Bandwidth Got You Down?

I just noticed a cool new feature of my favorite download site tucows.com. If you’re one of those people always looking for great new shareware, but you don’t have the time or the bandwidth to download the gigs of data that you want, tucows.com will now let you create a custom CD-ROM full of all the shareware (up to 600 megs per disc) and then they’ll mail it to you. Seems very retro to be using snail-mail to ship bits, but it works around that problem of having the broadband at work but no CD burner, or just plain no broadband at all. Cost is $10 per disc, plus $2 shipping worldwide.

Swiping with Style

Following the advice of a well-connected Net celebrity, I started using Limewire to fulfill my P2P needs on OS X. Then I discovered Iswipe Connects to three times as many networks, including Hotline and some others I’d never heard of. Finally, I’m able to find some artists that just weren’t showing up in Limewire. Iswipe is also donation-ware.

Fun with Mozilla

I’ve recently been playing with Mozilla plug-ins on my eMac. Googlebar emulates the popular IE searchbar, and Composite lets you do WYSIWYG HTML (sorta) in text areas such as form submissions. The Mac OS X version of Composite has no Save button and the OS X version of Googlebar has to be re-selected to show up.

I Go Pogo

While we’re talking about Tablet PCs (see Nate’s Street Noise item), check out this lilliputian wonder: the Pogo. This baby is a mere 155mm on the diagonal. It sports a color touch screen with a Web browser, has dual-band GSM/GPRS, SMS and email, an MP3 player, organizer software, etc. The Pogo is currently availble only in the UK (for as little as £50 w/Web service contract) and there’s no indication on their site that the device will be available elsewhere.

Linksys Cable/DSL router vulnerability

A security company called iDefense has announced that they have discovered a vulnerability in the Linksys BEFSR41 EtherFast Cable/DSL router. The vulnerability allows someone to crash the router by simply typing a URL into their browser. If remote management is turned on, then this can be done from anywhere on the internet.

Upgrading the firmware to a version newer than 1.42.7 will fix the problem.

Dell’s New Pocket PC; Goodbye $600 PDA

Dell has two new PDAs just about ready for release in mid-November — the new Axim line will include models with 300MHz and 400MHz chips running PPC OS, and 32 or 64 megs of RAM resprectively. The unit is slightly big-boned for a Pocket PC, but considering that they’ve got both CompactFlash and Secure Digital slots, it’s undersandable. The units have a 3.5″ transreflective screen, which allows readability outside without sacrificing color or battery life. Both have a five-way D-pad and a scroll wheel for navigation. The biggest innovation in these units? Price. US$199 and $299 after rebate.

Those Crazy Canadians!

While I’m not Canadian, there are many things I’ve always respected about our neighbor to the north (or, as I like to call them, the 51st state) — they have a good human rights record, a good attitude about guns (see Michael Moore’s new film Bowling for Columbine) and they make a mean Cafe au Lait. But some things are not as good up there as down here in the good ol’ US of A, and here’s one example; the Copyright Board of Canada has proposed a tax on recordable media that would add $0.021 on every megabyte worth of digital media. That means $21 per gigabyte on hard-drive based MP3 players, and for something like the Lyra Jukebox, the tax alone would be $400 or more. Now, sure, that’s just those Canadian Dollars, not US Greenbacks, but that’s still alot of scratch to be paying the feds, even if they pay for your healthcare. Read the proposal at The Copyright Board (pdf).

Giant…er…Laptop?

Here’s one from the “Who the hell is their market?” department:

Xentex has a fold-out laptop computer. It starts out life as a 12-pound, normal laptop-sized bundle, but them folds out in four sections into a…ah…VastTop with a 20″ dual TFT screen.

Um…kinda cool and all, but where the hell would you use it? Not on a plane, train or in an automobile. It’s hard enough finding space for a regular desktop-replacement-sized laptop on the go, let alone, this big-boned boy. I also wonder about the dual screens, which they make a big about, like it’ll greatly boost your efficiency. To me, it smells like they tried to make something positive out of a design problem (how to deal with a bi-folding screen). C’mon, there can’t be a sustainable market for this thing, can there? Oh yeah, this baby’ll put ya back five Gs.

[Thanks to Sean Carton]