Five Star Wall – Week 3 – August 2011

Posted on Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Must admit that I’m not overly keen on wallpapers that are based on someone else’s stock photo, but the results are often great and if the original photographer is cool about it, then who am I to complain. This particular wall caught my eye on DeviantArt and ended up on my desktop pretty quick. You can get this wallpaper here.

Five Star Wall – Week 2 – August 2011

Posted on Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Something whistful for you all this week. Deep Blue Sea is a beautifully designed wallpaper that reminds us that there’s a lot going on beneath the surface in the ocean. If you fancy making something similar yourself, you can find a list of 18 montage tutorials for Photoshop here.. You can get the wallpaper here.

Five Star Wall – Week 1 – August 2011

Posted on Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Tilt-shift photography can produce some amazing effects. If you fancy trying it yourself, you can either invest in an expensive tilt-shift lens for your camera or ‘cheat’ with a Photoshop action or even just use a tilt-shift iPhone app. This week’s featured wallpaper utilises ideal source material for that true tilt-shift look – the city at night. You can get it, right here.

Minimalist Desktop Wallpaper Collection – August

Posted on Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Back once again with ten tasteful and minimalist images for your desktop. This month we’ve picked through the archives of DeviantArt picking out the best looking walls – this is no mean feat as by any standards the word minimalism (according to most DeviantArt users) seems to involve rainbows, cats and hardcore porn – though not necessarily all three at the same time. Anyway – on with the show.

Passware Kit Scrapes OSX Passwords in Minutes

Posted on Saturday, July 30, 2011

Edit: Apple has plugged this hole, as per this support article.

Well here’s a scary story that might burst a few Mac bubbles. Developed by Passware, their Passware Kit 11 can ‘recover login passwords for Mac OS users in a matter of minutes’. It does this by exploiting a weakness in the OSX sleep-state mode, whereby all passwords are stored in a portion of memory that can be accessed via Firewire because it has direct memory connections.

The software can apparently perform this feat on all recent versions of Mac OSX, including 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and the just released 10.7 (Lion). It can access the all-important OSX Keychain database giving access to saved passwords (for websites, network shares, wireless networks), private keys, certificates, etc. If it’s any consolation to Apple owners, the same software will accomplish the exact same feat on Windows (all versions) and Linux too and the OSX exploit can be avoided by turning off Automatic Login and shutting down rather than using sleep mode.

[Via HotHardware]

Five Star Wall – Week 4 – July 2011

Posted on Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Some smooth modern styling for you this week. Wrap is a gorgeous and colourful wallpaper sporting a clean and vibrant vector swirl or two. If you’re interested in producing something similar, the designer has linked to the original tutorial he used to create the wallpaper. You can get it, right here.

Move your Facebook photos to Google+ with the Move2Picassa Chrome extension

Posted on Thursday, July 21, 2011

As soon as Google+ was released and once word had got out that it was really rather good, users started wondering about transferring their digitial lives there. There’s only really one player in the social scene and that’s Facebook and if Google+ is to gain any real traction with committed FBers then they need tools like this and lots of them.

When Move2Picassa was first announced it was released in the guise of a web service. You went to the website, connected your Facebook and G+ accounts and let the site take care of the rest. However the site was inundated with requests and couldn’t handle the traffic and so the developers went back to the drawing board and came to the conclusion that it would all be far easier if the end-user suffered the burden of all this web traffic. So they created an extension for Chrome called Move Your Photos which is available for download and use by anyone.

Before you install the extension, ensure that you are logged into G+ or you’ll get a strange error message. The extension requires access to Facebook, natch, so the first step is the customary granting of access to all your junk. Once it’s all connected it will display all your Facebook photos by Gallery. It might be the case that you don’t want to transfer everything over to G+ and so you can choose not to upload entire galleries. Once you’re happy with your selections, you can click the Upload button. Depending on how many photos you’ve uploaded to Facebook over the years, you may wish to go and make yourself a cup of coffee or join a round-the-world yacht crew, because the extension will now proceed to download all your photos and upload them to G+ one by one.

It’s not the most sophisticated utility in the world, but it does exactly what’s required of it and it saves a lot of effort on the user’s part. Even if you’re not a day-to-day Chrome user, it’s worth installing the browser just to use this extension because there don’t seem to be any equivalents imminent for Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer. Once your photos have been safely rehomed, remember to check the privacy settings for the newly created albums as you may be showing off private family snaps to the whole world.

Five Star Wall – Week 3 – July 2011

Posted on Wednesday, July 20, 2011

With summer well and truly arrived in the northern hemisphere, we thought we’d channel the surfing vibe for this week’s five star wall. It’s an amazing image from the surf bible Surfing Magazine and shows a monster wave getting the tow-in treatment. You can get it, right here.

Hey you get off of my Cloud – Min.Us is here

Posted on Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Is there room for another easy-peasy drag-and-drop cloud-based file-sharing service? The folks over at min.us certainly think so and they’ve got an obtuse shortened URL to prove it. The principle difference between min.us and Cloud is that min.us is available on all platforms, desktop and mobile from the get-go while Cloud is a Mac app that only recently got a Windows client. Other than that they’re remarkably similar products.

Min.us is currently available for Windows, Mac and Linux on the desktop and Android, iPhone and WM7 on the smartphones – there are also browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Alternatively  you can point any web browser on any device at the min.us website and drag and drop the file(s) of your choice into the cloud. As it stands you can upload up files up to 25Mb in size, but if your register (free) you can upload up to 50Mb. The only other (claimed) limitation is that you can only store 100 files in each of your generated galleries, but you can have as many galleries as you like. Anyone else wondering how they’re planning to monetise this?

Once you’ve uploaded your file, a short URL is created for you automatically for immediate sharing. If you’d like to create something slightly more user-friendly you can edit the URL to a custom address. With the image online there are several social buttons in the file window that enable you to immediately Tweet your file, FB Like it or +1 it. There’s also search and follow functionality built into the service that works along fairly standard lines.

Having had a play with min.us there’s little doubt that it’s a flexible and well designed service. The website is well designed and hides what is undoubtedly a complex process behind some cool HTML5 styling. While Cloudapp decided to concentrate on the Mac platform, even in the face of the forthcoming iCloud from Apple, Min.us is a truly cross platform and cross device service that enables you to share and access your files on pretty much anything. The question though is who is paying the bills for this – and what happens to all your uploads should they run out of money to fund that Amazon EC2 and S3 Cloud storage space of theirs?

Track your lost or stolen phone or laptop for free with Prey

Posted on Saturday, July 16, 2011

Consider what you’d do if you laptop was lost or stolen. Swear? Turn a lighter shade of pale? Weep? Suddenly wish you’d been diligent with your back-ups? Realise that persons unknown now have full access to every dark corner of your life? It’s scary stuff, there’s no two ways about it. There will always be accidents and, unfortunately, there will always be crime – that much is certain. What is also certain is that we can take steps to mitigate the loss of a laptop.

Prey is an open-source anti-theft application for Mac, Windows and Linux systems. It is a small application that lies dormant on your system until its services are required. Should your laptop go missing, you simply log-in at the Prey website using the credentials you created when you installed the software. You can then track, screenshot and lock-down your laptop or Android phone, as you see fit.

The Prey install is a small agent, always resident while you’re system’s running, but displaying no memory footprint. Once activated Prey will begin gathering information – if your laptop has been connected to the Internet then it will transmit that information immediately – if it’s not online it will do so when it is. It will use either GPS or wi-fi triangulation to provide a geographic location of your laptop. All of this information will be made available to you via the Prey control panel.

However this software goes much further than just locating your laptop. It can take a picture of the person using your machine via the webcam, it can screenshot the desktop so you can see what their Facebook name is. It doesn’t just do passive stuff either – Prey can display an alert on-screen, sound an unmutable alarm, lock the computer completely and/or hide or delete emails and browser cookies to protect your log-ins to websites.

The basic version of Prey, which does everything mentioned above, is completely free. The developers are also offering a series of premium packages that offer multiple devices on the account, an on-demand mode and an active mode that reports on machines check-ins.

Five Star Wall – Week 2 – July 2011

Posted on Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Something cool for your desktop this week. To celebrate the latest minimalist wallpaper round-up on the site, we’ve found a very funky blissed-out split-tone aqua wall for your desktop. Airena is available in widescreen friendly 1920×1200, though given the design of the image you could crop it to any resolution. You can get it, right here.

The Minimalist Collection July – 12 Stylish New Wallpapers

Posted on Monday, July 11, 2011

Here’s a piping hot and brand new batch of minimalist wallpapers to adorn the coolest desktops around. We’ve curated this collection from DeviantArt, which is no mean process as many ‘Deviants’ seem to have a pretty fucked perception of what constitutes minimalism. If you like this article, plus consider ‘Liking’ or ‘+1′ing it below. Anyway – on with the show:

Read on for the links …

Paper Planes Wallpaper

Posted on Friday, July 8, 2011

Inspired by this Reddit thread, I’ve made a wallpaper based on the paper aeroplanes in the original image. Resolution is 1920×1080 and you can get the full size version here. Hope you like it.

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Five Star Wall – Week 1 – July 2011

Posted on Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Here at Geekosity, we’re currently in the throes of winter, but we understand that most of you guys live in that other hemisphere, upstairs. And with that in mind and with nothern hemisphere schools and colleges all breaking up for the long summer break, we thought we’d tap into that cool road-trip summer vibe with this rather funky wallpaper of a VW Combi Van. You can get it, right here.

Thunderbird 5 Released

Posted on Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Mozilla have released the latest version of the popular email client, Thunderbird. If you fancy making the switch to Thunderbird, you’ll be pleased to hear that it has a migration agent to ease the process, along with a mail account setup wizard that can handle IMAP, SMTP and SSL/TLS settings without much input from you, beyond the usual username and password.

Thunderbird 5 has a one-click address book which enables you to add a new contact by simply clicking on the star icon next to their name. There’s also a quick filter toolbar, fully indexed search, built-in archiving and junk mail tools and phishing protection.

As always, it’s a totally free open source download, available in the usual Windows, Linux and Mac flavours for download right now from the Mozilla website. Changes from the previous version are:

• More responsive and faster to start up and use
• Thunderbird is based on the new Mozilla Gecko 5 engine
• New Add-ons Manager
• Revised account creation wizard to improve email setup
• New Troubleshooting Information page
• Tabs can now be reordered and dragged to different windows
• Attachment sizes now displayed along with attachments
• Plugins can now be loaded in RSS feeds by default
• There are several theme fixes for Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Support for Mac 32/64 bit Universal builds (Thunderbird no longer supports PowerPC on Mac)
• Over 390 platform fixes that improve speed, performance, stability and security