Occasionally listening to music files or watching videos with lightweight media apps the likes of Gzine, Alsaplayer or Gnome Player is fine if you are not ultra demanding of your listening environment. If you do not fall into that category, Banshee is a much better multimedia option. The Banshee Media Player’s listening and viewing pleasures are in many ways similar to those that Amarok and [...]

A federal grand jury has subpoenaed Pandora to produce documents in what could be an industry-wide investigation of smartphone apps. In an SEC filing, Pandora said the subpoena was served early 2011, and it was told it wasn’t a specific target of the probe. However, it believes similar subpoenas have been issued to publishers of other smartphone apps. The mere convening of a grand jury does [...]

If you haven’t upgraded your current computer setup to Windows 7 yet, hold your horses — the landscape is about to change with Windows 8 now becoming the center of attention. Shortly after Microsoft released a pre-beta build of the operating system to select partners, screenshots have begun surfacing on Microsoft enthusiast sites. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, but what may are [...]

The downer in buying a new gadget is in ditching the old gizmo. The mental gymnastics set in almost immediately. Sell it? Donate it? Trash it? To make matters worse, the ditching dilemma appears to get harder to solve with every passing year. eBay, the old standby for profitable disposal of just about anything, is not a reliable option anymore. “The buyers simply aren’t there anymore,” [...]

It appears that Sony is definitely planning to join the tablet wars: Its CEO Howard Stringer told the Nikkei newspaper that the company was planning to deliver a Honeycomb-based tablet no later than the end of the year, and possibly, according to some versions of his comments, as soon as this summer. If accurate, a Sony tablet — especially one geared to the gaming market as this development [...]

Whenever I see super-clean hands touch-typing away on horizontally placed iPads in slick TV ads, I can’t imagine that I’ll ever get good at that myself. No, when it comes to a virtual keyboard, I fear I’ll be forever the hunt-and-peck kind of guy. When I saw Aesthology’s Touchwriter HD, $2.99 in the Apple App Store, I saw a possible solution: I could use an app to touch [...]

IT security giant RSA is still trying to figure out exactly what was stolen from its systems, more than two weeks after announcing that they had been breached. The company detailed how the attackers broke into its systems, in a blog post by Uri Rivner, its head of new technologies, consumer identity protection. However, it still apparently doesn’t know just what was taken, apart from credentials [...]

Plastics make our lives convenient, but they’re the gift that keeps on taking — they pollute the environment, and they’re often difficult to get rid of in an ecologically sound way. Plastics don’t break down readily, which is why they’re such a nuisance. Worse yet, some of them contain chemicals that give off noxious fumes in a fire. Agilyx, a company based in Oregon, [...]

Two books came out last week: Idea Man, about (and by) Paul Allen; and The Steve Jobs Way, about (but not by) Steve Jobs. These books reveal differences in the approaches the two men took to achieving their goals, showcasing why Apple is so successful and why other companies just can’t make the grade. I think by looking at these two men, we can gain insights on a lot of things: why Apple [...]

April hadn’t even yet arrived in the U.S. when a shocking announcement began circulating through the Linux blogosphere. “We are pleased to announce the birth of the Canterbury distribution,” began the announcement from the Debian site. “Canterbury is a merge of the efforts of the community distributions formerly known as Debian, Gentoo, Grml, openSUSE and Arch Linux to produce [...]