.::REALITYRECALL::.

Well, this is it. Hell has frozen over, pigs are flying, dogs and cats are living together – MASS HYSTERIA!!

Gearbox has just confirmed that they will be releasing Duke Nukem Forever. If this actually comes to pass, it looks like L.A. Noire may be the new king of the vaporware.

The future of Duke Nukem Forever looked black indeed when 3D Realms finally went bust in May 2009. Take Two retained rights to the game, and they apparently felt that Borderlands developer Gearbox could put the polish to the long-awaited franchise.

No word yet on when it will hit stores, but we’ll let you know as soon as we do. In the meantime, there’s a live stream of the announcement and gameplay footage in this post.

UPDATE: The game has completed development, and will be released in 2011 on PC, PS3 and XBox 360. Said Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, “When Duke ran into trouble, we were glad to [help him out of] a spot. You can’t let the Duke die, right?” Apparently not, since the game is fully playable at PAX right now.

Ridley Scott continues to prepare to return to the “Alien” universe.  Now he shares a little insight into what we can expect from the prequel.

Google has announced that despite Wave’s demise as a Google App, its open source code will continue to be developed into a fully-functional application available to anyone with the desire to host it. More »

Two years. Can you believe it’s only been two years since we started browsing the internet faster than a potato can tear through the air? Well, Google can, and it’s certainly not been sitting around during that time, improving Chrome‘s JavaScript performance by a factor of 3, and throwing in a litany of additional features, like tab side-by-side view, themes, auto-translation, and bookmark and preference sync across machines. To celebrate the anniversary, the company’s uploaded version numero 6 to its stable channel, which brings a few more GUI optimizations and some bug fixes to the table. Hardware graphics acceleration isn’t yet included in the public release, but it too shall be joining the party before long.

Chrome is now 2 years old! Google celebrates with release of version 6 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BP says it has so far spent roughly $8 billion US responding to the disastrous oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

A Yorkton, Sask., woman who tried to block police from entering a home to check on a caller who dialled 911 has been convicted of obstruction of justice.

With students across Saskatchewan returning to school, teachers are divided about whether popular social networks like Facebook have a place in the classroom.

Fans of the Saskatchewan Roughriders have another item they can put in their collection of club gear: one dollar coins, or loonies, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the team.

Ponder, for a moment, this photo of a field in Manor, Texas. Outside Jennie Lane SmartPark, which is also the home to the town’s farmers’ market, hangs a large QR code that directs both residents and curious passersby to this website, which gives a brief history of the land and its re-dedication from “park” to “SmartPark.” The SmartPark now boasts free Wi-Fi and “technology training classes,” all a part of Manor’s government tech upgrade that began back in 2008.

With an estimated population of 5,468, Manor is still a small town. But its upgrade — including services like a redesigned city website, a Web app for reporting street and water issues called SeeClickFix, and a crowd-sourcing website for new ideas called Manor Labs — has made news as representing the evolution of local government into the Internet age. Manor will be hosting a two-day tech conference later this month called manor.govfresh, where city officials will meet with other municipal governments about its programs, and will even give another town — De Leon, Texas — a “Gov City 2.0 Makeover.”

Continue reading Manor, Texas: Government Evolution or Fad Solutions in the QR Code-Connected Town

Manor, Texas: Government Evolution or Fad Solutions in the QR Code-Connected Town originally appeared on Switched on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung exec says next tablet will use Android ‘Honeycomb,’ Galaxy Tab getting Gingerbread originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chrome: TabRocket is a small Chrome extension that allows you to shuttle open tabs between remote Chrome sessions. If you’ve ever wanted to send a tab to your home computer or your laptop across the room, TabRocket can help. More »

Theoretical physicist and official World’s Cleverest Chap Stephen Hawking says there’s no reason to think that God created the universe.

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That Folio 100 (alias Smart Pad) from Toshiba we’d been hearing about? Yep, totally real, and totally Tegra 2-powered — a theme that we think is going to be pretty popular among tablet makers this season. We caught a handful of Folio 100s firmly affixed to a wall at IFA today, showing 10.1-inch multitouch LCD displays paired with a remixed version of Android 2.1, a handful of capacitive buttons, a front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera, 16GB of on-board storage, and not much else — there’s really nothing visually stunning about the setup as far as we can tell, and it’s not particularly thin. After bouncing out that crazy Libretto W100, Toshiba’s going to have to turn up the style dial to 11 if it wants to rise above the forthcoming onslaught of Google tablets, we suspect.

Toshiba’s Folio 100 with Android and Tegra 2 spied in the IFA wilds originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Would you like to make your blog look great on all devices, not just computers?  Smartphones and other mobile devices are increasing in popularity, so here’s how you can make sure your blog looks great no matter what people are reading it on.

WordPress is a great tool for creating a blog or traditional website for your business, organization, or simply to share pictures with family and friends.  You can make a free blog on WordPress.com, and if so, your blog will already be ready for most modern mobile device browsers.  Here’s our test WordPress.com site in Mobile Safari; WordPress.com automatically gave it an iOS style theme that’s easy to use on mobile devices.

However, if you want to tweak WordPress and make your site just like you want, you’ll need to use the Self-hosted WordPress.org.  If you’ve created a new WordPress site on your own server or hosting service manually or using an auto-installer such as Softaculous, you may be disappointed that your site looks the same on mobile browsers as it does on your computer.  This makes it difficult to use on small screens.

Thankfully, you can easily get the same iOS style theme on your blog for free with the WPtouch plugin.  Login to your WordPress Dashboard, and select Add New under Plugins on the left side menu.

On this page, enter WPtouch in the search box.

Now install and activate the plugin as normal.

Your site will now have a nice theme that works great on modern smartphones and other mobile devices, but will still show your own normal theme to visitors using computers.  If you’d like to preview how your new mobile theme looks on an iPhone, check out our article on Testing Mobile Websites in Safari for Windows.

Tweak WPtouch Settings

WPtouch works fine without any tweaking on most sites, but if you’d like, you can customize your mobile site and tweak WPtouch’s settings to get it working just like you want.  To do this, click WPtouch under Settings on the left menu.

Here you can tweak many settings, including the mobile theme’s background, fonts, icon, and more.

You can also add Google Analytics and Adsense to your mobile site, so you can monetize your traffic and know how many visitors you’re getting.  If you need to find you Google Analytics code, here’s how you can quickly find it.

You may need to tweak settings in other WordPress plugins, including WP Cache and W3 Cache, to make them work with WPtouch, so be sure to check the list at the bottom of the settings page.

Here’s Techinch.com with a customized logo, menu, and background using WPtouch.  Now your site looks just like you want, on PCs and mobile devices.

On occasion you will need to edit the hosts file on your machine. Sometimes because of an attack or prank, and others so that you can simply and freely control access to websites and network traffic.

hosts files have been in use since ARPANET. They were used to resolve hosts names before DNS. hosts files would be massive documents used to aide the network name resolution.

Microsoft kept the hosts file alive in Windows networking which is why it varies very little whether used in Windows, OS X or Linux. The syntax stays mostly the same across all platforms. Most hosts files will have several entries for loopback. We can use that for the basic example for the typical syntax.

The first part will be the location to redirect the address to, the second part will be the address that you will want to redirect, and the third part is the comment. They can be separated by a space, but for ease of reading are typically separated by one or two tabs.

127.0.0.1 localhosts #loopback

Now let’s look at accessing the hosts files in the different operating systems…

Windows 7

To access the hosts file in Windows 7 you can use the following command in the Run Line to open notepad and the file.

notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Once notepad is open you can edit the file. In this example we will block Facebook. To do this just enter in the following after the # mark.

0.0.0.0    www.facebook.com

Now that you have edited your Hosts file make sure to save it.

Now notice if we try to access Facebook in IE we can’t get to the page.

We also were not able to get to it in Google Chrome… (check notes at the end). Also for more info on editing your Hosts file, check out The Geek’s article on how to create a shortcut to quickly edit your Hosts file.

Ubuntu

In Ubuntu 10.04 and most Linux distro’s you can edit the hosts file directly in the terminal. You can use your favorite editor or even open your favorite GUI text editor. For this example we will use VIM. Like Windows 7, Ubuntu’s hosts file is located in the /etc/ folder, though here it is in the root of the drive. In order to edit the file you will need to open it as root which is why we use sudo here.

Now that it is open we can edit it to redirect Facebook into nothing. You will notice that with Ubuntu there is also a section for IP6. For most needs you will only need to edit it the top section and ignore the IP6.

Now we can save the file and try to go to Facebook.com. Just like in windows we will see that we are now redirected to a site that does not exist.

Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6)

In Snow Leopard, accessing the hosts file is very similar to Ubuntu. Begin in terminal and use your favorite editor, even is you wish to call a GUI text editor, it is easier to do so from terminal.

The file will look a bit more like Windows, only with a little less explanation. Again we are going to redirect Facebook.

This time it seems that 0.0.0.0 is a loopback and will direct you to the computers Apache test page.

Notes

There are some things to note from this walkthrough that we did notice. When tested it, Chrome did not use the hosts file in any operating system but we were able to block Facebook in Chrome by adding www.facebook.com. Also, make sure to place and extra line after the last entry for the section.

This should get you started in understanding the Hosts file and how it can help protect your computer. You can use it to block sites that you don’t want a PC to be able to access. If you have more suggestions for any of the operating systems we coved, then leave a comment and let us know!

Create a Shortcut to Quickly Edit Your Hosts File in Windows

The Zune HD continues to rank among our all-time favorites in terms of industrial design, so it’s good to hear that Microsoft isn’t entirely abandoning the PMP sector for its new Windows Phone 7 hotness. Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet has consulted her tea leaves (and in-the-know tipsters) and emerged with the strong feeling that some new Zune hardware is brewing up in Redmond. Little specificity is available, beyond the obvious postulation that a new ZHD would probably be driven by an ARM CPU and take some software pointers from WP7, but we’re told to look toward to the early 2011 horizon and see if we can’t spot any sexy new media players emerging. A mirage is as likely as the real deal right now, but it’s always fun to look to that horizon, no?

Zune HD could have all-new model in the works originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oakville, Ont.-based Ford Canada says its August auto sales rose eight per cent from the same month a year earlier, to 24,034 cars and light trucks.