Put on a Happy Face, It’s the Weekend

Good afternoon all, hopefully everyone has had a good week so far and nobody has succumbed to the quickly dropping temperatures over the last few days. With any luck we’ll at least get a little snow at Christmas, which should make it all worthwhile. For those of you just joining us while we’re getting festive, we tend to post a little something completely unrelated on a Friday evening; it takes our minds of work just before we get out.

Anyway, instead of going for something entirely slapstick this week, I thought I’d pst Kseniya Simonova’s sand animation art piece from Ukraine’s Got Talent. It kind of puts the whole X Factor versus Rage Against the Machine conflict in the shade

The next thing is something that popped up on Twitter earlier in the week courtesy of @Fee_oh_na that we liked so much it was immediately squirreled away for posting here.

It's so simple... now all it needs is a target and we can start blaster training

The other thing we’ve come across this week and really enjoyed more than we should have was this shot of an ATM that works in Cockney rhyming slang. It’s eerily reminiscent the time when you’ve had one too many and hit the “Gaeilge” button on the ATM…

No matter how many times I change phone languages, ATMs pose difficulty.

Alright all, that’s it from us for this week. We’ll be back with you right up until Christmas Eve, heroes that we are. If anyone needs anything I’ll still be manning the blog and our Twitter feed as well as Boards.ie with the ever charming Ryan from RMA.

With any luck we’ll all get through this together. Have fun all

DRM Issue Plagues Avatar Screenings

An issue with the digital rights management arrangement put in place for early screenings of James Cameron’s latest movie, Avatar. Apparently, the issues with DRM stopped some of the 3D screenings altogether, forcing the film to be displayed in 2D instead.

Avatar has been hotly anticipated, not only for the fact that it’s James Cameron, whose reputation probably doesn’t need to be discussed, and also for the fact that it’s been filmed using some particularly interesting techniques that essentially allow the director to see what the CG imagery will look like during shooting, allowing changes to be made on the spot that otherwise would have precipitated massive expense.

Google Talks Up Mobile Gmail

Google has taken some time to talk about the manifold ways in which the company has improved the mobile version of its Gmail service, having made the mobile app two to three times faster today than it was in April.

Try to imagine that the 'Beta' tag isn't there

Interestingly enough, the thought process behind the mobile version of Gmail closely echoes that of Mozilla’s head of mobile, Jay Sullivan, saying that the fact that a “growing number of mobile devices” now ship with a usable web browser built in. This allows Google’s developers to rely on an app being present that will be alright with HTML and JavaScript and will work across a plethora of different devices.

Facebook CEO Misunderstands Privacy Policy

Facebook’s new privacy policy has certainly been making the headlines an awful lot, with criticisms abounding that, despite Facebook’s claims that its new privacy policy changes were put in place to make the service more understandable, the new arrangement was deliberately too public.

There are a lot of reasons why Facebook might want to make its users data just a little more accessible to the wider-web, not least of which its relatively recent deal with Google to offer real-time searching of status updates. Perhaps the most intriguing twist in the story so far came earlier in the week, when Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, apparently misunderstood the new privacy policy, making some 300 of his own photos visible to the world at large.

Kindle App to Hit BlackBerries?

Amazon has slowly been rolling out Kindle functionality to a range of devices that have nothing to do with its own Kindle hardware except that, with the addition of a dedicated app, they’re capable of being ebook readers.

Last month, Amazon released a Kindle app for Apple’s iPhone and a standalone Kindle desktop app for those of us who’d like to read ebooks from the comfort of our desks. It’s certainly an interesting idea, and one that ensures that Amazon’s customers are more open to the idea of picking up a piece of its own Kindle branded hardware, having already interacted with the hardware.

Google to Launch New “Guru” Service

Word is leaking out that Google could be planning to launch a service under the simple name of “Google Guru” in the same style as other popular user-driven knowledge bases like Yahoo Answers.

For those who haven’t encountered services like Yahoo Answers, the model is essentially one whereby users can pose a question and other users will do their best to try and answer it. Users can then vote an answer up or down, meaning that the correct (or occasionally, funniest) answer floats up to the top. Google had already run a service somewhat like this simply titled Google Answers, but it’s been dead for a while now.

Firefox Mobile to Spell Death of App Stores?

Mozilla has claimed that it feels its upcoming mobile version of its popular Firefox web browser, named, appropriately enough, Firefox Mobile, could well usher in the beginning of the end for shops like Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market.

Among my favourite browser logos...

According to a report from PC Pro, Mozilla’s own vice president of mobile, the oft quoted Jay Sullivan, is of the opinion that working with Firefox Mobile and developing what amount to “apps” but simply making them web-based instead will be the future. Indeed, if you’re going by what Sullivan has to say, then markets like the App Store won’t be around long. In his own words,

Competition – Win a Nettop

Good morning everyone, hopefully you’re feeling hale and hearty on this decreasingly snowy, but still nice and crisp winter’s morning. We’re happy to announce that, as part of our Advent Calendar competition, we’re giving away an MSI Wind Nettop 120.

Click through to enter our Advent Calendar competition

For those of you who haven’t encountered nettops yet, they run on the same principle as a netbook does for notebooks, only in desktop terms. Where a netbook is a slimmed down notebook that sacrifices some performance for portability and size, a nettop is a slimmed down desktop that just gets the job done.

Google Pushes Chrome to Apple Users

Google has started pushing Chrome to Mac users in a big way, going so far as to post an ad for the new service on the main Google page itself if you’re viewing it from an Apple machine.

Google’s browser may well have taken an awfully long time to find its way to Apple’s Mac OSX, but now that it’s there it seems that the search giant is doing everything in its power to get users to move from Safari, Firefox and Opera Mac over to the light-weight Chrome browser. Indeed, this news comes after word was released earlier this week that Chrome had just managed to outpace Safari in terms of browser saturation.

Win7 Means Less Complaints to Microsoft

It seems that since the release of Windows 7 has seen calls to Microsoft’s customer care line diminish, bringing the volume of calls that the company’s call centres field down to half of what Microsoft expected.

Word comes from Cnet that Microsoft has seen the volume of calls to its customer care lines drop significantly more than even it expected since the launch of Windows 7. While it was reported earlier in the week that around 30% of all of the issues with Windows 7 were encountered during install, it had been speculated that the reason for that was that more people were trying a new install than with any Microsoft OS in recent memory.