Niri | Blog

Most of my car chargers are bulky and annoying. They stick out too far, the cable is flopping all over the place and most often the plug is not as good as the one the phone maker gives you.

Now check out this little guy. This is the Belkin Micro Auto Charger. It’s tiny, has a USB connection which will be perfect for my iPhone and it sits almost flush in the dashboard. Since I don’t use my charge port for anything else it’s basically like a nice mod to make the plug look like it came with the car. You know what I mean?

It’s coming out in May ’09 at about $15. [link]

(more…)

I caught this over at Reddit.

Looks like Google has it’s own Torrent search engine. Makes me wonder if Google is so big and have so many high paid lawyers it doesn’t have to fear the RIAA or MPAA when it comes to torrents.

(more…)

What if you got fired, laid off or otherwise terminated from your job? Would you seek revenge as a last measure before heading out? Most of us wouldn’t but I’m sure we’ve all dreamt about doing what some of these people have done.

    

Microsoft being the software giant of the world it’s very surprising they never had their own online store, but that’s the truth up until now! Now you can buy all your MS stuff at the Microsoft Store.

Welcome to the Microsoft Store

If you’re running Vista there’s a quick tweak you can do with the CMD window which your eyes will thank you for. Vista ships with a new set of fonts and the new fixed width font is Consolas which is an easy to read, clean looking font.

Consolas used in CMD window.

By default you cannot use it in your CMD window but a quick reg hack will add that ability. First run the following command either from a CMD window or a RUN window:

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" /v 00 /d Consolas

That’s all it takes to use Consolas as your option in your CMD window. Well, not quite. You have to log off and log back in for the changes to take effect, but no restart required.

CMD Properties with Consolas selected.

There you have it. Pretty simple, but much easier to read than the default system font and Lucida Console is so last year.

Haws is reporting on an article found over at Arstechnica.com:

Academic researchers have found an exploitable hole in a popular form of wireless networking encryption. The hole is in a part of 802.11i that forms the basis of WiFi Protected Access (WPA), so it could affect routers worldwide. German graduate student Erik Tews will present a paper at next week’s PacSec in Tokyo coauthored with fellow student and aircrack-ng team member Martin Beck that reveals how remnants of WPA’s predecessor allow them to slip a knife into a crack in the encryption scheme and send bogus data to an unsuspecting WiFi client.

As Jeff suggests you might want to switch your router’s WiFi security over to AES which is not hit by this exploit.

Things have been really busy in my life lately and before I could even write a blurb about the newly released WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 they go and release Beta 2! Here’s a rundown of the fixes, followed by the rel. notes for Beta 1.

• The Upload button didn’t always show. Fixed.
• JS on the Dashboard broke for blogs with no comments, causing several UI elements to “freeze”. Fixed.
• Recent Drafts Dashboard module didn’t show correct times. Fixed.
• Various Autosave fixes.
• Redirect after deleting a page from the editor went back to the deleted page. Fixed.
• Fixed loading of translations for default TinyMCE plugins.
• Added avatars to the edit users list.
• Added some missing translations.
• Fixed some validation errors.
• Fixed some PHP warnings and notices.
• Handle inconsistent file permissions during auto upgrade
• Change Publish box layout to better accommodate internationalized text
• Fix quick editing of the last page in the Edit Pages list
• Fix Screen Options for IE
• Fixes for choose tag from tag cloud
• Rewrite rules fixes for certain hosts
• Don’t check for updates on every page load
• Easier post box dropping
• Preview fixes
• RTL fixes
• Fixed broken wp-mail
• Plugin update and install fixes
• First draft of contextual help tab

If you have already installed beta 1, you can update to beta 2 via the Tools -> Update menu.  Beta 1 does have a bug in the automatic upgrade that breaks certain setups, so be prepared to download and install Beta 2 manually if you experience problems.

Download WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 here.

Release note from Beta 1 release:

 

The first public beta of WordPress 2.7 is here at last.  Join the thousands of people already testing 2.7 by downloading 2.7 Beta 1.  As previously mentioned on this blog, 2.7 is bringing a new visual design.  This design is almost completely implemented, but there are still a few areas that aren’t quite finished in Beta 1.  There are also several glitches in certain browsers.  Beta 1 provides the best experience in Firefox and Safari. Don’t worry, we are working on IE and Opera and will have those looking good in time for the final release.

Speaking of the final release, it will not be available on November 10th as originally scheduled.  We are two weeks behind schedule at the moment.  We need a little more time to finish the visual design, do a round of user testing against that finished design, and do a proper round of public beta testing. Our plan is to keep working as if Nov. 10 is still the release date.  However, instead of releasing the final 2.7 on the 10th, we will make a release candidate available instead.  The release candidate is intended to be a high-quality, almost-finished release that we are comfortable recommending for broad use.  After Nov. 10, the focus will be on fixing high impact bugs turned up by those of you testing the release candidate. I suspect 2.7 will be ready for final release by the end of November.  A specific date will be set as we progress through the public beta cycle and get a feel for how solid the release is.

 

Congratulations, you have become more flexible!

Exercise...you're doing it wrong.

Enjoy this little video.

This election has been special for many reasons and it’s become a world event with media coverage everywhere on a daily basis. Maybe that’s why a couple of folks from Ireland decided to create a website to see what the world as a whole thinks about the two candidates for the President of the United States.

I recommend checking it out and even if you don’t vote yourself it’s interesting to see the results and the breakdown of percentages for each country.

IF THE WORLD COULD VOTE

Here’s some information taken from their website.

Who is behind the site?

Just three guys from Iceland. The site is independent from all political parties, companies or hidden agendas. It’s just an idea a 22 yo guy in Iceland came up with and executed with a little help from a couple of friends.

Why are you doing this?

Just out of curiosity. The president of the United States is a powerful man, probably the most powerful person on the planet. So everyone seems to have an opinion on who should be the next president of the United States. We thought it would be interesting to see who would be the next president if the whole world could vote. It’s also a challenge to try to beat the number of voters in the last US elections. So spread the news!

How many times can I vote?

Only once. Each computer can only vote once. Yes you can clear your cookies and vote again, but we have a script(called the Psychic Monkey) that looks for multiple votes and specific voting patterns and deletes fake votes before we publish the results.

I’m from the U.S, can i vote?

Of course you can, that will only make it more interesting to see how the U.S would vote in relations to the rest of the world.

Where are the other candidates?

Unfortunately it is clear that either of these two will become president. Although the 3rd party candidates have a theoretical change, that wont happen. And since we are not giving the world a real chance to vote, we want to see which one of these two the world wants. If we do this again though, we will include the 3rd party candidates.

Do you really think the world should be able to vote?

No i don’t! The United States of America is an independent country. The website focuses on what would happen IF the world could vote. And lets not forget, we are only doing this for fun. Just to get the worlds opinion.

I really commend them on this effort and being a big fan of statistics and the freedom of speech it’s exciting to see the world chime in on such a high profile issue.

I hope everybody will use their voice and go vote on November 4th. This is an important day and if you have the right to vote you should really be part of this.