Technology Matters

Monthly archives for February, 2011

Microsoft LifeCam Studio Web camera Review

Feb27
2011 Written by Mauldor

Of the many Webcam’s out there, Microsoft feel they can offer a true HD experience with there Microsoft LifeCam Studio. While the initial price was closer to £80, it has dropped all the way down to £50 which means its is either very good value or it was not quite as good as first thought and is not selling. I had the chance to try one out for a brief period and everything recorded was using the supplied software and office style lighting. The question on your lips when you stand in the store will be “Is this worth the money and should I buy it”. I hope the video and pictures presented can in some way help you make that choice.

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Firefox 4 Beta 12 with Adblock and Ghostery

Feb27
2011 Written by Mauldor

I need to state here that websites need adverts, they use this as a mean to get money which in turn helps pay for the time and effort they put into producing the goods. Static adverts I can live with and even sometimes they show me something I might want to buy and all is good but when a site (mostly the video streaming sites) start to push adverts down your throat and they are loud and annoying and repeat over and over on each new page you go to – this is when you as a person need to take a stand.

While I Love the way Google Chrome works, there is just too many things that make me want to jump ship back to Firefox such as Adverts, flash slowing down the browser, my NAS box not working properly via Chrome and so forth. I have given the latest Firefox 4 Beta 12 a run and added a couple of extension and I will document how  it is working out for me so far.

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Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

Feb27
2011 Written by Mauldor

Today I shall do a review of a Playstation 3 title called Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days – I bought this for a very cheap price of £9 at Game and this was the Limited Edition title which includes extra on-line maps and items. By Sheer chance I saw the PC version also on sale for £5 but I left this as I really only need it on one format. It is billed as a Shooter but it steers away from the normal FPS type games in that going in all guns blazing will not get you very far. I would like to describe this as a “Hide and shoot” type game as you fight from cover to cover to complete each part of the game.

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Posted in Gaming - Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Police Raid PS3 hackers House

Feb25
2011 Written by Mauldor

In the on-going war between the PS3 hackers and Sony – Hacker Graf_chokolo was raided by the police with items removed. Graf has contributed a number of things to the PS3 hacking community that has helped keep it active in its battle against Sony’s frequent firmware updates. The police confiscated all of Graf’s equipment and accounts that were related to PS3 hacking. Unfortunately for Sony, the company probably never anticipated that Graf would strike back. Earlier Graf had promised that if he was pushed by Sony, he would retaliate by releasing all of his PS3 hypervisor knowledge to the world.

Keeping his promise, Graf_chokolo immediately released all of his databases to the world in what has now become known as the Hypervisor Bible, a plethora of information that will help developers around the world reverse engineer the PS3 and hack it some more.

“Guys, i don’t joke, it’s serious.” Graf stated. “And to prove it, i kept my word and uploaded all my HV reversing stuff. Upload it everywhere so SONY couldn’t remove it easily. Grab it guys, it contains lots of knowledge about HV and HV procs.”

Are Sony just wasting there time here and are they driving people away from buying the PS3 – I think so.

Posted in Gaming - Tagged , , , , , , ,

Firefox 4 Delayed Once more

Feb25
2011 Written by Mauldor

 

It seems that Firefox 4 which was planned to be released in February has once again been delayed. There is talk of a Beta 13 coming out and they say that they have got the bugs down to 15 now. Beta 12 was scheduled for a Beta build late last week, but that slipped to Tuesday night. Now Mozilla says that the code will sit there for a “couple days ” and wait for patches. The current bug count is 15 (at the time of this writing) which is down 7 from 24 hours ago, but up 1 from 72 hours ago.

Earlier this week, Mozilla’s Christian Legnitto told Mozilla developers that Beta 12 is likely to be the last beta, but he wouldn’t rule out a Beta 13. It turns out there will be a beta 13, as pre-Beta 13 builds surfaced on Mozilla’s FTP server. This indicates that Mozilla will miss the RC release target of February. At this point, a March release for the final seems to be almost too optimistic as well.

Posted in Tech - Tagged , , , , ,

Playstation 3 and the Banning Order

Feb22
2011 Written by Mauldor

The one console that remained rock steady in the light of people hacking them to play illegal and unsigned software was the playstation 3. A person by the name of Geohot managed to work out the secret security key that all playstation software is signed with. Armed with this information, you could load a game / application onto the PS3 and it thought it was an official piece of software and ran no problems. Ther was in fact three area’s that were of concern here and these were playing pirated games (Sony looses money), Install Homebrew software and finally hacking on-line games somehow. Sony recently not only updated the firmware to 3.56 to combat this but also issued an email to all people it suspected of running the firmware and saying it would ban them if they did not remove it.

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Posted in Gaming - Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Trying out Twitter again

Feb20
2011 Written by Mauldor

In my time I had I think Three Twitter accounts (maybe even more) and for one reason or another I changed them, de-activated them or just plain never used them. Now my view of Twitter is a pointless exercise in life and I feel the people who use twitter to tell you about every second of there life probably do not have a social life were they interact with real humans. I do not understand why anyone would need to know that I have woken up, eating my breakfast, going to work, arrived at work, having lunch and so forth. Anyhow – I shall have another go at this and as my previous accounts are all now lost, I created a New One – Called LiquidTV. Fell free to Follow, I will follow back.

Posted in Thoughts - Tagged , , , ,

Playstation Move Starter Pack

Feb20
2011 Written by Mauldor

I had been looking at buying the Playstation Move starter pack for some time and it was either out of stock or the price was too expensive. When the VAT went up in the UK to 20% – most retailers seem to be selling this now for £50 upwards and for some reason, I was not happy to pay that price. While out shopping today, I happen to notice one box for sale in my local supermarket (Tesco) going for £40. I bit the bullet and bought the Pack – would I be happy with what I had just bought or would I regret chucking money at some sort of gimmick device?

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Posted in Gaming, Review - Tagged , , , , , , ,

PayPal Hacked maybe?

Feb15
2011 Written by Mauldor

Before I jump into the story, let me tell you a bit of background. I only have a paypal account as I sold some items on eBay many years ago and recently I used this method I think to buy something from eBay. As a general rule I do not log into my PayPal account, I have no funds on there and I honestly thought it was safe. Yet more background – my passwords are so hard (Uppercase, Lowercase, Numbers – no real words, longer than 12 characters in length) that I have to write them in a book which is secure. I would like to say that maybe Chrome saves my passwords but in the case of Paypal and the fact I had not logged into it for so long, it was not stored on this computer.

So what is the Hack you may ask? Well let me go through a sequence of events which all took place today and I am glad I carry a phone that shows my emails as they come in.

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Posted in Personal - Tagged , , , , ,

TinEye – Reverse Image Search

Feb15
2011 Written by Mauldor

Have you ever seen a wallpaper say on a video or whatever and wondered “what is that Wallpaper called” – well wonder no longer as there is a site called TinEye that does a reverse image search. The best way to do this if you have Windows 7 is pull up the Sniping tool (or any use any screen capture you may have installed) and save a picture of the image you want. Feed this into the site and it will bring back a whole list of sites along with sizes of the wallpaper you were looking for – pretty neat right!

Posted in Tech - Tagged , , , , , ,
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