William Computer Blog

Microsoft has released Windows Vista Beta 1 today. The beta operating system is available for MSDN subscribers to download. Microsoft also released the official screenshot of Windows Vista.

PC Mag have a review of the operating system and also some screenshots.

They’ve been expecting this update since last week. There were many rumors about the new iBook and Mac mini from Apple. I thought Apple would release it last weekend because the Apple online store was closed for a few hours. But no new products came, instead the delivery time for iBook and mac mini orders were longer.

Today, they finally released it. A new iBook with a faster 1.42 GHz processor for the 14-inch. Just like the PowerBook, the iBook now came with trackpad that lets you scroll horizontally/vertically/pan around the screen without the need of additional iScroll2 driver.

The ibook also featured the Sudden Motion Sensor to protect your hard drive incase you drop it.

Unfortunately, the new iBook is missing a feature that was rumored last week. The new iBook does not have a widescreen display.

The mac mini have no speed improvement, it still featured the same 1.42 GHz but Apple released it with 512 MB of RAM as the standard and built-in wireless.

So, if you’ve been waiting to purchase a new iBook or mac mini, now is the time. I’m actually thinking to get the mac mini and install a Mac OS X server to use it at home.

I’m still waiting for the new PowerBook now, since my mac is getting kinda old.

There is a rumor going on the internet today that Microsoft latest operating system Windows with codenamed Longhorn is going to be rename to Vista. According to Flexbeta, Microsoft will announce the new name today. There is also a domain named windowsvista.us registered under Microsoft.

UPDATES: It’s official, Microsoft just made an official announcement today. They also published a new logo design for Windows Vista. Beta-1 is going to be available by August 3, 2005.

The windowsvista.us domain is also up. You can visit them now.

Go to Google Moon and zoom all the way. The moon has never seen so yummy before or maybe it’s spongebob squarepants on the moon?

Optimus keyboard, a keyboard with keys using OLED to display what function the keys. Really nice, visit optimus keyboard site »

I visited the Sony Central located in the new WorldSquare shopping center. The reason for the visit is because I’m looking for a new mobile phone.

The new Sony Ericsson k750i is available in that shop, although the price is a bit more expensive than buying it off from eBay. I really need a new mobile phone, because mine is getting very old. It’s a samsung mobile phone with no lcd color screen, and has no camera.

I need a new one because the samsung one is almost dead. Sometimes the keypad are no longer working, so in order to press a number you have to press many times. There are times when I can’t pickup calls because the answer key doesn’t work. Sometimes I can’t even make calls because I can’t unlock the phone keypad. The only way to turn off the mobile phone when the key lock are on is to take off the battery.

The battery for this mobile phone is almost dead. It used to be able to run for 2 days on standby, now the battery is finish after 2 hours after recharge. I’m not even interested to replace the battery on this ancient time mobile phone.

I think I’m going to get the k750i, unless there is a mobile phone that is more “interesting” out there. Beside, Apple updated iSync 2.1 a few days ago and k750i is supported.

I also took the time to look around in the notebook section. The VAIO notebook is definitely one of the best notebook PC out there. If I’m ever in need of a notebook PC, I will definitely get the Sony VAIO. At the moment, I still prefer to the PowerBook with Mac OS X.

There is a display of the Sony Playstation Portable, also known as the PSP. The product is coming out in Australia this September (2005).

There are many other things in the shop, I didn’t have the time to explore it though. I had to leave the store and meet someone, but it was nice looking at those gadgets.

Did you know that you can convert currency using Google. Simply type in the conversion you’d like into google search box (either from Firefox, Google Toolbar, or go to Google’s site).

The very basic example of the query is: 15 AUD in USD — The search result would look like this:

Let’s say you don’t know the name of the currency you can just query: currency of Brazil in Malaysian money. The result would be:

1 Brazil real = 1.62476535 Malaysian ringgits

(source google help)

The MPEG Audio Layer 3 codec or MP3 (What everyone call it) is ten years old today. On July 14, 1995 Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute chose to use the .mp3 extension for the popular digital audio compression. (source the register)

The speed of Mac OS X running on Intel hardware is impressing some developers who’ve been privy to one of Apple’s first Intel-based developer transition systems.

The systems started shipping to Mac OS X developers three weeks ago, each equipped with a 3.6 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with 2 MB L2 Cache, 800MHz front-side bus, 1GB of 533MHz DDR2 Dual Channel SDRAM, and an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900. (source)

Portable Firefox is useful if you work from one place to another and not each computers have Firefox installed. It is a fully functional package of Firefox and can be run from USB Key drive, Zip drives, External Hard drives, Mp3 players such as iPod shuffle, etc.

There is also Portable Thunderbird, Portable Sunbird, Portable NVU and Portable OpenOffice.

Unrelated to Mozilla Firefox, if you use a lot of portable software there is also TiddlyWiki.

TiddlyWiki, an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by Jeremy Ruston. It’s written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to any web server, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive.

Today, Mozilla also released an updated version of the Firefox web browser after Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.2 (Tiger). This release contained security update to the Mozilla Firefox browser and is recommended for all users. It also improved stability, so go upgrade your browser now!

Mac OS X 10.4.2 is available via software update. The most visible update I can see from 10.4.2 is the widget manager.

Widget manager is now available for dashboard. You can check/uncheck widgets to enable or disable them.

Of course there’s plenty of updates with this release. For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n301722.

Odeo is a podcasting service created by Noah Glass and Evan Williams. Odeo allows you to “Listen, Sync and Create” podcasts.

I registered an account with odeo and spend some time browsing through the podcasts directory, subscribing to a podcast and listen to it from the odeo website.

You can also download a software that lets you take the shows you listen to on Odeo and download them onto your computer. You can then sync it with your iPod or other mp3 players. The software is free and it is built off the iPodder Lemon open source project.

A screenshot of the Odeo Syncr software on Mac OS X.

Creating podcast is not available at the moment, but according to the page. Odeo will make it easy for everyone to create and publish. They plan to release Odeo Studio, Phone Posting, Feed creation and Hosting.

You can now sign up and try Odeo from the website of Odeo.

Google toolbar allows you to take the power of Google with you anywhere on the web! This toolbar is now available for firefox users on Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

If you’re thinking why you should install this because Firefox already have a built-in google search form then you should know that google toolbar have more functionality than just google searching.

Google Toolbar have a PageRank display feature which is used to show the pagerank measure for the page you visited.

A spellcheck feature is also available and it is used to check the spelling of text you type into web forms. You can now spell check the comments you write into weblogs, webmails, forums, etc.

Google toolbar also featured Word Translator, AutoFill, and Autolink feature.

The toolbar is currently released at beta stage. Feel free to check them out from http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/