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Part of being a good user and consumer is understanding how technology works, why we use it the way we do, and what the barrage of acronyms and PR jargon means. We’re here to help you make sense of it all and give you a better appreciation for how that pile of transistors, pixels, and antennas works together to deliver the conveniences of the modern world to your living room or office.

What is RSS?

RSS, most commonly expanded to “Really Simple Syndication“, is a way for frequently updated Web sites to publish content so it can easily be repeated and aggregated around the Web. These feeds, as they’re called, are most often associated with news sites and blogs, but almost every Web site offers them. RSS, along with its close cousin Atom, strips out many elements of a Web site and leaves only the text, images and, in some cases, the audio or video associated with an article. It uses the XML markup language, a document formatting standard used not only in Web pages, but in office documents like those of Office 2007, Open Office, and iWork. This makes it a lightweight way to pass around content

Continue reading RSS, The Web’s Most Underutilized Time Saver

Filed under: Columns, Google, Web

RSS, The Web’s Most Underutilized Time Saver originally appeared on Switched on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google announced on Wednesday that it plans to create and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States.
The network connections will deliver Internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second with fiber direct to the home connections. Google says it plans to offer…

Microsoft has shared some new Windows Live Messenger stats, confirming that more than 300 million people in 76 countries and 48 languages use Messenger every month.
The Windows Live Social Networking team also shared individual statistics for country specific Messenger users but did not include the United States. Microsoft’s Jeff Kunins,…

Yesterday, Google announced their new social networking tool, Buzz.  The tool started going live yesterday but is slowly being rolled out to the masses that are using Gmail.  The service that many are calling a ‘Twitter killer’ operates in a similar fashion to Twitter, but the overall idea is much…

Google is updating its Street View service with increased coverage across Canada.

Microsoft said on Monday that users experiencing battery warnings from Windows 7 are by design.
Last week Neowin revealed reports of users receiving notifications that they should replace their laptop battery. The warning is triggered when a laptops BIOS detects a battery replacement is required. Windows 7 provides the following…

Windows 7 has a lot of neat new features (such as Aero Peek) that help you see what’s behind a window, but reader Verygoodyear shares a very simple, one-key solution for any Windows version that, surprisingly, is new to us.

When moving a window in Windows, if you move the window, keep your finger held down on the mouse and then press Esc, it puts it back where you got it from.

Some of you may have known about this before, but we were a little shocked when we read Verygoodyear's tip—it's perfect for checking what's going on behind the frontmost one without disrupting your window layout and you don't need to activate Aero Peek to do it. Were we just incredibly slow on the uptake on this one (it works all the way back to XP), or is this simple-but-useful shortcut new to you, as well? Let's hear it in the comments.

The youngest son of Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke was killed in a car accident in Indiana on Friday.

TechCrunch reports that Facebook is working on a full webmail system to replace their current messaging platform, including full POP and IMAP support and a customized @facebook.com e-mail address. The codename for the new system: Project Titan.

In the TechCrunch post, Arrington suggests that Facebook has been working towards a webmail service for some time, expanding their messaging platform to be searchable and allowing Facebook users to send messages directly to non-Facebook e-mail addresses. The site has also shown interest in giving its users a more accessible and more complete online identity with the recent implementation of personalized URLs and the proliferation of Facebook Connect login on third party sites.

Project Titan would take this effort a step further, giving users a personalized username@facebook.com e-mail address and letting them access it on Facebook itself or independently via POP and IMAP. Facebook already has 175 million people logging into their site each day, but adding a true webmail solution would be a strong step in their transformation from a centralized communications hub to a broader platform for staying connected online. [TechCrunch]

I wanted to let you know that on April 15, 2010 Microsoft will discontinue Xbox LIVE service for original Xbox consoles and games, including Xbox 1 games playable on Xbox 360. Our first step in this process will be to turn off auto-renewals for those members who only use Xbox LIVE on a v1 Xbox. While I can’t comment on the specifics, this change will allow us to continue evolving the LIVE service with new features and experiences that fully harness the power of Xbox 360 and the Xbox LIVE community. We did not make this decision lightly, but after careful consideration and review we realize that this decision will allow us unprecedented flexibility for future features. 

Xbox LIVE general manager Marc Whitten (Gamertag Notwen) has posted this letter to the community which provides additional context.

The best is yet to come, and we look forward to sharing more details in the near future.

The Atlanta Thrashers traded superstar captain Ilya Kovalchuk to the New Jersey Devils in a five-player blockbuster late Thursday.

Want a wall-sized satellite view of your neighborhood? A full-page street map of the town you’re visiting? Google Map Buddy, a free, portable map maker, grabs data from Google Maps and arranges it exactly how you want it.

When you un-zip and run Google Map Buddy, it asks you to choose your Google Map nationality, then opens a browser to let you search out the location you’re looking at. Once you get there, hit “Select area,” then draw a rectangle around the area you want to capture. After fine-tuning the zoom level and hitting “Create Map Image,” Map Buddy goes to work grabbing, tile by tile, your area’s map. It generates a generally high-resolution PNG of your area, and provides the individual map tiles to keep and arrange yourself into a larger grid, if you’d like.

The software itself can be described as "picky"—you have to "X" out any particular business or destination that pops up in a dialog box on the map, and after zooming in on the Google Map browser to your destination, Map Buddy asks you for a deeper zoom level than what you've already set. So it's not an elegant tool, exactly, but it does deliver the very printable, full-picture map of your destination.

Map Buddy is a free download for Windows systems only, and doesn’t require installation.

With advancements in touchscreen technology, people are rethinking how they interact with their devices. The days of using an external keyboard and a clumsy mouse could soon be long gone. According to Wired, a Portuguese company called Displax has created a thin, polymer film that can be peeled and stuck onto glass, plastic or wood surfaces — transforming basically anything (opaque or transparent, round or flat) into an interactive touchscreen.

The film is about 100-microns thick (i.e., really, really, thin), is equipped with a grid of nanowires, can measure anywhere from 3- to 120-inches diagonally, and, most impressively, can detect movement from up to 16 fingers at once on a 50-inch screen. To do so, the film uses a technology similar to what’s used on the iPhone; which, as you probably know, is pretty darn responsive to touch. But Displax’s film can do something that even the iPhone’s screen can’t. It can detect your breath (although we’re not sure why you’d want to interact with something by blowing on a screen).

Continue reading Thin New Film Turns Anything into a Touchscreen

Filed under: Computers

Thin New Film Turns Anything into a Touchscreen originally appeared on Switched on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve seen a black-and-white Iron Man MacBook decal before, but this full-color one is much more striking. Although you’ve gotta be OK with equating Apple’s logo with the powers of a superhero. Fanboys. Buy one here: [Etsy via Geeky Gadgets]

The Calgary Flames traded Olli Jokinen and Brandon Prust to the New York Rangers for fellow forwards Ales Kotalik and Christopher Higgins late Monday.

Microsoft has issued a reminder that in two weeks Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) users will begin receiving expiration notifications.
Windows 7 RC does not expire until 1 June 2010 but from February 15 users will begin seeing expiration notifications in the task bar one time per day and then a…

The Toronto Maple Leafs announced on Sunday that they have made a seven-player deal with Calgary, with Flames defenceman Dion Phaneuf the centrepiece.