Rapidshare & Download limits are BACK!

By: Raymond

I guess our routers and modem have rested long enough from auto reconnect and now we have to start doing that again. If you didn’t notice, RapidShare has RE-introduced download limits for free users again. This means that there is a wait time before we can continue downloading then next file from RapidShare when we’ve just finished downloading one.

From what I tested, when I wanted to download a 200MB file from RapidShare, I had to wait for 99 seconds before I can start downloading and when I’ve completed downloading, I had to wait for 15 minutes before I can download the next file. I got the message “You have reached the download limit for free-users. Would you like more? Get your own premium account now! Instant download access! Or try again in about 15 minutes.”

I then tried downloading a 10MB file, had to wait 30 seconds first then after finished downloading, same thing, I am required to wait for 15 minutes before I can download the next file. 15 minutes wait time is not really long compared to previous restriction but it can be annoying when we’re left with only a few files to complete downloading the whole package. To beat the 15 minutes restriction, here are some third party auto reconnect RapidShare download managers which I’ve previously recommend that you can use.

Read more on how to BEAT this limit!

EA retools ‘Spore’ DRM activation features

Faced with growing criticism about the way its newly released game Spore is activated on computers, gaming publishing giant Electronic Arts did a little retooling of its own.

EA has increased the number of computers that can be loaded with the game to five from three, despite earlier precautions with its digital rights management (DRM) policy intended to reduce piracy of its copyrighted software.

Spore, released two weeks ago featuring unlikely creatures that can be tailored to the user’s liking, has altered other DRM limitations embedded in the software, the company announced.

Frank Gibeau, EA Games Label president, said in a statement:

We’ve received complaints from a lot of customers who we recognize and respect. And while it’s easy to discount the noise from those who only want to post or transfer thousands of copies of the game on the Internet, I believe we need to adapt our policy to accommodate our legitimate consumers.

EA announced it will not only increase the number of computers that users can load one copy of Spore onto, but will also offer ways in which users can receive additional activations of the gaming software if warranted.

The game publisher also plans to fast-track its development efforts on creating a system that will allow consumers to de-authorize machines and transfer authorizations to new computers.

Nonetheless, Gibeau added:

We’re willing to evolve our policy to accommodate our consumers. But we’re hoping that everyone understands that DRM policy is essential to the economic structure we use to fund our games and as well as to the rights of people who create them.

EA said it believed at the time it created Spore that its DRM policy would not present any problems. The company noted that 75 percent of its customers tended to use only one computer for running their games and that less than 1 percent of its users relied on three or more computers. It also added that it told consumers that they could receive more than three activations if warranted by calling into the company’s customer service.

Despite the criticisms over its DRM policy for the game, reviews of the game itself were labeled fairly high.

Source: Cnet

Adding Three column footer to blogger template

Unfortunately Amanda’s (Blogger Buster) Tip on adding a three column footer to blogger is currently facing technical database difficulties so i decided to bring up the the hack since i used it before, so here is how to Add Three Column Footer To Blogger:
1- Backup your template first:
Before making any modifications to your blog template, it is essential that you make a back up of your existing template. Then if you make any problems occur, or decide you don’t like the new look, you can just easily revert back to this design .

Now to back up your template, go to Template>>>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard, and click on the “Download Full Template” link near the top of the page. You can then save your existing XML template file to your computer.
2- Second of all you need to clear your footer from any widgets that you’ve added, as this hack will completely remove them “unless you don’t need them!”

3- Third step is to find the following code in your footer section.

<div id=’footer-wrapper’>
<b:section class=’footer’ id=’footer’/>

</div>

And replace the following code

<b:section class=’footer’ id=’footer’/>

With

<div id=’footer-column-container’>

<div id=’footer2′ style=’width: 30%; float: left; margin:0; text-align: left;’>

<b:section class=’footer-column’ id=’col1′ preferred=’yes’ style=’float:left;’/>

</div>

<div id=’footer3′ style=’width: 40%; float: left; margin:0; text-align: left;’>

<b:section class=’footer-column’ id=’col2′ preferred=’yes’ style=’float:left;’/>

</div>

<div id=’footer4′ style=’width: 30%; float: right; margin:0; text-align: left;’>

<b:section class=’footer-column’ id=’col3′ preferred=’yes’ style=’float:right;’/>

</div>

<div style=’clear:both;’/>

<p>

<hr align=’center’ color=’#5d5d54′ width=’90%’/></p>

<div id=’footer-bottom’ style=’text-align: center; padding: 10px; text-transform: lowercase;’>

<b:section class=’footer’ id=’col-bottom’ preferred=’yes’>

<b:widget id=’Text2′ locked=’false’ title=” type=’Text’/>

</b:section>

</div>

<div style=’clear:both;’/>

</div>

4- The last thing will be adding style for the new footer section. Add this code right above this code

]]></b:skin>

#footer-column-container {

clear:both;

}

.footer-column {

padding: 10px;

}

Congrats, you’ve just added a Three column footer to your blog. Now all you have to do is go back to “Page Elements” and you’ll notice Three column footers at the bottom of the page

And Amanda, We hope things are fine over there!

Add Icon Before Post Titles | BLOGGER ACCESSORIES

Add Icon Before Post Titles | BLOGGER ACCESSORIES

Today I am going to tell how to add Icons to post titles (Thanx to Blogger Accessories). You would have noticed in some wordpress blogs like Dezzain and other famous blogs using Icons before the Post titles. Never Wonder how to do or Whether only WordPress has this feature. It’s really an easy hack and I will help you to implement this.

Let us start :

Step 1 :

First you need to create an image / Icon which you would like to show before each post title. You can create the image either in Photoshop or in Online Image creators. After creating the image upload it to blogger or any other image hosting sites like imageasck.us , photobucket , etc . Now copy and paste the image url in a text file.

Step 2 :

You need to create simple HTML code for your image like below ,

<img src="your Image Url"/>

change the text in red with your image url. Now we have successfully created the code for our image.

Step 3 :

Now let us see how to implement the image code in blogger Template. Login to your Blogger Account , then go to Layout subtab and then to EDIT HTML tab. Before we start first take a backup of your template . Put a check in expand widgets box and search for the code in red .

<b:if cond=’data:post.url’>

<a expr:href=’data:post.url’><data:post.title/></a>

If you want to show the image before post title , you need to add the image code after the red line.

If you want the image to appear after post title then paste the image code after the green text.

After doing this preview your template , Then save it.

I hope you would have liked this hack. If you have any problems in implementing this hack ask in comment form I will help you.

Did ‘Spore’ copy protections backfire on EA?

After years of anticipation, the coming out party for Electronic Arts’ new evolution game Spore seems to be getting rained out.

Spore was one of the most highly-anticipated games in recent years, in part because it’s the brainchild of Will Wright who, with The Sims, turned simple tasks like taking virtual trips to the bathroom into the best-selling PC game ever. Fans and EA alike had high hopes for Spore, a similarly quirky game that’s based on evolutionary biology and individuals’ own creature creations.

By most accounts, Spore is a great game. But in the first week since its debut, many of the people perhaps most excited for its release have turned against it.

Enraged by what they call “draconian” copyright protections, thousands of people flooded Amazon.com to give the game a one-star rating. And now there seems to be another movement afoot, one that is far more likely to hit EA where it counts.

What’s the fuss about? Electronic Arts imposed copyright protections that limited the number of times a user can install the game to three. EA has likened the system to the limits imposed on songs bought through Apple’s iTunes store (though in the case of iTunes, users can easily manage their libraries by specifying which computers are authorized to play their purchased content).

Such digital rights management technology is intended to keep piracy to a minimum. But in this case, it seems to have had the opposite effect, angering would-be buyers and DRM opponents to such a degree that they are illegally downloading it en masse, apparently to make a statement as much as to get their hands on the game.

On Saturday, TorrentFreak wrote that the game had already been downloaded more than 500,000 times on BitTorrent sites.

Though it didn’t appear to have broken any overall download records at the time this story was published, peer-to-peer research company Big Champagne told Forbes on Friday that the rate at which it was being downloaded was “extraordinary.”

So will EA consider the DRM move a mistake? PR representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but that will likely depend on how well it sells. In its first week, it seemed to do pretty well–at least anecdotally, with stores around the country reporting they’d sold out of their stock.

Source: Cnet

How much my blog worth….Trick

According to what Technorati said:

We here at Technorati think that all your blogs are priceles But when Weblogs Inc. was bought by AOL a few weeks ago, Tristan Louis did the math He figured out how much each blog in the Weblogs Inc. stable was worth, based on their Technorati rank.Inspired, Dane Carlson whipped up a handy little calculator with the Technorati API. Just enter your blog URL to see how much it’s “worth” using the Weblogs/AOL math.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Today am going to show you how to trick your visitors or your friends with this little calculator:

First thing is visiting this site, and entering your website address “URL”.

Once done, you’ll see an HTML code provided.

Now all you’ve got to do is have a look at that code:

Now…you know what you’ve got to do!

Thats right, time to pump-up the ZERO to (Any number you want)

After that, just copy the entire edited HTML and just add it to your website.

You can see the code in action on my site.

And thats how we do it

P.S. This trick won’t work if you check your website again through the checking tool. It only works on the HTML code you’ve edited, ya i know my blog is worth nothing. But i hope it grows bigger

How to manipulate your Feedburner subscribers in two minutes

Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo Established blogs like ReadWriteWeb and Techcrunch proudly show a Feedburner chicklet that displays the sites popularity. But beware – since people are more likely to subscribe to a site with a bigger amount of readers, some sites manipulate the counter.

Every once and a while co-editor Patrick and I stumble on a shady looking website with a ton of readers. That made us wonder whether Feedburner is hackable. I’ve sacrificed my personal blog for a hacking experiment and the result; faking your subscriber count IS possible!

We found an easy way to hack Feedburner (Not the obvious hack that simply steals a chicklet from a popular site). Looking at the subscriber count at some sites, we’re not the first ones who found out, but we are the first ones to write it down. All it takes is an OPML file, a Netvibes Universe, and a good night’s sleep.

EDIT: While the hack still works, I am happy to tell you that Google and Netvibes are working on a solution to the problem. Steve Olechowski, co-founder Feedburner mailed me and said: “These things happen occasionally and are usually fixed in a couple of days”, he added that the feedburner counts do not influence advertisement measurement. Franck Mahon from Netvibes said: “We are working on a fix to filter out in the reporting the duplicates while still allowing people to add several instances of the widget to their startpage.” When things get fixed, it would be interesting to see the differences on some sites”

Source HERE

How to Power a TV using a AAA battery

Check out this website! http://householdhacker.com
We have put together a short instructional video which details how to power a TV (or any device) using a small but effective AAA battery.

You will need:

1. Duct tape
2. RCA cable
3. AAA battery

Check out this website! http://householdhacker.com

Disclaimer:
As with this experiment and all other HouseHold Hacker videos. We cannot be held responsible for damage or mistakes made if attempting the experiments. These projects are for demonstration purposes only and should not be attempted at home..

Top 10 Stupid iPhone Tricks

By just about any measure, the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone App Store has been an astounding success. It reportedly did US$30 million in business in its first 30 days, during which time users downloaded 60 million applications. For a store that didn’t exist before the launch of the 3G iPhone in July, that’s pretty damn impressive.

Still, by lighting up the world with so many cool third-party iPhone applications, Apple has also opened the door to deeper, dumber issues — like the $999 “I Am Rich” application that eight people managed to buy before Apple had the sense to yank it from the store altogether. There’s a walkthrough online, but basically it just offers the “rich” (or formerly rich) owner a glowing graphic of a ruby and a super-stupid “I deserv it (sic)” mantra.

While the “I Am Rich” app is clearly quite useless, how might other apps make the grade? The criteria are totally subjective, of course, but basically it comes down to this: If the apps don’t fulfill a real need, if their implementation is pathetic, or if they are just plain dumb and stupid, they make the list. The app is just taking up space and wasting our collective lives as we try to dig through the crap to find the true gems in the App Store.

A few people, of course, may find some of these apps indispensable, in which case Apple should create a new category or at least filter them for the rest of us. Either way, in the spirit of painfully dumb iPhone apps, here are the 10 stupidest iPhone tricks currently available in the iTunes App Store.

The Beauty of Inanimate Objects

10. Tip Calculators:

There are over a dozen applications, most selling for $0.99, that help you calculate the amount you should tip for a meal or drinks, and they all make me embarrassed to own an iPhone. In fact, maybe this is why AT&T was able to slap an extra $10 per month on the service plan for the iPhone 3G … no one could figure out that meant an extra $120 a year out of their bank accounts. Seriously, there are iPhone owners who not only need help with the math — 15 or 20 percent of a total — they need help calculating what they should tip if the service is just mediocre.

If I had a buddy who pulled out a tip calculator, I’d slap him on the spot. And then I’d ask, “Quick, what’s 20 percent of $10?” If he couldn’t answer “$2″ within a few seconds, I’d give him the answer and slap him again. Eventually, he’d figure out that a 20 percent tip for a $30 check is $6. And for the record, I sincerely believe this sort of app must make Apple CEO Steve Jobs very, very sad.

9. SimStapler:

This free application features the image of an old-school Mac OS 9 desktop with a stapler in a window on the desktop and a human finger that pushes the stapler down when you tap the stapler. And it makes a stapler noise. That’s it. There’s no prank associated with the app like in the TV show “The Office” where Jim puts Dwight’s stapler in Jell-O. But it’s a free app, right? Sorry. No excuse. People have finite lives, and this app is wasting those lives.

8. iBeer:

OK, this $2.99 app has some serious fanboys — teenagers, I’m guessing. Certainly not real beer drinkers. Basically, it uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to simulate a glass of beer on the iPhone’s screen. Tip it up to drink it and the beer will “drain” out of the iPhone. I don’t know about you, but if I pulled this out in front of my beer drinking buddies, I’m pretty sure they would lock me in a closet and make me “drink” alone until the battery went dark. The seller also makes iMilk, which goes for a similar sight gag. Is this the best iPhone owners can do to get a little attention?

The Tough Task of Random Number Selection

7. Crazy Fire Apps:

There’s a handful of $0.99 (or free) apps that simulate the real flame of a cigarette lighter. Some of them even respond to motion. It’s a sight gag, sure, but also there’s the idea that you could whip this out at the next rock concert you’re at and wave it in the air. You would be so cool.

6. Mating Call:

There are two “Mating Call” apps selling for $0.99: one for males and one for females. And no, they don’t generate a series of appreciative grunts and whistles when a receptive person ambles into the vicinity. All they do is provide a quick-dial app for calling your significant other. It gives you fast one-tap dialing, which isn’t a terrible idea, but slap it in a pink or blue wrapper, and it’s just gaudy. There’s also the Girlfriend Caller, which does the same thing but also tracks how many times you call her. Note to iPhone-loving geeks with girlfriends: Look, she should call you. The only reason to call her more than twice a week is to come unlock the closet door because your beer-drinking buddies saw you pull the iBeer gag. (And if you try to install “his and hers” apps on your iPhones, your relationship will last another three days, tops.)

5. Roulette Helper:

This $0.99 app supposedly might help you make decisions while playing roulette, but it doesn’t improve your odds, just your ability to possibly make a quicker decision to bet. Las Vegas casinos, however, won’t be concerned that you’re going to take the house and walk away a winner — but they’ll still kick you out for bringing down the respectability of game.

4. Lucky Lotto:

This $0.99 helps you randomly pick lottery numbers. You’d think whoever buys this might realize their buck could be better spent elsewhere — even on another lottery ticket.

Better Not Bring This Rubber Duck Into the Bath Tub

3. Crazy Disco:

This $0.99 just rocketed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s Top Paid Apps list, thereby again cluttering up the otherwise awesome App Store. Like so many apps of dubious distinction, this one features a graphic that you can manipulate — a disco ball. The seller says, “Cement your place as ‘Mr. Cool’ when you enter the room groovin’ to the beat.” Good point here: If there’s one thing that’s going to make everyone know who’s cool, it’s a dude dancing around and flashing an iPhone.

2. Rubber Duck:

This $0.99 app is a graphic of a rubber duck. You push the image on your screen and it squeaks. Take that Microsoft Windows Mobile phones! How do you like them apples, Mr. BlackBerry? And Android … you don’t even have a device yet, much less a rubber duck! I’m pretty sure that when Steve Jobs held the big press conference earlier this year with his private equity investor buddies from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, they were thinking they’d find a lot of great squeaky toys to invest in.

1. iDemocrat and iRepublican:

These two free apps show graphics of a red, white and blue donkey or elephant along with the proclamation “Proud to be Democrat” or “Proud to be Republican.” The seller noted on the app description: “When I did this, I wanted it to be something you download, install and bring to all your election rallies and hold it out like [a] torch.” Seriously. Because that’s what we want to see on TV … the next leader of the free world looking out over a sea of people holding up their iPhones with glorious red, white, and blue donkeys and elephants.

So yeah, some of these Apps not only get in my way as I try to find useful applications, they offend the sense of progress that comes with innovative devices like the iPhone. Maybe Jobs is anticipating the moment when he’ll be able to look out over the audience at the next Macworld conference in January and see a bunch of virtual lighters swaying in tune with his next-big-thing announcement.

But I think not

Technologyworld