Five Star Wall – Week 2 – October 2011
Everyone has their own unique preferences for the image they choose to adorn their desktop with – some like amazing landscapes, some prefer minimalistic designs, some think hardcore porn is the way to go. Personally my moods change all the time and in fact I have a different wallpaper on all seven of my Mac’s Mission Control desktops. Anyway – here’s a great design by KINGMANI100, available in a huge range of colours. You can get it, here.
Automated TV Downloads with SabNZB and RSS Feeds
This is tutorial video for anyone looking to automatically download TV shows from the newsgroups. Getting stuff from the newsgroups means you get it at the full speed of your Internet connection, unlike torrents. Downloading from newsgroups is made a lot simpler by using NZB files, which are the equivalent of .torrent files on Usenet. The site I used to create the RSS feed is Newzbin and the software I used is SabNZB which runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. I’ll be uploading some further tutorial videos soon.
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iOS Freebie of the Week – MixCloud
Time was when you had to spend some serious wonga to get the latest DJ mixes, courtesy of labels like Ministry of Sound. The digital music revolution and the Internet changed all that though and you can now listen to first rate DJ mixes 24 hours a day for the cost of nothing more than your bandwidth. DJs quickly realised that the net was a great way of getting themselves known and so services like Soundcloud and MixCloud quickly became very popular.
The MixCloud iOS app enables you to tap into the vast number of mixes online through a familiar iOS interface. You can see what’s ‘hot’ at the current time (inevitably either John Digweed or Carl Cox), browse by category (ambient, dubstep, trance etc) or listen again to any mixes you fav’d. Sound quality depends on the original mix of course, but streaming is very high quality. The only drawback to the app is that, unlike the website, you can’t skip within a mix.
Weekend Wrap – Interesting Reads on the Tech Blogs
Amazon’s Fire tablet has caused a few ripples online due, primarily, to the pricepoint. TechRader have a an article comparing Kindle Fire vs iPad 2 vs Galaxy Tab 7.7 vs HTC Flyer – a lot of this stuff comes down to whichever operating system you’ve invested your cash in (in terms of apps), but it’s still interesting to compare the specs of the different machines. Amazon have now put their Kindle Fire online for pre-order, incidentally. Meanwhile Ars have a hands-on review of the Galaxy Tab 8.9.
MetaFilter picked up an interesting story about a body suit that promises full mobility for the disabled. Digital Trends have an article on a very funky looking wireless steampunk styled mouse. DPreview have given the new Sony Nex-5N a typically thorough review – looks like an amazing camera thanks partially to the new mirror-less technology inside it. Uncrate cover Kodak’s Playful Waterproof Camera (and yes, that’s its name) which is good to 10ft and costs just $100.
BetaNews have an article on getting that funky Metro style Windows look and feel on your existing Windows 7 OS. NT Compatible report on-going development of Windows 8 via the official developers blog. CNN are reporting that Microsoft are keen to make Hotmail hot again. WinBeta report that an update coming down the pipe next week contains 23 new bug fixes including several ‘critical’ ones.
Web developing Mac users might be interesting in the thorough review of Espresso 2.0 over at Mac Appstorm- one of the big new features is integration of the excellent CSSEdit’s visual tools. That other trusted coding tool for a generation of Mac-based coders has recently had a major update too – BBEdit 10.1 is available now. iCreate have an interesting article on monetising your iWeb site.
With the impending arrival of the iPhone 4S, Macworld have some great information on what to do with your old iPhone. MacTrast have an intriguing report on attempts to get Android apps running under iOS which references this press release. Finally, TechCrunch have a possible sighting of the massively hyped Nexus Prime from Samsung, which has had fandroids frothing at the mouth lately.
Read MoreFive Star Wall – Week 1 – October 2011
Not the biggest fan of the folks on DeviantArt who spend their weekends looking for good photos on free stock library sxc.hu and then upload them as wallpapers with their name on them having simply resized them and run a filter or two over them. Irving’s created a neat montage from three stock images though, so I’ll cut him some slack. Dream within a Dream is a sweet monochrome wallpaper, download includes standard, widescreen and iPad resolutions. You can get it, here.
The Shit Box – For When You Need Something To Go On
We’ve covered all manner of hi-tech gizmos, gadgets, applications, add-ons and toys on Geekosity, but every now and then we find a product that confounds our expectations. This particular product addresses one of those age-old problems – how to have a crap, comfortably, when you’re away from your own cosy porcelain throne.
The Shit Box (no, we’re not making this up) is a portable toilet made from cardboard. It is correspondingly lightweight and measures just 14″ square in its flat-pack packaging. This reusable toilet, which can apparently take weights up 16stone/100kg (tested up to 20stone/127kg) assembles in minutes and comes complete with a duffle bag for carrying it, bio degradable poo bags which you insert into the box to collect your offerings and some tissues.
Developers, The Brown Corporation (no, I’m still not making this up) sell various packs, including the standard Shit Box (ideal for festivals so they say), Ploo Pack (for camping), the Camo Pack (you’ll be visible, but the cardboard box you’re shitting in will be hidden from view) and the Little Jack Girls Pack (a kids emergency toilet). They range in price from around £20 and can be accessorised with a waterproof jacket and restocked with extra poo bags.
Read MoreHamster Video Converter for Windows
There are hundreds of video conversions for Windows, some free, some commercial, some jammed full of unwanted browser toolbar add-ons and spyware, so it’s a brave company that decides to enter this market. Hamster have decided to concentrate on ease of use with their app and have concentrated on making it easy to convert videos to mobile, tablet and media player.
Hamster Video Converter employs a simple drag and drop interface and natively supports an incredible 200+ devices. It can convert pretty much any video format into 3GP, MP3, MP4, AVI, MPG, WMV, MPEG, FLV, HD, DVD and M2TS amongst others. I particular like the batch feature which enables you to cue up as many videos as you want, set the output format and then leave it going. It’s a terrific, completely free, little app that sports a fantastic interface and takes a lot of the hassle out of video conversion.
EaseUS Todo Backup – Excellent Free Windows Backup Tool
While security on Windows has improved drastically since the XP days, it’s still the number one target for virus/malware attacks and this alone is the reason why you should always backup your stuff. Factor in things like theft, hard drive failure and accidental file corruption and you have some fairly compelling reasons to put a good backup regimen in place.
EaseUS Todo Backup is a ‘disaster recovery’ backup tool, which means that it can backup your entire hard drive, not just your My Documents folder. It can backup disks or individual partitions in both differential and incremental modes, making for speedy updates. Should the worst happen and you need your backup, you can restore the image to dissimilar hardware or simply browse the image and restore specific items. And you can’t argue with the price.
Read MoreRightload – Another One-Click Cloud Uploader for Windows
If you wanted to upload files a few years ago you basically had one choice – an FTP program – probably a crappy clunky FTP program at that. Then came the reinvention of online storage as ‘the cloud’ and a veritable glut of services offering you room to relax and store your favourite photos, MP3s and Calvin and Hobbs strips. And to compliment the simple online storage services came simple uploaders.
Rightload is a tiny app that enables you to upload files directly from your PC to a pre-defined server. To send your stuff online you right-click on the files, pick your server and target folder and that’s it. It supports standard FTP servers, but also Facebook, Flickr, Tinypic and Imageshack. My favourite feature, however, is that once you’ve uploaded your image, you can also create a list of uploaded files in BB-Code or HTML to paste directly into a discussion forum thread.
Read MoreKod – Excellent Tabbed Programmer’s Coding App for Mac
If you’re a coder, you’re spoilt for choice with editors these days. While BBEdit remains the high water mark for coding apps, it suffers somewhat from feature bloat and takes nearly as long as Dreamweaver to open. If you find yourself crowded in by BBEdit’s mass of features and its free stablemate Text Wrangler isn’t doing it for you, then check out Kod a great little open source coding app.
Kod loads up in seconds and utilises a Chrome style tabbed environment and comes with support for more than 65 different languages/syntaxes which can easily be edited or extended. It also enables you to editing remote files accessible over HTTP or HTTPS. It’s a great little app free of bloat and well worth a look if TextEdit’s not doing it for you.
Read MoreAndroid Freebie of the Week – SkyScanner
Once upon a time, if you wanted to fly somewhere on your holidays, you had only one option, the travel agent. Those days are long gone now and, with online travel stores, 
direct sales by airlines and apps like this week’s featured freebie, the days of the high street travel agent must surely be as numbered as the independent record and book stores.
SkyScanner does just one thing – really well – it searches for airline flights. You simply choose where you are flying to and from and then hit the search button. The app will then display a list of flights from all the different airlines ordered by price, departure/arrival times, airline or duration. When you see a flight that interests you, just click on it to see the full details of the flight. If it meets your requirements you can choose from multiple booking options (eBookers, LastMinute and direct from the airline for instance) and pay up.
If we have any gripes at all it’s that the links between the app and the stores are lacking. When you click on the booking button it simply fires up your browser and takes you to that store or airline’s website – it doesn’t pre-fill any information and so you have to enter all your details again. It’s not a huge issue though, because SkyScanner is first and foremost a price checker and this is something it excels at.
Read MoreBladeslinger – The Best Looking iPhone Game Yet?
When the iPhone first came out, everyone focused on the interface and apps such as iBook, but what has really taken off on Apple’s smartphone is gaming. With the arrival of the iPhone 4 and the impending birth of the (presumably) high powered iPhone 5, developers have the chance to really push the envelope.
We’ve seen a few neat games on the iPhone but I don’t think anything’s come close to BladeSlinger, currently under development by Luma Arcade. This first-person shooter leverages the power of the Unity engine to bring a level of visual detail hitherto unheard-of on a mobile device.
Filterers and Finders – which are you?
The world-wide web has grown exponentially over the last decade and there’s every indication that it will continue to do so over the next. But a side-effect of that growth is that it becomes increasingly difficult to find anything meaningfully interesting to us, whatever our interests are.
There are many reasons why it’s so hard to find stuff that we care about. For starters, the signal to noise ratio is so high that you have to wade through an awful lot of crap to discover the golden nuggets. According to Netcraft there are in the region of 485,173,671 websites out 
there and that number is growing by about 22million sites per month. You don’t need to be a maths wizz to realise that that’s a lot of digital content, the vast majority of which is of absolutely no interest to us.
Originally we relied on human-sourced link directories to find interesting content. Yahoo, in its original iteration, was indexed by actual human beings, who vetted all submitted web sites and only included those perceived to have any value. Over time that task became increasingly difficult and Yahoo came to rely on spidered indexes – websites trawled by pre-programmed code. Other search engines, such as Alta Vista and Hotbot, competed with Yahoo for indexing prowess, but they all suffered from the same issue – vast numbers of search returns most of which were irrelevant to the search. It wasn’t until Google came on the scene, with its legendary page-rank logarithm, that it actually became possible to search for stuff easily on the web. Google’s influence on the web cannot be underestimated – I personally find it hard to believe that the web would have prospered even remotely as well as it has, without the awesome search results it made possible.
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