BIOS-Mods, Music in the Cloud, Nemo Docs, HP TouchPad, Facial Recognition, Cell Phone Rescue and Hamster Powered Computing – HT029
Jim, Andrew and Christian are joined by Jason, one of the developers at BIOS-Mods.com, for this weeks’ installment of the Home Tech Podcast.
The guys fire off with Christian filling us in with most recent project, Christian-Net, which is his project to create a digital life archive!
Jason and Christian give us an insight into what the guys do over at BIOS-Mods.com, with respect to adding new features and over clocking your PC. The guys can alter most features on a motherboard, as well as adding new features that may have been hidden by the manufacturer.
Jim kicks off a discussion about moving your music to the cloud, following on from good friend of the show Brian Burgess’ article over at Information Week, comparing Apple’s new iCloud music service with Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player, as well as “Private Cloud” services such as Subsonic.
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Andrew brings us a new piece of software, Nemo Documents, which is a nifty piece of software that enables you to track your document editing in a calendar view.
Coming out of the HP Discover Conference, held this week in Vegas, we now have a launch date for the HP TouchPad, the WebOS competitor to the Apple iPad. WebOS fans have been waiting for this device for some time now, and it will be hitting the market on July 1, 2011, with pre-order being available from mid-June.
Pricing has been indicated to be competitive with the iPad, being $499 for the 16GB Wi-Fi version, and $599 for the 32GB Wi-Fi version.
The guys discuss the use of the various mobile operating systems (Apple iOS, Google Android, HP WebOS and Microsoft Windows 7 Tablet Edition) that we are beginning to see come to market, and potential uses in medical, education and enterprise businesses.
From Christians’ Corner, the Tweak-of-the-Week comes from our guest, Jason, which is a tweak that adds a raft of features to the context (right-click) menu, and is available from Jasons’ blog F3-MODS.
The Deal-of-the-Week is the SAMSUNG 12X BD-ROM SATA Internal Blu-ray Drive from NewEgg.com, a great buy at $64.99, and includes SATA cables, mounting screws and all the software you need to make your PC Blu-ray ready!
Christian talks to us about Facebook prompting for enabling your Facebook E-Mail and letting your friends send you SMS messages directly from Facebook.
Whilst talking about Facebook, Christian reminds us about the Facial Recognition issues we’ve read about over at PC World, which are associated with the Facebook image tagging feature. Christian shares some of his visions as to where image tagging can become extremely useful for purposes, such as unlocking your account by naming tagged friends. The guys talk about the accuracy of facial recognition from systems such as Facebook and Microsoft Live Gallery.
Jason brings us news of a High School using school issued computers to use the inbuilt webcams to take photographs and videos without the students being aware of the activity. The guys discuss being careful to understand what the usage policies mean when you are issued with by your school or company.
Jason tells us about Best Buy’s plans to downsize and become a specialty store, focusing on retail outlets selling items such as tablet computers and smartphones.
The guys wrap up the show with Jason introducing us to an solution to what for some, can be a very common problem – rescuing a cell phone that has been immersed in water.
And finally, for those of you who have long dreamt of a hamster powered computer, then the wait is over, as seen in the Worth 1000 Photo Effects Contest….
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Interesting show, interesting news about abuse of power by school IT. Again. I strongly disagree with any policy that would allow a school to turn on a web cam in a student’s bedroom, or anywhere else for that matter besides the classroom. Tracking? School IT already has the laptops pinging home as it is. There’s the tracking. The only time that camera needs to come on, if at all, is if the laptop is reported stolen. I’ll tell you one thing, if it were any child of mine being subjected to this kind of creepy policy, I’m afraid I’d be rather upset. And that’s putting it politely.
This was not a well-intentioned idea gone awry. It was an obviously flawed policy that somehow slipped through.
Sorry folks, but this annoys the heck out of me. We’re already being databased and tracked by too many things as it is. How about some privacy? How about some dignity? How about some common sense?