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The Zune portable media player is shipping very soon and what better way to celebrate with Microsoft releasing a brand spanking new desktop theme for Windows XP!

The new Zune theme is a really nice looking theme. Make sure you go ahead and download it as it won’t be available for long.

Here’s a quick screenshot of the Zune Desktop theme in action:

The Zune Desktop Theme (for Windows XP) is available for download here.

Blogmusik is a free online music player or virtual ‘iPod’ as they like to call it. I have seen tons of websites out there offering free online streaming of music but none can compare to the elegance, simplicity and ease-of-use that Blogmusik provides. Best of all, you don’t have to become a registered member to use the service.

Essentially what Blogmusik allows you to do is listen to a huge collection of music FREE streamed online to your web browser. Its as simple as searching for an artist you would like to listen to, and choosing a song to play from the wide selection they have avaliable.

I tested out this service and ran a search on ‘Radiohead’ and their song collection for this artist was very expansive.

As I mentioned, there are heaps of similar websites out there which promote social networking and sharing of different musical tastes, playlists, ideas and opinions of millions of music lovers all over the internet such as Last.fm and Pandora which I have both used.

So, next time you’re at school or at the office and don’t have your iPod with you, be sure to check out Blogmusik. I’m sure they’ll have the music you’re in dire need to listen to! I highly recommend this service to anyone.

Just last week the release of Firefox 2.0 RC3 (Release Candidate 3) gave us a number of new features to play with including new tab functionality and anti-phishing measures just to name a few.

Now, this coming week (Tuesday 24th October) the final build of Firefox 2.0 will be released to the public and available for download off of Mozilla servers for the Windows, MacOSX and Linux platforms.

Some of the new features to grace this latest incarnation of Firefox include:

• Visual Refresh: Firefox 2’s theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience. For instance, toolbar buttons now glow when you hover over them. We will continue to improve the look and feel throughout the release candidate process.
• Built-in phishing protection: Phishing Protection warns users when they encounter suspected Web forgeries, and offers to return the user to their home page. Phishing Protection is turned on by default, and works by checking sites against either a local or online list of known phishing sites. This list is automatically downloaded and regularly updated when the Phishing Protection feature is enabled.
• Enhanced search capabilities: Search term suggestions will now appear as users type in the integrated search box when using the Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com search engines. A new search engine manager makes it easier to add, remove and re-order search engines, and users will be alerted when Firefox encounters a website that offers new search engines that the user may wish to install.
• Improved tabbed browsing: By default, Firefox will open links in new tabs instead of new windows, and each tab will now have a close tab button. Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs. The History menu will keep a list of recently closed tabs, and a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab.
• Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash.

Source: Mozilla Firefox 2 Release Notes - What’s New

I’ve been running Firefox 2.0 RC3 since it came out and am quite impressed with the build. I am looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of the final stable build of the web browser I’ve grown to love - Firefox 2.0.

Over 71% of all mail sent/receieved worldwide is spam. There are literally millions of email messages sent daily across the planet meaning that this figure is quite alarming, and obvious that email spam has become more and more of a problem since the beginning of the internet bubble (Web 1.0) in the early to mid 1990’s.

Everybody recieves messages talking about miracle growth pills and busty babes and at first it was merely just a nuisance, as of now it has almost reached epidemic proportions. While spammers used to rely soley on the volume of their attacks, these days they have a whole lot more to deal with such as mail filters, spam blockers, etc.

ISP’s are making a stand and trying to block as much of this ‘crap’ as they can, but its hard work and we all need to chip in to reduce the amount of spam we each recieve on a daily basis.

Some of the biggest spam culprits are:

1. Image Spam: A way of sending a spam message in a non-text form. Harder for spam filters to detect.
2. Phishing: A form of internet fraud which attempts to steal your personal details such as bank account numbers, PIN numbers, passwords, credit card information, etc.
3. Trojan style spam: Spam which automatically downloads and installs nuisance software onto your computer.
4. Spyware: Software that sends information about your web surfing habbits and preferences to its website.

So, what can we do? How can we stop getting this stuff? between you and me, there is plenty we can do:

1. Manage your Email inbox cautiously: If you’ve identified some spam, adding it to your ‘blocked sender’s list’ is always a good idea. As long as your email client is doing its job, it ensures you won’t recieve any more mail from that source.
2. Never open anything remotely suspicious: Watch out for email attachments that don’t exactly look ‘normal’ or with weird names such as “file001.zip” or “x003b.dat” or anything of that nature.
3. Always delete potentially harmful mail: This mainly includes email recieved such as Phishing and trojan style mail. This ensures that you don’t come back to the same message thinking it was legitimate.
4. Never give your email address to just anyone: Stay “off the grid” as possible. The less your email address is used in signing up for newsletters, mailing lists, joining forums, etc the less likely that address will be spammed.
5. Use spam filtering software on your inbox: Use spam-filters on your email inbox. There are a number of different filters out there these days for Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird. Just a few include spamMatters, SpamAssasin, Spam Bully or check out a great in-depth look at some of the best filters around here.

There’s always something you can do to combat spam. Its annoying I know, and wouldn’t you love to get rid of it!

With the impending release of the highly anticipated Firefox v2.0 web browser, Mozilla have gone all out on party planning. Its going to be huge, and in only 15 days time!

Mozilla (the company behind the popular firefox browser) are planning to throw as many parties as possible right across the globe and the site Firefox Party is keeping track of all the progress.

“All over the world, we’re celebrating the launch of Firefox 2. Join the fun by hosting or attending a party. We’re targeting the weekend of October 27th for the shared celebration, but if you’re hosting, you make the call.” - firefoxparty.com

As you can see, there are ALOT of parties happening all over the world, mainly in North America, but most continents across the world are hosting at least 1 party which will be great. I live in Melbourne Australia so I guess I could fly up to Sydney to check out the Firefox party up there, we’ll just have to see what happens. It would be really cool to go though, take lots of photos and share them with you guys here on my blog. That would be cool!

Just a quick post, but I thought I’d let others out there know that operate a blog at wordpress.com, that you can now embed your favourite podcast via Odeo into a written post on your blog. The kind folks here at WordPress.com have given us bloggers a brand new feature which creates a small little Odeo Podcast player on a post we’ve written.

To use this new feature, all you have to do is:

1. Find your favourite podcasts ‘audio player page’ and grab the URL from the address bar. It should look like: http://odeo.com/audio/1968091/view

2. Write out this URL in your blog post like this:

3. Thats it! An audio player will appear in your blog, simple as that.

This is really cool. I figured i’d get in on the action and post one of my favourite podcasts, diggnation.

The related update post ‘Odeo Support‘ that Matt here at WordPress wrote can be checked out here. Thanks again to the busy guys at WordPress for making life for us bloggers that much easier.

Are you a serious simpson’s fan who just can’t get enough? Can’t be bothered waiting for every season to come out on DVD? Well folks, I think I may have your answer…try streaming EVERY episode to your computer FOR FREE!

There is a website I just stumbled across called AllSimps - All the Simpson’s you need and they have every episode of every season freely avaliable for direct streaming across the Internet. They make it possible to do this becuase they are in no way distributing the content illegally by providing download links, just merely allowing them to be viewed online whilst retaining ownership.

Finding the episode you wanna watch is really simple. Just choose the season (1-1 you wann watch, and pick your episode and watch it stream directly to your computer. I always find myself around friends residing simpson’s quotes which (us anyway) just think are absolutely hilarious. If you are just like me, I always like to remember which episode some of these killer quotes came from so I can go back and look around for others, or just to hear them once more.

So, if you are a huge simpsons fan, or casual watcher you cannot go past this new site (link above), becuase it truely is All the Simpson’s you’ll ever need!

How many of you guys use applications such as Limewire, BearShare, etc to download music share legitimate files between anyone who wants it your friends and family online? Well, there is apparently an easier way to find stuff you like, all from the comfort of our favourite search engine Google.

In the search box, simply type:

“band” last modified mp3 “index of” -html -htm -php -asp

Where you replace the “band” with the band or artist you are looking for. Now ladies and gentlemen, I in no way promote or endorse illegal downloading of music or anything for that matter, just thought this was really interesting and can be used for other purposes also.

Instead of looking for files of type mp3, you could do a search for .avi files, or .mid’s or .zip files too. Here are some sample search strings looking for different file types:

“searchTerm” last modified avi “index of” -html -htm -php -asp

“searchTerm” last modified mid “index of” -html -htm -php -asp

“searchTerm” last modified zip “index of” -html -htm -php -asp

Simple as that, cool huh.

Today, you and I use email on a daily basis. It’s quick, easy, fast and most often reliable, but has the art of effective emailing been lost? Is it just another mundane chore we do online along with our instant messaging and RSS feeds?

I asked myself these questions as I’ve been using email much more frequently in recent times, whether it be communicating with my university lecturers or keeping in touch with old friends living abroad.

E-mail is a great way to quickly get a message off to whoever you need to write to, and is alot faster than tradition paper-based mail, but is it just as personal than a hand written letter? I guess it could be if you really tried. A written message of love sent to a girlfriend for example is still a written message of love is it not? Regardless of the medium in which something is written, every writer has the ability to add that ‘personal touch’ to their document/letter/communicae, correspondence, etc in whichever situation may deem appropriate.

These days, email can be send with all kinds of things that we ‘used’ to use when writing hand written documents or letters such as the use of stationary, signatures (electronic signatures), attachments, pictures and graphics and even things that we never really could attach to our writing before such as audio and video.

Many people i’ve heard saying that email is great, but it doesn’t have that personal touch you get with writing good old traditional letters, and I’ll agree with these people up to a certain point. I know that if you are trying to be romantic, a beautifully hand written letter will kill an email hands down, but for more business oriented or ‘quick message’ situations, email is great and should be used as much as possible.

When was the last time any of you out there hand wrote a letter to somebody? A friend, family member, significant other…the list could go on i know. I can’t remember the last time i actually sat down and wrote a letter to somebody for anything really, email is definately the way to go I think. Its just sitting there waiting for you to send something off. You don’t have to leave your house to post the letter, its just a matter of sitting at your computer, write whatever the hell you want to say and send it.

Here’s an open question for anybody to respond to: Which do you prefer, hand written letters or e-mail? It would be interesting to see i think.

“Lets face it, not everyone is a tech junkie at this stage in their life (I know that I am not) but the further one gets in their college career, the closer we get to the corporate realm, and it is important to note one of the most interesting tech issue revolutionizing our world, open source programming.”

I have been a big advocate of open source software for a long time and have recommended it to many people as a free alternative to many commercial software which typically costs many hundreds of dollars. Not only is it getting something for a whole lot cheaper, but it is introducing amazing new products into a bloated marketplace in much need of rejuvination which open source software can provide.

Check out the artcle via the ‘read more’ link below, a very interesting read.

read more | digg story