What is ‘Web Clips‘?

Web Clips shows you news headlines, Gmail tips, blogs, any RSS and Atom feed, relevant sponsored links, and more — right at the top of your inbox and messages. Receive updates from your favorite sites without having to leave Gmail!

This is pretty sweet. Nice way of adding an rss feed to your gmail, especially if you spend a lot of time in your browser and/or using Gmail.
‘Web Clips’ adds a single line above your Inbox in Gmail, showing a single rss feed title, very similar to what Google Desktop already does, with a navigation arrow for forward and back. Very nice. All random too, not content targeted.

Update:
Savory Spam Crescents – Bake 12-15 minutes or until golden brown
Heh, Google’s adding recipes for spam (the food, not the irritation) in their web clips bar when you view your Spam folder in Gmail. Heh. Nice guys…

Tags: Web Clips, Gmail, Atom, rss, recipes, spam

Image archive: video game controllers – Joystiq – www.joystiq.com

Take a trip down memory lane with this image archive of classic console controllers. It even includes several conceptual iterations of the devices we’ve grown to love. With exception to Nintendo‘s Revolution remote, most are very similar in design, plus or minus a few buttons.

These are some great memory-lane pictures of game console controllers. There’s even a pic of a Donkey Kong game there. Remember that one? Dual screen, orange body. Even the old Atari joysticks… Direct link to see Video Game Joysticks And Controllers.

Tags: video game, controllers, Nintendo

Informit.com has a shortish article about AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), explaining what it is, how and when to use it. In short, using AJAX allows you to make calls to your webserver, sending and/or retrieving information (any file type will do, but XML is generally preferred as it’s structured and allows for good parsing on the client side) from the server, and update the browser page with having to actually reload the whole page.

Not having to reload the complete page makes for a nice seamless user experience, with the user not having to wait for too long. One very popular site that makes heavy use of AJAX is Google‘s Gmail. There are some downsides to using AJAX though. One being that the functionality of the browser’s back button becomes a bit redundant, and may in fact actually break the navigation of your site if the user had to use it…

Confused as to when it’s a good idea to use AJAX? Read the article at Informit, it should clear things up.

Tags: AJAX, Javascript, XML

I know this is old, but I was just told about this now. The forum regulars at Something Awful made up some great remakes of some popular game boxes. Damn this stuff is funny…

Tags: Something Awful, game boxes

I just discovered this gem (Play Risk using Google Maps) via the people at lifehacker.com. I don’t have time to play with this right now, but it seems that this guy (calls himself TehDiplomat, heh) has been working on this for about 2 or so months, and it seems functional.

It reminds me of the Lord of the Rings version of the Risk boardgame I saw at the local CNA soon after the first LotR movies were released…
Same game principal, but just the Middle Earth map is used. Would have loved to buy that, but never did…

Tags: Risk, Google Maps, LotR, Middle Earth

The book is a chronological survey covering the best cinematic dramas, comedies, westerns, musicals, suspense and horror films, gangster classics, films noir, sci-fi epics, documentaries, and adaptations of novels and stage plays. The listings are dramatically augmented with memorable photos, both in colour and black and white. For students of cinema, for discerning film buffs, for general moviegoers, and for readers who enjoy reminiscing over unforgettable lines of dialogue, here’s the best place to start. It comes in hardback only and costs $35 [amazon.com]. I think you’d better get plenty of popcorn in!

GadgetryBlog: 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

This seems to be a must have if you love movies… I’d love to know how many of those 1001 movies I’ve actually seen… Assuming worst case scenario of none, and an average of between 90 and 120 minutes per movie, that’s a whopping 2 to 3 months of solid non-stop movie watching… Assuming one can even get hold of many of those movies… Hmmmm…

Tags: book, cinema

Maybe Sony’s Strategy Is To Convince You To Never Use A CD In A Computer

Techdirt:Maybe Sony’s Strategy Is To Convince You To Never Use A CD In A Computer

Heh, yeah, that may be true…

More from Mark at Sysinternals on the Dangerous Decloaking Patch too…
Infoworld also has some info on the patch possibly even crashing Windows…

When will this end?

technorati tags: sony, drm, sysinternals, windows

A very interesting read this:

Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

Mark’s Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

More links:

• Sony to offer patch for ‘rootkit’ DRM [theregister.co.uk] – Thanks devan
• Sony’s ‘secret’ stirs trouble [news24.com]
• Sony Rootkit – Worst.DRM.Ever [gizmodo.com]
• The Real Danger Of Sony’s Rootkit: It Lets Others Piggyback [techdirt.com]
• Sony to patch copy-protected CD [news.com.com]

It was bound to happen.
World of Warcraft hackers using Sony BMG rootkit [securityfocus.com]
To summarise:

• Sony’s “copy-protection” hides any process or file that starts with “$sys$”.
• Blizzard’s anti-cheating “Warden” scans the process list of the PC, checking for malicious processes interfering with World of Warcraft. (Big uproar [news.bbc.co.uk] over this though…)
• World of Warcraft cheaters rename their cheating tools, prefixing the file and/or process name with “$sys”.
• Blizzard’s Warden can’t see the offending process, and voila, you have a cheating system that’s undetectable.
• Blizzard loves Sony long time.

Doesn’t Sony own Everquest? Oh the irony.
This will really be applicable to any and all MMORPGs, and now the threat of undetectable worms are also there. However, it’s fairly easy to prevent the propagation though: Don’t buy Sony BMG cds and play them on your Windows PC. Simple.

Technorati Tags: sony, rootkit, drm, windows, registry

Well now, speaking of extensions.

Engadget.com has an entry on porting firefox extensions to Flock.

They link to a guy called Geoff over at frobba.com where he details how to dissect your extensions to make them able to install in Flock.  It’s not too difficult to do, as the extensions just have a small part in the one file contained in the extension, that lists the intended browsers that the extension is for.  Extract, edit the file, insert some xml, close, and voila, flock allows you to install the extention.  Beware however, that not all extensions will automagically “just work” in flock if they work in firefox.  There are bound to be some extensions that won’t work.  Flock and Firefox are, after all, not the exact same browser.

Technorati Tags: flock, extensions, firefox

After playing a bit more with flock, I found their Extensions page.

I immediately installed my standard extensions, being AdBlock (Flock has AdBlock plus), the Web Developer extension, and Noscript (a nice javascript dis/enabler…).

The one extension I initially passed over was the CustomizeGoogle extension, as I was already using the Personalised Google Homepage, and thought that this extension was going to do the same.  Boy was I wrong.

I noticed that RIP had an entry about CustomizeGoogle, I read through it, and tried it out.  He has a pretty good summary of what the extension does, so click over there to read a bit more.  Also check out the extend.flock.com CustomizeGoogle entry, and also the CustomizeGoogle homepage.

When installing the extension in Flock though, make sure you do it via the extend.flock.com site, as it’s been modified to install into Flock, and the extension on the CustomizeGoogle.com page only seems to install in Firefox.

Technorati Tags: flock, firefox, google, extensions, customizegoogle