Reviews

Reviews of technology and news.

The silent death of Technorati

UPDATE 1/30/2010: bayareatechpros.com has finally been approved. I should note that the thumbnail of the website remains unchanged and I am unable to edit site info or do anything with the claim at this point.

UPDATE 1/7/2010: It appears as though Technorati is inching forth, but the backlog which they are developing far outweighs the amount of blogs being approved.

UPDATE 1/7/2010: An employee, Phillip Winn, who is a senior web developer has taken up a PR stance and resumed replying to the thread. It appears as though Technorati is inching forth, but the backlog which they are developing far outweighs the amount of blogs being approved.

Technorati-DeadTechnorati has been an authorative and integral part of the blogosphere, positioning itself as a benchmark and indexed search engine for blogs in the start of the Web 2.0 boom. This was then, however, and how fast things change…

In October to November of 2009 a peculiar problem arose, the real-time search engine of Technorati was no longer indexing new blogs. According to some wizardly mathemagic a new blog is created every second and Technorati, as a search engine, is not indexing any of the 26,000,000+ new blogs which were created in the past 2+ months, according to math. [Read more...]

YouTube phases out old accounts

YouTube

If you signed up for YouTube prior to Google’s acquisition you may be displeased to see that you are no longer allowed to use your YouTube account independent of your email. The change merges your YouTube account with whatever email was associated with it at the time.

The qualifying conditions are as follows:

  • You’ve signed up for their original YouTube account before May 2009.
  • You’ve joined your YouTube and Google Accounts together.
  • You’re still signing in with your original YouTube password.

[Read more...]

Future of Torrents; DHT, PEX and Magnet Links Explained

Bittorrent Explained

This week The Pirate Bay confirmed it would shut down its tracker for good, instead encouraging the use of DHT, PEX and magnet links. This move confounded many BitTorrent enthusiasts, who although wishing to adapt, were confronted with hard to grasp terminology and technology. Time for some explaining. [Read more...]

Security Essentials weekend report

essentialsMicrosoft Security Essentials is Microsoft’s leap into the Anti-Virus market. The suite aims at tackling viruses, trojans, worms, and malware. It is surprisingly light on resources (unlike a certain Windows-Defender) and has features to match its competitors.

This is the first week that Essentials has been out of beta, and the MS Malware Protection Center has released some interesting statistics.

[Read more...]

Insignia HD Camera NS-DCC5HB09 Review

Insignia CameraFace it, your mobile phone camera sucks. In the age of blogs, social networking, and viral videos it almost becomes a necessity to own a competent HD recording device.

The NS-DCC5HB09 steps up to the plate at an exceptionally affordable price, 3 inch LCD screen, and HDMI output.

[Read more...]

Overclocking laptop, Mobility Radeon

Studio 15 laptopNot only unsupported, Mobility Radeons are further crippled by their drivers. Laptop distributors (HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc) limit the clocks on the bundled video cards and restrict access to the GPU BIOS. There are a number of logical reasons behind this, namely warranty overheating issues.

There are a number of ways to work around these restrictions, the best likely being a BIOS mod, as it would allow fluent clock changing through ATT, or other programs. However, some GPUs have their BIOS read and write protected, making the process rather futile.

Another, simpler, method is using a specific driver version. 8.9 and 8.10 Catalysts allow you to overclock when used in conjunction with AMD GPU Clock Tool.

[Read more...]