Crenk » Steven Finch

PS3 Coffee Table Makes Gaming The Focalpoint Of Your Living Room

Steven Finch — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:15:15 +0000

I must admit that Im not much of a Playstation 3 person, more of a Wii person. However, this product is really making me want to buy a Playstation 3 and deck out my living room.

Stephane Perruchon is the designer of this glass topped table, with the base made up of two gigantic PS3 controllers. It’ll make your place look like the classiest dorm room ever! Which would be awesome if you actually still live in a dorm room, but otherwise, I’m not so sure.

Google Chrome 4 Beta Released on Windows

Steven Finch — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:06:18 +0000

It has been amazing that Google have been able to pump out 4 releases of a browser that has only been in the market for a little over a year. Compare that to Firefox, which took over six years to reach 3.6.

We’ve improved performance scores on Google Chrome by 30% since our current stable release, as measured by Mozilla’s Dromeao DOM Core Tests, and by 400% since our first stable release.” – Idan Avraham and Anton Muhin

Expectedly, Google Chome 4 is currently only available for the Windows platform. Reports have come in that it works just fine with the latest release of Windows, despite the fact that it only specifies XP/Vista as being currently supported.

Download Google Chrome 4 Beta

Microsoft Soft Launch New MSN.com Home Page

Steven Finch — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:49:54 +0000

It has been reported that MSN.com is rolling uot a new version over time. You can preview the new version at http://preview.msn.com.

I never knew that more than 1/3 of all Internet users worldwide visit MSN every month. 400 million people per month. Thats nearly as good as Yahoo’s 600 million and killing AOL’s 80 million. But still, it’s the most popular Internet portal that no one actually ever goes to.

In the new version everything is a lot cleaner and easier to read. They have integrated Facebook and Twitter nicely and more videos. Additionally, you will notice the simplicity of the Bing search bar which provide no clutter.

Microsoft have also reported that more than half of their monthly visitors use Facebook on a monthly basis, as well as 15% using Twitter. These are the key reasons why these services are added but not much else.

Recyclable Paper Laptop That Can Actually Be Thrown Away

Steven Finch — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:12:27 +0000

Laptops these days never seem to last that long. I tend to go through a new laptop every couple of years and when I get new laptop I always have the issue of doing something with the old one. Over the year this adds up to a lost of waste for me and im sure millions of people around the world have exactly same issue.

This big issue is something computer companies are always trying to rectify. Designer Je Sung Park has now taken the idea of a recyclable computer to new heights. His Recyclable Paper Laptop is made from pulp and reprocessed materials, and would be broken down into the same when all is said and done.

All My Apps: The Easy Way To Install Software on Your PC or Mac

Steven Finch — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:02:26 +0000

Allmyapps makes software installation a breeze. No matter how many applications you need, 1 click is all you need to have all your favorite applications installed on your PC. Allmyapps also keeps your applications safe! Would you need to reinstall your system, Allmyapps takes care of reinstalling all your favorite applications in the blink of an eye.

With Allmyapps, installing software applications has become so easy that you’ll soon find yourself installing a lot of great new applications! Be prepared to enjoy your computer like never before! Allmyapps provides some great application ideas that I have never even heard of, but I’m sure they can make me a lot more product, but on the other side there are a lot of time killers out there!

Wall of Sound! Is This The Best Speaker You Have Ever Seen

Steven Finch — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:25:58 +0000

Who said size doesnt matter. The Wall of Sound weighing in at a sumo-esque 120 kilos (that’s 265 pounds) the WoS has a tube amplifier and 28 elements, each with its own handcrafted box, meaning it can pump 125W of sound out of its 3 x 4 foot frame.

Price = $4,495

The Wall comes from Brothers, but to me it doesnt seem like the best quality website and I was wondering if this is actually a real product.

IDG Tech Network Leave Adify and Move To DoubleClick

The Great Office War: Its Like Skermish But With Nerf Guns

Steven Finch — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:20:52 +0000

This is one of the coolest videos I have seen in a while.

Crenk Twitter Lists: Crenk Team, Top Technology News Sources, Tech Talk and Bittorrent News

Steven Finch — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:58:35 +0000

Well all know about the new lists feature that Twitter has released. Here at Crenk we thought we would add a few Twitter lists of our own and categories them so everyone can keep up to date with what is happening in the following areas:

Crenk Team – http://twitter.com/crenk/team

Top Technology News Sources – http://twitter.com/crenk/toptechnews

Tech Talk (Top Analysis from Leading Minds in Technology) – http://twitter.com/crenk/techtalk

Bittorrent News – http://twitter.com/crenk/bittorrent

Doom Game App Now Available in iPhone App Store

Steven Finch — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:48:29 +0000

This new application for the iPhone brings back a lot of old memories. Doom has to be one of the most legendary shoot em up games ever made.

Doom is now available in Apples App store and includes the original three episodes as well as Episode Four, Thy Flesh Consumed, spread across 36 levels of non-stop carnage and action.

You can choose from customizable control schemes, all designed by id Software co-founder and industry legend, John Carmack.

In DOOM Classic, multiplayer action is reborn! With a wireless connection, battle up to four players in Deathmatch mode, or work together cooperatively and fight back against the demons of Hell.

It will set you back a measly $6.99 and you can download it from here.

Blitter: Free Twitter Icons by Icon Shock

Steven Finch — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:05:10 +0000

The team over at Iconshock and HongKiat have released a new Twitter icon set called Blitter.

Download Blitter (256×256, 512×512), PNG format

Download Blitter source Ilustrator .AI format

Download Blitter full set (Icons + source)

Best Laptops for Gaming

Steven Finch — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:27:32 +0000

Online gaming is gaining very high popularity across the globe nowadays. So if u want to compete with the beat gamers of the planet u need to have the best gaming laptop in ur hands. Laptops with high graphics quality, high speed with sufficiently high RAM is mostly preferable by most gamers. Points to remember when choosing laptops for gaming are given below.

Graphics & Graphics

More gamers give prime importance to graphics. So u should be equipped with the fast and the latest graphics available in the market. Some of the well rated graphics chipsets rated by majority of gamers across the world includes ATi mobility Raedon 9700, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX. Also ATi Mobility FireGL V3200 is a high quality graphic card giving u high performance at lower power levels, saving battery. Some of more available chipsets are STMicro, 3D Labs, Matrox and many more…

Huge RAM

The higher RAM u can have the better it is because it is the RAM which determines how much graphics ur notebook computer can handle. Specially prefer Video RAM because this RAM is exclusively dedicated for handling graphics and visuals on your laptop. For even better visual performance there is a special Video RAM known as Windows RAM(WRAM) available.

High Speed

Once again the higher the speed ,the better it is. So instead of going for 4200rpm Hard drives go for 7200rpm hard drive which is 33% farter. Select Serial ATA Harddrives because it uses less power and is ideal for laptop specially if it is exclusively used for gaming. Core 2 Extreme Quad QX9300; 8GB RAM; two 500GB drives; 17-inch display (1,920×1,200); dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M (2GB); 12.7 pounds

Some of the best Gaming Laptops in the market

Till now the fastest gaming laptop available is Alienware M17x having Intel 2.53GHz core 2 extreme quad QX9300 processor, 8GB of RAM, two exclusive 500GB harddisks, 17” display with NVIDIA GeForce GTX280M(2GB).

Some other best laptops are Alienware Area51M-15x ,Sony Vaio NW180J/S, iBuypower M865TU, Asus G51Vx-Rx05 having a minimum of 2GB Intel core 2 duo processor ,4GB of RAM which is very much high, minimum of 400GB hard drive with 15.5” display, minimum 512 MB above mentioned Graphics card installed which make them among top 5 gaming laptops preferred across the world.

This guest article was written by Amit Bhawani who writes different Laptops Guides at Laptops Next

Random Posts

BBC Hacks Into GMail eMail Account over WIFI

Steven Finch — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:20:59 +0000

This article was just written over at TheNextWeb. I didnt want to just rewrite the article for everyone so here is what they said. I was wondering if anyone has any answers, mainly because this is a Gmail account and could affect millions of people.

BBC Watchdog is British TV program that investigates viewers’ reports of problematic experiences with traders, retailers, and other companies around the UK. A recent investigation has discovered that wi-fi hot spots across the country are not secure – leaving tens of thousands of users at risk of fraud.

In this particular case they reveal how easy it is to hack into someones GMail account over Wifi, sending emails and changing their password. According to Danny Sullivan who shared the link on Twitter, if he’d signed via secure https, he’d probably have been safe – can anyone verify?

If you can’t see the video below, watch it here.

Google Page Rank Update, But Does Anyone Care?

Steven Finch — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:37:38 +0000

Here at Crenk we have noticed that our page rank has gone up to a PR 5, and a lot of other people have also been writing about the update. However, does anyone still actually care about Page Rank? or is it now all about building a brand and hitting the long tail keywords?

Random Posts

Roku Releases Two New Netflix and Amazon Video HD Streaming Media Players

Steven Finch — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:41:49 +0000

Roku is a new startup in the USA who has been making a lot of waves with their HD streaming media players. Roku lets Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand users stream HD videos on the cheap, with millions of titles.

Roku has now released two new models, the $130 Roku HD-XR that adds faster 802.11n Wi-Fi, and the cheap Roku SD, playing standard definition video at a rock-bottom price of $80.

That lower-end Roku SD is an excellent value, especially because most of Netflix’s and Amazon’s current offerings only stream in standard definition. You’ll also sacrifice an HDMI connector and optical audio in that Roku SD player, which might not make much difference, given that there’s no HD playback involved.

On the higher end, the Roku HD-XR offers another tantalizing feature in addition to its faster wireless-N Wi-Fi capability: there’s a USB port on the back, but currently it does nothing. Roku says as soon as the unit’s firmware is updated, that port will allow you to play video files from an external hard disk. This we gotta see. Let’s hope Roku includes support for lots of video types.

Movie Watch List: Watch and Download Free Movies Online with No Downloads

Jibbigo: New English to Spanish Speech Translation App for iPhone

Steven Finch — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:19:16 +0000

Jibbigo has just release their bilingual translation app for the iPhone and iPod touch with the capability of translating a user’s speech directly into another spoken phrase.

Users record one sentence of English or Spanish at a time, which the app then translates into a synthesized counterpart. A vocabulary of 40,000 words is included, generally skewed towards travelers and doctors.

Unusual in the software is the requirement of an iPhone 3GS for full functionality. Two-way translation is supported, but only on the 3GS. Older iPhones and the second-gen Touch are limited to unidirectional translation, and also said to operate more slowly. The app costs $25, and requires iPhone 3.0 firmware.

KickAssTorrents: Lightning Quick Torrent Search Engine

Steven Finch — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:33:53 +0000

There are so many torrent search engines in the market and as we all know most of them are considered illegal by all major media companies. I find it funny that these torrent search engines are normally just indexing where files are stores online in the same way as Google, and not even hosting the files on their own servers.

The newest torrent search engine on the market is KickassTorrents. KickassTorrents has a great user interface that is very easy to use and search through. Additionally, the site has an amazing index of music, files, documents, movies, games, tv shows, applications and more.

The community around KickassTorrents seems to also be on the rise as they have a growing number of leechers and seeders on the site. Plus, they have additions like a Firefox addon, Vuze addon and others.

If you are looking for a Torrent Search engine that is on the rise and is already in the top 5,000 alexa, then KickassTorrents is for you!

Top Sites for Free eBooks

Steven Finch — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:21:06 +0000

eBooks are becoming more and more popular these days and Crenk just wanted to let you know the best places on the web to find eBooks.

eBook Search Engines

www.pdfgeni.com
www.pdf-search-engine.com
www.data-sheet.net

Scribd.com

Scribd is basically the YouTube of documents. They have a great library of free ebooks to choose from.

Free Ebooks For Your iPod, PDA, Smartphone, Blackberry etc.

www.gutenberg.org
www.manybooks.net
www.feedbooks.com
www.booksinmyphone.com

Free Tech eBooks

www.freecomputerbooks.com
www.freetechbooks.com

Advertising on Crenk Has Never Been So Cheap!

Steven Finch — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:49:39 +0000

Here at Crenk we have recently partnered with Adphilia as our new advertising platform. All fixed price advertising will now go through the Adphilia platform as you can already see in our sidebar.

Current Opportunities:

300 x 100 ad = $100.00 per month – Purchase Here.

We will be offering a monthly round up article in which will include details about all our sponsors and what they offer.

Over the next few months we really hope to bring in more cheap fixed sponsorship opportunities on Crenk, with the aim of really helping startups grab cheap exposure that can really help drive returns.

I also wasnt too sure whether to offer 300×100 ads or 125×125. What do most readers and advertisers prefer?

Top 4 Converter Programs from PDF to JPG for Mac

Steven Finch — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:45:43 +0000

A lot of people have big issues converting files from PDF format to any other format. Today, I wanted to run through converter programs which change PDF files to JPG (image) files for both Mac and PC.

Zamzar

Zamzar is probably the most well known file conversion site. The process is simplicity personified: Choose the file to convert then choose the format to convert to (e.g. JPG) then enter your email address to receive the converted file then convert. The minuses with the free service are that the file size is limited to 100MB with just 5 simultaneous conversions. Also, you might feel a wee bit uneasy uploading sensitive data without encryption support.

YouConvertIt

YouConvertIt is a new site that lets you upload 5 files at a time and then convert them from PDF to JPG format.

Neevia Document Converter

Neevia Technology has a web interface which facilitates the conversion of PDF documents to image files. Select the conversion settings and upload your file. The converted file can be rendered in the browser or can be downloaded via an email link. Two dropdowns further give you control over image quality and resolution. The only visible restriction is the 1MB file upload size limit.

If you are wary of uploading sensitive files over the net, you need to look beyond the online solutions to something much more local. Thankfully these three pieces of free software take up the task.

PDF-Xchange Viewer

PDF-Xchange Viewer is a light feature-rich PDF document reader. The free version of the software is a capable document handler with most of the standard features expected. Add comments and annotations, mark-up pages with texts and objects, type within the PDF document along with plug-ins for both IE and Firefox are also included.

But the feature which interests us is the ability of the software to export a file or a page to the supported image formats like JPEG, BMP, TIFF, PNG and more.

Open the PDF file in the viewer, click on File – Export to Image and the dialog opens up where you can set the pages to convert, the image type to convert to and the destination folder. More importantly, the ‘Export Mode’ setting allows you to designate the number of image files for the subject PDF file. The ‘Page Zoom’, ‘Resolution’ and ‘Page Background’ also allow added finishing touches.

W3 Total Cache Wordpress Plugin That Provides a Transparent Content Delivery Network

Steven Finch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:21:31 +0000

W3 Total Cache is a new wordpress plugin that improves the user experience on your blog by improving your server performance. W3 caches every aspect of your site and helps your server to reduce download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

W3 Total Cache plugin remedies numerous performance reducing aspects of any web site going far beyond merely reducing CPU usage (load) and bandwidth consumption for HTML pages alone. Equally important, the plugin requires no theme modifications, modifications to your .htaccess (mod_rewrite rules) or programming compromises to reap the benefits. Setup is easy.

Free Old Bottle Crowns Icons Set

Steven Finch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:39:01 +0000

Six Revisions presents to you a free icon set consisting of 20 social media icons such as Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious, and Twitter called Old Bottle Crowns Icon Set created by Dawghouse Design Studio for you Six Revisions readers.

The theme is worn-and-torn, so it’ll look great on grunge, vintage, classic-themed web designs. This set contains 20 200px x 200px PNG files that you can easily resize and edit for your website design.

Download

Grab the Old Bottle Crowns Icon Set as a ZIP archive below.

old-bottle-crowns-icon-set.zip (ZIP, 2.3MB)

Licensing

The above works featured here are licensed under the Creative Commons license and can be used for personal and/or commercial purposes.

The Creative Commons license requires you to “attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor”. Our attribution specification: you don’t need to attribute the work to us (though you’re more then welcome to, and we will definitely appreciate it).

New Mac Ads That Hate on Windows 7

Steven Finch — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:49:00 +0000

Apple has released 3 new ads that take aim at Windows 7. What do you think of the ads?

New York Times Report That Online Advertising Brings in Nearly a Quarter Of Their Revenues

Steven Finch — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:37:47 +0000

Over at Techcrunch they reported yesterday that the New York Times are now receiving nearly a quarter of their total revenues from online advertising.

The New York Times announced third quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues were down 17 percent to $571 million. Of that advertising revenues decreased 27 percent to $291 million, and the online advertising portion was down 8.2 percent to $68 million.

Last quarter, advertising revenues declined an even steeper 32 percent, and online advertising was down 15.5 percent. So maybe this is the first step on its way back to positive territory. Here are the year-over-year declines in online advertising revenues for each of the past four quarters.

Annual Decline In Internet Advertising Revenues

4Q08: -3.5%
1Q09: -6.1%
2Q09: -15.5%
3Q09: -8.2%

Another interesting data point is that because its print advertising revenues are shrinking at a faster rate than its Internet advertising revenues, the Internet portion is actually a bigger percentage (23.5%) of the New York Times’ total advertising revenues than it was year ago (when it was 18.6%).

I have been a firm believer that print business will slowly leave only the major players in each market and all the smaller business will have to move online or close. However, with these latest figures I now think even the major players could be in big trouble!

Has Rivals Techcrunch and Silicon Alley Insider Partnered??

Steven Finch — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:03:55 +0000

I noticed this morning that in the Silicon Alley Insider RSS feed that they were not just promoting Techcrunch content, but linking directly to their articles!

Have these two key rival in the technology news space partnered to try to catch up to Mashable in terms of traffic numbers?

Ever Wondered Who The Best Looking Girls In Tech Are? Well Manolith Is Here To Tell You!

Steven Finch — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:56:22 +0000

I know how at all those technology conferences it seems as though it is just a sausage fest. Well Manolith have put together a list of the hottest girls in tech. Now I just wish they went to the same technology conferences as me!