Networking

It’s no secret that HP MediaSmart Server owners have been having an awful time getting their device to operate correctly, er, at all since HP loosed its most recent software update on July 21st. In order to make sure owners have a solution implement its best damage control tactics, HP’s own Director of Marketing for the Connected Entertainment group has put out a statement informing users that the problems (slow console shown above) are more than a figment of their imagination. Furthermore, the so-called solution is to simply “install each update one at a time, independently,” because clearly HP cannot be bothered to fix a problem it helped create. Oh, it gets better. HP is also aware that PacketVideo (bundled with the update) “no longer supports media streaming to Sony’s PlayStation 3,” so it simply encourages owners to surf on over to a third-party website and hack up the PV database in order to get things back to normal. Jump on past the break for the patently ridiculous letter in its entirety.

[Image courtesy of Within Windows]

As you know HP released a software update for MediaSmart Server on July 21, following Microsoft’s release of Windows Home Server Power Pack 1. The HP software update provides support for 64-bit operating systems, plus two optional add-ins that a user may choose to install – McAfee Total Protection Service and PacketVideo PVConnect media server. The 64 bit upgrade prepares the MediaSmart Server for support of Vista 64-bit systems. Users do not need to enable this feature. It is an automatic update.

The PacketVideo Connect add-in provides advanced graphics such as photo thumbnails, in-menu browsing, and album art during remote access, as well as broader support for the more popular video, music and photo formats. The McAfee anti-virus add-in will provide Server side anti-virus protection with free virus definitions for seven months. Both of these are add-ins will be automatically downloaded to the Add-In folder in the software folder on the HP MediaSmart Server. The user can add them if they choose just like any other add-in.

The McAfee Total Protection Service must index all of the files stored on the Server in order to provide the protection against a virus attack. The PacketVideo PVConnect will, upon installation, create a database of all the media files such as photos, music and videos on the Server. When these two services are installed together, the combined ‘first run’ indexing by McAfee and database creation by PacketVideo, can use the majority of the resources on the Server. This may result in slow response times from the Server until those activities have been completed. If the user has also installed other add-ins or software packages on the Server there may be an additional lag in response time. It has also been reported that the Windows Home Server Console can become unresponsive during this time.

As a result, we recommend that users install each update one at a time, independently. Users should first install Windows Home Server Power Pack 1, then PVConnect followed by McAfee.

Additionally, since the release of the HP MediaSmart Server software update, it has been discovered that PacketVideo no longer supports media streaming to a Sony Playstation 3. This is an issue with PacketVideo, not with the MediaSmart Server. There are directions for opening the PV database and fixing the problem by inserting a space between “PLAYSTATION” and “3″ at http://forum.wegotserved.co.uk/index.php?s=61889a8d1ecc971a335b1d7e52d2eaf4&showtopic=2878

Sleipnir is a web browser that’s popular in Japan and pretty much unheard of in the rest of the world. The Windows-only browser lets users choose between the rendering engines used by market leaders Internet Explorer and Firefox. But Sleipnir is more than just a pretty front end for either browser. It’s a standalone tool that provides users with a huge number of customization options.

Fenrir, the company behind the free browser, has been making an English language version for a while now, but Computer World reports that the company is stepping up its efforts to promote the browser outside of Japan.

Here are a few of the things that make Sleipnir worth checking out:

• If you install the optional Gecko plugin, you can switch between the Firefox and Internet Explorer rendering engines with the click of a button. You can do something similar with the IETab add-on for Firefox, but Sleipnir includes this functionality out of the box.
• When you select text, a box shows up on screen letting you search for that text on the web or translate the text from English to Japanese and vice versa. You can even plot a highlighted address on a map.
• You can extend the browser’s functionality with scripts and plugins.

There’s also a portable version of Sleipnir that you can run from a flash drive.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Orca Browser is a web browser based on Firefox 3 which offers a bunch of features that you’d only get in Firefox by adding plugins and tweaking your browser settings. Orca is made by the same folks who develop the Avant Browser, which is based on Internet Explorer.

So what does Orca offer that you won’t find in the standard version of Firefox 3? First up, it’s fast. Like ridiculously fast. Like, if you thought Firefox 3 rendered web pages more quickly than Firefox 2, you an’t seen nothing yet fast. If that’s not enough for you, there’s also a service that lets you save your passwords, bookmarks, RSS feeds and other configuration settings online. That way you can sync your settings between Orca browsers installed on multiple machines.

Orca is also extremely customizable. You can adjust the toolbars and other elements of the browser with just a few clicks. And Orca comes with about 20 skins preloaded, making it easy to change the color scheme. The only major problems we see is that Orca des not support Firefox 3 add-ons, and that the browser is Windows only.

[via gHacks]

If the thought of downloading a large PDF file makes you (or your computer) shiver, check out PDF Download 2.0. This free Firefox extension gives you several options upon encountering a PDF file. First, you are presented with a warning that you have encountered a PDF file. Then you are given the choice to download it, view it as HTML, skip it or bypass using PDF Download.

Last year we looked at version 1.0. But since then, PDF Download has added at least one major new feature. Not only can you convert PDF to HTML for easier viewing and choose how and when to view your PDFs, you can now also convert a web page to a PDF document, keeping the general look and layout of the page.

PDF Download is useful because whenever you click on a PDF link, instead of just opening the link, you are given a choice on how to proceed. And some of those chices just might save you some time.

[Via download.com]

Moralize.us is a site with an interesting concept: users post hypothetical scenarios, and other users vote on whether a course of action is right or wrong, according to their own personal moral codes. It’s a nice theory, that we can crowdsourcing our tricky moral dilemmas. In practice, though, the responses mostly seem to hover around the level of discourse you might find in the comments on a YouTube video.

For example, someone asked “is it right or wrong to push a fat man off a bridge in front of a speeding train to stop it from killing five people?” The responses ranged from “Right: he’s fat” to “Wrong: the fat man is Michael Moore.” This is not exactly erudite stuff here, friends. Our recommendation: if Moralize.us is going to be more than a place for lame jokes, they should just ditch the ability to leave a justification, and just ask users to vote right or wrong. The data would probably be a lot more meaningful — because hey, they’re at zero now, and it can only get better.

That picture of Fluffy is never quite the same once you blow it up on your big, HD monitor. Fluffy looks less cute and much more pixilated than in real life. In fact, a lot of pictures and wallpapers just don’t look the same.

The folks over at NerdBusiness have just the solution. They have assembled 218 HD wallpapers for your viewing pleasure. Everything from mint leaves to scenic photos to otherworldly Photoshop environs and Mario Party 8 shots. Our favorite? Digg-er from mandolux.com

Check it out and see what looks good on your big screen.

With torrents hiding in all corners of the ‘net finding what you want can be difficult. Sure you could go to all the sites that host torrent files one by one or you could use Speckly and search all of them in one shot.

Speckly takes what you’re looking for and searches most of the popular torrent sites for you. Speckly further breaks down your search results into categories to help narrow down your results.

In our test we searched for the very popular Linux distro Ubuntu which returned 312 matches. From this Speckly also listed that 198 matches were for the software, 39 for books and 2 for movies. Un-categorized results were listed as others.

Speckly results also lets you know how many” complete sources” (seeders) have the file as well as how long the file has bee online. This all helps in determining the success of retrieving what you are looking for.

All in all Speckly is a great option if you know what you want but don’t want to spend the time hoping from one site to the next looking for it.

Due to many complaints from users of LiveJournal the company announced it will again offer basic accounts. Unlike most other free blogging platforms, LJ’s basic account has limited capabilities but the bonus of no advertising.

The option of signing up for a basic account was removed in March. Makes sense considering a free account with no advertising generates no money for LJ and in fact, probably costs the company money in storage space at the very least.

Apparently, LJ bloggers have grown accustomed to blogging without the distraction of ads. When the basic accounts were removed as a new user choice, many current users decided to hold a one day protest, refusing to blog or comment. In a news post LJ announced that basic accounts will return by the end of the summer for those in the Northern Hemisphere. The LJ team has also started a new blog specifically to discuss options and ideas for the future of basic accounts.

The LJ team admits it was probably a bad decision in the first place to remove the basic accounts but it looks like the developers plan to work with users on ideas to make things work to everyone’s satisfaction.

[Via Profy.com]

Remember when your less than cool cousin started blogging and used black text on a background covered in multi-colored flames? And you shortly developed a headache, not only from the content but from squinting and tilting your head to the side just so you could sort of read the text. If you are color blind your every day web browsing might be a bit like this as well.

DLS reader, Eric, sent us a question, wondering if there was anything out there to help color blind web surfers see things, like weather maps, a little bit more clearly. “Like 8-10% of males, I have a degree of red-green colorblindness. Unfortunately, many web designers do not take this group into account when designing web sites and applications. This leaves many features most people enjoy daily unusable or at least hard to read for people with this condition” Eric says.

The simply named Colorblind Web Page Filter may be a solution. It’s not fancy and it’s still in development stages, but if you type in a URL and pick your color filter (red/green colorblind, grayscale, etc.) according to the type of colorblindness you have it will load up a page that you can hopefully read a little bit better than that white text over kittens. If not, break out the 3D glasses to really spice things up!

[Thanks, Eric]

We’re big fans of FriendFeed, the social network aggregator that helps you keep track of your friends’ activities across different platforms like Twitter, LastFM, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and about 1,000 36 others. If you’re a fan or if you’re just getting started, below are 10 tools to help you experience it just the way you like, after the jump.

1. Filter FriendFeed by Service - when you don’t want one big data dump, this Greasemonkey user script allows you to filter streams by individual services and by context. After installing, you will get a display box of the 41 service icons. If you are within a specific user’s stream, then clicking on the icons will filter by that app for that particular person. If you’re browsing within friends, then clicking on the icons will filter by that service on all your friends’ activity.

2. Better FF subscribed to me - another Greasemonkey user script which adds a convenient subscribe button for the people you aren’t subscribed to on the FriendFeed “Subscribed to Me” page.

3. FF to Go - take FF with you on your phone. FF to Go is a web interface built specifically without Javascript so the rest of us mobile users without iphones can access FF. Since FF is built on Javascript, iphone users can just go to Friendfeed.com to see the interface automatically.

4. Mail 2 FF - if you’re on the run, you can post updates/photos to your Friendfeed account via email thanks to this neat little app. You just send an email to nickname key@mail2ff.com. Put your message in the email subject line and comments in the email body. Nickname refers to your Friendfeed nickname, is the actual plus sign, and key is your remote key.

5. FriendFeed Twitter client - this Greasemonkey script allows you to send a tweet to all your tweeps via FriendFeed. It does require you to provide your password. Once you do you will see a “Tweet” tab on your FF page, and clicking on it will get you to a message box where you can tweet away.

6. FriendFeed Profile - a Greasemonkey script which shows a user profile section on FF user pages by retrieving Twitter and LinkedIn information if available.

7. FriendFeed Facebook - yep, another Greasemonkey script that adds a Facebook tab to your FF page so you can click on it and get transported to Facebook where you can then give mini comments on your Facebook friends’ feeds. (Cue Ironic by Alanis Morrisette). Of course, you could just install the FriendFeed app within Facebook - whichever is your fancy.

8. FriendFeed Google Reader - since you’re wasting time being so productive staying in touch and updating your social networks on FF, while you’re there you should install this Greasemonkey script that puts a Google Reader tab on your FF page. Pinch yourself. You’ll never, ever have to leave FF again!

9. FriendFeed Filters: Friends and Groups - here’s another script to help you weed out all the noise you’re getting from all those dead A-listers. It allows you to create your own filters and segment your friends into various groups. When you click on a particular friend, you also can add them to any of the filter categories you just created.

Note: we could not edit the filter groups we created by clicking on the edit button. However, a workaround to this would be to click on one of your friends and either add/delete them in the filter category. If you have loads of friends though, this would be a hassle.

10. NoiseRiver - new web app built on FF’s API which allows you to filter the noise and indicate your likes/dislikes with the philosophy being recommended friends should be about shared interests and likes, not just popularity. NoiseRiver is going for what they call smart social connections - those based on mutual interests and likes.

A first step towards finding smarter social connections is a prompt to put in keywords and then using a slider of hate and love, position your keyword accordingly on the slider box.

You can even import keywords from your del.icio.us accounts. You do this for people as well and NoiseRiver displays a color overlay to help you see the posts which might have more relevance for you.

The app is only 3 weeks old and they’re adding new features every day. It will be interesting to see how they further develop the smarter social connections feature, so stay tuned.

Bonus track: Feedalizr, Twhirl, AlertThingy, Posty all Adobe AIR apps for your desktop to take your FF all the way to the desktop level, or not.

So, what’s your favorite noise filter for FriendFeed? Gotta favorite FriendFeed Adobe Air app? Share, cause we want must, must know.