It is called the Peanut for its shape, and it is available in both 1GB and 2GB capacity. It also has high speed 2.0 USB interface for fast file transfer, and it can provide 12 hours of continuous playback with one AAA battery.

The Nextar Peanut also has seven equalizer modes including normal, pop, rock, classical, jazz, bass, and soft. There are also associated play modes such as repeat one, repeat all, shuffle, intro, repeat folder, and random. The user support is available in seven different languages, and the entire device is only 2 inch long.

It sounds like Nextar wants this to arrive around Christmas, and they seem to market the Peanut as a stocking stuffer. I have to admit, that this device sounds like one of those “perfect gift” items.

The MA588 is available in five different colors including black, pink, red, blue, and silver. It is available at Staples, K-Mart, Bon Ton, Canadian Tire and other retailers. The price is about $19.99 for the 1GB version, and $29.99 for the 2GB.

Source

A few days back, I showed you the new touch interface for Media Center PCs running Windows 7, and though I had to pull the video, I promised a walkthrough of proposed Windows 7 Media Center features. I say "proposed" because, like everything else about Windows 7, this is all alpha and subject to change. But these features are very cool, and really should be included. One more thing: These screens were projected on a wall in a well-lit room, so they look horrible, but anyone familiar with Media Center (and Microsoft has shipped like 100 million of them, so that should be plenty of ya) will have a good idea of the pleasantness to come. Or you can just drink in the following prose descriptions:

• Shows appear dissolved behind menus - When you're watching something and want to pull up a menu to add a new show or browse the channel guide, or even go into another area of the Media Center, the current show stays on, not as a picture-in-picture, but tastefully dissolved into the background.

• Chronological turbo scroll for channel guide - When you're looking at the channel guide, but want to go from Tuesday to Sunday in a hurry, you just hold down the arrow button on the remote, and the days start to whip by. Listings become a blur, but the days of the week, and the portions of the day, appear floating over the listings to give you an idea of when to stop.

• Live thumbnail forward and rewind - During HD video playback, you might want to jump around. Grab the time marker and drag it forward or back, and as you do, you see a miniature version of the show playing backwards or forwards at the same speed.

• Launch TV from Start menu - Media Center can occupy a pole position in the Start menu, and when you hover over the MC logo, a list of recently recorded shows pops up, along with other frequently used MC features.

• Floating Media Center gadget - Not only can you access shows from the Start menu, you can browse MC features from the desktop with the gadget. I am not clear whether or not you'll get to have actual video playing in it, but for people who need MC at their fingertips, this appears to be a nice, subtle execution.

• Alphabetical turbo scroll for music - The chronological turbo scroll on the channel guide is cool, but this one will come in more handy for me: As you scroll through the countless artists in your music collection, the names become a blur but your location in the alphabet is denoted by two letters, probably so that those longer letters like J, M, R and S can be broken up better.

• Drifting cover art grid - When you're playing a song, the album art for that track appears with some basic metadata, and all the cover art for every other track you own materializes and drifts in the background. The primary cover art jumps from side to side and top to bottom, so that everything is in constant, fluid motion.

• Scattered photos picture show - As you're playing music, you can opt for a photo show that essentially reaches into a folder, grabs a handful of shots, scatters them evenly around the page, and then zooms in on one at a time. A nice touch: In the wide angle, all the photos look like desaturated black-and-whites, but as each shot gets its own screen time, it magically becomes full color.

• Copy remote content - If you are browsing multiple libraries or Media Center PCs and come across a show you like, you can watch it or save it for later by hitting "make a copy." As long as there's no broadcast flag or some other DRM, the vid will flow over to your local HDD so you can watch it when you've left the network.

• Virtual channels without TV tuner - One of the new Media Center's central concerns is the new popularity of internet-based video, not just YouTube clips but whole TV episodes like those shown on Hulu. DVR functionality is key to making the most of an MC, but at launch there will be loads of virtual channels with shows you can watch just as easily. Microsoft demoed a special MSNBC channel that had clips and full shows; it's of course feasible for them to build similar channels for third-party web video services too. [Windows 7 on Giz]

However, there are several desktop applications that I have to install to be in my zone. I have been using each one of these for as long as I can remember. 

Sam Spade - Sam Spade is an integrated network query tool for Windows 95, 98, NT and Windows 2000. This tool allows me to keep several sites in the options as I am running traces, pings and whois calls.

Agent Ransack - Freeware graphical file searching that supports regular expressions for Windows. I keep a copy of all software I download, such as a copy of each Wordpress Release. With Agent Ransack I can quickly find any reference to anything I am looking for in a very large file folder.

Process Explorer - Process Explorer, also known as procexp.exe, shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. If you want to know what is using up your resources on a Microsoft OS machine, this is the best way I have found. The biggest benefit to me is the ability to shut down and process without affecting the others.

TextPad - TextPad is an award winning text editor for Windows.  with powerful features that will increase your productivity. This is probably the most used tool I have. Everything I write or code gets passed through TextPad. There are so many features and reasons I could not possibly list them all.

Lynx Text Browser - Lynx is the text web browser. Recommended by Google to see what a site looks like to a Search Crawler. This package should be required of anyone who is working on website (blog) development. If you really want to know what it looks like, you have to check this out!

The Fanboy's excuse was that he had taken the picture but never sent it to anyone. In fact he was so worried about his Iphone taking the picture that he said had paid a visit to the ironically named Apple Genius Bar. There he swore that a spokesman for apple had told him that it was a known glitch. Photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent, he swore blind that the Genius told him.

The cool thing about the ActiveSync for BlackBerry client is you can download it OTA, and it installs right there on your employee’s BlackBerry device. Once installed it provides its own email box, and access to the native BlackBerry Calendar, Contacts… all the usual built-in apps.

Key features in the new PHASE 2 ActiveSync for BlackBerry:

Email

• send, receive, reply to, forward and delete message (with or without attachments)
• Folder Mirroring to synchronize Exchange email account to user’s device
• filtering via Outlook rules to eliminate unwanted email messages
• attachment viewing using BlackBerry native viewers
• save to memory card capability for attachments

PIM (Calendar, Contacts and Tasks)

• interfaces with the BlackBerry native Calendar, Contacts and Tasks
• Calendar event synchronization with customizable look-back and look-ahead
• Remote Lookup to retrieve contact information from Global Address Directory via LDAP
• receive and respond to meeting invitations
• meeting initiation

Security

• SSL encryption protocol for data-in-motion between the BlackBerry and the Exchange Server
• Remote Wipe for lost or stolen devices
• strong password security with history, expiration, timeout, echo, failed unlock attempts and duress notification
• inactivity timeout for password entry

Productivity

• auto-complete of email addresses
• weekday and weekend settings to control when the device receives messages
• sync to server option for messages that have been read or deleted
• intelligent cleanup to ensure device memory optimization
• intelligent radio reset for bad coverage areas

ActiveSync for BlackBerry is available to PHASE 2 Microsoft Exchange clients. Pricing is based on user licence quantity. For more information head on over to PHASE 2 International.

Thanks Kim!

Related News from IntoMobile:

• Exchange ActiveSync supports Symbian OS
• DataViz adds Motorola Z8 support to RoadSync
• Helio Ocean gets jiggy with Exchange ActiveSync
• RoadSync available for S60 3rd Edition
• RoadSync available for UIQ 3 phones

Please help! I took my husband's i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!

Pictures automatically attach to e-mail? [Discussions.Apple.com] (Thanks, Jon F.!)

Please help! I took my husband's i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!

Poor soul. Also goes to show, after you get caught committing cyber-infidelity, there's no use lying about it. The internet makes it too easy for people to verify this stuff.

Help! Iphone snapped my husband's genitals [Inquirer]

Photo: Swingnut/Flickr

No, the iPhone will not accidentally email photos of your nekkid husband originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

First of all we would just like to apologise to Andrea who sent us this demo of GoodSync version 7-5-2 to be reviewed, we’ve been having some trouble with our one and only PC after it was sent in, its given up on us! So as a result, you will probably notice from some of our screenshots, we’re doing this review using a freshly installed Windows XP Pro via VMware Fusion on a Mac!

Let’s first tell you what GoodSync is all about…

GoodSync, is the latest software in a series of highly reliable, easy to use products from Siber Systems, the makers of RoboForm. The program automatically synchronizes and backs up emails, photos, financial documents, MP3s and any other important files between desktops, laptops, servers, and external drives.

GoodSync uses an innovative synchronization algorithm to prevent file deletion, data loss, and eliminate duplicate files. GoodSync already enjoys numerous favorable reviews from both users and the press. Its powerful technology is remarkably easy to use, and is the only solution that offers true bi-directional synchronization.

Also it’s worth pointing out to those who aren’t used to the two terms sync and backup. The simple difference between synchronisation and backup is that backing up is a one way transfer, whereas in synchronisation, you’re performing a transfer process that’s two way and the end result is that both sources (computer folders which you have pre-specified for example) will have the same files.

So without further ado, let’s tell you what we thought of GoodSync. Just from first impressions, launching GoodSync was fast, no delays, we thought on first glance that it was simple but also professionally made and well thought out.

And if we take a closer look at what it’s doing to our virtual PC, for those who are cautious about memory usage, we can see that it’s consumption on system’s memory is very minimal:

We then give it a simple task to do in order to test it out. This task was a very common one, we wanted GoodSync to sync for us some music files from another computer on the same network to this computer via WiFi. The aim wasn’t to test out its transfer speed but to find out how it performed a job, as well as reliability, does it crash half way through, does it have bits of missing data at the end of the transfer process, etc…

Another feature I would like to point out is that you can ask GoodSync to perform multiple jobs at the same time by pressing the yellow plus button in the top left corner.

Of course this will compromise your system memory, but it’s not something we see in all synchronisation tools you come across these days.

Now that I have given GoodSync the location I would llike my files to be synced from, it immediately provides me with a tooltip pointing out to me as to where I need to press to select the local folder for files to arrive and this is great for those who just hate reading instructions or find it difficult to recognise what the next step required actually is. As soon as I have provided it with the two locations I would like my files to be synced, again it now points to me that my next action is to use the analyze function.

After quickly analyzing, it provides me with a data report like screen, telling me which folders and files will be synced, as well as the memory that I will require to complete this task, any conflicts or errors that it encountered that I should give attention to.

Another good thing about this feature is that now I can see which files it will be synchronising for me, I can easily right click on a file or folder on the left and tell it to exclude synchronisation for those if I had regrets. As oppose to some softwares which go ahead and sync automatically, you often end up finding out that files you didn’t want to get transferred got transferred anyway.

So now that I’ve just clicked on Sync, let’s see how much more system resource it’s using up:

Surprisingly it’s just taken a tiny fraction more.

I guess now is a good time to recap and show you what I’ve just done using an example instruction taken from GoodSync:

In addition GoodSync isn’t just for synchronising and backuping files from two computers. A key part of GoodSync’s value is the options that you can use to control when items are synced. For USB flashdrive / key users, the option of having a sync start whenever a key is inserted is a must have. The periodic scheduling down to a one-minute sync is also very useful.

Check out the instructions below:

In my opinion this is my favourite feature, not only because I loose USB flashdrives all the time, this feature will ensure that I have my lost files right where I want them as long as I have plugged it in for a sync recently.

GoodSync also gives you a simple check box option whether or not you want to propagate deletions across a sync pair. That is, if a file is deleted from one side of the sync, it’s up to the user (in the options) to choose whether or not the file should be deleted on the other side.

For those who were wondering whether GoodSync would work with other devices or servers. GoodSync does offer the same smooth functionality for FTPs, Amazon S3, WebDAV and also Windows Mobile. See screenshot below:

Did I mention our music transfer test went smoothly? After synchronising for us GoodSync also gave us a quick report, this is what I found useful. Especially if you plan on synchronising anything important, you would want to know which files or folders its missed out.

So in a short summary here are what we thought were the good points and the bad points:

Pros:

• Good simple user interface
• Runs smoothly, no instability issues
• Only a tiny bit of your system memory resource will be required
• Has some very useful features such as analysis, easy customisation for specified jobs
• Supports multiple types of files sources and destinations such as FTPs, Amazon S3, WebDAV and also Windows Mobile
• A reliable tool for those who need to sync priceless pictures, files and data

Cons:

• None! No issues were identified
• Some past reviews commented that “some configuration menus are quite heavy, with loads of text explaining each option” (http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=5941), but we felt this has been much improved on the latest release which we tested
• Unfortunately, no support for Macs

We weren’t asked to give a rating, however if we needed to, GoodSync would easily deserve a rating of 5/5 from us. So if you’re looking for a software that’s reliable for transferring, synchronising and backing up important files across different devices or servers, no matter what type of files, we would definitely recommend you try out GoodSync.

Though it isn’t free, the download is just 1.05Mb and supports Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista, you can test out its 30-day trial with no limitations or restrictions, click here to find out more via GoodSync…

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Review: Sync with confidence using GoodSync