Posts Tagged cool sites
Let’s get Press Pause on the Zune Marketplace
Posted by jasoncross in PC Tech, Software on October 30, 2009
Okay gang, I have a quick task for you. Don’t worry, this will take about 10 seconds and you don’t have to get up from your computer.
For some reason, Press Pause, the weekly video game web show I co-host with Carlos Rodela, is not listed in the Zune Marketplace. You can get it on iTunes here. You can subscribe to it in the Zune software by adding the RSS feed. But we want to be listed in the excellent Zune Marketplace, and for some reason it’s not there.
So, I need your help to submit it. If they get enough submissions, they’ll add it. Just follow these three steps.
1. Go to the Zune podcast page on the web. Any browser should work fine.
2. Click the bright “Submit a Podcast” button on the left-hand side.
3. In the dialog box that pops up, enter the following URL and click “Submit”: http://mevio.com/feeds/presspause.xml
That’s it! Thanks for all your help! And to show you that this wasn’t just a complete waste of your time…hey, you’re already at this neat Zune podcast directory thing on the web. Did you check it out a bit? You might want to. You can stream any podcast in the Zune marketplace (which is really big) right on the web page. Free. That includes audio and video podcasts. And you don’t need to have a Zune account, or to sign up for anything, or enter in some arcane RSS feed, or any of that stuff. It’s just a big, totally free podcast playback machine on the web. Neat, huh?
Update: Looks like we’re listed now. Thanks to everyone who submitted.
Ninite: A life-saver for new PCs and fresh Windows installs
Posted by jasoncross in PC Tech, Software on October 28, 2009
Upgrading to Windows 7? Sure, a lot of noise has been made about whether or not you can do an “in-place upgrade” or not, depending on which version of Windows you’re going from and which version of Win7 you’re going to. My advice – never do an in-place upgrade. If it’s a major new operating system, wipe your drive and start fresh. It’s nothing if not a good excuse to back up all your precious data.
Maybe you’re not doing an upgrade. Maybe you’re shopping around for a new PC. Either way, the biggest pain in the butt with getting a new PC or wiping your drive and starting fresh with a new OS is re-downloading and installing all those indispensable apps you use every day. (Well, the biggest pain is actually backing up all your photos and music and stuff – but you really should be doing that anyway.)
Enter one of the greatest websites in all creation, Ninite.com (no, that’s not hyberbole). It’s an idea so brilliant, so simple, and so useful that I wonder why it hasn’t been done years ago.
How Awesome is Hubble? (Answer: So Awesome)
Posted by jasoncross in Science on October 1, 2009
Back in May, NASA sent a crew of astronauts to the Hubble Space Telescope for the last time. STS-125 was an amazingly complex and risky mission, but also a smashing success. The crew fixed what wasn’t working and installed a bunch of new sensors and cameras and whoozits and whatchma-bobs. It took some months to test and calibrate and make sure everything was working, but we’re now getting back some new images from the greatest telescope ever built. And they’re awesome.
Cell Phone Radiation Chart
Posted by jasoncross in Science on September 28, 2009
The Environmental Working Group has a neat chart online that lists the amount of radiation leaked by most current cell phones. The ranking is in watt per kilogram (a measure of what engineers call “specific absorption rate” or SAR). Bear in mind that the FCC regulation limit is 1.6 W/kg, and there are quite a few phones that get incredibly close and a few that even hit 1.6 W/kg right on the head. That’s 1.6 W/kg measured over a gram of tissue or fluid, by the way.
Screw GameStop, Try SwitchGames
Posted by jasoncross in Gaming on September 20, 2009
There’s no love lost for GameStop among the core gamer demographic. My friends bitch about them all the time. The “exclusive” preorder deals, putting money down to reserve a game, and of course, the used game ripoff. Sell your game that came out two months ago for $15 in store credit, then go buy a used copy of some other game that came out two months ago for $45. What a deal! This is why I now buy all my games on Amazon. (Note to Publishers – if your super special collector’s edition of the game isn’t available on Amazon, you’re losing that sale on me. I’m thinkin’ about Forza Motorsport 3 here.)
So a friend recently turned me on to a pretty neat site called SwitchGames. It’s not officially launched yet – it’s in “beta 2.0″ – but I kicked the tires and it looks like it’s in pretty good shape and definitely usable.