Web review

Waze is born from a simple and smart idea: connecting cars together, to automatically create a new “social network” that detects and gives alerts about traffic conditions, police traps and accidents.

You’ve only to install the Waze client, free and available for Android, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile, starting it everytime you’re driving your car. It will anonymously record your track  to inform other drivers about traffic (Waze collects speed informations from all the phones and it creates statistical alerts). You can also send “human” messages to the community, reporting speed cams or dangerous events on the road.

In addiction of this, Waze is a “normal” car navigation system, with a “not-so-normal” feature: also the maps are drawed and updated by the community! When you drive with Waze running on your phone, it records every your move and it sends it to Waze servers, where the centralized system merges this data with the existing maps. When several phones record a difference (because, for example, of a change of a road) this part of the map is updated.

People from United States are luckier than Europeans, because USA government gives maps of the territory for free, so there’s a complete base to start with. Anyway it’s also possible to start from scratch: we just started to draw maps here in Italy, and major cities like Rome or Milan are already half-mapped. Let’s call Waze the Wikipedia of streets

www.waze.com

Digiarty Software informed me that they began an interesting giveaway for their new DVD Authoring software: you can download WinX DVD Author and get a free unlimited license, until the end of the month. Next, the cost will be USD 29.95.

WinX DVD Author is able to create DVD-Video directly from a variety of formats (AVI, ASF, MPEG, MKV, MP4, MOV, RM, RMVB, XIVD, DVIX, H264, OGG, Quicktime, FLV, etc).
You can also add a custom menu and choose between several type of supports (DVD, DVD-DL, DVD+RW, etc.). The software is multilanguage (English, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish are only a part of supported languages).

The special giveaway offer is here:
http://www.winxdvd.com/specialoffer/oct09.htm

I already talked about my problems with the SCX-4200 printer, with Samsung drivers for Linux and Ubuntu 8.10. Now I discovered that the newer model I bought, the SCX-4300, has a disagreeable system to check the level of the ink in the toner, with a chip mounted on original toners from Samsung. Checking the toner and printer inks can be very tricky!
When the level is near to the end, the printer gives error and stops. In other words, it disallow you to use all the ink; in addiction of this, you can’t use compatible toners because they doesn’t have the chip, so the printer doesn’t restart even after you replace it.

Gabriele Piscitelli published the complete procedure to enter the service mode of your Samsung SCX-4300 printer, flash it and reset the ink counter. I translated the tutorial in english and I want to share it with you. read full post »

While we are waiting for BLUntrl, a very promising application that is partecipating to the Windows 7 “Code 7 Contest”, I want to put highlight an interesting little utility: ScreenBright (aka “ScreenWhite”) is able to control your monitor brightness, contrast and color balance, directly from Windows.
ScreenWhite is really basic, but it represent one of the few Windows applications that can communicate directly with the hardware of your monitor throught DDC/CI. A lot of monitors have uncomfortable commands, so it can be useful if you want to quickly change the brightness of your screen, several times a day.

A lot of Google Chrome users are experiencing problems with page scrolling in Windows, that is too fast with several devices (mouses and touchpads). It seems that there isn’t any “official” fix for this behaviour, but you can resolve this with a little freeware utility, KatMouse.

Just download it from the author’s site and install it. First of all, you’ve to open the Wheel Button tab and choose “None of the buttons” from the list (this feature isn’t useful and it can give you usability problems in Windows). Then, switch to “Classes” tab and start Google Chrome: drag and drop the KatMouse “target” icon to the main section of Chrome windows (the one where web sites are rendered); you’ll see a new item named “Chrome_RenderWidgetHostHWND” in the KatMouse list: double click it and choose “Custom scroll”, then set it to “1″ and confirm with OK.

That’s it!

Don’t be evil is the famous Google slogan. Since some time, it seems that something is changing: last week they contacted Cyanogen, the author of the most famous “unofficial” firmware for Android phones, telling him to stop the distribution of these releases; the problem comes from the fact that Android code is open source, but Google applications that are shipped with it (Google Talk, YouTube, Android Market…) are not.

This contradiction bring the impossibility to build a fully working ROM (if the developer can’t release a firmware with Android Market, final users can’t even download the other Google Apps!). Cyanogen has confirmed his intention to respect Google copyright, so he will continue to develop new firmware without any proprietary component, but the final solution is still incomplete. Let’s wait to see if this story will have a happy ending.

see also:

CyanogenMod home page: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

“A Note on Google Apps for Android“, from the Google official Android developers blog.

The fifth version of the most popular browser for mobile devices is now released as public beta. Opera Mini is the Java version of the Opera browser: it can run on any J2ME enabled smartphone, bringing a good web experience also on devices with limited browsing capabilities.

The idea at the base of Opera Mini is to offer a fast browser that saves bandwidth with the help of Opera servers, that compress web pages and graphics before sending them to the final user. In addiction of this, Opera Mini tries to embed a number of features that are normally present only in desktop browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer… and of course Opera for PCs), like tabbed browsing and speed-dialing bookmarks.

Opera Mini 5 beta is available for free. You can download it directly from your phone, pointing it to http://m.opera.com/next .

Every blog based on WordPress – the most famous CMS for blog management – is at risk since yesterday, because a new security hole that was discovered in this platform, until version 2.8.3. This bug allow the “injection” of a new administrator account in the blog; from this account it’s possibile to do anything. The suggestion for bloggers is, of course, to update their WordPress installation to the last release (at this moment it’s the 2.8.4), that is immune from this vulnerability). Users with a blog that is hosted directly on WordPress.com haven’t any concern, because the automatic update service that is offered by the network is already in action, protecting the blogs that are in hosting.

Raneri Web Design released a new free online service, thinking about eBay users: eBalert is able to create RSS feeds from any eBay search, on the fly. eBalert is for people that is looking for something in particular: it allows users to avoid the annoying activity to check daily on eBay, monitoring the same search, to discover which new bids have started.

You can do the search once (it works also with advanced filters, like geo-distance or the ordering by criteria), then copy and paste the URL of the results’ page to eBalert: it will instantly create your feed, updated every 12 hours and ready to be added to your preferred feedreader. The service doesn’t require any signup.

CrystalDiskMark is a simple, easy and free utility to test drive performances. Just choose the unit you want to benchmark (it works also with SSD and flash devices like USB sticks or SD card!) and click the “All” button to execute a complete test. The application will check sequencial e random read/write speed, showing you the results in a minimal interface. You can also choose the dimensions of the dummy file to be  used during the test, to fine tune it.