch square space could only fit 1 Terabyte. Once the laser starts heating the surface up, the driver can manipulate the surface on an extremely fine scale of about tens of nanometres. A huge benefit of these drives is the way the information is organized on it. The data will be organized into self-arranging magnetic arrays that allow the creation of a single bit of data on every grain of the drives surface. Don't expect this drive to be installed onto your computer for the next holiday season though. Its still a research project but Seagate expects to sell a 5TB HAMR hard drive by 2011

Bored of your internet connection? IPv4 is getting to be recurrent and so an old technology is expected to take over around the beginning of 2011. 2011 is the date when all the IP addresses in the current format will run out. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses whereas IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses which is a vast improvement. IPv6 also has network-layer encryption and authentication to make much more secure communications between computers. Give credit to the US government for making IPv6 more mainstream as they have ordered all there computers to be outfitted with the technology in 2008.

Search engines have been a hot topic lately and many new search engine sites have opened up. I've already reviewed 2, Spacetime and Hakia, but now Microsoft has released its own, Tafiti. At the time I wrote Beta Update, Spacetime was in its Beta 1 with many issues to fix, but now its very close to releasing Beta 2 with many improved features. I highly encourage you to visit SpaceTime to learn more and see more. They have a video up on the new features and the overall free product. Hakia however is in the midst of fully implementing its flagship feature, Semantic-Rank algorithm which is designed to extract meaning from your search phrases and questions. This is a massive step in bringing better search and more credible results to you. Another company that is using this type of technology is Vlingo. They offer a voice-recognition system for on the go Sprint users. It uses the Hieracrhical Language Model to recognize every single word you say and make educated predictions on what word you are going to say next based on the previous word uttered. On top of this, it will adapt, learn, and improve itself to understand new words, speech patterns and more.

The big news though is Microsofts new search engine called Tafiti. If you don't already have Silverlight*, the website will instruct you to download it. Once started, Tafiti loads surprisingly quickly and will position a search box in front of you. Once you've entered a phrase or keyword and pressed Go, the search box will slide to the left and below it, an orbit of the world, RSS, News, Images, and Halo icons will swirl around. These are just like the Google tabs of Web, Images, News, Groups, etc. After you've gone to the tab you want, you can click the result which has a larger description, or you can save that website by dragging it over to the corner which contains 5 empty slots. You can label those slots, email, or blog it (Windows Live Spaces). This is only possible if you have a Hotmail, MSN, or Live account. Not only does it display the results in such a cool way, they give you a second option to display it in a tree view which isn't the best but definitly looks cool.

Silverlight is basically another version of Adobe Flash but much better. This is why Tafiti can support such great graphics, video and animation. Sun Microsystems has already released a competitor for Silverlight days after its release called JavaFX. Currently, Silverlight is supported by the most popular broswers on Windows 2000 and up except Opera. The Mac versions are in the making and should represent a fair amount of the downloads. I won't get into the technical details of Silverlight but the jist is: it's more useable, superior graphics, animation, and video, more searchable, and doesn't need Windows Media Player, WMP Active X, or Windows Media plug-ins to be played. You can view some demos of the type of quality Silverlight provides on Fox. To learn more on Silverlight and other Beta products go to Beta Updates.