David Pitlyuk

You may or may not have heard of a little thing going on today, dubbed “Download Day”. The newest version of Firefox was just released today, June 17th, and there is an effort to make it the most downloaded item in one day. An official site is being dedicated to the event, and can be found at SpreadFirefox.com.

Firefox is a great browser, and version 3 only makes it better. One of the biggest improvements, no more memory leak! Among that, there are also more than 15,000 improvements which make Firefox faster, more stable, and smarter. For the amount of time we all spend browsing, little improvements add up to a big difference.

From a designers perspective, Firefox follows web standards, and makes things much easier for us to get websites we make looking the way we want. While IE8 takes a big leap into helping with this, it still won’t be near as good.

To “pledge” your download, simply head over to SpreadFirefox.com and submit your pledge. So far there are over 1.6 million pledges.

Make sure and upgrade your Firefox version to 3!

There are a couple of new downloads you should be made aware of:

Wordpress 2.5

You can read all about the ton of updates that were made here. You can also download the new version here.

I haven’t upgraded any of my blogs, but I played around with a local version…it seems nice. I should be upgrading to 2.5 when this sites new redesign launches.

Magento 1.0

After a long wait, Magento has released their first stable 1.0 version of their eCommerce software. You can download that here.

I’m playing around with this locally, and there is a fairly steep learning curve. I’m still going through all of the features and trying to learn how to make it do what I want. I’m hoping Magento releases an official startup guide that goes through each feature and provide tutorials to do certain things. I think it would be nice if they essentially made a guide that teaches you how to go from a blank store, to one with all the demo data. There’s so much I want to do with Magento, so I’m hoping to learn quick.

My business partner for Tri Megatech drives a Subaru STI when he’s not managing or setting up a network. He sent me a video this morning which I thought was worthy of sharing with you guys…they take a Subaru STI out snowboarding…you just have to watch and see:

This should have been an ad for the Super Bowl, I wanted to go out and buy an STI after seeing it. Eric took his STI snowboarding with us last a couple weekends ago, here’s his with the snowboard rack:

Here’s a video I did back in college featuring a buddy’s WRX tearing it up through the snow:

I’m back from Vegas, unfortunately internet access wasn’t as accessible as I had hoped (nor did I have much spare time!).  Vegas was a great time with pretty much non-stop action and little sleep.  We arrived on Sunday, and headed over to Bellagio to see the O Cirque De Soliel show after checking in.  The show was very impressive, especially the stage which went from a regular stage to a pool in seconds.

Later that night we headed over the Absolut Vodka penthouse suite in Caesars Palace for John Chow’s CES kickoff party.  While I’ve known John for about 10 years now, this was actually the first time I ever met him.  We ended up getting their almost 2 hours late, and by that time John was pretty trashed…he didn’t realize who I was until the second time I introduced myself lol.

The room was awesome, with different themes in each bedroom.  For anybody that went there, you would have noticed a variety of banners as well as a couple vendor setups around the room.  That’s how you make an expensive party free :)   This was one of the setups from NZXT for example:

The next day we went to CES.  We ended up going to the smaller portion of the show at the Sands convention center and weren’t that impressed.  That night we went out to Jet Nighclub in the Mirage.  That’s always good times as always, if you go, I recommend getting there early unless you have some sort of connection.

I know the picture looks like there are only guys there, but rest assured, the girls are inside

The last full day we were there we went to the big portion of CES, which turned out to be much better.  I wish we had done that for both days!  We tried to pack in as much of the show as we could in one day, which is not nearly enough time.  Here’s a few of my favorite things:

This is a Pioneer Kuro (the new name for the high-end elite series) concept which was just ridiculously flat:

If you know me, you’ll know that you can probably find me in the automotive car entertainment section of the show.  That’s where you’ll find all the cool cars, cool car gadgets, and hottest booth babes.  In there you’d have found a Hummer with 30″ wheels with a ridiculous dish.  Pictures don’t really do justice, but for comparison sake see how big the lip is with a $100 bill on it:

For those of you that haven’t heard of the Tesla Roadster, it’s a 100% electric sportscar that does 0-60 in under 4 seconds.  I haven’t seen one yet, but luckily the Blaupunkt booth had one:

I didn’t grab a picture, but it was cool to see the Optimus Maximus keyboard which features all programmable OLED keys.

I didn’t have much time to do any gambling, I only pretty much played roulette for about 15-30 minutes at a time every now and then.  Luckily I was able to walk away from Vegas up $150 or so…while only putting $20 on the roulette table at one time.  I should be going to Atlantic City on Friday, so I’ll have some time to actually do a little gambling and hopefully play some poker.  All in all, Vegas was a great success for a first time visit, and I hope to be back again soon.

Many of us AIM as our main instant message application.  There is a built-in feature in AIM 6.x that I’ve found almost nobody knows about, but everybody loves once they do…and that’s AOL Radio.  For those of you that have never used AOL Radio before, it’s time to get on the bandwagon because it is simply awesome.  AOL Radio features a ton of stations in all of the categories that you can think of, and you’ll be surprised to hear that even has the majority of stations from XM Radio channels are included…for free.

Surprisingly enough, I think the AOL stations are actually better than the XM channels!   So now that you know AOL Radio is so good, you’ll be happy to find out that it’s actually built into AIM.  Simply click the headphones on the bottom of your buddy list:

Once you’ve done that, click the listen now button (you MIGHT need to install an ActiveX file), choose the category of music, and then the station:

I actually don’t even really listen to MP3’s anymore, I just pop open AOL Radio through AIM since it’s already open.  I know this probably sounds like a big ad for AOL Radio, but I’m just a huge fan of the product.

Did you already know this existed?  So far everybody I’ve told about it did not know, but now uses it.

A company by the name of Aeros has envisioned a new concept in flying called the Aeroscraft. It’s sort of a mix of an airplane, blimp, and helicopter all in one, but looks more like a blimp:

The Aerocraft is about the size of two football fields, and can fly by a mixture of helium and 6 turbofan engines. The aft-mounted propellers are electric powered in order to reduce the amount of noise. It can travel at close to 200mph, and goes about 8,000 ft up.

How Will It Be Used?

This is the most important about why the Aeroscraft is so innovative. Since the craft is so large, it can fit quite a bit of stuff in it. For the consumer market you can imagine a luxury hotel in the air. Imagine getting picked up in Los Angeles, going on the Aeroscraft where you can freely walk around, eat dinner at a fancy restaurant, go dancing, see the view from only 8,000ft, going to bed in your luxury room, and waking up in New York City. For the industrial market the Aeroscraft can carry a ton of cargo, but more importantly it has the capability of taking off and landing anywhere. The craft takes off and lands straight up and down like a helicopter, imagine a new Wal Mart opening up, and its entire inventory being delivered in one shot. For the military market the Aeroscraft can carry a ton of vehicles like tanks for example. As you can see, there is great opportunity here, and I’m excited to see this come out.

A scaled-down prototype is supposed to be released next year, with a production version to be seen as early as 2010. Here’s a video I found on YouTube you may enjoy:

I’ve previously written about one multi-billion dollar product that makes wireless power a reality. A new one that I’ve found is a device that is made by a company named NeuroSky. The device allows you to control things with your brain by turning brainwaves into commands.

Now, first thought is what applications will it be used for? The company is targeting three things mainly; sleepiness/drowsiness detectors for automotive and industrial markets, gaming consoles, and therapeutic solutions for ADD problems. Check out this video to get an idea of some of things it can be used for:

There is just such a huge market for this product, and surprisingly enough, it sounds like it’s going to be really cheap to implement. They mentioned in the video the component was only $15. You can definitely expect next generation consoles to use some of this technology, especially considering the success of the Nintendo Wii. In fact, according to CNN Money, the CEO of NeuroSky is already in talks with the makers of Dance Dance Revolution.

How many times have you been driving down the highway late at night and started to dose off? I had a friend take my car for a 7 hour one-way trip back and forth to pick up a car. They drove, picked up the car, and drove back. On the way home, he fell asleep, did a couple spins in my car, went into the grass, back onto the road (while still spinning), and managed to stop somehow (with a mud all over the car). In the future, an application can be built by NeuroSky for the car that would have prevented him from doing that and potentially had a much worse situation. Now imagine every car in the future has this, that’s a lot of money to be made, and that’s just one application. Another big market is health. For example as was stated in the video, people in wheelchairs may be able to move the chair by just thinking about it.

Do you agree that this has the possibility to be a multi-billion dollar market?

For those of you using AIM 6.1, you’ll notice that one of the new features is being able to choose various themes for the AIM buddy list and IM windows. All of the themes are based on the same background, but can change some of the colors. There is a hidden black theme, which actually changes the entire color to black, and looks so much better in my opinion.

To make your AIM 6.1 buddy list look the same, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you have AIM 6.1 installed
2. Open the blGadgets.box file from C:\Program Files\AIM6\services\imApp\ver6_1_32_1\content\bl\blGadgets.box in notepad or any text editor.
3. Search for “black” (at about line #580).
4. Remove the collapsed=”true” part
5. Close AIM if you have it open
6. Re-Open or open AIM and sign in

You can see the new color choice once the change is made here:

Much cleaner looking!

[Source: Gus What?!]

I’ve always known the Yamaha R1 motorcycle to be one of the big daddies of sports bikes. That is until a company in Oakland, CA that goes by Electric Motorsport converted the 99′ R1 into a LiIon (lithium ion) battery powered bike that can do 100mph and 0-60 in 3 seconds.

To get the bike this way, they had to yank the engine, tailpipes, radiator, gas cap, transmission, and clutch. They then replaced all that with 28 lithium ion batteries, an AC regenerative motor, and an electric throttle…all weighing less than what was removed in the first place.

One of the coolest parts is that when the bike is idle, it is completely silent…when it’s going, it sounds like a remote control car on steroids. The conversion costs about $15,000, but is just a prototype at this time. The company hopes to have a production version around this price range with a custom chassis, as well as a cheaper, smaller $6,000-$8,000 version.

Here’s a video report that was done by LATimes.com:

[Source: LA Times]

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Microsoft gave a sneak peak at the future of computing at Convergence 07, as Engadget reported.

“the so-called DigiDesk does indeed incorporate many features we’ve seen before, including a multi-touch display (we know, we know), document digitizer, speech recognition engine, and ability to resize objects on the fly”

Watch the video of Microsoft demonstrating:

The major “cool” thing with this is all about integration and productivity. I love how all of the systems are tied together, where suppliers are pumped into your systems, and you are pumped into theirs. If you change anything, the system adjusts everything all-around.

The whole setup and way it works seems great, but I can’t imagine what it would take to set something like that up. Between integrating it into your own systems and working with your various suppliers, vendors, customers, etc to get into their systems, it sounds like there will be a lot of cost involved.

From a new business perspective, this can lead to many things for IT solutions companies like mine (Tri Megatech). I hear all the time, computers are getting easier to use and more automated, aren’t you worried about the future of your company? Technology always evolves, and there will always be something to fix or do. It’s being on the edge of it and knowing what is next that will allow you to monetize the most.