JonesPC

I just heard of a browser that claim to be a web browser for the African American community. I wondered, how can a browser be a “black” browser. Of coarse being an African American myself, I decided to download the Blackbird browser to see what it is all about.

The Blackbird browser is built on top of Mozilla, that alone let me know that it should be pretty safe to use for a while. After installing the browser, I loaded it up and noticed something. Everything was black…as far as the theme color. I started poking around and noticed a few things.

Scrolling under the menu bar are news headlines that looks to be news stories that would interest African Americans. That scrolling headline can be easily turned on and off if the scrolling bothers you. Once I started to tab through some of the built in features, it became aperant what the developers were trying to do. Things that Black people look at online are integrated into the browser somehow. For example, there’s plenty of modified browsers that integrate Facebook and Myspace. There’s another one of those Social websites that has been around just as long as Myspace that many might not know about, Blackplanet.com, which there is a link.

A “videos” tab takes you to Blackbird TV, which looks like a video portal with “black video’s” or videos that feature talent, news, and info from the African American community.

Many of those features are features that I usually ignore in modified browsers but for people that are not as tech savvy, I can see Blackbird being a bit appealing. The overall look of the browser is decent, even though it is just Mozilla with a new skin, it does feel like its own browser.

For more info or to download and try for yourself, checkout blackbirdhome.com

You know, there are a lot of apps on the iPhone’s app store. Probably over 1000 by now. The problem is this

99% of those apps are worthless!

Yea Ive downloaded a lot of the free apps, bought a few of the paid apps. Other than a handfull of of apps, most of the apps are just screen clutter. Untill I downloaded Field Runners.

Remember Desktop Tower Defense? Well Field Runners is a clone of that game, which works pretty well on the iPhone. You do have to pay $4.99 to enjoy it, but it is one of the better apps Ive downloaded. If you don’t want to pay the fee, there is another clone called Tap defense that is almost as fun.

A while ago, there was a BBC tv show that I wanted to watch. If you aren’t in the UK and have tried to watch a BBC show online, you’d know that you get the this message.

So whats the sensible way to get around this? Find a proxy that would fool the BBC to think you are in the UK. In my search, I found a free solution…but it didn’t help me. It will however help people that aren’t in the US to watch US content from websites such as Hulu.com. Hotspot shield is a free program that allows you to view websites through a VPN. The IP address that websites will see when you visit their site is a US IP so sites like Hulu.com will think you are in the US and let you see all of the wonderful content available at that site.

I say its free, but its not…really…well you don’t have to pay any money for the software. How it is Hotspot Shield is funded is by serving an ad at the top of every webpage you view while the service is activated. Yes you can activate and deactivate the service when you want.

This program would work perfectly for what I was trying to do, but you don’t get to select the region you want to appear you are located. It will always be in the US.

There are other uses for this program. Lets say you are on a network that blocks certain websites…such as Facebook. Well since Hotspot Shield uses a VPN to serve webpages, you would be able to still view those websites. Now to find a way to run it from a USB drive so you wont have to install it on your PC at work or school.

Check out Hotspot shield here

I don’t know what to think about this, I got home from work the other morning and was checking my Gmail and read this

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15,
2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.

To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can
save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.
Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not
be accessible after this date.

After reading this a little more, I found out that Six Apart has purchased the whole Pownce operation. The Pownce technology and the people that built and maintained the service/app all are a part of Six Apart. There really aren’t any details of what the plans are but if you read the blurb of this news over at Six Apart, I tend to think that Pownce will be incorporated into the VOX blogging platform.

I remember trying out Pownce when it first launched and I thought it was cool but to be honest, I never really used it mucha after that initial trial run. Hopefully we will see something exciting come out of this little transaction.

CD and DVD burning is something I find I don’t do as much anymore. With good reason. Most music I listen to is either done on my PC or on my portable music device. Most video I watch is either DVD’s or through websites like Hulu or Netflix. Since I have pieced together a full time Vista media center, Ive been having problems with the really slow network times when it comes to transferring files between that PC and my Vista laptop. I realized that burning those files to a disc were a lot faster than waiting for the files to transfer. Problem is, I never installed any cd/dvd burning software on that Media PC. The dvd drive came with Nero but at the time I didn’t feel like looking for it. That’s when I decided to download and try out CDBurnerXP.

I have to admit, I am a fan of Nero and have been for years, I never look at anything else. I was pleasently surprised by CDBurnerXP. First of all its FREE. When I first found it, the listing in Google called it a free Nero Alternative. This little piece of software does indeed have a lot of features. Support for CD, DVD, Bluray and HDDVD. Yep I did say Bluray and Hddvd. Other features include some ISO tools and Litescribe integration. Its really a full featured disc burning solution.

The interface is pretty standard, when you first load CDBurnerXP, you get the window asking what type of disc you want to burn then you are taken to a file explorer style screen where you can then select your files and add them to the compilation.

So far, things have been working out great and I can see installing CDBurnerXP on any of my machines if I dont specifically need Nero. Read more or download it here. (I know it says XP but it works in both XP and Vista)

There was a comment/question in one of my old blog post that I thought would be a good idea to talk about in a blog post. The question:

“I need to recover some space on  my Windows Vista computer. I did all that I can think of doing but there is XX gigs in system restore that I cant delete. How do I delete that space?”

System restore is one of those features that I usually enable and leave alone. In Windows XP you can assign how much space you want to allocate to be used for system restore. In Vista, that space is allocated automatically. So what do you do to delete those files if you need the space. Well there is 2 ways of doing so, both are pretty simple but Im going to go through both.

Deleting system restore points in Vista:  1st way.

The easiest way is to just turn off system restore, reboot, then turn it back on (rebooting is optional). When you turn off system restore, Vista deletes all of the previously made restore points.

Click on start, then control panel, then System. Or you can click on start and type “system” and pick system from the search results (make sure you pick “system” not “system restore”)

From the System window, Click “System Protection”

In the new window that pops up, click on the “system Protection” tab and uncheck any drive you have checked.

This will shut off system restore on those drives, You will get a message warning you that all of your restore points will be deleted. Click ok, then Apply, then ok. You have turned off system restore and deleted all of your system restore points freeing up that space. You can turn it back on if you want and it will start creating restore points again.

Deleting system restore points in Vista:  Second way.

There is a second way to do pretty much the same thing. Click start, type “clean” in the search bar and pick “disk cleanup”. You will get a window asking which drive you want to clean, pick the drive you want to clean up.

Next. click on the “more” tab. Click on “clean up” under the System restore and shadow copies section of that tab.

You will get a message saying that all but the most recent restore point will be deleted. Click ok.

Like I said, Both ways are pretty simple, but not everyone would think to look.

Things to note: The first way deletes all of your restore points. the second way deletes all but the most recent.

This sounded really good when I first quickly (half) read this at techcrunch. A Pandora like web service with movies? So of coarse I quickly went over to Jinni.com to check it out. I signed up for a beta account and started poking around to see what Jinni.com was all about. What I found was a website that was only like Pandora in the background. After I got over my disappointment, I realized that Jinni is till pretty cool in its own right.

OK so what is Jinni.com

Basically this is how it works. You sign up, You rate moves, and Jinni.com suggest movies that you might be interested in seeing based on the movies you rated. Yea that sounds like Pandora alright. But where it differs is what you do with those suggestions. At Jinni, every movie that is suggested also have a way for you to watch the movie. Watching the movie isn’t done at site, or with an aplet or anything like listening to suggested music is listened too at Pandora. What you are given is a link to where you can purchase the movie, either by buying the CD or buying a movie download. There are some movies that are linked to somewhere like Hulu where you can watch the movie online for free.

I will check this site out for a while longer but so far, it seems pretty cool.

A few days ago I posted about how I took some old PC parts I had and pieced together a media center PC. The PC I built was meant to be used as a full time media center, connected to my TV and used to view media and online video. The OS I used was Vista Ultimate.

I have been using Vista for a while now but I never once fired up the media center app that comes installed with Vista. So ar its been about 2 weeks of using my new PC as a full time media PC and I have to say, that I really like it so far.

There were of coarse a few things I had to do after the fact to get things to work how I like it. The first thing was to install FDDSHOW. Over the years I kind of got away from installing codec packs, even did away with installing the Divx codec. FDDSHOW seems to do just about everything I need, every video and audio format can be played and everything is lovely.

The Media center app works really well on a TV, but trying to surf the internet at 1080P is almost impossible from across the room (it works, I just cant see it).

Make sure you check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series if your just joining in.

I held off on playing World of Warcraft because I just knew EQ2 was going to suck me in for about a year (only lasted about 2 months). I ended up picking the game up about 6 months after the release and so far, this has been the best MMO (obviously). But did they do everything right? Well most. Let’s take a look

Compared to my EQ likes

Combat

Combat in this game is about the best so far. WOW’s combat is similar to DOAC, but improved. Also, due to the character building features, you had more choices in how you play your character.
The World

WOW got closer to the feel I got when playing EQ as any MMO. While things were a little cluttered in some places, and sparse in others, the immersiveness in the world was there. The only problem, even though the cities were very nice and fleshed out, they still felt like you were entering an area with filled with “quest vendors”. Without other players around, the cities actually felt empty, lucky enough there were always tons of other players running about.

Dungeons

In WOW, something changed. Instead of having dungeons where everyone went, got a group and camped monsters, they had instances. Instances did 2 things, one good and one bad. The good was that it really created “dungeon crawl” style gameplay. You started at the beginning and fought your way to the end. Many times it was just your group. The bad thing is you couldn’t go into an instance and see all your peeps “camping” their different spots, no Lower guk all nighters here.

Armor State counting

This is something I think was an improvement in WOW. Because of all the different ways you could build your class, you had different options of what type of armor or weapons to support that build. Yea in the end, there were still times where there was a default outfit for X class, but this time it was more for show than viability. Don’t get me wrong, armor and weapons were still real important to your viability, you just had more viable options.

Did WOW improve on any of my EQ dislikes?

Random Instant deaths

WOW, for the most part, didn’t have any of these areas. The level grouping of monsters in a certain area was pretty stable. Thinking about this made me realize one of the possible reasons EQ mixed it up a bit. In WOW, you usually only see other players in your level group in any particular part of the world. If a area have monsters that are level 10-20, you would hardly ever see a level 30 or higher player. In EQ, I remember seeing the occasional higher level players roaming the high level monsters that wander the low level areas. Even though I don’t know if I agree with this, it was kindof motivational to see that level 40 taking down the high level monsters in the low level area in EQ.

Death Penalty

I have had some comments on the other post that disagree with me, but like I’ve said before, harsh death penalties are a big turnoff for me. Playing the game is fun, and with any game, once you take someone out of the actual “play” it isn’t fun anymore. World of Warcraft found a nice balance with their death penalty. I was never scared to attempt something because I didn’t want to deal with the death penalty. If I died, there was a mild penalty but you usually were respawned close enough to where you were hunting that it wasn’t a chore to get back into “play“. You could ignore your corpse if you wanted and it didn’t ruin your day.

Leveling

Just like the death penalty, the leveling in WOW was balanced out nicely also. Like most games the higher you got in level, the longer it took to gain levels. But it was overwhelming in WOW. You always had that sense of accomplishment and pushing forward, if that’s what you’re into

Balance

Ok, this is where Wow hasn’t learned too much. When it comes to PVE, Id say any class is just as capable as any other class. PVP is where things change. Some classes are just more fun and better to play, and some were clearly gimped (then patched to be overpowered then gimped etc)

Forced Grouping

I would have to say that there definitely no forced grouping here. You could solo every level if you wanted. Where the forced grouping came into play was with the dungeon raids (instances). That kind of forced grouping was understandable and you always had an option as to join a raid group or solo.

For the most part, I would say compared to EQ, WOW took out most of the bad and added enough new or different to keep people playing, which is why it’s the best selling MMO of all time (so far).

I know what you are thinking, blogging for a lot of people is free. For others there’s a cost but that cost is pretty minimal. I agree, for the most part, the cost associated with running a blog is small. If you host your own blog, you pretty much have domain cost and hosting cost.

When it comes to domain cost, most pay on a per year basis. Even then the cost of a domain name is usually $10 a year or less. Hosting is really the only monthly bill associated with running a blog. Those can cost as low as about $6 bucks a month to over $30 bucks a month. The actual cost of running a blog is not really going to be effected by today’s economy, but the problem lies with the money people look to make by running their blogs.

There are several different ways people make money blogging

Adsense or something similar

Amazon or something similar

Paid reviews or blog post.

All advertising based. Lets take each one and look at how the economy could impact that method of making money.

Adsense

This is probably the method of making money that will get hit last. The reason why, advertisers of all shapes and forms use adsense to advertise. While cut backs and a down economy may cause companies to spend less there is plenty of advertisers in that pool to keep things running. Another thing about Adsense style programs is the fact that its based on clicks, not purchases. As long as people are browsing the web, those clicks are going to happen. I’m not going to say that Adsense revenue will never drop, because if things stay bad for a long time, you will start to see it drop. But the way adsense work right now, it will be a while before things get to that point.

Amazon (or similar programs)

This type of advertising will probably be the one that people will start to “feel” first. If you arent familiar with the type of advertising Im talking about. Ads that bloggers get a commission for purchases made due to clicks on the blog. You talk block about a clock radio and link to that clock radio’s listing in amazon. a Reader click the link and purchase that clock radio, the blogger makes a few cents.

This is real obvious and we are already seeing this happen. People are cutting back on their spending. They may click on those amazon ads, but they just aren’t as quick to buy as they were about a year ago. If you are one of the lucky bloggers that make any money using this form of advertising (Im not one of those). You are probably already seeing slowdown. The longer the economy stay bad, the worse this is going to get.

Sponsored reviews or paid blog content.

This form of advertising I think will see changes is a different way. Here you get paid a set amount for a blog post or review. Like adsense, its a market that all manner of online business use. but unlike Adsense, those fee’s for writing such content will start to drop. Another thing that can happen is as companies start to cut back to save money, I can see this form of advertising being one of the first on the list to be dropped or lowered. The amount of advertising here will stay there for a while, but the quality choices will start to dwindle. In turn, bloggers that are looking to make that extra money because the bloggers themselves are also needing to make ends meet, will lower their standards on what they choose to accept as a paid offer. The better offers will get even more picky than they were before because they would be looking to maximize the effectiveness of the blog post they are paying people to write.

Hopefully, things will start to turn around here soon. If not, things are going to start to get a little tough for bloggers trying to make a few bucks