Geek News and Musings

• Top 10 Windows 7 Booster Apps (Windows 7)
  Windows 7 is a big improvement over Vista, and a pretty convenient OS in general-but it’s by no means perfect. These 10 downloads improve Windows 7’s looks, functions, and make it easier, safer, and more convenient to upgrade to.
• Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Out Now (Linux)
  The final version of Ubuntu 9.10 has hit Ubuntu’s servers a little bit ahead of its front page. Grab a torrent or ISO of the free Linux operating system while the servers aren’t slammed.
• Aerofoil Keeps Your Laptop’s Battery Alive (Windows)
  Open-source system tray utility Aerofoil helps keep your Windows notebook running longer by automatically turning off Aero Glass and other battery-sucking preferences when you disconnect from a wall outlet.
• Livebrush Makes Design Creation Simple (Adobe Air)
  If you’re looking to put a flourish or two on an invitation, business card, or web page, Livebrush makes it super simple to create your own designs without purchasing advanced vector-based software.
• LongBar is a Slick, Open-Source Sidebar for Windows (Windows)
  Desktop sidebar LongBar hosts mini-applications as “tiles”, giving you application launchers, system stats, Facebook updates, sticky notes, and more on the side of your screen.
• Google Voice AIR App Keeps Voicemail and SMS on Your Desktop (Adobe Air)
  If you’d like to keep quick access to your Google Voice voicemail and SMS messages handily in place on your dock or taskbar, a cross-platform app gives you exactly that by packaging up Google Voice’s mobile site.
• PicTranslator Turns Your iPhone’s Camera into a Language Translator (iPhone)
  Whether you’ve found yourself in a foreign land or you just need a little help with a foreign-language menu, snap a pic with PicTranslator and let it translate for you on the fly.
• VMware Fusion Updates with Excellent Windows 7 Support (Mac OS X)
  If you’re looking to run Windows on your Mac, you’ve got a few options. If you want to run Windows 7 on your Mac, complete with Aero, Flip 3D, and 64-bit support, try the new VMware Fusion.
• Taskbar Meters Monitor Your Windows 7 Hardware in the Taskbar (Windows 7)
  If you’re not into Windows desktop gadgets, there is another way to easily monitor your computer’s CPU and RAM: Taskbar Meters puts simple, attractive resource monitors right on your Windows 7 Taskbar.
• Minimalist Gmail Pares Gmail Down to the Basics (Firefox)
  If you liked the look of Zen Habits’ Minimalist Gmail adaptation, but don’t usually roll with Greasemonkey scripts, a coder has put together a single Firefox extension that can hide header, footer, and sidebar elements for an elegant look.

Posted via web from Leo LaPosterous

Our favorite jingle guy is at it again. Jonathan Mann, who TechCrunch readers will best know as the guy behind the awful Bing jingle, has released another new video (as he does every day), this time to serenade the children of Keith Valley Middle School who recently performed his Bing jingle. “It’s kind of creepy,” Mann admitted at the time, but he was happy to see his work live on, so he came up with this gem.

But this latest video almost had a very different tone. “I thought about writing them an anti-corporate anthem, something they could raise their tiny, furious fists to, but ultimately decided on this,” Mann tells us. Too bad, because that would be been awesome. It could have been “Another Brick In The Wall [Part 2]” for the 21st Century.

Representatives for Bing also wrote us after our “torture” post to point out the backstory about the students singing the Bing jingle. Apparently, they decided to do it on their own — or rather, their teachers decided to make them do it. Still, it’s very creepy. And as a number of readers pointed out, a little bit too much like Jesus Camp (trailer below Mann’s new video and the students singing his song).

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Sample sales are an amazing resource for marked down goods for both mainstream and luxury brands. Online private sample sales are picking up serious speed. Here is how they work: big designers, such as Marc Jacobs or Versace, place excess inventory on a sale site at 50 to 70 percent discounts over a several day period. The sales are private, available only to members, with upcoming sales from brands announced via emails. Products include clothing for men, women and children as well as jewelry, handbags and home accessories. You can get invites from other members or request invites via the site.

Startups in the online sample sales space like Gilt Groupe, Ideeli and Hautelook are all raising huge amounts of money, growing their user base at a rapid pace and turning a strong profit. The concept has even attracted retail giants like Saks and Nieman Marcus, which are now jumping on the bandwagon to offer their own private sales. Even GSI Commerce, which previously wasn’t directly involved with selling luxury goods, is getting into the private sale business with the recent acquisition of sale site RueLaLa.

It’s worth noting how sample sales have evolved in the past decade. I attended my first sample sale in 1997 in a convention center in Baltimore, where women (and a few men) were scouring for deals on clothing from J.Crew. The items were placed in huge cardboard boxes in no particular order or size breakdown. It was utter chaos, but the deals were great.

Flash forward four years to my shopping life in New York city, where sample sales are a bit of a religion. At Kate Spade, I fought intense lines (waited in an hour long line in the middle of December, nearly got frostbite in my toes), pushed my way into packed fitting rooms, and found myself intimidated by the catiness of aggressive deal-seekers. At Gucci, I was asked to sign up for an hour-long “window” of shopping time. Only all the convenient times were already taken, and I was left with times in the middle of a workday. And yet I walked away from both sales with steeply-discounted designer stuff that I wouldn’t ordinary be able to afford.

You get the point. Sample sales offer great deals, but highly uncomfortable situations. Gilt and other online private sales are simplifying the sample sale market. The online sample sale was originally brought to market in Europe by Vente-Privee in 2001. US companies like Gilt, Hautelook, Ideeli and BillionDollarBabes emerged a few years later with a similar online model, offering users radical discounts on overstock goods from designers.

Sample sales are also proving to be a compelling market opportunity. Vente-Privee itself is on target to achieve €650 million in turnover globally this year. The price (in a possible sale) for Vente-Privee is estimated at $1.5 billion, with some sources even putting the figure at between $2 billion and $4 billion. The New York Times reports that Gilt Groupe, co-founded in late 2007 by a former eBay executive and, was able to bring in $25 million in it’s first year of operation. Gilt currently has 1.6 million members. And the startup recently raised an estimated $40 million in funding in July, which valued the company at $400 million. Ideeli, which was founded in November of 2007 and now has over one million members, is set to do $50 million in revenue this year, and the company’s CEO, Paul Hurley, expects to do $175 million in revenue next year.

So why is this model successful? Well, in addition to the fact that women and men can now avoid the chaos of the in-person sample sales, the sales are now brought to the masses. So it’s no longer shoppers in New York City who can solely benefit from the steep discounts, but consumers all over the world now have access to these goods. And because the sale only takes place in short amount of time, with limited stock available, shoppers feel the urgency to actually buy the product, because it may not be available within a few hours.

Most brands are also on board with the model. Since the sample sale site presents the brand in a luxurious, desirable way, via a “private” sale, designers don’t feel that these online sales are distorting the value of their brand in any way. So Gilt can get a premier designers like Marc Jacobs to sell his coveted handbags on its site for half the price. Plus, adds Hurley, the time frame of the sale ensures designers that their clothing or accessories aren’t just sitting in a bin somewhere. Hautelook even gives designers a real-time metrics dashboard that allows them to see what items are being bought, what parts of country where specific items are selling best and more.

As I noted earlier, the success of this model has now led to a number of retail shops and other technology companies sniffing around to either acquire or build private shopping sales of their own. Yesterday, DailyCandy released the news of their private shopping club and even designers themselves, like Tory Burch, are holding few-day private sales online. And as we reported earlier in the month, we hear that Gilt, Amazon and eBay are all actively looking at acquisitions in the European private shopping club space.

Online sample sites are drawing massive audiences, and monetizing them in a meaningful way. Of course, it’s a competitive space with every site duking it out for supply (the designer inventory) and demand (the buyers). And yet, even in recessionary times, the sample sales market seems large enough to sustain a market of startups, and keeps me looking like TechCrunch pays me a decent salary (joke!).

Photo credit: Flickr/Ed Yourdon

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

If you loved Readability, the previously reviewed bookmarklet that cuts the extras out of sites for easy reading, but wanted an even more minimalist experience, you’ll definitely want to try out Readability2.

Readability2 is based on Readability, but goes even further in the stream lining process, removing absolutely everything—logos, print buttons, etc.—and leaving only the actual images from the article you're reading, plus the text, of course. One of the nifty features is that Readability2 keeps all the markup code in the body of the article, which makes for easy cutting and pasting.

Check out Readability2 by visiting the link below and dragging the Readability2 button at the top of the page to your toolbar. Activate it on any webpage you want to strip away the extras and focus exclusively on the article you’re reading. Readability2 is a bookmarklet and should work on any modern browser.

One of the great things about digital television is also one of the not-so-great things. When you get the signal, it’s crystal clear. When you’ve a weak connection, you’re out of luck. Boost your reception with this monster homemade antenna.

If you live far from urban centers but you’d still like to pick up some over-the-air digital stations, you’re going to need a pretty sizable antenna. Earlier this year we shared a great antenna design with you, based on the Gray-Hoverman model.

The model you see here is what results when a little Gray-Hoverman antenna visits the beach, gets washed into a deep trench outside of Tokyo filled with radioactive waste, and emerges again, ready to reach havoc on the world. Well, all except for that last part. This massive build, based on the Gray-Hoverman model, can pick up signals from around 60 miles away, making it suitable for either boosting your local reception of picking up signals from areas you’ve never called home.

If you’re put off by the size of it, it is possible to put this style of antenna inside an attic. You’ll lose a bit of reception, but you’ll avoid your neighbors whispering about the mutant antenna on your roof. Check out the full build guide at the link below.

Be helpful, even to people who want to take their business somewhere else. It’s a tough thing to do sometimes, but I want to have the most complete list of Web Hosting Companies on Twitter. Are you one? Do I not have you listed yet? Let me know. Leave a comment here.

By the way, I’m making a list of all Rackspace employees too (at more than 200 employees already it’s far from complete). Why? We want to be the most available, most helpful, and most knowledgeable Web Hosting Company out there. Tweet on!

Amy Wallace’s Wired feature, “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All” looks at the life and times of Paul Offit, vaccine inventor and advocate, and the anti-vaccine pseudo-science he battles as he attempts to convince parents not to give in to fear and disinformation, and to follow the science that will keep their kids safe.

At this year’s Autism One conference in Chicago, I flashed more than once on Carl Sagan’s idea of the power of an “unsatisfied medical need.” Because a massive research effort has yet to reveal the precise causes of autism, pseudo-science has stepped aggressively into the void. In the hallways of the Westin O’Hare hotel, helpful salespeople strove to catch my eye as I walked past a long line of booths pitching everything from vitamins and supplements to gluten-free cookies (some believe a gluten-free diet alleviates the symptoms of autism), hyperbaric chambers, and neuro-feedback machines.

To a one, the speakers told parents not to despair. Vitamin D would help, said one doctor and supplement salesman who projected the equation “No vaccines + more vitamin d = no autism” onto a huge screen during his presentation. (If only it were that simple.) Others talked of the powers of enzymes, enemas, infrared saunas, glutathione drips, chelation therapy (the controversial — and risky — administration of certain chemicals that leech metals from the body), and Lupron (a medicine that shuts down testosterone synthesis).

Offit calls this stuff, much of which is unproven, ineffectual, or downright dangerous, “a cottage industry of false hope.” He didn’t attend the Autism One conference, though his name was frequently invoked. A California woman with an 11-year-old autistic son told me, aghast, that she’d personally heard Offit say you could safely give a child 10,000 vaccines (in fact, the number he came up with was 100,000 — more on that later). A mom from Arizona, who introduced me to her 10-year-old “recovered” autistic son — a bright, blue-eyed, towheaded boy who hit his head on walls, she said, before he started getting B-12 injections — told me that she’d read Offit had made $50 million from the RotaTeq vaccine. In her view, he was in the pocket of Big Pharma.

An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

We're huge fans of ubiquitous capture—recording everything that comes to mind when it comes to mind—as a method of getting organized and keeping things from slipping through the cracks. Turns out it's also great for saving money.

Photo by koalazymonkey.

At The Simple Dollar finance blog, a reader wrote to ask how having a pocket notebook at all times might save them money. The answer includes an ambitious list of ways, including using your notebook to record prices for future comparison—is the sale in front of you really a sale or just money off an inflated price? Along with comparison shopping and making a simple price book, one of the often overlooked uses for ubiquitous capture—but one I use all the time—is using your notebook to capture gift ideas.

Record great gift ideas. When I’m interacting with a friend or a family member, they’ll often drop a hint of some kind indicating a Christmas or birthday gift they’d like to receive. If I note that idea immediately, I can often give myself plenty of time to bargain-hunt for that specific item, enabling me to get that person a gift they’d really like for the lowest possible price for me.

A perfect example of this in action: I was having dinner with a friend some months ago. When the wine was decanted, the particular funnel that the sommelier used caught my friend's eye—it was quite an interesting one. When we were leaving the restaurant I quickly scribbled a few notes about the style of the funnel. A little Google-fu later and I found that it wasn't a particularly pricey item, but it would be much appreciated by my friend and show that I notice things that matter to him.

Check out the full article at The Simple Dollar for more ways you can save using your capture tool of choice, and if you’ve got a great example of how ubiquitous capture has saved you money we want to hear about it in the comments.

Terry Storch, over on Twitter, noticed I was slamming Google Reader and wrote “is it me…or did you go from Google Reader being the best thing in tech, to Google Reader sucks? Hot or Not with Scoble…”

Yes, two years ago I thought Google Reader was the best thing to come along for news freaks like me. Then they started adding features and messed it up.

See, teams can go off the rails.

How bad did they mess it up? My account, today, took 1 minute and 16 seconds to start up. This is a very common experience.

Why does it take so long to start up?

Because I have about 1,500 friends and the code that starts up is VERY POORLY DESIGNED.

Now, lots of people point out that I’m an exception. Joel Houseman, for instance, did just that. “I would point out that you are the exception. With my 150 feeds and 20-30 friends, it loads very fast and is snappy.”

The thing is, I’m an exception everywhere, right? But over on Twitter I have 12,128 friends and Twitter loads in less than a second. Over on FriendFeed I have more than 10,000 friends and it loads in less than a second. Over on Facebook I have about the same number of friends as I have on Google Reader and it opens in a second or two. Heck, even on FourSquare, a service that has not gone mainstream yet, I have more than 1,000 friends and it always opens fast.

So, yes, I loved Google Reader. Before they added crapily-written and crapily-designed code to it.

Now I hate it and never use it.

What does this mean for regular users? Maybe not much. BUT I remember the days when people like Joel used to make fun of me for being the first person to hit more than 1,000 friends on Twitter. Now that is very commonplace.

Keep that in mind if you are using Google Reader. Do NOT use its social networking features.

Oh, and I can’t figure out how to delete all my friends there so I can make it work again.

No biggie. Twitter has replaced Google Reader for me anyway. Howso?

Check out my Twitter list of Tech News Brands. This is far better than anything I ever had in Google Reader, even with thousands of RSS feeds coming in there.

And head over to Listorious.com. Twitter’s list feature has only been around a day and look at how many lists there already are. This is FAR FASTER GROWTH than Google Reader EVER saw. Especially among “normal” users. Did you notice how many celebrities are on Twitter but aren’t on Google Reader? There’s a reason for that.

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