“So you’ve created a kickass, play-anything media center with XBMC, but it’s a too hard for your less tech-savvy friends and family members to use. Here are a few ways to make your home theater PC so easy that your four year old could use it.”

XBMC is a powerful media platform, but it’s not always the easiest thing to use – especially for the “regular” types of users who weren’t the ones to set it up in the first place. This article walks you through some of the ways to optimize the whole experience. Worth a read!

“If you have more than one computer at your workspace, ShareMouse will let you control them all with a single keyboard and mouse, as well as copy and paste text between them and drag files back and forth.”

If you’re looking for a simpler way to use a single mouse and keyboard across multiple computers, and found Synergy a little too hard to set up, ShareMouse is worth a look!

When an earthquake ruptured the main physical connection between Taiwan and the rest of the world, it was a bad day for BIOS downloaders. Any connection to Taiwan’s main technology companies dropped to a trickle almost instantly.

But there was a trickle.

Right now, the war against piracy over the web is at a critical stage, with governments press-ganging ISPs into the fight (often against their will, with court orders and the like) – determined to cut off the supply of TV shows, films and music that some people get for free.

But the internet, by its very nature, is all about ‘resilience’. It’s all about ‘OK, so there is a block here, no problem, I will route around it’.  And with modern networks/data transmission rates, it’s not like the Taiwan cable rupture – because the ‘fall back’ networks are also amazingly fast.

So what happens next?

Well, first up, it seems that Pirate Bay has declared itself to be some kind of political party, standing for various rights and freedoms. Tecnobitsis no legal expert, but that has to create some new challenges/tensions/difficulties for the governments that wish to battle the pirates.

The first of these is that, it seems, in most of these legal hearings in Holland, the loser would have some kind of right to lodge a statement. That looks to have been denied to Pirate Bay – but maybe as a political party, they would have more rights and it would be illegal to censure their speech in most countries outside of North Korea, Saudi Arabia and <insert name of your favourite dictatorship here>.

What also seems clear is that if Pirate Bay had been allowed to broadcast a message to the world, then it would have started with “Oh, by the way, here’s the fastest way around the block” and the court would have been obliged to print those instructions.

If we use a real world analogy, a government has decided that Scotland is an illegal place to visit – and it has shut the main motorway. However, there are several ‘A roads’ which allow you to drive to Scotland and back quite quickly. The court has decided that publishing an alternative map to Scotland is not legal. They have not managed to nuke Scotland, just trying to block people in England from knowing that you can drive there – in the hope that English people will, instead, visit Scottish stores (run by the UK government) and buy ‘approved’ Scottish products’.

The truth is that people who wanted to buy ‘Scottish goods’ would have already been getting them from the most conveniently located store – and those who were making the trip to Scotland and back had no intention of buying locally anyway – so it’s hard to know if this is a genuine win.

In fact, there is a strong argument to say that it was the constant influx of Scottish goods – from Scotland – that encouraged locals to buy more from the government-approved Scottish shops.

OK, we has stretched that analogy to breaking point – so we’ll leave it there.

Pirate Bay rebrands as a political party, Queen Elizabeth and her love of piracy – alongside a dubious graphic for the copyright defenders people (who 'borrowed' the design in the middle – ooops)

Comment below or in the Tecnobitsforums.

With the Facebook IPO set to smash all records this month, there will be an icing smothered cake to be divided up among the owners.

Eduardo has around 4% of the company, so his slice of the cake will immediately make him a member of a club with less than 2,000 members: The Billionaire Boys club 2012.

When asked about his decision to drop his US citizenship like a hot potato, Eduardo’s representatives said that it was crucial to his plans that he spend lots and lots of time among the 3.5 million Singaporeans that presently hold passports for the city-state.

After 150 years as a British trading post, Singapore gained independence and had its first elections in the late 50s, but wisely decided to carry on driving on the correct side of the road [Everyone knows that most people on the planet are right handed, so it makes sense to control the car with your superior right hand and only use your left, intermittently for minor operations like gear changing and to open the glove compartment - Ed].

Beautiful as the local occupants might be, Singapore is a really small place. Seen here next to central London and New York.

Comments below or in the Tecnobitsforums.

The thing is, while Siri would love to say that the iPhone is the greatest smartphone ever, Siri uses Wolfram Alpha, a knowledge database that is used when Siri doesn’t know the answer herself. Plus it is not under the jurisdiction of Apple, meaning it is free to say whatever it feels like.

In the above screenshot the Lumia 900 is deemed the best smartphone ever by customer review average, and wait for it, is based off just five reviews or ratings. This didn’t stop the Windows Phone social media team lapping it up, European carriers would agree with Siri either.

Way back on 11th May, we ran a story about Apple’s new iPad software update. Earlier, we were contacted by a reader to ask if their experience with the update was (a) normal or (b) totally bizarre.

Having seen our story, she had updated one of her iPads. The second iPad was being used by her kid, so she left it.

This morning, when she attached the second iPad to her PC, Apple not only told her that she needed a software update to 5.1.1 (which she had figured out already, when the same PC said the same thing the day before) – but it also insisted that she download a copy.

When you speak with Apple, they insist that the intelligence has been built into the iPad in such a way as to make it, well, friendly to all users. Maybe, but the download team works in another building.

Both of the iPads are ‘synched’ in the sense that they both install software with the same user name and password – so why the double download?

The use of the same user name and password, means that Apple automatically duplicated all of the software/purchases on both tablets – so the Jobs legacy knows that more than one tablet will need updating…  so why not keep the download instead of pressuring the interwibble for a second batch of around 770MB of data.

Surely this has to be viewed as a kind of ‘really dumb and totally unnecessary kind of spam’ ?

It’s possible that we’ll now be contacted by an Apple guru to say that if only she’s sacrificed a rabbit with a granite blade, thrown potassium iodide over her left shoulder and chanted the phrase Steve Krishna seventeen times in a row, then a copy would have been saved – but it would be nice to be asked.

It's Deja Vu all over again

Comment below or in the Tecnobitsforums.

The article’s pretty great; this kind of calculation room was probably a part of every Mayan city, but it’s the first to be found well-preserved enough to examine. This particular city, named Xultún, was “discovered” about a hundred years ago, north of Tikal and south of San Bartolo, two other Mayan cities. The calendar-type charts on the wall of the cave emphasize the Mayan concept of cyclical time, and counts some 7,000 years in the future, which pretty much debunks the 2012 myth (which is itself based on a calendar that shows the year “starting over” in 2012).

[National Geographic]

Samsung decided to use a Pentile display in the Galaxy S III to increase the lifespan of the display

Samsung has defended its use of the Pentile sub-pixel arrangement that has one red and one blue pixel for every two green ones, over the more traditional RGB stripe. The Pentile effect can cause issues with text clarity and image colour. The Korean mobile giants says that they chose a Pentile matrix based display because they tend to have a longer lifespan.

While Pentile displays have been improving over the years and a decent analogy would be the early teething issues Plasma TVs encountered, how much more playtime are we going to get out of a phone if it has a Pentile matrix? Most people don’t keep the same phone for more than two years, plus the first thing to fail is unlikely to be the display.

Citrix announced the launch of Citrix CloudPlatform, the first commercially supported cloud orchestration system based on Apache CloudStack. With the new commercial release, Citrix says "customers can quickly and easily evolve virtualized datacenter resources to automated, elastic, self-service IT delivery models."

Last month, Citrix submitted its CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, and, with support from over 50 key ecosystem partners, the Apache Software Foundation accepted CloudStack into its a major battle with OpenStack on the open source cloud computing scene. 

In conjunction with the conference, Citrix has also launched Project Avalon, discussed here.  Project Avalon enables windows desktops and windows applications to be delivered as cloud services, which can help give Citrix’s cloud platform an inroad into appealing to many enterprises. Citrix’s post on Project Avalon notes that it has “taken major engineering efforts to transform the XenDesktop product, which was designed to run on enterprise virtualization architecture, to work seamlessly on Apache CloudStack and Amazon Web Services.” Project Avalon is a big, Windows-focused bet on virtualization and the cloud.

At the conference, Citrix is also swe covered here. Citrix is positioning Podio as a new part of its GoTo line of products, which includes GoToMeeting, and if you consider Podio alongside both GoToMeeting and CloudStack, it becomes clear that Citrix has its eye on end-to-end cloud platform tools, including approachable front-end applications. While Podio isn’t open source, its freemium model and user-configurable cloud collaboration environments have an open and flexible ethos to them. There is a good discussion of this week’s Podio demos here.

With all of Citrix’s CloudStack moves, it’s becoming clear that CloudStack will do direct battle with OpenStack, but we’ve noted that there is room for both of these open source cloud platforms.  We’ve covered Citrix’s decision to cut its support for the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform and move full steam ahead with the next phase of its CloudStack strategy. Both OpenStack and CloudStack have many big backers, so it’s natural that these two platforms are being characterized as engaged in a high-profile fight.

The ReadWriteCloud Channel extrapolated on the notion that multiple cloud platforms can succeed in an excellent point in a post titled "It’s Not Highlander: There Can Be More Than One Open Source Cloud":

"Assuming even one-third of the companies that pledged to support CloudStack become serious contributors, CloudStack should have a bright future. It takes little away from OpenStack for CloudStack to succeed…After all the dust settles, it would be best for everyone from the open source cloud communities to figure out how they can work together. The "there can be only one" approach isn’t going to help anybody, and may benefit Amazon, VMware and other proprietary vendors who can market their wares without any drama."

We’ll round up more news from Citrix Synergy, but through the end of today, you can still catch the free webcasts of events from the conference.

Members of the case modding community have long looked up to John Hanlon, aka JohnHanlon303, as more than just a friendly face; many consider him a full-fledged mentor. Earlier this year, the community learned that Hanlon suffers from incurable asbestos poisoning that leaves him with 40 percent lung capacity and recently, left him permanently unable to work. Rather than simply sending social media condolences, the modderati, with the help of several sponsors, leaped into action to try and raise funds for Hanlon. The result — the John Hanlon Fundraiser PC — went up for auction on eBay this afternoon and looks amazing.

Several of the modders whose work was highlighted in our recent case mod gallery had a hand in the John Hanlon Fundraiser PC, and members of the Bit-Tech modding forums contributed gear — including water pumps, fan grills and the Windows 7 OS — to the build. Zotac, Steel Series, Star Trek PC fame) donated several other items and actually built the John Hanlon Fundraiser PC, complete with custom airbrush work by modding maestro Brad Galvin (whose work was highlighted in our eye-popping case mods feature). Richard “DarthBeavis” Surroz of Out of the Box Mods helped with the water cooling installation.

This one-of-a-kind beaut’s stacked with care, love, and all kinds of powerful components, so don’t expect it to sell cheap. (In fact, it’s already up at $1,025.) If the eBay auction’s a bit too rich for your blood, Alex Ftoulis (aka AnGEL) and Masbuskado Modding have also set up a Paypal donation fund for Hanlon’s benefit. If it isn’t, you have 10 days (until May 21) to place a bid.

Thirsting for more? Mnpctech’s Bill Owen gives a walkthrough of the finished build in the video below, and you can find the worklog here. I won’t spam you with stuff like this too often but this one’s for a good cause, folks.

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