Thought I’d give a quick update and test out a WordPress android app. And mention that Diggnation was a blast!!

Another week, another Google product launch rumor—but this one’s a bit more notable than most. If TechCrunch’s source is correct, the first iteration of the operating system may be available for download within a week from today—but it would be far from a plug-and-play download. Unless Google employees and/or hardware manufacturers have a little Manhattan-Project-type camp set up, hardware support is likely to be specific to a few netbook or laptop models at first, and expanding out from there. We’d previously seen suggestions that Chrome OS on netbooks would appear this month, and Google itself has pegged Chrome’s release to this fall. Any which way, we’ll be eager to see what it actually looks and feels like. Let’s hear where you think Chrome OS will make its mark in the comments.

After we’ve been hearing all along that Xbox 360 had a game console exclusivity to Netflix streaming, Sony just announced it, too, will be joining in on the fun. Timeframe? Sometime next month.

Press Release Via Playstation Blog

COMING SOON: NETFLIX MEMBERS CAN INSTANTLY WATCH MOVIES AND TV EPISODES STREAMED TO TVs VIA THE PLAYSTATION®3 COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM

With Movies Streamed Instantly from Netflix, Blu-ray/DVD Playback and Downloadable Videos via the PlayStation®Network, the PlayStation 3 System Offers The Industry’s Most Comprehensive Options for Watching Movies and TV Shows

FOSTER CITY and LOS GATOS, Calif., October 26, 2009 – Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. (SCEA) and Netflix, Inc. [Nasdaq: NFLX] today announced that they are joining forces to make thousands of movies and TV episodes from Netflix available to be streamed instantly to TVs via the PlayStation®3 (PS3™) computer entertainment system. Netflix expects to begin streaming via the PS3 system next month at no additional cost to Netflix members in the United States who have a PS3 system.

Today’s announcement pairs two of the most popular and fastest growing home entertainment brands in the U.S. The PS3 system’s installed base has reached close to 9 million units in the United States, and Netflix recently reported 11.1 million U.S. subscribers as of September 30.

The partnership further solidifies the PS3 system as the most complete home entertainment hub on the market today, enabling consumers to play high-definition games, watch Blu-ray movies, listen to music, view photos, browse the Internet, and download content from PlayStation®Network − from exclusive games to blockbuster movies and popular TV shows. PS3 system owners will soon enjoy an unparalleled experience watching their favorite movies and TV shows streamed instantly from Netflix, downloading from the PlayStation Network or watching Blu-ray/DVD media. The Netflix offering expands on the entertainment experience delivered to PS3 system owners via PlayStation Network.

For only $8.99 a month, Netflix members can instantly watch unlimited movies and TV episodes streamed to their TVs and computers via Netflix ready devices such as the PS3 system and can receive unlimited DVDs delivered quickly to their homes.

“The PlayStation 3 system has always been about more than just gaming, and it will soon be the only platform in the industry to offer consumers such a variety of convenient options for enjoying movies and TV shows,” said Jack Tretton, president and CEO, SCEA. “Whether you want to watch content on Blu-ray disc and DVD, download it from the PlayStation Network’s video delivery service, or stream videos instantly from Netflix, the PS3 system is the only solution that offers it all.”

“As instantly watching movies and TV episodes streamed from Netflix becomes an increasingly popular way to enjoy the Netflix service, our goal is to rapidly expand the devices that stream to our members,” said Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings. “As a leading game console and Blu-ray disc player, bringing Netflix to the PS3 system is a real win for both Netflix members and PS3 system owners.”

Initially, watching movies instantly streamed from Netflix via the PS3 system will be enabled by a free, instant streaming Blu-ray disc that is being made available to all Netflix members. The free instant streaming disc leverages Blu-ray’s BD-Live™ technology to access the Internet and activate the Netflix user interface on the PS3 system, which must be online via Wi-Fi or Ethernet.

Netflix members simply slide the disc into their PS3 systems to reveal movies and TV episodes that can be watched instantly. These titles are conveniently organized into a variety of categories based on members’ personal preferences, popular genres, new arrivals and members’ individual instant Queues. Members can use the Netflix Web site or navigate directly on their PS3 systems to add movies and TV shows to their Queues. With the PS3 system’s Wireless Controller, members can choose a movie to watch from their instant Queues or just play directly from any of the lists. They also have the ability to read synopses and rate movies. In addition, they have the option of fast-forwarding and rewinding the video stream via the Wireless Controller.

Netflix members and PS3 system owners can now reserve a free instant streaming disc for PS3 systems by going to www.netflix.com/ps3. Upon availability, the instant streaming disc will be delivered for free by first-class mail, generally one business day after members request it.

About Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc.

Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. continues to redefine the entertainment lifestyle with its PlayStation® and PS one® game consoles, the PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system, the PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system, the ground-breaking PlayStation®3 (PS3™) computer entertainment system and its digital services which include the PlayStation®Network and the PlayStation®Store.

Recognized as the undisputed industry leader, Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. markets the PlayStation family of products and develops, publishes, markets and distributes software for the PS one® game console, the PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system, and the PlayStation 3 and PSP systems for the North American market. Based in Foster City, Calif., Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. serves as headquarters for all North American operations and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

About Netflix, Inc.

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) is the world’s largest online movie rental service, with more than more than 11 million subscribers. For only $8.99 a month, Netflix members can instantly watch unlimited movies and TV episodes streamed to their TVs and computers and can receive unlimited DVDs delivered quickly to their homes. There are never any due dates or late fees. Netflix members can exchange DVDs as often as they want using a postage-paid return envelope. Members can choose from a vast selection of DVD titles and a growing library of movies and TV episodes that can be watched instantly. Netflix is partnering with leaders in consumer electronics to bring to market a range of devices that can instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix directly to members’ TVs. These devices currently include Blu-ray disc players and new Internet TVs from LG Electronics; Blu-ray disc players from Samsung and Best Buy’s Insignia brand; the Roku digital video player; Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console; TiVo digital video recorders; and, soon, the PS3 system and Internet TVs from Sony and VIZIO.

Time to rejoice for all the gaming fans.

The popular flight action game, Ace Combat could be coming soon to the iPhone.

This was revealed by the developers of the game, Namco Bandai at the Tokya Games Show 2009 where a demo of the upcoming iPhone game, Ace Combat Xi was on display.

Considering that a game like Ace Combat requires terrific skill in maneuvering and shooting targets – something that could be pretty difficult on a small screen like iPhone’s, reviews show that Namco Bandai has done an excellent work in making it so simple to ‘fly’ and ‘shoot down’ enemies.

Players control the flight movements with tilting the iPhone while all other controls like throttle, selecting and firing weapons are all available as icons on the screen.

Here are a few reviews from those who were able to try their hands at the game:

“iPhone Ace Combat plays pretty much how you’d expect it to, but for a series that’s as huge on control and precision as Ace Combat it’s awesome to see that Project Aces managed to squeeze all the controls from the main game into the tiny platform.” – IGN’s Mark Bozon

“The demo level I played was a simple enough matter of keeping enemy fighters (who were very far away and therefore tiny on the screen) in target lock until the icon turned red, then tapping the “missile” icon and watching them explode. For a bite-sized Ace Combat experience, that seems like enough. The graphical presentation is somewhere in the early PS2 era, which is to say very impressive for an iPhone experience.” – JC Fletcher,Joystiq.com

You can checkout the demo video of Ace Combat Xi for iPhone below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

While the demo of the game was available on iPhone 3GS, Namco Bandai are believed to be working on providing a similar experience on iPhone 3G as well. ‘Ace Combat Xi’ is expected to be available on the iPhone App Store sometime in the winter.

If you are a fan of Ace Combat like we are, let us know in the comments how much will you be ready to pay for this iPhone game.

-Source

It’s not doing anything crazy like lowering the price, but it looks like Mad Catz is at least set to give fighting game fans a few more options when it comes to choosing their peripheral of choice. As usual, the headliner is the company’s Tournament Edition fightstick, which dials things back after the explosion of color on the Comic-Con exclusive edition, but otherwise remains identical inside and out. Those that honed their Street Fighter skills on their SNES or Genesis can also now choose from a new range of fightpads, featuring artwork with your choice of M. Bison, Guile, Zangief, C. Viper, Cammy, or Sagat. No firm release date just yet, but the whole lot should be out sometime this fall for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with the fightstick setting you back the usual $149.99, and the fightpads running a considerably more affordable $39.99 apiece.

-Source

In an attempt to track down the reason behind the oft-complained poor battery life of its iPhone OS 3.0, Apple has sought the help of the affected users! Going by the messages on Apple’s support forum, some users of the iPhone have been urged by the company to install power-logging software so that the underlying problem with the battery can be detected.

According to reports from the The iPhone Blog (TiPB), Apple has contacted an “undisclosed number of users;” and has asked them to respond to 11 questions pertaining to their iPhone usage, in terms of battery drain.

The TiPB said that in a note that Apple has sent to the selected users, the company has enclosed an attachment that installs a profile – a developer-level app-provisioning scheme – sets up an Apple-supplied Battery Life Logging utility, to sync battery-life data logs to iTunes.

Talking about the Apple move, on a support thread associated with poor battery performance, a user identified as “mikefradette” said: “Some of you may already have been informed via e-mail by Apple, but for those of you that haven’t, I can assure you that Apple is trying to get to the bottom of this problem.”

Appreciating the Apple move, Aaron Vronko, the CEO of Michigan-based iPhone repair shop Rapid Repair, said that the recent “diagnostics” would likely help Apple in narrowing down the ‘nagging’ battery-related problems!

GrandCentral, the service that Google bought two years ago and transformed into Google Voice, is shutting its doors tomorrow—requiring all users to migrate to Google Voice. That means if you’re a GrandCentral user who hasn’t already made the upgrade, you’d better transition today if you want to continue using your GrandCentral/Google Voice number.

Of all the fakeables in consumer electronics, the weekly newspaper ad has to be one of the easiest marks. Still, this one looks pretty legit, and if it’s real it means either we’re getting a much overdue Wii price cut on September 27th, or someone on the Toys R Us ad team has been severely misinformed. If it’s not true and we have to wait another holiday season for the Wii to break the $200 mark, we’re not getting Nintendo that Snuggie we promised it for Christmas — everybody knows only good little boys, girls and multinational game companies get presents.

Source – Joystiq

So I Thought Id Throw up a few Quick Tips on Ubuntu.  Just a few commands you may or may not know but they do come in Handy.

So many different Kernels out there But say you have a driver or piece of software that requires a certain kernel.  What is a Kernel you ask. Well lets ask Wikipedia :

In computing, the kernel is the central component of most computer operating systems. Its responsibilities include managing the system’s resources (the communication between hardware and software components).[1] Usually as a basic component of an operating system, a kernel can provide the lowest-level abstraction layer for the resources (especially memory, processors and I/O devices) that application software must control to perform its function. It typically makes these facilities available to application processes through inter-process communication mechanisms and system calls.

Operating System tasks are done differently by different kernels, depending on their design and implementation. While monolithic kernels will try to achieve these goals by executing all the operating system code in the same address space to increase the performance of the system, microkernels run most of the operating system services in user space as servers, aiming to improve maintainability and modularity of the operating system.[2] A range of possibilities exists between these two extremes.

So in partial laymen terms…  a Kernel is an operating system kernel is the piece or pieces of software that is responsible for servicing resource requests from applications and the management of resources. A kernel has facilities to receive resource requests and grant access to resources such as allocating space for a new file or creating a network connection. To generalize, kernels use a system call (or syscall) interface to handshake with applications.

In really Laymen terms..  Its what makes your Operating System function.

Now how do you find out what your kernel version is?  Easy from a terminal prompt:

uname -a

Need to find out what distribution of Ubuntu you are running ….  i.e.  Edgy, Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty, Karmic , again from a terminal prompt :

cat /etc/issue

So say your a little bit more of  advanced user? and you want to mount a remote path via ssh. easy.

There are quite a few steps that you’ll have to follow, so get ready and open a terminal window.

First we’ll install the module:

sudo apt-get install sshfs

Now we will use the modprobe command to load it

sudo modprobe fuse

We’ll need to set up some permissions in order to access the utilities. Replace with your username.

sudo adduser  fuse

sudo chown root:fuse /dev/fuse

sudo chmod +x /dev/fusermount

Since we’ve added ourselves to a user group, we need to logout and back in at this point before we continue.

Now we’ll create a directory to mount the remote folder in. I chose to create it in my home directory and call it remoteserv.

mkdir ~/remoteserv

Now we have the command to actually mount it. You’ll be prompted to save the server key and for your remote password.

 sshfs @:/remotepath ~/remoteserv

Now you should be able to cd into the directory and start using it as if it was local.

fury@geekyServ:~/remoteserv$ ls -l
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 1 915247 155725 4096 2007-12-13 13:30 plasmaburn.net
drwxr-sr-x 1 root root 4096 2009-09-11 06:45 logs
drwx—— 1 9251247 155725 4096 2009-08-11 16:09 Maildir
drwxrwxr-x 1 151247 155725 4096 2008-10-29 02:34 scripts

Hope that is some help for some folks.   More to Come.. Stay tuned for a How-To on Fedora 11 / GMA500

Just submitted to Apple as a bug, rpetrich (developer of the ActionMenu packages in Cydia) discovered an interesting security bug in the iPhone firmware.

If a password is inputted in a field, shake to undo, and you will be able to see the character you are deleting. Simply repeat this for every character, and you have the password.

Obviously this isn’t an issue that would be useful for those with a criminal bent, as you’d have to be within grabbing distance of someone who input their password, DIDN’T navigate off the page, and then left their iPhone… but a security bug none-the-less. rpetrich lets us know, this also works in any apps that save passwords (such as most Twitter apps) – making this bug much more severe.

You can submit security bugs to Apple here.

rpetrich’s Twitter

You know how it goes… you finally signed up for Facebook after your friends and family kept bugging you, and now your Facebook Wall is just covered in idiotic quizzes, applications, and other random nonsense. You can’t block everybody that would defeat the purpose of a Facebook page, so now what can you do?

Blocking Individual Applications

If your significant other is completely addicted to some retarded Flash game on Facebook, you’ve probably ended up with a ton of messages about every tiny accomplishment in the game. The easy option is to simply click Hide –> Hide Application.

This sometimes works… but with the amount of nonsense on Facebook, you’ll quickly be overrun with new games on a daily basis, and you’ll have to hide every single one of them, defeating the whole purpose of reading this article.

Blocking Posts On Your Wall

If you’ve really given up, and don’t need your wall cluttered up with stuff that you didn’t put there, you can simply block anybody and everybody from posting to your wall by changing the settings… hit the Settings link while looking at your wall.

Then remove the checkbox by the option for “Friends may post to my Wall”.

Your friends will still be able to message you, chat, and you can still comment on their idiotic nonsense—but they won’t be able to post anything to your wall.

Use Facebook Purity to Block Annoying Applications

If you can’t disable your Wall entirely because you want your friends to be able to post real messages there, you can always use a Greasemonkey script for the Firefox browser, which will completely disable all of those idiotic quizzes, applications, and other nonsense.

You’ll need to make sure that you first install the Greasemonkey extension and restart Firefox, if you haven’t already. Once you’ve done so, head over to the Facebook Purity installation page, click the Install button, and you’ll be prompted to install the script.

The next time you load up your Facebook Wall, you should see that the idiotic nonsense is blocked, and there’s a tiny little link in the upper right that lets you unhide the hidden stuff if you so choose.

It’s the type of script that is pretty much required if you want to use Facebook without losing your mind.

Download Facebook Purity Greasemonkey Script from userscripts.org

Remember when the Wi-Fi Alliance finalized the 802.11 draft-n spec some two and a half years ago? Of course you don’t — as long as your media players, laptops, and the like can connect to each other (and to the cloud) without a hiccup you probably don’t care about IEEE’s paper trail. The standard, which saw no major changes between then and now (meaning that all your draft-n devices should work fine with the finalized standard) theoretically connects at 300Mbps, or about six times the peak speed of 802.11g. But you already know that, since you’ve been using it for years now. The final standard is set to be published mid-October.

-Source

Well I got Snow Leopard installed.  Had to do a Clean install though, my lack of knowledge on Macs caused that. A couple weeks ago I upgraded my hard drive in my MacBook Pro from a 80gig to a 120gig Hard drive, and I didn’t know it needed to be a GUID partition.  Anyways I have it all installed and customized and setup how I like it.  And I must say its Everything, Everyone said it would be and more!  BUT…

I’m Having one issue and its an annoyance.

Is anyone else getting a Service Battery Indicator and their battery acting all weird?  Running on Battery it said I had 1:30 Mins of Time.. I normally get 2:30 to 3:hrs of time on a charge.  So I let the Mac Drain to do a calibration I noticed when the computer shutdown. I looked at the LED indicator on the battery and it showed it still had 1/2 charge left.  So I did a SMC Reset. Powered back on and Service Battery Indicator was still there.  I Did a Full Charge Let it sit for 5 hours  and pulled the plug and the service battery indicator went away.   YEAH!!

Well Now its back ..  And I can get rid of it for a few days but that’s about it.   There are many forum posts on Apples forums about this so I know the problem is somewhat wide spread. I also booted from an External HD that has Leopard (10.5) loaded on it and the Battery works like a Champ on this. So I Know its Software related for sure.

If you are having this issue comment back.  Or if you have a fix let us know.

It’s one thing to have your computer crash. It’s another to have it crash in front of thousands of sports fans. This latest humiliation took place Saturday at the pre-game festivities for the Oklahoma/Brigham Young game at the at the brand new $1.15 billion Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. TUAW Reader Jeff tells them that they had a breakdown on the scoreboard screens: first, the screens went blank, then displayed some odd ASCII gibberish, then announced to the assembled crowd that things weren’t going so well in Microsoft land. Jeff was there with his trusty iPhone to capture the moment for us, and we present it to you on this day when you’re not working, either. It’s not the first time this kind of embarrassing stuff has happened; Microsoft had another glitch at the Beijing Olympics last year. But hey, it could happen to anybody, right?