Welcome To Gmail Central

Gmail helped revolutionize the entire webmail landscape when it was first released to beta in April 2004.
One person loved it so much they have created a Gmail Tips website that's designed to be a portal to all known Gmail tweaks and add-ons.
You can visit the Gmailtips.com here.
Thanks to Digg.com for the link.

Oops I Goofed

After a little further checking and thanks to some very informed geeks it turns out Exeem does in fact contain some spyware bundled with some pretty intrusive adware.
I've found a better solution with Exeem Lite which is guaranteed to be 100% spyware and adware free, you can download it here.

The Greatest American

The Discovery Channel is looking for the Greatest American of all Time.
They are in search of nominations until February 1, at which point they will cull the list down to 100 people by March.
Then watch for a new show on Discovery Channel in April and May as they countdown from number 100 to the greatest American of all time.
You can nominate up to five people here, and for more information you can visit this link.
Thanks to Ann for the tip.

Exeem Goes Beta

Former users of Suprnova can finally end the weeks of mourning over the abrupt shutdown of the popular bittorrent site as eXeem™ has finally gone beta.
eXeem™ is the newest peer to peer (P2P) file sharing application to hit the web from the creators of Suprnova.
Some of the best features of the new P2P application include a solid rating and comment system, easy network uploads and the elimination of nodes and trackers.
The program is currently in beta, and is ad-supported but it doesn't contain any spyware.
You can download eXeem™ here. Thanks to Digg.com for the link.

Thursday Geekdom Round-up

A little bit of a different post here's what's going on in Geekdom today.

~ ThinkSecret.com has finally found legal representation in it's fight against Apple. ThinkSecret.com is owned and run by 19 year old Harvard Law student Nick Ciarelli, and is being sued by Apple for posting stories in late December about a variety of unreleased products that Apple was planning to announce at Mac World including the Mac Mini and iPod shuffle. ThinkSecret.com is now represented pro-bono by renowned San Francisco Internet lawyer Terry Gross who once represented the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group who champions consumer fair use laws.
~ According to The Wall Street Journal, HP will now region encode printer cartridges so that consumers will be forced to buy replacement cartridges for their printers in the country where they live. For example if you live in the U.K. and buy cartridges from a U.S. vendor the cartridges will not work in your European bought printer. The full story is here.
~ It looks like the long awaited sequel to the 1998 movie version of the TV show the X-files is getting closer to production. According to a story in the Sun Newspaper in England series creator Chris Carter is close to finishing the script for the new movie and David Duchovny has already committed to the project. The full story is here.
~ Microsoft yesterday announced plans to offer it's Outlook e-mail client as a subscription service. CNet has the story here.
~ AOL has announced that they are jumping into the desktop search arena along with Google and Yahoo. ZDNet has the story here.
~ Slashdot is reporting that the U.S. Department of Justice has reached plea agreements with two men who operated P2P filesharing hubs. William Trowbridge of Johnson City, New York owned and operated MovieRoom.com from 2002 to 2004, while Michael Chicoine of San Antonio, Texas ran Achenon's Alley. Both men plead guilty to conspiracy to commit felony criminal copyright infringement and face up to five years in prison and/or $250,000 in fines.

Looking For Geeks

As many of you know getting access to this blog can be accomplished in one of two ways, either directly via http://jamesmason.blogspot.com, or through a redirection from my domain www.closetgeek.net.
I bought the domain ClosetGeek.net because I wanted to create a website devoted to the beginning or mid-level geek who was looking for tech news, information and troubleshooting.
I have been working on the new site for a while now, and it looks to be ready for beta on March 1, and go live sometime shortly thereafter.
I've now reached the point in site development where I can begin the process of recruiting site contributors.
I am looking for people to contribute original content in the following channels - Windows, Linux, all things Apple, Open Source software reviews, general troubleshooting, online security, WIFI, blogging, hardware reviews, internet news and trends, gadgets, white hat hacking and modding.
In addition to being a geek, contributors should have good writing skills, be avid tech enthusiast and be willing to submit content on a regular basis.
If you are interested please send me an e-mail here, and include the following:
- A brief description about yourself, including why you consider yourself to be a geek
- Your age and where you live
- What channels you would be interested in posting, and how often you feel you could contribute
- Some samples of your past work (links if possible, but definitely no attachments), or a link to your blog if you have one.
- Contact information
Remember you do not have to be the most experienced writer in the world or an HTML guru to contribute, the only real pre-requisite is that you must be a geek.

RIP Tech TV

The worst kept secret in the U.S. television industry was confirmed today as G4 Tech TV Founder and CEO Charles Hirschhorn announced that the network would be re-branded G4 TV on Februaury 15.
G4, owned by Comcast, purchased Tech TV (TTV) from Vulcan Ventures last year and quickly merged the two channels into one entity, and over the last 12 months has stripped the channel of most of it's tech content, and instead pushed programming aimed at gamers.
Most experts agree that G4 purchased Tech TV, solely because TTV had more than 50 million subscribers in the U.S., while G4 languished with less than 5 million.
The new G4 will almost certainly be all video games, all the time.
This signals the beginning of a huge void for people looking for tech news and content on television, and will not do much to win over the original Tech TV audience who have nothing but disdain for G4.
No word yet on what is to become of G4 Tech TV Canada. The Canadian Tech TV is majority owned by Rogers Communications, with Comcast holding less than 1/3 ownership, and as a result G4 U.S. has next to no say in content north of the border.
Rogers had no immediate comment when contacted, stay tuned for details.

A Mac In Every Home, CES Round-up

First a warning, if you plan to watch Apple CEO Steve Job's webcast from MacWorld, skip down to the CES round-up.
Among the announcements expected from Jobs on Tuesday is the release of a sub $500 iMac. ThinkSecret is reporting the unit will come without a monitor and have a G4 processor, a 40-80 gig hard drive, a combo optical drive, USB 2.0, Firewire 400, 10/100 base-T Ethernet, Airport Extreme capability, VGA and DVI. Bundled software included with the system is thought to include Appleworks and iLife, without iDVD. The unit will be housed in a flat enclosure with a height of less than 2 inches, so users can place the iMac either beside their Windows machine or under a monitor.
The new unit seems to be in line with Apple's desire to convert Windows users over to Mac. In addition to an affordable iMac. Apple is also rumored to be developing their own version of Microsoft Office, code named "sugar", and expected to be branded iWork 2005 upon release.

CES Round-up - The announcements that got the most buzz at CES:
- TIVO's new HD Unit that comes with a cable card slot, so analogue cable customers can use the device.
- HD DVD will be in stores by the end of the year with at least 100 titles available by Christmas. Also look for Toshiba's stand alone HD DVD burner around the same time.
- Yahama YSP-1, winner of best of CES, is a home theatre receiver which replaces speakers with beams and offers superb virtual surround sound.
- The world's largest Plasma TV at 102 inches.
- DAVE.TV - a new service designed to allow content providers to join the IPTV revolution.

HD DVD To Make 05 Debut

Supporters of HD DVD, the next generation of DVD's, say that the first titles in the newest DVD format should be on store shelves by Christmas 2005.
HD DVD media can hold a whopping 50 Gigabytes (GB) of information compared with today's single-layer DVD media which hold 4.7 GB. Among the biggest supporters for HD DVD are Sanyo, NEC and Toshiba.
Initially about 100 titles will be available including all the Harry Potter, Batman and Spiderman movies.
Entertainment companies like Paramount, Warner Home Video and HBO have committed to having some of their biggest franchises including The Sopranos and Six Feet Under released in HD DVD.
In addition Toshiba announced at CES on Friday that their first generation HD DVD recorder will also be available by Christmas.

Microsoft Joins Spyware Fight, CES Day One Round-up

Microsoft finally joined in the fight against Spyware as they announced today the availability of it's new anti-spyware application on it's website.
Spyware is software that is secretly installed on a users computer, and tracks which websites they visit and automatically displays pop-up ads in your web browser.
The new program, currently in Beta, is available for download here.

CES 2005 got underway in Las Vegas last night, with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates delivering a key note speech on the best features of MS's new Portable Media Center (PMC) software. And just to prove that even Bill Gates isn't immune to the "Blue Screen Of Death", while demonstrating PMC to host Conan O'Brien, the application unexpectedly froze prompting O'Brien to joke "right now nine people just got fired". Then if that wasn't funny enough following the address Gates told CNet.com that he compares anyone who doesn't support intellectual property laws to communists.

Huard Speaks Out

Former G4Tech TV Producer Dan Huard has posted a good story on his blog about the events that led to his recent dismissal.
Hats off to Huard for having courage to speak his mind, you can read the entry here.