scattered technology news

Netflix Finally Reaches The PS3 0

Since launch, Sony has advertised the PlayStation 3 as a household center for entertainment. In addition to Blu-Ray playback, Sony soon took it a step further with a few software updates giving it access to tons of Movies and TV Shows through the PlayStation Network Store. It even supports DLNA streaming to share music, photos, and videos between computers on your home network. Despite those features, it lacked something that Microsoft was able to put into the Xbox: Netflix Streaming.

Fortunately Sony has caught up with the times and has partnered with Netflix. They plan to offer PS3 owners and Netflix subscribers streaming access to their library as early as next month at no additional cost. This will be a great complement to their snail mail Blu-Ray rental service.  To enable your PS3 for the service, you’ll need to get a special free disc from Netflix that will enable the service. Let’s hope there will be more features such as this one coming down the line. Hulu please?

Links: Netflix.com/PS3

Free Google WiFi On Virgin America 0

Are you flying for the upcoming Holiday Season? If you are, Google’s got a special treat for those flying with Virgin America. All flights between November 10, 2009 and January 15, 2010 will have free WiFi internet access for all passengers thanks to Google. Virgin America normally charges $6 for flights under 1.5 hours, $10 for those in between 1.5-3 hours, and $13 for those longer than 3 hours.

So if you find yourself getting sick of the on-flight entertainment, just pull out your laptop and get online. Even mobile devices such as a Blackberry or iPhone are allowed to connect to the WiFi network as long as the cellular component is turned off. I haven’t had a chance to test the network speed, but they are suppose to be decent. Google claims it to be comparable to “the mobile broadband experience on the ground.” However that probably won’t be the case this holiday season. With flight full of passengers connecting to the network since it’s free, rather than the usual few business folks, it will probably slow down a lot. If you’ve tried in-flight WiFi, please share your thoughts below!

Links: Google Holiday WiFi aboard Virgin America

Dropbox, File Syncing Made Easy 0

How do you get your files from one machine to another? Most of you probably use a USB flash drive or email files to yourself. That hassle is a thing of the past with Dropbox, a new web service. After a one-time setup, your files will be accessible anywhere whether it’s on your laptop, your phone, or even through a web browser. Plus, the basic version of the service, only limited by space, is entirely free!

Setting up Dropbox is easy. Just visit GetDropbox.com and download the installer for Windows, Macintosh, or Linux. The program will prompt you to register for an account if you are a first time user. A folder named “My Dropbox” will automatically be created. If you have a second or third computer, install Dropbox on those and login with the same username and password. If you have an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch, grab the free Dropbox App from the iTunes App Store. Next just copy any files or folders into the “My Dropbox” folder. Assuming that you are connected to the internet, the files placed in there will automatically be synced to and stored on all your other computers. If you add, delete, or modify files, the changes are relayed over to all your other devices.

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Video: Install Movable Type In 3 Steps 3

Last week we posted a quick video tutorial entitled, “Installing WordPress In 40 Seconds.” A few of you folks emailed in asking if there was something similar for Movable Type, so I decided to make one. With this script, you can have the latest version of Movable Type installed on your server in just 3 steps.

Things you’ll need:

• SSH Server Access
• SSH Client

If you need an SSH Client, on Windows machines I recommend PuTTY. It’s less than 1MB and doesn’t even need installation. If you are on Linux or Macintosh, you are fortunate enough to have a Terminal built right in. Now connect to your web server and login. Then browse to the folder of the domain you wish to install Movable Type. For the rest, just watch the video below!

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Video: Install WordPress In 40 Seconds 2

I happen to be someone who constantly installs and re-installs WordPress for this blog, to test plugins, and for clients. I found that the critically acclaimed “Famous 5-Minute Install” took just a bit too long for me. The process eats up quite a bit of time, especially if find yourself installing WordPress constantly. So to speed things up, I wrote a quick shell script that does just about all the work in just a few commands.

Things you’ll need:

• SSH Server Access
• SSH Client

If you need an SSH Client, on Windows machines I recommend PuTTY. It’s less than 1MB and doesn’t even need to be installed. If you are on Linux or Macintosh, you are fortunate enough to have a Terminal built right in. Now connect to your web server, login, and watch the video for the rest!

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WordPress 2.6 Released 1

WordPress 2.6 was just released a couple of hours ago and it packed with plenty of new features. I had a chance to upgrade Skatter Tech, previously running version 2.5.1, and the entire process went through quite smoothly without any issues. I have included the official video demonstration of WordPress 2.6 above, however I will also go over some of the notable features below.

Post Revisions
This implementation will be a savior to authors who write and edit articles in the WordPress editor. Each time a post is modified a revision is saved. (Like Wikipedia.) Authors can switch back to previous editions or compare two different revisions. This is probably the next best addition to the editor since auto save. The editor also received a few other new goodies including a Word Counter and a improved uploader.

Press This! Bookmarklet
For those who blog content as they browse the web, this is going to be very handy. The new Press This! bookmarklet acts quite like Tumblr. When you launch the bookmarklet, a popup window appears offering options to blog the page you are currently viewing and choose whether it should be considered a Text, Photo, Quote, or Video post. Although I may not use this to blog right away, it is quite neat to be able to save drafts with some info so I can come back to it later.

SSL-Encrypted Admin Panel
Security is a big issue for those who have large blogs. Previously with no SSL support, hackers monitoring a network could theoretically capture passwords and data being published to your blog. There have been a couple of WP Plugins to address this issue, however I personally never found any to function as required. Authors now can login using the HTTPS protocol to encrypt the data being related between their machine and their server for protection. And it’s been working great, for me, so far!

Other Stuff
There are a couple other notable features added, one of which is the Gears add-on. The add-on has to be installed to your computer’s browser and intelligently caches Javascript and CSS files to your machine to allow a much faster and smoother work flow. WordPress now also allows bloggers who are re-designing their themes to now preview it before making it visible to their readers. This would have been quite handy when I was in the process of designing my theme!

There are plenty of other things that have been included in the update and if you wish to find out more about them, visit Word Press 2.6 Announcement Post. If you are using WordPress I personally recommend you upgrade to 2.6. There are many new features you will truly appreciate!

Links: WordPress.org
Download: WordPress 2.6

Skatter Tech: Get Your Own Gravatar 0

We recently upgraded Skatter Tech to WordPress 2.5 and along with it we decided to make some changes to the icons that go along with each comment. Previously, each commenter’s icon was based off the favicon from the provided url. Today, we have switched to using Gravatar, “the globally recognized avatar.” Starting now the associated image will be linked to your email instead of the url.

To setup your own Gravatar, visit Gravatar.com/signup. The registration process is as simple as entering your email address. Then just login and upload an image to become your Gravatar. Now the next time you leave a comment on Skatter Tech or any other blog using the Gravatar service, you should see your icon appear! And in case you are wondering about privacy, your email address is kept private by both Gravatar and Skatter Tech so you’ll have nothing to worry about.

Links: Gravatar.com SignUp

Every South Park Episode, Now Online 0

Ever wanted to watch any episode of South Park? Well now you can, thanks to South Park Digital Studios, a joint venture between South Park and Comedy Central. SouthParkStudios.com features every full-length episodes from all twelve seasons which can be legally streamed to your computer for free. This seems to be a new trend which many studios are following. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, also a part of Comedy Central, made a similar move last year making every clip ever filmed available online at no cost to the viewer. Hulu, a News Corp and NBC Universal project, went public earlier this month offering hundreds of high quality full length episodes of TV shows.

“We got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time so we gave ourselves a legal alternative.” said Stone and Parker, when asked about the launch of the new site.

This move is beneficial to viewers since they won’t have to deal with downloading content illegally and to studios since they can rake in extra profits through ad revenue. At this time the content will unfortunately not be available for viewers in other countries rather than the United States due to contract issues, however they are working to change that. New episodes of South Park will appear on the site as soon as it is aired on TV, however will be removed after 7 days. The episode will become permanently available 30-days after the original air date. Lets hope more studios follow what Comedy Central has done with South Park and the Daily Show and NBC has done by launching Hulu.

Links: South Park Studios
Related: Hulu Goes Public

Hulu Goes Public & Gets More Content! 0

After about a week of unofficial hints and rumors, early this morning Hulu opened themselves up to the public. Anyone located within the United States can visit Hulu.com and watch high-quality TV shows, nightly highlights, full length movies, full games, and short clips. Hulu limited to a audience of private beta users since October 2007. In addition to previous studios partnerships, Hulu now features content from Warner Bros. Lionsgate, NBA, HHL, and 20 other new providers. All content is viewable right through your browser without any additional plugins or software other than Adobe Flash. And to clarify the content isn’t user uploaded content, but rather high quality shows such as Family Guy, The Office, 30 Rock, House, Heroes, 24, and Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

“Today, Hulu is crossing a milestone in its mission to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium content, when where and how they want it,” said Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu. “With full-length episodes of current and archived television shows, feature films, sports and news, we believe the Hulu service is a step forward in giving consumers entertainment on their terms.

In return for access to the premium content which is freely available on Hulu, viewers will be required to watch short 15 and 30 second ads a few times throughout each show. From most of the content I’ve viewed, there were only around two to three ads for a half-hour show which is a whole lot better than TV commercials. Hulu seems to be a big winner at the moment. With services such as these, the amount of illegally distributed copies of these shows should drop drastically. Due to the fact that Hulu was a joint venture between News Corp and NBC Universal, they were able to gain support from a lot of production studios which other competitors such as Joost failed to do. Plus with the freedom to embed full episodes onto any web page or social networking sites, I expect Hulu to spread faster than ever!

Links: Hulu.com
Download: Hulu Programming Guide

How To: Share Torrents With “Dummies” 5

I’m sure most of you geeks out there have run into the issue of trying to help someone download a torrent at some point. To save you folks some time, I suggest using BitLet to send torrent files to people who don’t have BitTorrent clients installed. If you haven’t heard of BitLet, it’s a simple web-based client which will allow download torrent files right from your browser without the need to install additional software. As long as the downloader has a fairly recent version of Java installed, there shouldn’t be any issues. The service is completely free but is still in beta an “experimental” project. I tested the service a few times and it functioned as advertised without any hiccups.

So to help out your client-less friends, tell them to paste the .torrent URL of the file they are trying to download into the box on BitLet.org. And if you’ve already got the .torrent link and are attempting to help them download it, just use the formula below (without the brackets).

http://www.bitlet.org/?torrent=[URL To .torrent File]

BitLet should launch a new window and the file should begin downloading after a destination of where to save the file is chosen. Overall BitLet is a great little tool to help downloading torrents for dummies. It also comes in handy if you are trying to download a file on a machine that doesn’t allow installing new applications. To make this even easier BitLet has a neat little set of bookmarklets on their site so you don’t even need to deal with copy and pasting. And on another note, if you are looking for a lightweight yet powerful BitTorrent Client checkout uTorrent (personal favorite!).

Link: BitLet.org | Bookmarklet