Gadget Access

by Donald Melanson, posted Apr 23rd 2008 at 12:37PM As you may have noticed, Xbox Live has been a little wonky as of late and, according to Microsoft’s latest status update, it looks like it could stay that way for at least a little while longer. While the service itself is apparently “up and running,” it seems that anyone matchmaking or using client voice communication may “experience difficulties,” which is just a little bit more than a minor issue. No word on a full return to form just yet, but it seems that the folks in Redmond are on the case.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Filed under: Gaming

by Joshua Topolsky, posted Apr 23rd 2008 at 9:56AM
The Eee-sparked trend towards smaller, cheaper laptops continues unabated — which is good news if you like small, cheap things. The lastest entry into the ultraportable market comes in the form of the Medion Akoya Mini, a handsome looking entry that clearly aims to compete with ASUS’ wunderkind. The 10-inch laptop scores big points right out of the box due to its inclusion of Intel’s infamous Atom CPU. The system will feature a traditional hard drive, with some form of Linux on-board, 1GB of RAM standard, two USB ports, a memory card slot, VGA out, and a 1.3 megapixel webcam. No word on if we’ll see this in the States, but it’s hitting Europe soon with a starting price of €399 (or about $638).

[Via le Journal du Geek; Thanks, Anh]

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Filed under: Laptops

Though iRiver P10 was introduced during the CES 2008 this January, it seems that not ready to be launched yet. However, one of the reader of China-based iMP3 manage to get one sample to play with it. This is an engineering sample with the buggy firmware version 0.9.

Generally, the reporter quite satisfy with it, especially on its big 4″ display! One thing to be dissapointed is its battery life. During the testing, it could only plays video up to 4 hours continuosly.

Still, no idea on when will it be available!

[ More image at iMP3 ]

iRiver, P10, PMP

Microsoft says the third and final service pack for the aging Windows XP will be available for download on April 29th while manufacturers and larger customers currently have SP3 in house. SP3 will include all updates released since 2004 when SP2 was released. Here are some added features in SP3:

A feature called Network Access Protection
that’s borrowed from the newer Windows Vista operating system. NAP
automatically validates a computer’s health, ensuring that it’s free of
bugs and viruses before allowing it access to a network.

Windows XP SP3 also includes improved “black hole” router
detection — a feature that automatically detects routers that are
silently discarding packets. In XP SP3, the feature is turned on by
default, according to Microsoft.

Windows XP SP3 also steals a page from Vista’s product
activation model, meaning that product keys for each copy of the
operating system don’t need to be entered during setup. The feature
should prove popular with corporate IT managers, who often need to
oversee hundreds, or even thousands, of operating system installations.

When a Microsoft spokesperson was asked for the number of fixes in XP SP3, they responded “one billion fixes” while resting the pinky finger aside the mouth.

Source: Information Week

Posted in Software

Here is one of the 10 ways that Dvice featured that you could become ‘greener’ that is not only tree-friendly, but mailbox and sanity friendly too! It’s a way to cleanse your mailbox of unwanted catalogs, credit card and other assorted offers that we all get via snail mail every day.

A non-profit called 41pounds.org will for $41 (for 5 years!) help to eliminate junk mail by directly contacting those direct mail companies that send you this stuff. In case you’re wondering why the name isn’t 41dollars, it’s because you are sent approximately 41lbs worth of junk mail each year.

Here are some frightening stats from their site:

To produce and process 4 million tons of junk mail a year, 100 million trees are destroyed, 28 billion gallons of water is wasted, and energy equivalent to 2.8 million cars is spent — which produces greenhouse gases and more global warming. In addition, $320 million of local taxes are spent to dispose of junk mail each year.

Here are even more horrendous stats. I’m signing up right now. $41 is a small fee to pay, not to mention that over 1/3 of that amount is donated to community and environmental organizations.

Cheers to the gents at 41pounds for starting up this great idea!

Posted in Miscellaneous

Dealing with a cold (man flu my partner calls it) is not the sort of virus I was planning to write about in a technology review but it has that knack of impacting on most aspects of every day life especially as it dulls the reflexes somewhat. This is what happened when I heard about the Live Mesh Technical Preview beta (Live Mesh - are we finally breaking free from the desk?) - by the time I got my lethargic mind round to signing up - the preview program was full. But if like me you want to be added to the waiting list then head on over to https://www.mesh.com.

Interest in Live Mesh follows on from recent interest in all things Web 2.0 and in particular the idea of what is Web 2.0 in 2008. I just hope that with all this additional bandwidth - my Internet broadband connection will remain up to the job - especially as I am so far from the local exchange - that last mile seems somewhat longer than a mile these days. Even Blog posting is taking much longer than it used to.

If you run a Blog and use ranking or comparison sites to assess your audience reach you may have been wondering Why your Alexa ranking has changed dramatically. It seems the people over at Alexa have been busy rethinking their strategy and are now taking into account more information than the merry band of Alexa toolbar users activities alone.

On a lighter note, our new Daily Notion micro-blog is really taking off with some highlights being you will not believe what happened to me … and when nothing makes sense.

Posted in Networking & Internet