If you're not big into tech media, chances are you have never heard of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs , a satirical blog by an anonymous writer that pokes fun in a semi-serious way at Apple, Steve Jobs himself, and the tech industry as a whole. The writer, only known as Fake Steve Jobs, does an excellent job of staying in-character as he writes his witty and often scathing articles about what's going on in the tech world. However, the fact that Fake Steve is anonymous appears to have ...
Sometimes you wonder what a company is smoking when it comes time to sit down and dream up a new application and they come up with 3D Mailbox, quite possibly the worst application ever conceived and developed. Think of it as a low-quality 3D game from the late 1990s, only it's all about reading and sorting your email. Want to get rid of spam? Feed it to a shark. Want to read a message? Your avatar will lounge by the poolside in a bikini while you sort through your lat...
We've all had those days where our PC is just being maddeningly problematic. Blue screens for no reason, word processors crashing taking hours of work with them, the list of frustrations goes on and on. And when these things happen, I'm sure the temptation has been to take a hammer to the tower, or just shove the whole thing in the trash bin and be done with it, but I doubt anyone here has gone quite as far as a frustrated fellow in Germany did this weekend. A man in Berlin, Germ...
A week ago today, the WC Wiki opened up to the community, and the response has been fantastic! Here are a few statistics for those first seven days. Considering the nature of the project (community-driven documentation), I'm very happy with the results. In time, I hope to be able to point most user questions to the Wiki. Week One Statistics: Nearly 10,000 page views! 89 Registered Users 321 Total Pages 163 Uploaded Files Users like SViz, Digitalchet, SK Originals, ...
The tech boom is back. Sort of. But instead of the powerhouse firms of old ruling the roost, it's up-starts and amateurs who are having their day in the sun. Forbes.com takes a look at how things have changed between the last boom and this one. In the late 90s, companies had to invent the revenue models from scratch, as the banner ad didn't exist and people were still struggling to find the optimal way to earn money off of a free website. A few businesses that pion...
The word from Microsoft today is that Windows Home Server has been declared done and released to manufacturing for CD duplication and boxing. OEMs such as Gateway, HP and others should be getting their final copies very soon, so we can expect packaged WHS systems from them very soon. In addition to the OEM bundle packs, users will be able to purchase copies of the OS individually, for use home-built, or older systems they may have sitting around. WHS received a very positi...
Two weeks ago, we polled you on whether or not you picked up the iPhone on release weekend. Even with the poll running a week longer than planned, a grand total of 15 people have sunk the cash and picked up the iPhone. Honestly, it was so lopsided there's no real point in even posting a pie chart this week. This week, we move on to the WinCustomize Wiki , which officially launched last week and has already seen a lot of activity in updates and new content being added by...
25 years ago this month, a 9th grader from Pittsburgh, PA marched into history as being the author of the first recorded computer virus. It wasn't a malicious virus, really more of a prank to annoy friends and teachers. The virus, called Elk Cloner, spread between Apple II computers via floppy disks (the 5.25" variety). When the computer was booted from an infected floppy, the virus would automatically start. Once infected, the system would then write a copy of the v...
It's been a pretty busy week despite everyone here just coming off of a brief holiday. In case you missed anything, here's a round-up of all the important news from the past week or so. WinCustomize Wiki Launches The WC Wiki opened its doors on Tuesday, and so far the response has been phenomenal! Keep up the good work guys! Desktop Customization Group on Facebook Island Dog opened up a group on Facebook dedicated to Desktop Customization. As of this writing, the g...
The year is 1994, the World Wide Web is just two years old and NCSA Mosaic is the only browser worth using. There are only a handful of websites in existence and they're mostly links, lists and very few low-resolution images. Want news? There are only 3 or 4 news sites to pick from. It was a cleaner time, a simpler time, one where very few people yet had access, and the Internet hadn't devolved into one big spam and porn distribution channel. Download Squad has a grea...
Social Networks are taking off lately, some are even saying they'll be supplanting traditional blogs soon as ways to communicate with groups of like-minded individuals on any given topic. It's also a good way to expose people to your hobby that wouldn't have otherwise heard of it. Probably the fastest growing social networking site out there right now is Facebook, appealing to college students and professionals (less teen angst garbage than MySpace). It's quickly attracting th...
For a long time now, the popularity of a website has been determined by how many pages are viewed, and how many unique visitors hit the site. The higher your numbers, the more popular/valuable your site was. At least that was the idea up until very recently. Now, ratings firm Nielsen/NetRatings has announced they will be considering a completely different number to determine the success of a website: Time spent per visit. The idea is that the longer a user spends at a site,...
Since the iPhone came out a week and a half ago, all sorts of review sits have been putting the device through its paces, trying to find its limits. Most notably, many sites have done their hardest to actually destroy the phone, to see how well it will stand up to the average clumsy user. PC World tossed it around, tried gashing it with keys etc. Ars Technica dropped it off a 3 story building and dumped it into a toilet. They cover the most common potential mishaps your ...
The video podcast, Digital Underground, recently put up their fourth episode in which they cover all sorts of things nerdy. Among the topics talked about is Windows UI Customization. They spend most of their time in the segment looking at various Stardock products like WindowBlinds and ObjectDock. They even show a bit of WinCustomize when talking about the huge amount of community-created content, but never mention the site explicitly. It's a funny video podcast as it's a c...
About 2 months ago we announced that we were starting on a new WinCustomize site project, a wiki to help organize all the information out there on what skinning is, what applications there are to use, and how to best use them. We chose a wiki instead of a static list of links for several reasons: It's a proven method for organizing and delivering information (see Wikipedia ) It's open to all users to edit and contribute It quickly evolves to meet the needs of the community A...