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.

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.

Visit ninite.com and you’ll see, right there on the front page, a list of checkboxes for commonly used Windows applications and utilities. It’s all categorized, and most of the big “must haves” are there. Check the ones you want to install, and hit the little “Get Installer” button at the bottom. This will download a tiny (less than 200k) executable which, when run, will download all the apps you picked and install them. There are no prompts, no sites to visit, nothing to sign up for. It installs all the apps to their default locations with default settings.

Take, for example, the notebook I just upgraded to Windows 7. I head to ninite.com, and check the boxes for Chrome, Firefox, Skype, Pidgin, iTunes, VLC, Hulu Desktop, Picasa, Microsoft Security Essentials, Adobe Reader, Flash (both IE and non-IE), Silverlight, uTorrent, Dropbox, Steam, and WinRAR. Hit the button, run the exe (which downloads in two seconds because it’s so small), and walk away. I come back later and all those apps are installed and ready to roll.

Genius.

It’s even smart enough to recognize that I’m running 64-bit Windows and grab the 64-bit versions of apps like iTunes, Security Essentials, and WinRAR. All they need to do now is add the Zune software and Ventrilo to their list and it’ll have literally everything I need on a new PC install (outside of boxed products and games). Try it. You’ll love it.

Dear ninite.com people – work your magic on a site for drivers!

Fantastic astronomy website Bad Astronomy (get it? Bad Ass…tronomy?) has word of a couple new pictures that are pretty incredible.  Both are pictures of galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, the nearest large cluster of galaxies to us – “only” about 60 million light years away. First up is NGC 4402:

Then we have NGC 4522:

The Virgo Cluster is made up of more than a thousand galaxies, packed fairly tightly together (for galaxies, anyway). The gravity they exhibit on each other causes them all to swarm around each other in crazy orbits at incredible speeds. Like, 10 million kilometers per hour. To put that in perspective, a high-powered rifle bullet may leave the muzzle at about 1,500 meters per second. That’s 5,400 km per hour.  So, some of these galaxies are whipping around over 1,800 times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet.

Now, there’s a very, very thin cloud of gas all around these galaxies, called the interstellar medium. It’s thinner than the atmosphere on Earth by a long shot. We’re talking about, like one to ten atoms per cubic centimeter. But over the massive size of a galaxy, it adds up. And when the galaxy is whipping through it at 1,800 times faster than a rifle bullet, this so-thin-you-can’t-see-it gas actually rips out the gasses within the galaxy.  What makes these pictures so cool is you can clearly see this happening.

You can grab bigger versions of the photos, including desktop wallpaper images and really big TIF files here: NGC 4022 and NGC 4522

It has been 19 years since Hubble launched in 1990. It’s initial construction, all the launches to put it in space and repair and upgrade it several times, have cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $8 billion. So, a little more than $400 million a year. Sound crazy high? Again, some numerical perspective: There are 156.3 million taxpayers in the U.S. (as of 2008) Hubble’s cost averages out to about $2.70 per year for each taxpayer. I can’t get a cup of goddamn Starbucks for that. Your tax dollars at work!

This isn’t exactly a crazy amount of radiation, and it’s probably not worth getting worked up about. I know this intellectually, and I’m sure my body can and does easily absorb that much radiation without complications. All kinds of radiation hits us all the time, and whether it’s harmful or not depends on the strength and length of exposure. EM radiation bombards us from radio towers (FM, AM, TV, etc.), power lines and outlets and stuff, cell phone towers, Wi-Fi, and a whole bunch from the freakin’ Sun itself. Of course, we do constantly talk about protecting yourself from all that solar radiation with sunscreen and such.

Even knowing that it’s almost certainly not harmful, it’s still a little troubling that my iPhone 3G, which I always keep in front pocket when I’m out of the house, is 0.24 - 1.39 W/kg. I mean, how often is it way down at the .24 range? When is it way up at 1.39? I suspect this range has to do with things like whether or not Wi-Fi is enabled. Annie’s G1 comes in at 1.11 W/kg, which is somewhere in the middle of the list. 3G smartphones, unsurprisingly, fare worse than…uh…dumbphones I guess you’d call them.

(By the way – I was going to name this post “I’m nuking by nuts!” but I chickened out.)

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.

The whole point of SwitchGames is to serve as a trading community, where you directly swap games with other gamers. You make a list of games you have available for trade, and a list of games you want, and the site recommends trades with its other members. You propose a trade, they accept, and you ship your games to each other. The interface is clean and it all seems to work rather well. You can trade systems and accessories and stuff, too.

It’s free, but not really. Signing up is free, and trades are free (except for your shipping costs, duh). But you get these “badges” for doing things like getting positive reviews and completing a certain number of trades and so on. They’re mostly superfluous, but the “Verified Membership Badge” is important. It means you have paid $1.95 to verify your shipping and billing addresses. This helps assure users that you’re not just on there to propose a bunch of fake trades and screw people over. I don’t expect a lot of people are going to want to trade with people who don’t have that badge. Still, two bucks to verify yourself and then just the cost of shipping to trade is a much better deal than you’ll get from GameStop.

The site even does stuff like print shipping labels for you. Of course, even though almost everything is “free,” there are a few upsells. There’s the aforementioned Verified Membership Badge, and they sell a “SafeTrade” for $5.95 where they guarantee your trade and provide first-class USPS shipping. There’s a YouTube walkthrough of the site/service here.

I’m not here endorsing the service, to be clear. I haven’t completed a trade yet, for starters. But I did sign up, get the Verified Membership Badge, and kick the tires a bit. I thought it looked pretty interesting, and given the amount of GameStop griping I hear from my circle of friends, I thought you all might want to check it out.