Monday, December 17, 2007

Great Japanese bands

There are a LOT of bad japanese bands out there. With j-pop infesting the markets, it can give people the impression that there is no good musical taste whatsoever in the land of the rising sun. But fear not! Here is a short list of japanese bands that may make you think better of the scene in the far east.

Hip-Hop:
Dan the Automator

Noise:
Boredoms
Guitar Wolf
Melt-Banana

Punk:
Guitar Wolf
Shonen Knife

Read More......

Friday, November 30, 2007

Free Phone Management and Free Phone Calls by Google

Imagine if you could have someone call one number in your area code and have your work phone, home phone, cell phone and computer ring at the same time, along with the option of not having some phones ring outside of work day hours. Imagine having one voice mail with unlimited storage for all of your phones in one place. Imagine being able to block callers, screen callers, personalize voice mail greetings for different contacts, make and receive free calls and a hundred other features...ALL FOR FREE!

Well you can. With a service called GrandCentral and Gizmo soft phone. GrandCentral is a phone organizing tool owned by Google. It has a ton of cool services that will be hugely popular when let out of beta. Gizmo is an open source service similar to Skype...but with some deals that may give it the edge like the all calls free plan which lets you call any phone cell or landline for free if the person is also a Gizmo user. Gizmo is also usable on over 200 different models of cellular phone, so you can make really cheap roaming/international calls and instant message/voice message your friends on all the major protocols like aim, msn, and yahoo.

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Thursday, September 6, 2007

Joost Software Review

Software Reveiw: Joost Beta from the makers of Skype and Kazaa

Joost is a program that lets you watch TV shows. And no , its not another internet video stream program, this is real TV. CBS, National Geographic, BET, MTV, IndieFlix, to name a few. (If you want an invite, send me your e-mail and I'll give you one)

How it works: Joost uses P2P technology. You get content from the Joost servers (The original seeders), as well as from other users watching shows on Joost. As you watch content on Joost it is saved in a cache and Joost uploads from that cache to others as you watch TV. You never have the entire file downloaded on your computer at any one time, so that prevents people from stealing content, which is why big TV companies have added their shows to Joost.

The upside: There is almost no buffering. Watching Joost is the same as watching regular Television, and as more people join the network, it will only get better. The other really cool thing is the widgets. You can can use the chat widget to talk with other users watching your channel, a clock widget to keep track of what time it is, news feed, and a "blog this" widget to send a screen and post to the blog client of your choice. You can also use 3rd party widgets. Yep, fans can make widgets for Joost and put them up for others to download, and thats going to really make Joost a good program.

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Saturday, August 18, 2007

List of the best software and online services

Many people have a list of software and services that they consider the "Best". The software that everyone should have and use daily. I always disagree with those lists, and find them inadequate in their target. So I'm going to make my own list. My criteria for things making the list is straight forward. Items have to be usable on a daily basis. Which means an easy to understand, clean interface and alot of features both basic and advanced.

I'm going to list software and services in a series by catagory so things will be easier to find. I'll most likely be making lists for the following:

Media players and hosting sites (multi-media, music, radio, movies, internet-tv, comics)
Media Manipulation (video editing, photo editing, audio editing, 3D rendering)
Communications (voip, instant messaging, e-mail, irc, social networks, usenet)
Security (anti-virus, firewall, adware, tackers, wifi networks, proxy servers)
Office/School Tools (text editors, dictionaries, spreadsheets, organizing software, alerts, pdf's)
Internet (browsers, ftp, file-sharing, file-hosting, logging, website hosts, website creation)
Utilities (password managers, thumb drive, file-managers, search tools, boot cd, network tools)
Fun Stuff (games, muds, shell replacements, icons, themes)