Archive for the ‘IT’ Category

CSS is effing awesome! WordPress’s editor is a bitch that can’t retain html code for shit. That is pretty much all. New about-sites, go get to know us! Hoping that the remaining two authors will finish theirs soon. Do you like our new favicon?

I’ll let you in on a secret: There are a few candidates. Which one do you like better?

[poll id=”4″]

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OK is a man sideways. If you did not already know this, was your mind blown? Also, the word bed looks like a bed. The question then becomes, is there a way of putting a man on a bed using nothing but ascii characters?

In other news, Windows 7 has not blue-screened on me for over a day, which is certainly a new record. Granted, I haven’t really done anything, and it has stopped receiving input from a bluetooth keyboard (that it insists is still connected) several times, but you just have to take what you get and run with it.

Going to some concerts tonight… Does anyone know who the fuck the “Skanksters” are?

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Moof!

Dear God! This has got to be the website of the year! Nay, the idea of the year is more accurate! So what is it, you ask? It is YouTube, but not. It’s the music service you always wanted. Granted, if you simply cannot listen to music that isn’t over 320kbit/s quality, this service is not for you, but if youtube sound quality is good enough for you, it is simply brilliant. It looks roughly like an iTunes spinoff, and it roughly is. It gets music from, you guessed, it, YouTube. I’ve tested getting music from videos I know are HD, but there are no popups or options, so I suppose it automatically grabs the highest quality possible, and plays it back to you, instantly, just like, you know, a normal music player would. It’s free youtube music! With a sleek interface and elegant search function, and functional controls, all on a website.

Will YouTubers ever decide on a grammatical standard?

But, as everyone knows, no one really likes websites, it’s kind of like an evil you have to live with. Except Mozilla has already solved this problem, and recently made the solution available to mac owners too! No matter which OS you are running, even you Linux fans, the combination of Mozilla Prism and moof is too good to pass up!

The service allows you to listen to any music you want, that exists on YouTube, or that you have uploaded. Though I haven’t tried it, due to the massiveness of my library, there seems to be an option to upload your library to their server. The site also allows you to add any song to the library on your personal account (yes, you need to register, but it’s completely free, and ad free to boot). After you’ve added a song, Moof even keeps the playcount for you. The creators really seem to have put a lot of effort into making a fully functional music app for you. What will they do next? Offline support?

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So Google has finally decided to get serious about computer operating systems. This can be nothing but great news. Of course, we can’t expect it to compete with the good old contenders as soon as it’s launched, it will most likely be used in the dark by linux enthusiasts. I expect it to be a flawed gem, but around the third release it should at least be good enough to run on netbooks. Around that point, if Google starts a heavy ad campaign, who knows? It’s working for Microsoft’s Bing, and Google is already well known, and used by many. It’ll never be a Windows killer, not even Steve Jobs will be able to do that, and that’s because Microsoft is just too deply embedded in the common man’s perception of computers. Until the computer world is revolutionized, Microsoft will likely be around to torment us all, their blue screens barring their nasty teeth at every corner of every street. Error: Missing system file: Chrome.dll

In other news, the Chrome browser is almost done for the Mac! Maybe I’ll be able to browse the web without crawling back to firefox now… There are some nasty bugs in the 64bit version of Safari 4 on Snow Leopard. It can’t make comments on facebook, but that’s happening on their server, can’t blame Apple for that, as proven by it’s fluctuation status. More importantly, the browser dies every time I try to use the blogger editor! As I dislike Firefox, I might just not write a lot of blogs until the issues is fixed.

Song of the Blog: Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright

Sincerely
Bjørn

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Have you tried Bing yet? You know, that new Microsoft search engine, powered (and advertised for) by Microsoft?

Why Microsoft thinks we need another old school web search engine is beyond me. With Web 3.0 about to bloom, and real-time search making it’s entrance, showing up sporadically as we speak, how could they possibly think that there is a market? WIth all the big bloggers raving about the real-time web every other day, why would anyone endeavor to fill a niche that Google beat to death a decade ago?

Ironically, finding this image on Bing.com was not as easy as you’d think, I had to refine the search and scroll pretty far to find it.

That being said, Microsoft is doing a pretty decent job. As a standard text search it doesn’t do anything new, it’s basically just Google with a new logo. It’s supposed to have all these nifty features, but they just don’t show up. I’m thinking maybe they only work in Internet Explorer, which is just a childish decision if that turns out to be the case, but neither google nor Bing provides any kind of fast confirmation. Supposedly, Bing will categorize your search results, pull up online stores when you’re searching for a product, look up reliable medical info, etc. Sadly, as far as I can tell, this is not the case. Simply put, none of the features touted are actually available (at least not to mac users).

However, I still love Bing. “But why, Burnie? Don’t you use a mac?” Yup, I sure do, and since I do, I have a very good wallpaper thing going, where it changes my wallpaper every 5 seconds. This means I need a large amount of wallpapers to keep things from getting repetitive, and Bing gives me just that! A steady supply of walls! Now, 4scrape already does a splendid job of that, but their search function is rubbish, where Microsoft’s is gold. Bing has one very amazing feature, which I use all the time: It lets you categorizes your image searches by size (small, medium, large, wallpaper), style, colour, and layout! Oh, and there’s a people function, but it’s largely useless as it doesn’t work properly.

This comes up if you search for Bing UK. I don’t know that doesn’t even
I’ll keep this short. I love the… Wow. As I was typing that sentence, I headed over to Bing to get another picture, the one that you see right over this text, and suddenly some new stuff is working. I don’t know what they did, they’re probably monitoring me, although that’s not my area of expertise, but the main point is, now the web search function is actually marginally less useless than it was at the beginning of this post! I went to the UK site, wondering if there was some racism going on, and now even the .com site thinks I’m from the UK, so I guess there was, but whatever, stuff works. The categorizing still doesn’t do much, mostly it just pulls up the “news” category no matter what I search for, but at least now it shows some promise!
Does it stand a chance against Google? No. Does it do anything new? No. Is it good? Yes, it’s good, but it doesn’t matter. Google is not going anywhere, and Microsoft is basically just spending a lot of money advertising for a new old product on a static market. It’s a bad business move, unless Microsoft decides to introduce real-time search to Bing some time very soon, and even then they’re not first, since Collecta launched today! So go check that out at Collecta.com! It’s a bit on the slow side, but at least they’re innovating! Maybe it’s just me, but I like a little bit of pause button with my search engine.
Song of the Blog: Everything’s Magic
Sincerely yours
Bjørn
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