Xboxyde

Just wanted to share with you guys a website that I've visiting for a while now Xboxyde . It is mostly reviewing Xbox 360 titles but they are usually ahead of the crowds in getting stuff out daily. These two French guys must have some connections or something because they come with videos and still images of games that are coming out way before anyone else. What really impressed me is the videos they are producing themselves "Gamersyde Series". Today they came out with a second chapter that's about 40min long.They show gameplay of games like GoW,CoD3,and specially some PS3 games and Wii games. The do an excellent job showing the actual gameplay and discussing it for several minutes, even interviewing a couple game developers.
So far this is the best game-review website that I have ever seen so far. If you know of others that can compete with this one please share.

Update: I guess they also have another Playstation site: Playsyde

Happy surfing!

Top 10 girl geeks!

CNET has an article about Top 10 girl geeks. I personally learned that the first real program AND (in a way) compiler was written by a woman! Props to you ladies! Anyways check it out and see for yourselves.

Enhancing your experience with dual monitors

I have had dual monitors at work for a long time and luckily I've had an nVidia video card, which has a great utility that allows you to be pretty flexible with your dual monitors. However I've always had problems with the taskbar options and finally I was able to find an application that allowed me to customize my taskbar just the way I wanted. Introducing Ultramon. The application allows you to set your taskbar to stretch all the way AND (this is what makes it great) it'll only display the apps that are open on the respective monitor. It also adds items such as "maximize spanning both monitors" and "move to the next monitor" next to minimize, maximize and close buttons on every window. The application has a lot more options such as setting a different screen saver for each of the monitors and many others. The only drawback of the application is that it's not free. However if you'd like to try it, there's a trial edition. Alternitavely if you'd like to get a free program, there's another one called Multi-Monitor Taskbar which does a lot of the same things (I haven't tried this one). Anyways here are some screenshots that I took of my dual monitors:

Soccer helmets?

OK this goes on the list of "You know you're in the US if." And the answer is "if you're required to wear a helmet while playing soccer."



The state of Massachusetts is trying to pass a law that would require anyone playing soccer to wear a helmet. Apparently they are worried because head/brain injuries are not so uncommon in soccer. While I understand where they're coming from, I think it's still extremely silly. Can you imagine during the world cup hearing the commentator, "and here comes the USA team wearing their protective helmets!"

Anyways just wanted to throw this out there and see what you guys think, since a very large percent of our crowd here are big soccer heads (pun intended lol).

Finally I'd like to quote Jerry Seinfeld on this issue:

"There are many things that we can point to that proof that the human being is not smart. The helmet is my personal favorite. The fact that we had to invent the helmet. Now why did we invent the helmet? Well, because we were participating in many activities that were cracking our heads. We looked at the situation. We chose not to avoid these activities, but to just make little plastic hats so that we can continue our head-cracking lifestyles."

Live Wii coverage!

So here I am in my first ever console line with my roommate Paul waiting on the Nintendo Wii. The wait time is about 18 hours and as of right now we've been here for 2 hours. I got my trusty blackberry helping me out and Paul has his Nintendo DS. In addition we brought my iPod with a movie loaded on it. So the first two hours went quick! Anyways I'll probably add some pictures later (: And we'll definately throw on a review once we get it (I'm still not sure if I'm buying one lol)

Update: Well we got the Wii after almost 19 hours of wait! I just want to say that it's a ONCE in a life time opportunity lol, but it was fun all in all. We ended up getting home around 1am and playing till 3:30. It's a lot of fun even though feels a little awkward in the beginning.

Hockey

Test your musical ear

There's a cool site that lets you test your musical ear. You listen to 36 different tunes and each tune is played twice. After each "pair" has played you have to tell it whether you heard two identical or different tunes. It's a simple idea, but cool at the same time. I got 80.6% on it :(

Anyways here's the link:

Test your musical skills in 6 minutes

PS3's and Wii's and Gears of War

So! It's time to discuss the various consoles coming to market along with XBOX 360's Gears of War.

I think I will end up with a Wii AND a PS3 (more to come about how I'm getting those for free - hee-hee-hee) and Nico (my brother-in-law) has a 360, so I am as you can guess pretty excited about the console war going on.

PS3's launched in Japan today, and come to the US Nov. 17th, 2 days before the Wii, which hits on the 19th. Apparently almost no one in the huge lines outside of the stores even got a console b/c they sold out online so much. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/technology/11sony.html

Anyone thinking about buying one of the new systems or anyone else own a 360?

Nico, have you played Gears of War yet?

Using Cement to reduce Air Pollution !

Click here for the article.

Backing up files to your email made easy!

Alright I think that all of us at one point or another have emailed a file to ourselves to make sure we have it backed up somewhere. I'm a big Gmail user and this is one of the great functionalities because of the size of the inbox that Gmail allows you to have (almost 3G now and growing every second). Well here's an application called "Backup To Email" that creates a context menu on the right click menu in windows called just that - Backup To Email. What it will do is send an email to your Gmail account with the file attached making it faster and easier instead of opening a new browser, logging into gmail, composing, etc etc. In addition (and this is what really attracted me to this app) it will break down any file that's bigger than 10MB into smaller sizes! Gmail does not allow attachments larger than 10MB, so this is required and "Backup To Email" will take care of this for you! I personally haven't tried it yet, but hopefully tonight when I get home. So enjoy it and leave comments on what you think (:

Backup To Email

Command Prompt Hotkeys!

Ok so I might be over hyping this, but this is one of the coolest windows command prompt "did you know?" features that I've seen in a while. Lifehacker had a post about this article on smallvoid.com that lists what the function keys f1-f9 do when you're in command prompt (Start->Run, then type cmd and hit enter). Some features include bringing up the last command (perhaps done easier using the "up", "down" keys) and even bringing up a menu listing all the previously entered commands and letting you choose from them! Great hotkeys for people who use the command prompt. So fire up the prompt and check it out for yourself!

You're at work.. but are you working?

Alright me and Goga have had this conversation a billion times. Wouldn't it be cool if you could somehow have a fake screen on your desktop so when your boss comes in, he/she sees work, however if you wear special glasses or contacts or something of that sort, you would see the REAL screen which would be something different... something far from work... Ok so this might sound like we're a bunch of slackers (which we aren't... honestly... ok maybe sometimes). But Lifehacker posted a nice and easy solution today. Granted it's not the best and most delicate, however it's a solution! The idea behind it is just to hide your desktop icons, take screenshots of your desktop periodically and set it as your desktop background. There might even be a program that'll do something like that! If any of you guys know about it let us know (:


Here's the actual article.

Microsoft's Zune audio player to rival the iPod?

Well looks like Microsoft's Zune player is becoming popular. I know a lot of us here have iPods so it will be interesting to hear what you think about this player. It has impressive features such as 13/14 hour battery (depending if you have wireless on or off), wireless (something I think iPods should have had a long time ago) that allows you to share music between Zune players, much bigger display than iPod's and more. Now yes it IS from Microsoft, but that doesn't mean we have to hate it right away. I think a player with these kind of capabilities deserves a chance. Wired ran an article found here saying that many iPod users will probably switch to Zune when it comes out. The official date is November 14th this year.

Explosion at PayPal headquarters

Apparently there was an explosion at the PayPal headquarters last night. Here's a site that has a video clip of a news reporter reporting from the scene.