PC Mike -Tech News

Verizon Wireless and those ringback phones that play when you call someone with a ringback-activated Verizon mobile phone have released a Top Ten List of what p[eople have been downloading from Nov. 15 through Dec. 15. For whatever it’r wirth, here’s the list:
1 All I Want For Christmas Is You, Mariah Carey
2 Luxurious, Gwen Stefani
3 Big Poppa, The Notorious B.I.G.
4 Don’t Cha (Radio Edit), The Pussycat Dolls
5 (Leaked Tone) Unpredictable ft. Ludacris, Jamie Foxx
6 Baby Got Back, Sir Mix-A-Lot
7 Unbreakable (MTV Unplugged), Alicia Keys
8 Hung Up, Madonna
9 Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Frank Sinatra
10 GIT-R-DONE!, Larry The Cable Guy
I just don’t get ringbacks. When I call someone who has it activated, I feel like I’m in an elevator. I also feel they’re wasting my time playing music to me when they should be talking. Guess I’m out of the loop on this one.

AOL is still the biggest ISP on the broadband block. With 20.1 million subscribers, it’s well more than twice the size of the number two player, Comcast, with 8.1 million users. SBC is thuird with 6.5 million. Check out the entire list of the Top 24 U.S. ISPs by Subscriber.

By now everyone knows the value of those portable little flash drives, sometimes called thumb drives because they are thumb-sized and shaped. They can store files, pictures, songs, presentations, whatever. Thumb drives are great gifts, but just released is a new credit card-sized USB flash drive so thin that it fits in your wallet. A 128 MB card costs $29 from a company called Walletex. I’ve had mine about a weeka nd, since I always have my wallet, I always have it. I’m surprised by how much I’m using it to move files around between home and office and laptop.

As the folks at the North American Air Defense Command have been doing since 1958 (before the Internet, even), all systems are now go to detect the entry of Santa and his sleigh into U.S. air space Saturday night on his annual Christmas Eve journey. If you haven’t taken your kids to the Santa Tracker site, do so this year.  NORAD Tracks Santa 2005.
Meanwhile, for some other fun Christmas stuff you can do with your computer, check out my weekly NBC-TV High Tech Talk segment this week. It’s about sharing Christmas photos, downloading holiday screensavers and finding kid-friendly online Christmas fun.

Despite the lingering uncertainty over a patent dispute that, pushed to the extreme, could disrupt BlackBerry service for U.S. customers, two new BlackBerry models are drawing admiring looks from consumers.
I’ve written about the 8700 offered by Cingular before.
But Verizon Wireless is now selling the new BlackBerry 7130e, the first such unit to take advantage of the Verizon EV-DO network, also known as BroadbandAccess Connect. That means you get broadband-speed when accessing e-Mail and Web sites. Besides that, the new Blackberry can also be used as a tethered modem for laptop users.
I’ve been messing around with a unit for a couple weeks now and am impressed by the brightness and clarity of the screen. It also feels more like a phone than the wallet-shaped 8700.
But sending text is a challenge. Instead of dedicated letters on the typeboard, it bunches them up two and three to a button, like a standard phone. A proprietary typing method called SureType “guesses” at what you’re trying to say and it does so with amazing accuracy. But I find it hard to get used to after being spoiled by the regular BlackBerry typepad and the one on the Treo 650.

The nutso demand for Microsoft’s xBox 360 is showing no signs of letting up. Acting on rumors that Best Buy stores would receive new inventory Sunday, a line at my local Best Buy - in Auburn Hills, MI - started forming at 2 p.m. Saturday. Chris, one of the blue-shirted BB sales clerks who works in the media department, told me that by the time the store opened Sunday at 8 a.m., the line ran around the building. True enough, the store did receive new xBox 360s - 32 of them. They were all gone five minutes after opening. Whether more will be in by Christmas is iffy, he said.

The scamsters who try to trick you into revealing your eBay password have a new trick: They send you phony e-mails claiming that you sent them an offer to buy or sell something improper and threaten to report you to eBay unless you explain yourself by hitting a respond now button. It comes looking for all the world as a real eBay mailing, as you can see in the example I post here of one I received just this morning (click it to enlarge).
If you hit that respond button you’re taken to another spoofed site that looks like the eBay login page.
All it really does is capture your ID, which can be used by criminals. The key is the URL attached to the e-mail respond button. It goes elsewhere than eBay. In the case of the example above, it’s a dummy site somewhere in Romania, as revealed by the .ro suffix in the address line.
You can learn other ways to recognize these ever-changing scams from the Security Center at the REAL eBay site.

Think of them as e-mail time capsules. There’s now a bunch of Web Sites That Let Users Send E-Mail to Future. Some like FutureMe.org will go out in a couple of years, reminding recipients what their aspirations were today and how their life was going in 2005. Others like  myLastEmail.com or LastWishes.com promise to send messages to loved ones after you die. How the services will be able to send to the then-current e-mail addresses of the future isnt quite clear. But it’s a neat idea, I guess.

One of the reasona Firefox is such a popular Web browser is because it allows you to add all sorts of extra capabilities through mini programs called extensions. The folks at Techtree have put together a handy guide. Extending Firefox.

Wanna know how popular iPods have become? Look no further than LoadPod, a booming national business with hundreds of local reps around the country who will come to your house, pick up your CD collection, transfer it to your iPod and return it to you, installing everything on your computer while teaching you how to synchonize.
The cost is under $2 a CD, depending on how many you are transferring.
The nearly two-year-old company is the brainchild of Bill Palmer, a very entrepreneuirial Mac enthusiast from Florida.
His busiest day of the year? Next Monday, Dec. 26, when millions of people will likely be looking at their new iPods and contemplating how to get their CD collection onto that tiny little player.
Most, of course, will figure it out just fine. But with such a huge user base, the number of newbie iPod users who are technically challenged or too busy to do it themselves makes for a nice little business.
Great idea, Bill.
I wonder how many other iPod-related businessees and services there are out there.

New York’s St. Barts has released a recording of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer sung in Latin. Music at St. Bartholomew’s. Sing along, everyone. You can download the MP3 or play it live. Thanks to reader Phyllis Evans for passing this along.

Jessie Seyfer has a good Q&A on the BlackBerry/NTP suit. What patent dispute is about; what it means for BlackBerry users.