There is talk about Google working with Verizon to make a tablet to go on the Verizon network. The best thing about the experience compared to its competitor the Apple iPad is that the Android OS is all open source so people will have a lot more freedom like a normal computer compared to the locked down iPad that acts much like the iPhone when it comes to only being able to install apps that are on the app store and only update the OS if Apple puts out an update.

“We’re looking at all the things Google has in its archives that we could put on a tablet to make it a great experience,” Verizon Wireless chief executive Lowell McAdam told the Journal.

Read more from PC Magazine

Boxee has just pushed out a new update with some new features to include NHL and more file control.

NHL GameCenter LIVE™ on Boxee

First and foremost we’re excited to announce that NHL GameCenter LIVE™ is now available on Boxee.  Subscribers to the monthly/annual subscription service ($19.95 / $79 respectively) can now watch great Hockey games & fights in HD (where available) on Boxee.

Boxee Beta Updates

In addition to this great new content partnership, we are also releasing the next version of the Boxee Beta, which now includes:

File Identification Progress

Easily see how many files Boxee is scanning, has identified, and doesn’t recognize within your media collection.  Check the status from any menu sidebar (TV shows, Movies, Music) or from the Media settings menu (Settings -> Media).

Manual Movie & TV Show identification
Help Boxee identify your personal media by telling it what’s in your collection.  To change incorrectly labeled files select the movie or TV show, then click the “drivers license with a circle in the top right corner”  icon on the right end of the pop-up menu.

Find and identify unresolved files by going to the “Files” menu, and selecting the “unresolved” folder from the bottom of the list.  Select files and follow the instructions above to label them properly.  You’ll now be able to put in movie names and TV show seasons and episodes to ensure your collection is pristine.

Facebook & Twitter in your Boxee feed
In addition to pushing recommendations to your social networks, you can see recommendations from friends on Facebook & Twitter from within Boxee.  Shared videos appear automatically in your feed with an icon on the right to let you know where they are from.  Set up this new option from the web in your service settings for Facebook & Twitter.

New & Improved RSS Management
We’ve created a brand new way to manage, discover and play RSS feeds in Boxee.  First, check out the new management & discovery console on our website.  Search, arrange by category or sort through the most popular, top rated, new, and HD feeds available on Boxee.  Then use the RSS feeds App to play back your favorites.

Bug Fixes and Fixes and Fixes, and Fixes!
We’ve been able to address hundreds of bugs in this version of Boxee.  Thanks to everyone who helped us out by submitting issues to our support team.

In a keynote by Apple (Keynote Video) Steve Jobs announced the new release of the iPhone OS 4 (Official Site).  Within the keynote Jobs talked about many new features being released with the OS including folders and the ability to multitask between Apps. Although with all the new features coming to the iPhone the older 3G iPhones will not be able to fully upgrade and older 2G iPhones will not be able to upgrade at all.

On top fo the new OS if you follow what Apple usually does then there should also be a new release of a new iPhone all together.

So the questions are. If there is a new iPhone are you going to get it or hold on? And why can’t they upgrade the older iPhones? Or at least fully update the iPhone 3G!

With the popular torrent site ISOHunt redirecting its US users to a new “lite” version which basically renders it useless to US users due to the crackdown by MPAA, I have been on the search for a new service to use. Like many people have done in the past I’m sure we will all just find a new source or service to use instead of giving up and going fully legit.

If you ask me this is just power and money hungry “media whores” trying to get every penny from anyone and everyone. If you go to other countries like Iraq, you can purchase illegal copies of DVDs at 10 for $5 way before the movie even gets released to DVD much less theater. Makers of movies make enough money as it is off of box office profits and need to let us (We the people) be more free (In a free country).

FIRST ALTERNATIVE

So now the question is what are we going to use? I made a post earlier about how to proxy your torrents to better protect you from your ISP and help you search torrent sites that would regularly be blocked by your ISP. But unfortunately there is filters now being used by the popular torrent sites, filtering out torrents based on a word database called FileRights.  In the future they plan to use FileRights but have not yet. Below you will find a list of replacements I found so far. The list from top to bottom is my favorite to least favorite.

1. http://extratorrent.com/
2. http://torrentz.com/
3. http://thepiratebay.org/

SECOND ALTERNATIVE

Another alternative that you can still use until they and if they start using FileRights is to use a proxy server located in another country. I suggest you use a Canadian proxy as they are the closest to the United States. There are two ways to do this by altering your proxy settings in your browser or by going to an actual proxy site.

Proxy By Browser Settings List (Advanced)

Proxy By Site  List (No Setup)

Please let me know in a comment if there is anything better out there!

Lately it seems Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been cutting down on people downloading content from BitTorrent sources. In the past it used to be a big deal with songs, now they have moved onto movies. A couple days ago I received a letter from our ISP explaining that one of the movies I downloaded was having its download activity being watched by the makers of the movie, and that I need to stop downloading copyrighted material, and delete any copyrighted material I have now. I talked around, and it seems that a lot of people have gotten more than one of these notices. So today I’m going to show you the steps I took to help avoid getting in trouble,  and help better protect your identity when downloading torrents.

Everything I’m going to talk to you about involves proxies. A proxy is just an alternative path to a source via a provider that keeps you anonymous. So for example instead of going up and telling someone “Hello my name is __ and I’m downloading your movies” , the proxy will do that for you and say “Hello my name is Proxy and I’m downloading your movies for someone who I can’t tell you their name”. Of course there is a lot of proxies out there, and with the right papers in some countries they can make that proxy reveal who the true downloader is (You), and that is why I use a proxy from Canada. Canada has some of the most strict privacy laws, helping this proxy keep its customers hidden.

How A Proxy Server Works

BTGuard (Torrent Downloading Proxy)

The proxy I’m using right now is called BTGuard. BTGuard is not a free service but there are no free torrent proxies I know of. It is also important to take note that going through a proxy your download speeds will drop, and if you use a free service to do this good luck downloading at all. With this any downloading I do is now going through a proxy, leaving my identity hidden.

Furk (Torrent Searching)

You should be doing pretty good keeping your identity hidden when it comes to downloading and uploading torrents but what about when we search for them? A lot of ISPs have been blocking torrent search sites and with a proxy you can get passed that. Although it is not required if your ISP is not blocking them, it is still a good idea to use it so your ISP does not know what you are searching for. My favorite service to use is Furk.net. It searches all my favorite torrent sites to include ISOHunt.com and ThePirateBay.

So now you are all proxyed up and ready to start downloading torrents again in complete privacy. Some sources also suggest turning off the seeding features in your torrent client but I DO NOT recommend this as it beats the whole purpose of torrents, and you are already hidden behind your proxy. Like I mentioned before, downloading will be a lot slower now, but just plan your downloads to start over night and/or turn the proxy off when downloading safe content (Just don’t forget to turn it back on).

Looking for a ISOHunt Alternative? Check out this article

Technology has came a long way from the first computer. Now you are able to interface with your computer pretty much anywhere with anything. TV has also evolved a long way from just being able to watch it to recording live tv to watching episodes online. Now you have Boxee.

“Boxee“, which is a open-soruce, cross platform social media center that works for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Boxee, a bran of XBMC, takes normal Media Centers and allows you to view, review, and share your media through social networking services. Even though it is still in early development it is a great leap forward to having a “all-in-one” media center allowing you to watch local movies, tv shows and listen to music but also allowing you to grab the same kind of content from the web.

Although it has not been relased yet Boxee is working with D-Link to make the “Boxee Box“. This product will run Boxee for under $200 dollars with all the nice high definition connections.

If you have ever connected a second screen or monitor to your Mac and don’t like how the Apple menu does not extend to both screens. SecondBar is a Tool which allows you to have more than one menubar in Mac OS X. With this you no longer have to drag your mouse across multiple screens to do a file, copy or file, print or open a new browser window.

To run secondbar just simply download the .dmg file and move it into your “Applications” folder. Once it is in your applications folder double click it to run and you should now see an additional bar on your other screen(s).

Fiverr is a cool website that is just a bunch of posts with people making offers for $5 dollars. Within this site you will see people willing to do your homework, photo editing, classes and much more for only $5 dollars. It is a good site to go to when you are bored or have an extra $5 dollars to spend on nothing (If that ever happens?).

Another cool feature that they have is the ability to “suggest” offers. So lets say you want something done for $5 dollars you can suggest it, and someone might accept the offer.

Have you ever wanted to be able to update your computer or multiple computers without having to connect to Microsoft’s update site or download automatic updates? Lets say you are an IT person and you need to push updates to multiple standalone or none network ready computers. With AutoPatcher you can easily accomplish this task, and they just made it compatible with Windows 7!

AutoPatcher is a portable Windows application that will grab the latest Windows updates, and give you the ability to apply those updates to as many computers you want with the downloaded updates it pulled. One of the coolest things about this application is its free too!

Looking for a free way to serve media to your PS3 such as Movies? At my house I have a Windows Server setup and a couple TB hard drives full of software, music, movies and other types of documents. It was great for sharring them between computers but I really didn’t have a way to view them on the PS3. I looked all around for solutions and found this free piece of software that runs on Windows, Linux and MAC OS. It may not be feature packed but the best thing about PS3 Media Server is its free!

PS3 Media Server is a DLNA compliant Upnp Media Server for the PS3, written in Java, with the purpose of streaming or transcoding any kind of media files, with minimum configuration. It’s backed up with the powerful Mplayer/FFmpeg packages.

URL: http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/

Current features

• Ready to launch and play. No codec packs to install. No folder configuration and pre-parsing or this kind of annoying thing. All your folders are directly browsed by the PS3, there’s an automatic refresh also.
• Real-time video transcoding of MKV/FLV/OGM/AVI, etc.
• Direct streaming of DTS / DTS-HD core to the receiver
• Remux H264/MPEG2 video and all audio tracks to AC3/DTS/LPCM in real time with tsMuxer when H264 is PS3/Level4.1 compliant
• Full seeking support when transcoding
• DVD ISOs images / VIDEO_TS Folder transcoder
• OGG/FLAC/MPC/APE audio transcoding
• Thumbnail generation for Videos
• You can choose with a virtual folder system your audio/subtitle language on the PS3!
• Simple streaming of formats PS3 natively supports: MP3/JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF, all kind of videos (AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG)
• Display camera RAWs thumbnails (Canon / Nikon, etc.)
• ZIP/RAR files as browsable folders
• Support for pictures based feeds, such as Flickr and Picasaweb
• Internet TV / Web Radio support with VLC, MEncoder or MPlayer
• Podcasts audio/ Video feeds support
• Basic Xbox360 support
• FLAC 96kHz/24bits/5.1 support
• Windows Only: DVR-MS remuxer and AviSynth alternative transcoder support