Roobaroo

User-Selected Digg.com Expands

June 23rd, 2006

Digg.com is a Web site that ranks various technology news according to users’ recommendation. The Web site currently only limits its topics to technology but it hopes to expand it through videos and topics beyond technology. Users are limited to tech-related categories such as hardware, gaming, digital-music and robots. However, on Monday users will start having access to entertainment and business news. Users will be able to post videos which can be non-news videos. New sub-categories such as games and science is also planned to be on general technology section. Users will have more personal choices like customize their pages, hiding certain categories or subcategories from the site. There will be user’s friends list where they can get the overview of what their friends find interesting along with other interest.

Although Digg began as a technology news Web site in September 2004, it has received great amount of pressure from users to expand. It received 1.3 visitors in May compared to 129,000 a year earlier. The chief executive of Digg Inc. says more users have been posting news that has been non-technology related anyhow.

Digg is unique a community which uncovers items that are rare and otherwise be hard to locate. Big companies like Time Warner Inc.’s AOL are transforming its Netscape portal into user recommendations Web site similar to Digg. The new redesign of Yahoo portal also introduced user-voted items. If Digg users stumble upon something interesting while surfing the net, they can simply “dig,” or post it on Digg.com. You can see at the bottom of this post there is a link to Digg it. The item that receives vote goes up on the list while item lacking enough votes are omitted over time.

Amazon Introduces Groceries

June 23rd, 2006

As an Amazon customer, you can now have your groceries delivered right to your door step. Amazon has recently started selling groceries on its Web site, but its service is limited. Unlike other online grocers that ship items to limited zone, Amazon will be able to deliver its groceries to any customer. However, Amazon offers limited items that are non-perishable like pasta, cereal, and canned soup.

The ability to buy groceries was silently presented as a beta on Amazon’s Web site since May 25th. The beta evaluated the service before promoting in public. There have been many companies unsuccessful selling groceries online in the past. Much money was invested during the 1990s on online grocery stores such as Webvan. In 2001, the company Webvan went bankrupt after the dot-com crash incident. Webvan had planned to spend as much as $1 billion on warehouse network.

Amazon claims to carry 10,000 non-perishable items along with new items added everyday. Plus all items are legible for Super Saver Shipping. Feel free to browse Amazon here for more information on their new service.

MySpace New Age Restrictions

June 22nd, 2006

Recently MySpace has announced its new age restrictions policy that makes a few modification regarding profiles viewable by adults and minors. The new policy prohibits MySpace users who are eighteen or older from requesting to be on a 14 or 15-year-old’s friends list. However, if they know the teenager’s full name or email address, they are not restricted from requesting to be on friends list of a teenager. Another new rule will prevent users 18 or over from viewing full profile of 14 or 15-year-old.

In addition to that, all users will have the ability to prevent contacts from people that not their age. All users will have the option to make their profile half-viewable to those people not on their friends list. While it is mandatory to know a 14 or 15-years-old’s email address or full name to be on his or her friends list, it will remain optional for those 16 and over.

MySpace is concerned that they have no knowledge of the registered users real age or identity; hence a person 18 and over can still register as a youth and yet have access to full profiles. The new changes are expected to be in action by next week.

Security Problem With Copy On Clipboard

June 22nd, 2006

We all copy various data by using the Ctrl+C or copy function for pasting elsewhere. This copied data is stored on your clipboard and is accessible over the net by a combination of Javascripts and ASP. Hard to believe isn’t it?

Just try this:
1. Select any text on this page and copy it.
2. Click the Link: http://www.friendlycanadian.com/applications/clipboard.htm
3. You should be able to see the data you copied on this webpage through the site you clicked. If not, congratulation!

Next time, do not attemp to copy sensitive data (like passwords, credit card numbers, PIN, username ect.) in the clipboard while cruising the web. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to crack into your clipboard and extract the text to steal your sensitive information. If by any chance large amount of data is acquired by hacker, it can give away important and confidential information without any trace.

Take a few minutes and follow these steps to protect yourself from being robbed.
1. Go to internet options->security
2. Press custom level
3. In the security settings, select disable under Allow paste operations via script.

Now the contents of your clipboard are safe. Pass this information on to create an awareness of the same.

PSP Dead Pixel Fixer

June 22nd, 2006

Majority of PSP owners have dead pixels and they usually think they are stuck with it. I had a similar problem with my PSP and I followed many suggestions by PSP forums users but none of them worked. However, there was one PSP dead pixel fixer for me that worked like charm.

Many of the first PSPs shipped with bad or “stuck” pixels. Although that is not the case today, many PSP owners will have dead pixels. I found a video that is based off a DVD that runs on LCD TVs to fix stuck pixels. You can get the PSP dead pixel fixer video by clicking here.

This MP4 video flashes red, green, and blue frames rapidly and stimulates dead pixels into working again. If you need help transferring files, visit this excellent site which has step-by-step directions on how to transfer videos into PSP. Reports of success have been mixed. Remember to click the triangle button on your PSP when running the video and enter into full screen mode because default is a smaller screen. Please make sure you let it run the full 20 minute length with screen brightness on max.

Here is a quick direction on how to transfer videos into PSP. You need to send video files to your PSP memory card. First create a directory: Drive Letter:\MP_ROOT\100MNV01 and place MP4 file in the dictionary. The MP4 file is located in the zip file you downloaded through this page.