Geek News and Musings

The “dark underworld” of online economies is the supposed “gold farmers” often found in countries like China, where people are working in sweatshop like conditions, “playing” video games to generate as much currency or valuable virtual goods as possible, that the gold farm operators can sell for real cash. However, the Chinese government claims it’s cracking down on the practice, though it’s not entirely clear how they’ll stop it from going on. In fact, it’s not even clear why the government is trying to stamp out the practice. At best, the claim is that it wants to avoid “possible impact on the real financial system.” While any time you have “alternative” currencies, that’s certainly a possibility, it’s hard to believe that World of Warcraft gold would have any serious impact on China’s economy any time soon.

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Daytime photo tricks don’t always translate when you’re trying to capture the perfect night shot. The Photography Bay web site outlines tips for taking a stellar post-sunset shot without relying on a tripod or expensive flash system.

Photo by shavar.

We’ve outlined some night photo tips before, but The Photography Bay has some worthy additions. Among the tips is to increase your camera's ISO—but to consider the camera in question before doing so.

If you’ve got something like the Canon T1i, Nikon D300, or Nikon D90 then you can probably afford to crank the ISO up to 800 or 1600 and still get very clean and beautiful shots. In which case, you can hand-hold the camera and look through the viewfinder to compose your shots.

The post also recommends never to shoot on auto, only manual, aperture, or program modes. Certain weather conditions—rain, for one—are also advantageous for taking night shots because they double the available lighting. Hit up the full post for the complete list of tips, then come back and share your own night shooting pearls of wisdom in the comments below.

SkyGrid, the nifty, free financial news aggregator, is now publishing a stream of news on Twitter, letting users follow breaking business news headlines via the microblogging network.

The news aggregator, which only features stories about publicly traded companies, not only has an comprehensive Twitter feed for news stories, but the site also has Twitter feeds that are broken down by sector. So users can follow SkyGridHealth or SkyGridEnergy for sector-related news. SkyGrid currently has separate Twitter feeds for 8 different industries. SkyGrid says that the Twitter feed may be especially useful to users who want to access SkyGrid on their mobile devices.

Similar to TechMeme and Google News, SkyGrid clusters related news stories based on keyword analysis, what they’re linking to, etc. SkyGrid also tries to determine the sentiment of each article - red for negative, green for positive.

As we wrote in our earlier review of the services, SkyGrid is an incredibly useful tool, especially now that it is free. But the one element that is missing from SkyGrid is coverage of larger private companies, like Facebook. In order to become a serious competitor to popular aggregators like Techmeme (which also has a Twitter firehose), the site will need to expand its range of coverage. But especially for people in the financial services industries who use Twitter as a news source, SkyGrid is on the right track to providing users with real-time valuable financial news.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

It looks like Apple has already started sending out the beta version and SDK for the next iteration of the iPhone OS, 3.1, to developers.

The iPhone 3.0 software was released just about two weeks ago, ahead of the iPhone 3GS launch. By most accounts it’s pretty stable, though some users have been having battery issues. That’s why it’s a bit odd that Apple would iterate up to version 3.1 already, instead of something like 3.0.1, which it tends to do for minor updates and bug fixes. Could we be seeing a larger update to the OS already?

I’m told that there’s nothing much of interest in the release notes to indicate anything major that is new or changed.

Here’s the text of the email being sent from Apple:

iPhone SDK 3.1 beta and iPhone OS 3.1 beta are now posted to the iPhone Dev Center. These versions are for development and testing only and should be installed on devices dedicated to iPhone OS 3.1 beta software development. Please read the iPhone OS Pre-Install Advisory and the iPhone SDK 3.1 beta release notes before downloading and installing.

Update: I’m hearing a few reports that one change is that MMS is turned on by default. Perhaps AT&T is getting closer to turning it on as well in the U.S.

[thanks Michael]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

A girl discovers an overheated bear in the forest. She helps him by shaving his fur in hard-to-reach places. Says Japan Probe: “This commercial is apparently an advertisement showing how Nisshinbo cares about global warming and the environment.”

As many of you know, a lot of the sites that use Rackspace as their hosting provider were down for about an hour yesterday. That’s because Rackspace went down. Apparently, it was a power outage at a data center that caused it, an incident report that we’ve obtained explains.

While Rackspace has backup systems in place, a series of event apparently caused those backups to fail, resulting in the servers going down. Here’s the key nugget:

The breaker on the primary utility feeder tripped, initiating a sequence of events that ultimately caused a power interruption in Phase I and Phase II of the data center. All systems initially came up on generator power without customer impact. The ‘A’ bank of generators, which support UPS clusters A and B in Phase I and UPS cluster E in Phase II, then experienced excitation failure which escalated to the point where the generators were no longer able to maintain the electrical load. Rackspace then attempted to switch to our secondary utility feeder, but was unable to do so due to an issue in the Pad Mounted Switch (PMS). At approximately 3:15pm CDT, power supply through UPS clusters A, B and E was lost when the batteries in those clusters discharged, and equipment receiving power through those clusters experienced an interruption in service.

The service says only one of its nine servers were affected by this failure, but main high profile sites collapsed as a result, including EventBrite, Justin Timberlake’s site and Michelle Malkin’s popular political blog. As Rackspace noted yesterday that “We owe better, and will deliver.”

Below, find the full incident report.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

FriendFeed now lets you individualize your account with six new designer themes. When you select a theme, your FriendFeed account will always include your theme, and other people looking at your profile page will see it in whatever theme they have chosen.

FriendFeed says that it plans to allow users to customize themes down the line as well as give users the ability to create an entirely new theme. Twitter and Gmail also let you add themes and designs to your homepages but some of FriendFeed’s themes have a nicer design, in my opinion. On the other hand, Gmail has a good amount of variety when it comes to choosing a theme. The advantage to Twitter’s themes is that you are able to choose multiple designs in different colors.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Reader Stephen writes in with an excellent, time-saving Windows 7 tip: you can create Outlook templates for boilerplate emails and pin them to the Windows taskbar for easy access.

This technique is not limited to readers using Windows 7, since you can pin a folder to the taskbar in any version of Windows—but the new Jump lists in Windows 7 make it a lot simpler. To create your own set of Outlook templates, Stephen advises:

1. Create an Outlook template by composing a new email message with the text you want, and then using File -> Save As to save the message as an Outlook Template into a folder of your choice.
2. If you are using Windows 7, simply drag the template files onto the Outlook icon.
3. For previous versions of Windows, right-click the taskbar, choose Toolbars -> New Toolbar, and pick the folder that you saved the templates into.
4. Now you can quickly access your templates from the Jumplist by right-clicking on the Outlook icon. For previous versions of Windows, you can use the pop-up folder menu.

It’s a great tip for anybody that repeatedly sends emails on the exact same topic. Thanks, Stephen!

For more ways to be productive while dealing with email overload, learn how to save time and typing with Outlook 2007’s Quick Parts, tweak Outlook to empty your inbox faster, knock down repetitive email with AutoHotkey, or just take a look through our top ten Outlook boosters.

(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube / Watch it at boingboingvideo.com.)

Founders of The Pirate Bay have made a deal to sell off “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” to a Swedish gaming company for about $7.8 million.

More than 20 million visitors use the site each month. This April, TPB’s three founders and a representative of their ISP were sentenced to a year in prison and damages of about $4 million over allegations of copyright violation.

A week before the news was announced, I interviewed Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde at the Open Video Conference in New York City, about that lawsuit, and about their plans for the future. He mentioned that “huge, huge news” was coming up, but refused to disclose the news at that time. An edited version of our conversation above, including Peter’s explanation of why he believes filesharing and anonymity are good for democracy, is above.

(Special thanks to OVC organizers Elizabeth Stark Dean Jansen, Eddie Codel, and Intelligent TV for production assistance).

Related: My former colleague Ben Fritz at the LA Times has this piece up about the sale, analyzing the news from Hollywood’s perspective.

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Sponsor shout-out: This week’s Boing Boing Video episodes are brought to you in part by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is a site where users come together to “share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC.” Participants’ designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and “will influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside.”

Has anyone ever actually bought a laptop where the battery length claims were anything close to what you actually got? I know I haven’t. I tend to read online reviews from various testers to get a better sense of how long a battery can really last, but apparently some are so annoyed by the bogus claims from PC makers that they’ve filed a class action lawsuit. I’m all for things that would encourage computer makers to be more honest, though these sorts of class action lawsuits always seem a little silly. Are people really significantly “harmed” if the battery life doesn’t live up to expectations? These cases usually seem more like opportunities for a few lawyers to get a bunch of money out of companies. The real issue should be that the FTC should have investigated the false claims from laptop makers.

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