.::REALITYRECALL::.

It’s not officially released, but a gallery-like site for extensions has made itself known into the latest development builds of Google Chrome for Windows and Linux. Take a peek at what’s coming, presumably very soon, in these development screenshots.

The Download Squad blog was the first to notice the new new thing in Chrome—namely, a jigsaw-like page corner in Chrome's new tab page, next to a message at the bottom that reads "New! Chrome now has bookmark sync and extensions!", with both the message and the corner piece linking to http://chrome.google.com/extensions

I saw the same link appear in the chrome://extensions page on my copy of Chromium, from a nightly build Ubuntu repository. Clicking that link, however, re-directs you to Google’s home page. But as many are guessing, Chrome/Chromium wouldn’t push out a new link to leave sitting dead for too long, so we’ll keep watching that page to see when a full-fledged gallery pops up.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler dove into Chromium’s Code Reviews section, and finds screenshots and discussions indicating that Chrome’s extensions will be able to add icons to Chrome’s top toolbar, inside the address bar, and in the bottom-right status bar, and that developers will also be allowed to customize items such as Chrome’s new tab page. Right out of the gate, developers are also indicating extensions from Google itself tied to its Maps, News, and a Gmail checker.

Exciting stuff, and even more so if many of Firefox’s developers take notice and bring over some of the same functionality that hardcore Mozilla users could never imagine leaving behind. Top and bottom photos from TechCrunch; new tab page image from Download Squad.

At last, here’s the droid we were all looking for. In this frame you can clearly see R2-D2’s cameo in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek. This time there’s absolutely no doubt about it: It’s been confirmed by ILM.

Click on the image to see the high resolution version

Can you see him floating there, on the left, right below the huge arrow that I also missed when I saw the movie? That's obviously him, a fact that has been confirmed to me by one of the movie's sequence supervisors at Industrial Light & Magic—the same guy who said this previous sighting was just the shuttle.

I don’t know about you but, right now, I feel like what I imagine my dog Jones feels every time I take his collar off to scratch his neck. Oh yesyeyeyeyes. YES. Harf. Woof. [Image capture from Science Fiction Stuff—Thanks ILM tipster]

Generally speaking, upgrading to Windows 7 is a no-brainer. “But what about my gadgets?” you might ask, eyes watering slightly, “will they be OK?” Yes, yes they will. Here’s how to make Windows 7 play nice with all your favorite toys.

Your Phone

Windows Mobile: To sync with your Windows Mobile phone in Windows 7, you're going to need Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1. Just like in Vista! Except this time around, Windows is savvy enough to autoinstall the suite, which saves a little time and potentially a lot of Googling. (Just give it a minute after you plug in your device via USB—if nothing happens, go here.

This will take care of calendar, contact and media syncing for the most part, though a lot of newer Windows Mobile phones depend on microSD storage for music and movies. For this, you simply mount the disk as a folder, and drag and drop.

iPhone: As always, this is a job for iTunes. However, Windows 7 is compatible with doubleTwist, an alternative media manager that doesn't just sync with your iPhone—it works with almost anything else, too.

Speaking of which, Android: Android generally isn’t a “syncing” kind of OS, intended instead to be kept up to date by tapping into Google’s services over the internet. That said, doubleTwist will work for music syncing with most Android phones, and HTC Sync will keep their phones, like the G1, MyTouch and Hero, in sync with your Outlook Address book, contacts and calendar.

BlackBerry: BlackBerry Desktop Manager and Media Sync still reign supreme, for contacts, apps, media and software upgrades.

Palm Pre/Pixi: doubleTwist, again, at least until Palm fully withdraws from their silly slapfight with Apple over iTunes and makes their own client.

Your Zune, iPod, or other PMP

Zune: Zune’s software plays nice with Windows 7, but it’s you only choice. And even moreso than Apple products, the Zune HD is locked to its client software, meaning there aren’t any alternative for the time being. Luckily, Zune 4.x is fantastic software—it's just a shame it's not optional, and that it doesn't work with other devices.

iPod: As with the iPhone, you’re more or less stuck with iTunes or an app like doubleTwist for music and movie syncing, but that’s not so bad: iTunes in Windows 7 comes with some nice enhancements, including jump list shortcuts that can quickly take you to the iTunes Store, and hoverable controls, which give you quick access to skip, play and pause functions. In some ways, iTunes is actually better on Windows 7 than it is on OS X. [via]

Other PMPs: PMPs that rely on raw mass storage never took an advanced degree to use, so it's interesting to see that they've gotten a little simpler in Windows 7. The "Devices and Printers" system in Windows 7 can claim a few advantages over its predecessors, with much better icons—you generally get an reasonable approximation of whatever you've plugged in on the devices screen—customized Device Stage interfaces, seen left, and something called Device Containers, which group components of the same device into one icon. Like, if your 3rd-party PMP has internal and expandable storage, Windows won't just act as if there are two different devices attached; it'll group them together. Just click them to expand.

And if you third-party PMP does have a syncing app, be wary. Many of them, especially for older players, won’t have been update for Windows 7. Install them in a compatibility mode for XP or Vista—whichever they're most compatible with—to avoid any potential problems. [pic via]

Your Camera: Camera support is pretty great in Windows 7 so you’ll often be able to just plug your camera in and go. As with PMPs, printers and the like, cameras with multiple storage devices will be lumped into the same icon in Device Stage, which will also (hopefully) display other device info, like remaining battery, photo import options and alternative sync apps.
Windows also puts quick shortcuts in the taskbar for supported cameras.
Unfortunately, Windows 7 doesn’t add anything in the way of RAW support, so you’re going to have to go 3rd-party for that. FastPicture’s codec pack supports most of the popular RAW formats used in DSLRs from Nikon, Canon, Sony and the like, and it’s perfectly compatible with Windows 7. And free!

Your Displays

Adding a second monitor to Windows has never been particularly complicated, but the methods have never been all that apparent, either. Along with a refreshed multi-monitor displays settings interface, Windows 7 adds a fantastic shortcut: Windows+P will bring up a monitor management widget, which lets you set your monitor to either off, display duplicate or display extend.

The shortcut also works for enabling a projector. Laptop manufacturers have been adding functionality like this with their own software for years, so it's good to see Microsoft taking their ideas onboard in 7—it's easier for everyone that way.

Windows 7 also ships with a monitor calibration tool—again, something that had to be previously furnished by third-party software or monitor manufacturers. It helps you adjust brightness, contrast, gamma and color settings with a simple wizard, accessible by navigating to the Display panel in Appearance and Personalization in the Control Panel

Your Other Computers

These are the gadgets your Windows 7 PC has to play nicely with—your other computers. Windows 7 file sharing has gain some new features, but just as many quirks.

Windows 7 PCs: Since most people just want to share some files and get networking setup over with, Windows 7 includes a feature called Homegroups, which lets you share files and media between Windows 7 PCs with almost not setup at all. Think of it as the old network setup wizard from XP and Vista, except much, much simpler. To create a Homegroup, you need to have a version of Windows 7 that’s better, or, er, more expensive than Starter or Home Basic—those two can connect to Homegroups, but they can't initiate one.

To create one, just navigate to “Network and Internet” in the Control Panel, or search “Homegroups” in the Control Panel search bar. At the “Share with other computers running Windows 7 page, select “Create a Homegroup,” and designate the types of media you’d like to share. Joining a Homegroup in Windows 7 from Windows 7 should be easy: as soon as you connect to a network with available Homegroups, Windows will prompt you to join. Just enter the passkey generated during the Homegroup creation process.

Windows XP and Vista: Homegroups are nice and new and WOW and all, and they don’t work directly, as Homegroups, with Windows XP and Vista. Thing is, under all the fresh trappings, Homegroups are the same old Windows networking protocols. Accordingly, XP and Vista can still access Windows 7 PCs, just not under the official “Homegroups” guise. So, first: Set up a user account for your client PCs to log in to:

Click the Start button, type “user accounts” in the search box, and then click User Accounts and Family Safety.
Click Add or remove user accounts, and then click Create a new account.

Type a name for the new account, such as “share.”

Click Standard user, and then click Create Account.

Click the tile for the user account you just created, and then click Create a password.

Log on as the user you created (for example, share), and then log off. (This is required so that the user account is created with the correct credentials.)

Now that you've got the account set up, connecting should be easy: On Vista, just click Start, then Network, then open the computer you want to access—it should be listed by default. Enter the user name and password you've just created, and you're there. For XP, the process is similar: Just go to My Network Places, the click View Workgroup Computers, open the computer you want to access and enter your credentials.

From a Mac, the process isn’t necessarily so straightforward. If you’re lucky, your Windows 7 share will just show up in your Finder sidebar, where you can click on it and enter login info when prompted. (Windows 7 still uses basic SMB shares, which OS X is more than equipped to access.) If it doesn’t show up, the process is a little more complicated. Deferring again to MS:

In [Finder] the toolbar, click Go, and then click Connect to Server (or use keyboard shortcut Command +K).
In OS X 10.3.x and later, click Browse, select the computer running Windows 7, and then click Connect. (Or follow the common instructions below.)

If that doesn't work, click Connect to Server again, and manually enter smb://username@computername/users as the network address, where username is your newly created user account, computername is your Windows 7 machines network name, and users is literally the word users—don't change that. Alternately, you can use the smb://username@ipaddress/users syntax, where ipaddress is your Windows 7 computers local IP. (as in 10.0.0.2, or 192.168.1.102)

Your Streaming Devices and Consoles

Play to: Play To was one of the most touted features in Windows 7, and yeah, it’s pretty cool. Here’s a breakdown:

One of the most potentially groundbreaking features of Windows 7 is “Play To,” the ability to send music, video and photos to any compatible devices on the network, without running any kind of proprietary software, and without any initial setup. Sending a song to a Sonos or a video to an Xbox is-theoretically-just a right-click away.

The important thing to remember here is that "compatible devices" include—or rather, will include—anything that adheres to the DLNA 1.5 standard, from connected TVs to your Xbox 360 to other Windows 7 PCs with Windows Media Player 12. Play To devices show up automatically once they're connected to your network, it's just just a matter of enabling the functionality in Windows:

Before using Play To, you will first need to turn on Streaming. To do this, with media player open, click Stream and then click Turn on media streaming. You will then be given some options for sharing media and which devices you wish to allow.

You can right-click the item that you wish to play and move your cursor to the Play To option and select the device you want to receive that media file.

That’s it! To allows a Windows 7 PC to receive Play To streaming, just enable Play To in the receiving computers’ Media Streaming options, located in the Network and Sharing Center in the control panel.

Consoles: As I said before, Play To will stream to the Xbox 360 if it's in Media Extender mode (that is, connected to a Windows Media Center PC). Chances are, though, you're going to just want to stream media from your Windows 7 PC to your Xbox 360, controlled from your Xbox 360. Good news: the same old methods work fine here, so shared files with certain codecs, or anything in your Windows Media Center library, are all fair game, and should work straight away. Likewise, the PS3 will play a limited number of video and audio formats streamed from your PC with virtually no configuration, but the utility is limited—especially if you do a lot of downloading, or archive video in a rare codec or container. For both, the solution is the same: Get TVersity, because it's awesome. Setup isn’t super-easy, but the results are worth it: Pretty much any video you can come up with can be transcoded on the fly to stream on your console. Full instructions are here.

So that's about it! I've only scratched the surface here—this is like Windows 7 Gadget Mediation 101, or maybe 102—so add you favorite tips and trick in the comments, since your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. And if you’re still curious about Windows 7 in general, look no further than our Complete Windows 7 Guide. Have a nice weekend!

7.08GHz. That’s the record-shattering speed an AMD Phenom II processor was overclocked to using a massive amount of liquid helium. You can watch the whole process in this documentary video set to one kickass soundtrack. [Crunchgear]

For today’s data dump: the iPhone now accounts for nearly a fifth of new smartphones, and BlackBerrys are on a surprisingly serious tear, passing a 20% in world market share. So, uh, who’s losing?

Well, for one, Nokia, whose smartphones have failed to penetrate at all in the US, despite massive popularity overseas, and whose Symbian OS is starting to look downright old. Manufacturers like LG and Motorola, who for the last year were depending mostly on the waning Windows Mobile 6.1, have had a rough time of it, while Palm, presumably included in the “Other” category, consolidated its line to one phone for the duration of 2009, which has done wonders for its image, but unfortunately not for its sales.

Interestingly enough, Apple and RIM are doing spectacularly well for similar reasons: both have appealed to mainstream consumers with new products—the marked-down iPhone 3G and cheap-but-decent BlackBerry Curve line, respectively—while pushing app stores as a selling point. And honestly, look around. Smartphones are decidedly a thing right now.

I’ll be interested to see what happens next year, when Android’s had a little time to spread its wings. It looks like Google helped buoy HTC a little bit this year, but Android phones are still a rare sight. [Ars]

It’s a decidedly case-by-case question, and you shouldn’t let silly things like “data” and “value judgments” get in the way of an enthusiastic impulse purchase. But for the more prudent types, Consumer Reports has compiled handy a repair-or-replace guide.

The magazine drew together reader survey results with their own internal data to evaluate peoples’ experiences repairing and replacing certain classes of products, and the results aren’t terribly surprising: Point and shoot cameras are cheap and difficult to repair, and get noticeably more advanced over short periods of time, you may as well just replace them if they break outside of two years of ownership. LCD HDTVs? Hold on a little longer.

Granted, the general trend here seem to be that it's not worth repairing anything that's more than a few years old, so it's less a guide about when to replace than confirmation that today's gadgets—even the most expensive ones—are more or less disposable. Full chart below. (Click to enlarge) [Consumer Reports via Consumerist]

First-day sales of Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke records, raking in an estimated $310 million US in North America and the United Kingdom alone.

Project Natal has been listed as one of TIME Magazines Inventions of the Year.

The Toronto Maple Leafs topped Forbes magazine’s list of the NHL’s most valuable franchise for the fourth straight year.

Remembrance ceremonies attracted crowds in Canada and around the world to honour those who died while serving their countries.

Since yesterday’s rumour about the amount of consoles banned from LIVE during this Ban Wave (altho I wonder if I should still call it a ‘wave’) lots of general-public news sites started posting it as a fact today. It even seems like msnbc (FYI: a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC) puts these numbers in the mouth of the Redmond company:
[QUOTE]
Anywhere between an estimated 600,000 and 1 million players who use Microsoft’s Xbox Live gaming service will be cut off from the service because they have modified their game consoles or played games that were illegally downloaded from file-sharing sites, according to the company.
[/QUOTE]

However a real quote made today by Microsoft on venturebeat.com says:
[QUOTE]
“While we don’t comment on specific numbers, Microsoft’s commitment to combat piracy and support safer and more secure game play for the more than 20 million members of the Xbox Live community remains a top priority. All consumers should know that piracy is illegal and modifying their Xbox 360 console violates the Xbox Live terms of use, will void their warranty and result in a ban from Xbox Live. We can assure you that if an Xbox Live member follows the Xbox Live terms of use, purchased a retail copy of Modern Warfare 2 and played the game on an unmodified Xbox 360, no action will be taken.”
[/QUOTE]

You’ll notice the latter part of the quote is also on the msnbc article.
So while the number might be right (or not), I believe this rumour got out of hand and Microsoft never actually confirmed these numbers to anyone, at least not on-the-record. FYI: There are about 33M consoles sold worldwide (19M in US/CA) to-date and about 20M Xbox LIVE users.
And … I’m not even gonna start about how inaccurate and incomplete many of these articles are 😉

It’s been a little while since we’ve seen a good multi-billion dollar acquisition, but HP’s sure come through in a big way today, announcing that it plans to acquire networking giant 3Com in an all-cash deal valued at $2.7 billion, or $7.90 a share. The deal will, of course, still have to clear a few regulatory hurdles and receive the approval of 3Com’s stockholders, but it has already been given the go-ahead by both company’s boards of directors, and HP expects the transaction to close in the first half of 2010. Not surprisingly, HP sees nothing but pluses with the acquisition, saying that it will do nothing short of “transform the networking industry,” and “enable customers to build a next-generation network infrastructure that supports customer needs from the edge of the network to the heart of the data center.” Equally optimistic but slightly cooler on the world-changing language is 3Com CEO Bob Mao, who says that its company’s “extensive product line and innovative technology together with HP’s breadth and scale will expand our global opportunity.”

Filed under: Networking

HP to acquire 3Com in $2.7 billion deal originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Need some extra space for your gigantic Gmail habit, or to stash more pics in Picasa Web Albums? Google took a knife to its extra storage prices, offering, for example, 80 GB for $20 per year.

At the bottom end, 20 GB goes for $5 per year, or a bit over 41 cents per month. Want to get crazy with it? A terabyte runs $256 per year, and 16 terabytes tops the list at $4,096. The extra space is officially shared between Gmail and Picasa Web albums, but, as Google Operating System suggests, it might be a preemptive step toward making the expected, anticipated “GDrive” storage space a real thing.

If you’ve already bought extra Google apps space, your account should see an automatic space boost for the remainder of your year’s purchase to match the new prices. Does this kind of cheap space make you consider moving your pictures to Picasa, or investing a bit more in Google as a storage platform?

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The mastermind of the 2002 sniper attacks that killed 10 in the Washington, D.C., region has been executed.

Last week we asked you to share your favorite antivirus application and then we rounded up the five most popular candidates for your review and a final vote. We’re back with the results, and this was one very close race.

In the end AVG came out on top as the most popular antivirus app with 23 percent of the vote, barely beating out Microsoft Security Essentials (22 percent), which in turn beat out ESET NOD32 (19 percent).

If you’re unfamiliar with Microsoft Security Essentials, the newest kid on the antivirus block, check out our feature on Microsoft’s security tools for a little more on why we think most users should stop paying for their Windows security applications. For more information on the winner and runners up, check out the full Hive Five.

Windows only: Planning an upgrade soon? Save yourself the web searches for your specs and download Speccy. Speccy does a quick scan of your machine and gives you a complete rundown of every piece of gear that’s in your computer.

Upon first glance, Speccy seems like something that’s only attractive to power users, but it can be useful for anyone. When the Device Manager doesn’t give you enough information about what kind of RAM you have (say, if you’re looking to upgrade), Speccy will give you all the information you could possibly need, including the RAM type, how much you currently have, and even the number of slots used so you can buy with confidence.

You can view your computer’s information in a brief summary (as shown), or click on any of the categories for a very, very detailed report. Speccy gives you detailed information for CPU, motherboard, graphics, hard drives, optical drives, and audio, all so you don’t have to go searching somewhere else to find out what you have. In addition, it also gives you real-time information on things like bus speed, DRAM Frequency, and temperature, to name a few.

We’ve featured one or two different tools like this in the past, but thus far, this is the cleanest and most detailed one we’ve used yet. Speccy is a free download, Windows only.