RSS feeds from around the web

• And We’re Back - How do you like the new look of PlayStation.Blog?
• Happy Birthday, PS3! - There will be nothing terrible about these “twos.”
• LittleBigPlanet Weekly Download Update - “Sack in a Box” is actually a Sackboy with a TV on his head. What did you think it meant? Get your mind out of the gutter
• PSP Firmware (v5.02) Coming Soon - for increased performance with the PlayStation Store.
• LittleBigChallenge - Celebrating PS3’s 2nd Anniversary - We’re already starting to see some cool levels on the LittleBigWorkshop.
• BioShock PS3 DLC Surfaces Tomorrow - Exclusive DLC for Bioshock PS3.
• PlayStation.com Continues to Evolve - Soon, you’ll be signing into this blog with your PSN ID.
• Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Cometh! - Exclusive for PS3 owners - 5 free Street Fighter hip-hop songs with download.
• Killzone 2 - On The Spot Today! - Did you catch it?
• PlayStation Store Update - featuring free and premium LittleBigPlanet content and a lot of Dead Space add-ons.
• PlayStation: Entertainment Unleashed - See the new holiday PS3 and PSN commercials.
• PlayStation Network Video Content Update - it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Wild Things, but damn, I loved that movie.
• Burn Baby, Burn! - The weekly Burnout Paradise surprise from Criterion Games.
• New Urban PSP Ad Campaign Launches - take a look at some of the city-themed spots for yourself.

Courtesy of Victor Zuylen – Editor, Killzone Community

• Early Helghan Era unlocked - After agreeing to leave Vekta for Helghan, the Helghast arrive on a barren, inhospitable planet, where they must make terrible sacrifices to survive.

guardian.co.uk

Bay Area Cities Agree to Power Electric Cars PC Magazine - Nov 21, 2008 by Chloe Albanesius Mayors in the San Francisco Bay Area on Thursday announced a series of initiatives aimed at making the region the electric vehicle capital of the US by 2012. A $1 billion plan for car-charging network ZDNet Get Ready for the Car 2.0 Era Earth2Tech Wall Street Journal - San Francisco Chronicle - TechNewsWorld - EcoGeek all 296 news articles

NewsOXY

NASA scales back flagship Mars mission The Associated Press - Nov 21, 2008 LOS ANGELES (AP) - NASA is scrapping a controversial piece of hardware from its next-generation Mars rover that would have allowed the spacecraft to store rock fragments in a mini-basket for a future mission. NASA’s Black Hole Budgets New York Times NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Glides Into New Year Aero-News Network Animation World Network - NewsOXY - Macon Telegraph - Aero-News Network all 74 news articles

The Age

Study: Surfing The Net Is Good For Your Brain CRN - Nov 21, 2008 By Jennifer Bosavage, ChannelWeb Some of what a recent study released by the MacArthur Foundation found is something virtually every adult knows: Teen-agers use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of … Study: Internet Social Networking Good For Young People DailyTech Chill out, parents: Time online teaches kids important skills … San Jose Mercury News New York Times - ZDNet - Yahoo! Tech - NewsFactor Network all 166 news articles

dan writes ” Multi Theft Auto is a third-party modification for Rockstar’s hit title Grand Theft Auto San Andreas — and it has become open-source after over four years of closed source development. As a (somewhat) regular player of MTA since the early days of GTAIII, this hit me by surprise, somewhat.” (The news is on the project’s front page, from which dan extracts more details, below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York Times

Apple Releases Its Highly Anticipated Software Upgrade eFluxMedia - 28 minutes ago By Michael Todd Apple released a software upgrade for its iPhone 3G and iPod Touch, bringing new features to the devices and also fixing some reported stability bugs. Apple Updates Maps, Apps in … InternetNews.com Lots to like about new iPhone 2.2 software update Ars Technica San Francisco Chronicle - IntoMobile - CNET News - NewsOXY all 166 news articles

eFluxMedia

Is kumo.com the new Live Search? Computerworld - 47 minutes ago In Monday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches bloggers watch Microsoft rebrand its search efforts. Not to mention shaken, not stirred… Microsoft and search branding has been a mess for a while … there has been separate chatter about a rebrand … Re-branding the Windows Live Search! ChattahBox Kumo? C’mon, Microsoft! Technologizer eFluxMedia - CNET News - PC Magazine - I4U all 18 news articles

perlow (Jason Perlow of ZDNet) suggests that the current crop of netbooks might be missing the boat, when it comes to getting maximum battery life and small-screen usability, and asks “Could Mac OS X iPhone or Google’s Android be the key to mass adoption of the next generation of netbooks?” Android looks pretty nice, I admit, but so far I like having full-fledged Ubuntu on my own small computer. He’s not the first one to think that the iPhone would be well-employed as the guts of an ultra-portable, though. (Note: it’s only a model.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Age

Why Did Google Discontinue SearchMash? TechCrunch - 2 hours ago by Robin Wauters on November 24, 2008 Whether you like SearchWiki, the new voting and commenting feature for search results Google introduced last week, or not, it was undeniably a bold move for the company to turn on the feature for everyone with a … Does Google's SearchWiki Work? Pretty Much PC Magazine Google Wikifies; Build Your … InternetNews.com CRN - InformationWeek - NetworkWorld.com - PC World all 335 news articles

PC World

Verizon Employees Snooped on Obama's Cellphone Records DailyTech - 2 hours ago “This week we learned that a number of Verizon Wireless employees have, without authorization, accessed and viewed President-Elect Barack Obama's personal cell phone account," Verizon Wireless CEO and president Lowell McAdam told reporters in a … Verizon sacks Obama snoopers Register Verizon fires workers who snooped on Obama cell records ZDNet TG Daily - PC World - eFluxMedia - ChattahBox all 615 news articles

TECH.BLORGE.com

Consoles foot city-sized energy bill Inquirer - 3 hours ago By Dean Pullen: Monday, 24 November 2008, 8:38 AM A NEW STUDY by the American-based Natural Resources Defense Council, suggests that World-wide console usage consumes an estimated 16 billion-kilowatt hours per year. Wii Still Dominates Gaming Through Second Year PC World Video-Game Consoles Also Waste Your Electricity InformationWeek New York Times - PC Magazine - Current.com.au - Bitbag all 42 news articles

ABC News

Astronauts venture on 4th, final spacewalk The Associated Press - 3 hours ago HOUSTON (AP) - Three spacewalks down. One to go. Astronauts Stephen Bowen and Robert "Shane" Kimbrough venture outside the international space station Monday for the fourth and final spacewalk of space shuttle Endeavour's nearly two-week visit to the … Video: Astronaut Who Lost Tool Bag Admits Mistake AssociatedPress Behind spacesuit technology stands astronaut's ‘leap of faith' PhysOrg.com Washington Post - Columbus Ledger-Enquirer - ABC News - WLOS all 6,184 news articles

Da Massive writes “UNIX PDP-7, a classic DEC PDP-8, the original IBM PC, Commodore’s C64, Apple’s Lisa, a MITS Altair 8800 made famous by Bill Gates, through to a working PDP-11 that plays the ADVENTURE and DUNGEON games. Max Burnet has got it all. Burnet has turned his home in the leafy suburbs of Sydney into arguably Australia’s, if not the world’s, largest private computer museum. Since retiring as director of Digital Equipment Corporation a decade ago, Burnet has converted his home into a snapshot of computer history. Every available space from his basement to the top floor of his two-storey home is covered with relics from the past. On top of his hardware collection are numerous punch cards, tape machines (including the original paper tape) and over 6000 computer reference books. So in demand is his collection that one Australian film called on him to recreate a computer setting (PDP-9) for a movie about the moon landing in 1969.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Carolina Now

Prison wants to jam cell signals Live 5 News - 4 hours ago By Tracey Amick, Live 5 News (WCSC) CHARLESTON SC - More than 1600 inmates are locked up at the Lieber Correctional Facility in Dorchester County. Prison Plans to Shackle Cellphones Wall Street Journal FCC offers prison boss phone jamming help Register NewsOXY - WCIV - Greenville News - Charleston Post Courier all 31 news articles

Astaro Security Linux is an all-in-one network security gateway that includes a firewall, intrusion protection, virus protection, spam protection, URL filtering, and a VPN gateway. Features include stateful packet inspection, deep packet filtering, intrusion detection and prevention, portscan detection, content filtering, virus detection for email and Web traffic, profile handling, IPSec, SSL, and PPTP VPN tunneling, spam blocking, proxies for HTTP, FTP, POP3, SMTP, DNS, VoIP, SOCKS, and Ident, logging, and reporting. The WebAdmin, the Install Wizard, and Up2Date service make it easy to install, manage, and update.

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License: Free For Home Use

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Changes:
This release is the beta version of the upcoming ASG 7.400. It includes several new features like HTTPS filtering, WAN link balancing, site-to-site SSL VPN, customizable URL filtering groups, PDF and CSV report support, and much more. A small bug hunting competition has been organized again.

Blob Wars : Blob and Conquer is a 3rd person
action shooter. With the apparent defeat of Galdov
and the reclaiming of the Fire, Time, Space, and
Reality Crystals, the Blobs’ battle was only just
beginning. Bob had rescued many Blobs and fought
many battles, but now he had an ever bigger task
ahead of him. The Blobs’ homeworld is still
littered with the alien forces and Bob once again
makes it his task to lead the counter attack. But
even without Galdov the aliens are still extremely
well organised.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
The game now starts in a resolution of 800 x 600 rather than 1900 x 1200.

Necromancer’s Dos Navigator is a “Norton
Commander” clone. It uses a well known text-mode
interface, is highly customizable, and has a lot
of features. Its key features are a text editor
with syntax highlighting, horizontal/vertical
blocks, multiple codepages, undo/redo, bookmarks,
powerful searching, and regex; a file viewer with
text view, asm/dump/hex edit, raw blocks, header
viewer, search, regex, and unlimited filesize; a
powerful filepanel with higlighting, VFSs, and
filefind with textsearch and regex; a calculator;
and more.

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License: Freeware

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Changes:
This release fixes issues in the dbf viewer, English status lines, calculator, editor, command line, and the FTP VFS.

libv4l is a collection of libraries that adds a
thin abstraction layer on top of video4linux2
(V4L2) devices. The purpose of this layer is to
make it easy for application writers to support a
wide variety of devices without having to write
separate code for different devices in the same
class. It consists of 3 different libraries.
libv4lconvert offers functions to convert from any
(known) pixel format to V4l2_PIX_FMT_BGR24 or
V4l2_PIX_FMT_YUV420. libv4l1 offers the
(deprecated) v4l1 API on top of v4l2 devices,
independent of the drivers for those devices
supporting v4l1 compatibility (which many v4l2
drivers do not). libv4l2 offers the v4l2 API on
top of v4l2 devices, while adding for the
application transparent libv4lconvert conversion
where necessary.

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License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

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Changes:
The frame format is now initially set (s_fmt), even if there is no change, to satisfy some UVC cameras’ expectancies. Flooding cameras with try_fmt requests is avoided for performance reasons and buggy cameras that might crash.

Cgstmad is an experimental articulatory speech
synthesizer that uses GnuSpeech’s tube model and
articulation data.

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
The articulation data has been adjusted. Smooth closure of the glottal waveform has been implemented.

pppd-sql is a plugin for the Point-to-Point server
(pppd) on Linux and Solaris that adds an
authentication backend using a MySQL or PostgreSQL
database for the Challenge Handshake
Authentication Protocol (CHAP) and Password
Authentication Protocol (PAP). It supports
MS-CHAPv1 and MS-CHAPv2 too. The IPCP negotiation
after authentication handshake is also supported.
pppd-sql supports a flexible configuration scheme,
has built-in failover functionality (no
load-balancing), and comes with easy and handy
documentation.

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License: GNU General Public License v2

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Changes:
This release adds only minor enhancements to the build environment. The plugin now checks for the right PPP server version, which has working plugin support, and you can specify the destination plugin directory with a new configure option ‘–with-plugin-path’.

Piggydb is a Web application for building personal knowledge base systems. You can write your knowledge in the same manner as blogging. Piggydb enables you to create highly structural knowledge by providing the features such as hierarchical tagging and flexible relationships between knowledge fragments. It encourages you to organize your knowledge continuously to discover new ideas or concepts, and moreover enrich your knowledge.

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License: The Apache License 2.0

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Changes:
This is a minor update that contains usability improvements and bugfixes. You can change the location of the database files by setting the Java system property “piggydb.database”.

Mon Petit Site is a Web site made to be a simple
family Web site. It is only written in PHP, is
Strict XHTML 1.0 and CSS compliant, has support
for internationalization, and makes a limited use
of cookies. It provides a blog, a photo album, a
calendar, a geographical address page, a member
directory, a gold book, a simple forum, and a link
page.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This version provides some ergonomic progress: numerous parameters are directly accessible from the pages they affect. A book of cooking recipes and a polls system have been added.

Argentum is a Web-based project and invoice
management software. It aims to be easy to use,
while remaining a powerful tool.

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License: OSI Approved

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Changes:
This release fixes the schema.sql file for a missing column in the modules table. It fixes a bug where entering the time would not record the user entering the time. It adds missing user form fields when creating a user. It fixes a bug where entering table rows in any table would not work properly. It forces the application to use short tags even if they are disabled in the main PHP installation.

squid-nufw-helper is an external ACL helper
for Squid that provides Single Sign On
capabilities. It uses the NuFW firewall suite
and supports the NuFW users SQL logging
scheme. The module allows for strict SSO
identification and authentication of users on
any Squid proxy, including transparent proxies.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release supports reconnecting to MySQL > 5.0, autodetects little/big endian architectures, and has a new “-U” failsafe option so that proxy access is granted even if the database is down or the user cannot be authenticated.

Fur is a filesystem based on FUSE which mounts a
Windows CE device (connected with the librapi2
from the synce project) onto a directory of the
local filesystem in a transparent and user-friendly
way.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release adds a fake chmod fuse hook to allow Konqueror to work smoothly on the FUR filesystem. A workaround has been added for devices that crash while reading the “windows” directory.

Ctalk provides object oriented programming features, like classes, methods, operator overloading, and inheritance to otherwise standard C programs. You can use only a few objects and classes in a program, or you can write programs entirely in Ctalk. The package provides a translator from Ctalk source code into C for compilation and a library that provides run-time support for class objects. The preprocessor, ctpp, is also available separately, and the package includes sample programs and documentation.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release contains many internal improvements and bugfixes that improve user object tracking and accounting, expression analysis, and performance.

iCalcreator is a PHP implementation to create,
parse, select, and edit iCal calendar files for
non-calendar systems like CMS, project management systems, and other applications able to support calendar information like agendas, tasks, reports, todo lists, and journaling data, and able to communicate with calendar applications. iCalcreator features the ability to create, parse, edit, and select calendars and calendar components. It is composed of a single class file with a simple interface, and is oriented around iCal
calendar component properties.

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License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

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Changes:
This is a major sub-release focused on enhanced performance, ensuring date input formats, UTC bug correction, and refactored setfunctions. It has an updated user manual. An extensive external beta test program has been executed to verify the release.

recordMyDesktop is a program that captures audio
and video data from a Linux desktop session,
producing an Ogg-encapsulated Theora-Vorbis file.
The main goal is to be as unobstrusive as possible
by proccessing only regions of the screen that
have changed.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
The code has been refactored and cleaned up extensively to ease maintenance and bugfixes. The cursor-flickering bug has been fixed, color-space conversion has been corrected, detection of compositing window managers has been improved, and libjack is now linked normally during compilation instead of being dlopened later.

Approdictio provides implementations of
dictionaries that allow approximate lookup. When
looking up a word, all words are returned that are
approximately equal to the word given. The
definition of approximately equal depends on the
metric provided to define the distance between two
words. An implementation of the Levensthein Metric
with customizable edit costs is part of the package.

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License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

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Changes:
The build process has been changed to produce Java 1.5 class files for wider compatibility. Some classes have been refactored for better readability and maintainability.

MP3nema is a tool aimed at analyzing and capturing
data that is hidden between frames in an MP3 file
or stream, otherwise noted as “out of band” data.
This utility also supports adding data between
frames and capturing streaming audio.

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
This release updates the output of out-of-band data to flush to a file. This modification assures that the data is written to disk and not hanging around. The usage statement was slightly modified to reflect all of the options.