1. Newsletter Editorial

Greetings everyone, and happy upcoming valentine's day.  If you have a carbon-based loved one in your life, might I suggest that you turn off the computer for the day and spend it with them.  Or else set up a lan network in your house so the two of you can chat via instant messenger.  If you don't have a human loved one in your life, don't stress it -- plenty of posts in this newsletter to excite your neurons.

And now let's get down to brass tacks.  If you haven't yet heard about and checked out the software creations unveiled on January 1st as part of our NANY (New Apps for the New Year) event, that's the first thing you should go check out -- several of the entries have continued to flourish and are worth your attention.

And if those applications aren't enough for you.. I'm excited to be able to highlight another wonderful surprise to emerge from the Coding Snacks section of our forum.  The Coding Snacks area is a place where anyone can come and post an idea or request for a new freeware utility -- and where coders hang out and implement these requests.  Recently someone posted a very clever idea to combine standby/hibernate modes with a computer restart operation, and it resulted in a very cool utility called Boot Snooze which you can read about below.

Let's see what else.. Well I put lots of posts in the "Your input requested" section of this newsletter (section 2), so if you've never posted on the forum before, why not pick one of those threads and add your thoughts.

For those of you that are always on the lookout for some nifty tools to stick on a USB drive or for one's back pocket when called to the rescue for some friend or family member, I ran across some nifty tools from:

http://www.rizonetech.com

I'm sorry to say folks that I won't be able to do the weekly news over the coming weeks. Trawling through the news on a daily basis typically happens at work (I have very little free time on weekdays), and my company is currently in the process of being relocated, generating a ton more work than usual. I expect that in the next 2 months or so my free time will pick up again and I'll be able to get back to the regular weekly tech news for you all. In the meantime, I'll be sure to post anything I come across that I think is relevant to the forum and will generate discussion. See you round the forum guys.
-Ehtyar

Table of Contents:

• 1. Facebook’s Project Titan: A Full Featured Webmail Product
• 2. Quantum Superclock Will Be Accurate Past End of Life On Earth
• 3. "Don't Be Evil" Meet "Spy On Everyone": How the NSA Deal Could Kill Google
• 4. H.264 Video Codec Stays Royalty-free for HTML5 Testers
• 5. Carbon Trade Phish Scam Disrupts Exchanges
• 6. Wikileaks Finds Cash to Continue
• 7. IiNet Wins! Film Industry's Case Torn to Shreds
• 8. Crystals in Meteorite Harder Than Diamonds
• 9. Comcast Sees End of IPv4 Tunnel, Beginning IPv6 Trial
• 10. Oz Banker Caught Porn-surfing On Live TV

Another nice real life spy story:


http://www.wired.com/maga...e/2010/01/ff_hideandseek/

I find the rise of twitter and the decline of blogging sad..  It seems like the amount of aggregate writing on the web is staying constant, we're just now getting a lot more one-line off-the-cuff throwaway comments, and less thoughtful considered commentary.


http://www.roughtype.com/...10/02/blogging_a_grea.php

Found this this morning, and it may be of use/interest to others

Lots of quick reference/cheat sheets for a wide variety of languages and applications

http://devcheatsheet.com/

Just came across this on Tom's Hardware site -- they really love it and say it's the first foolproof backup solution they've come across.  Might be the perfect gift for a loved one in your life who needs some backup intervention.


Review: http://www.tomshardware.c...backup-recovery,2450.html

Looks like its from $130 to $180 in price: http://www.seagate.com/replica/

Tom's Hardware is one of the most respected computer hardware review sites on the web.

They've started a new recurring series called "BestConfigs" where they regularly challenge some of their more serious people to put together and optimize a few machines at different price points, and then they analyze the hell out of them, overclock them, and sum up the performance.

So if you've been itching to try putting together a new PC, I think you'd do well to keep an eye on this series, and when you find a pc setup that tests particularly well and fits your budget, well then you have a parts list and you can give it a try.


http://www.tomshardware.c.../value-pc-build,2506.html

CacheMyWork is a handy utility that enables you to reboot Windows without losing your place in your work. It builds a checklist of currently open applications, and will restart the apps you've selected the next time you logon to the computer. Cache My Work is great for occasions when you need to unexpectedly reboot, such as on "Patch Tuesday", after installing new drivers, or when Windows runs out of Desktop Heap, Handles or GDI Objects (which happens more often than I'd like - even with the fixes described here).

If you're like me, you avoid rebooting your computer because it means you'll forget what you were working on. Every time I have to reboot because of some install/uninstall/patch, invariably I forget half of what I was working on because I don't remember all the docs and apps I have to reopen (those 5-15 minutes between "shutdown all apps" and "logged in, Windows quieted down" are huge opportunities for me to be randomized and lose my short-term memory cache).

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A DC Member wrote about an interesting idea for a utility, which was promptly coded by resident DC coding snack phenom Skwire, and dubbed "Boot Snooze":

The latest edition of Tech News Weekly is out.
Table of Contents:

• 1. Google Mystery Server Runs 13% of Active Websites
• 2. Who's the World's Largest Tech Firm?
• 3. Google Wants to See Client Addresses in DNS Queries
• 4. Gallery: The Best and Worst Fake Apple Tablets
• 5. Simpsons, Powerpuff Girls Porn Nets Jail Time for Australian
• 6. Aussie Censor Balks at Bijou Boobs
• 7. Settlement Rejected in ‘Shocking’ RIAA File Sharing Verdict
• 8. Ubisoft's New DRM Solution: You Have Be Online to Play
• 9. IPv4 Free Pool Drops Below 10%, 1.0.0.0/8 Allocated
• 10. Do You Have a Pad I Could Borrow?

This thread contains mini-reviews of several DJ tools including:

• PCDJ Red Mobile
• DJ Surface
• DJ Legend

Nice roundup today on MakeUseOf.com about some good hardware review sites.  They recommend the following sites:

• Tom’s Hardware Reviews
• Overclockers Club
• HardOCP
• Legion Hardware
• Hardware Canucks

http://www.makeuseof.com/...es-for-the-pc-enthusiast/