Safari Extensions Gallery is a go!

For Windows users, Apple’s Safari browser is borderline garbage. It seems they ported it to Windows simply because they felt “they had to”. Mac users on the other hand enjoy a much more polished and refined browser that among other things, doesn’t crash every five minutes. Speaking more-so to the latter, if you’ve managed to keep laser focused on Apple’s in-house browser in the age of Chrome 6, Chrome 10.5, and Firefox 4 beta 2, the new Extensions Gallery which just went live will make your browsing experience much, much better.

Much like Firefox and Chrome’s extensions portfolios, Safari’s will seek to bring untold amounts of added productivity, connectivity, and entertainment to the browser. After taking a brief spin through it myself, I must say that there are some pretty notable players already jumping in. For myself, I’m finding the Twitter extensions to be pretty handy, displaying relevant/trending tweets alongside the page I’m currently in — nice!

The Bing extension is another nifty one that incorporates robust search, mapping, social information, and statuses (read: flight updates) right within the page by simply highlighting text.

Clearly, Safari just became a much more useful browser. Go on ahead and give it try. Just make sure to come back and let us know what you think?

Safari Extensions Gallery

Think your computer is fast? World Record trampled for data sorting: 1 Terabyte conqured in 1 minute.

Think you’re computer is fast? How much do you think it would sort in any given minute: 1GB, 10GB? 100GB? Scientists at University of California, San Diego have managed to conquer the old world record for data sorting by reaching rummaging through a full Terabyte in a mere 60 seconds. Remember, 1TB is a 1,000GB. That’s a huge amount of 1′s and 0′s!

Besides competitions such as the 2010 Sort Benchmark Competition — The so called “World Cup of data sorting. — it may seem rather frivolous to have such power. But when you’re dealing with multiple petabytes of data (1 petabyte = 1,000 terabytes), even 1TB/minute isn’t exactly “fast”, as it would take roughly 3-4 days to work through 1PB of data. Companies who make their livelihood on the data pool provided by consumers (Think: Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Google, etc.) surely can’t get enough speed.

How soon until our own computers on our desks, (and even our smartphones) have the power sort 1TB/minute?

Architecture junkies unite: The “Submarine House” constructed out of an old silo.

The next time you’re in the Santa Cruz mountains, be sure to swing by the Submarine house. Home owner Harry Neal used an old grain solo to build the staple piece of his unique house. Though that’s not the only notable design choice. Instead of your typical wood or metal frame, Harry made use of the mountainside for said purpose, giving the house a much more eco-friendly design and simply looking a lot cooler too boot.

I absolutely loathe the wooden boxes that have proliferated subdivisions today, as I long for some unique character in a house. Lucky for Harry, he lives in a dream house more or less. What would you build your dream house out of?

Couple ‘o shots after the jump…

“Apple Peel 520″ turns iPod Touch into a bonafied phone.

Those who would consider themselves to be tech connoisseurs have no doubt tried their hand at setting up their iPod Touch for VoIP calls. Free yaking by way of a mp3 player is pretty incredible to think about. Especially given the fact that you can bypass those dreadful 1,2, or 3-year contracts that carriers often place on customers. But there’s one inherent problem with VoIP iPod Touch scenarios — they’re limited.

Not so with the “Apple Peel 520″. This mystery gadget straight out of China (red flags yet?) actually incorporates the gadgetry to turn your iPod Touch into a bonafied phone, allowing real SIM cards to be swapped out at will. If you’ve got a sweet pre-paid/post-paid plan and want to yak it up on your iPod Touch, have at it.

In the case of the Apple peel 520, voice & texting are the names of the game. Going one step further in the name of utility, however, the manufacturer decided to toss in an 800mAh battery as well. A longer running iPod Touch Phone — awesome.

Since the Apple Peel 520 is being made by a rather obscure company, “Yosion”, dropping the reported $45 USD – $77 USD (on something that for all intents and purposes, could end up as vaporware) just doesn’t seem like a very smart investment. Perhaps it’s best to sit this one out and see how other folks fare, hmm?

Milestone gets FRF91 Froyo! (Unofficially)

Motorola doesn’t really care about the Milestone or its users anymore. So what? When has a manufacturers whims and wishes affected the hearts and minds of the talented hacking community? That’s right — never. While Moto sits around twiddling their thumbs wondering if they’ll grace the Milestone with aging Android software, the dev community has taken the issue to heart and delivered fantastic results once again. The Milestone haz Froyo!

Proceed with caution, however. The process isn’t exactly as easy as your standard Droid rom flash given the fact that the Milestone’s “open” nature is anything but. Making one wrong click or forgetting a step could turn your beloved device into a rather useless plastic brick. If you’re questioning exactly how the devs cracked into the Milestone’s locked bootloader, familiarize yourself with the term “second boots”.

Now that the infamously locked down cousin of the super open Moto Droid is finally starting to open up itself, all of the other Moto devices with locked bootloaders have just instantly received a second chance at life. With that said, hop inside to a see a splendid little video showcasing the latest Froyo FRF91 build up and flawlessly running (save for the camera — sorry shutterbugs) on the Motorola Milestone…

Shocker: Broadband speeds nowhere close to advertised broadband speeds…

If you came up to me and said that real-world broadband speeds are nowhere near the big, beautiful number we see advertised on TV, I’d smack you up side the head and question your earthly origins. As more tech savvy individuals know, said problem is hardly a new secret. The ISP’s of maintain that distance, amount of users, and amount of content per user all ratchet our broadband speeds lower and lower, citing the advertised speeds we see on TV as theoretical maximums. But just how far off are real-world speeds compared to advertised rates?

If you’re living in the UK, the difference between real-world and advertised speeds is actually quite alarming, thanks to a new study published by Ofcom. In the study, one can see differences so great that paying end users are getting a paltry 33% of their actual bandwidth — this being DSL users. I don’t know about you, but paying 100% for something and only getting 33% is infuriating and frustrating. We don’t accept such failure in say, auto mechanic work. Why accept it in our broadband speeds/rates?

While old school DSL suffered pretty bad, newer fiber networks such Virgin emerged from the digital bloodbath a bit better. Still, only receiving ~50% of a paid service is inexcusable.

But don’t take my word for it. Jump inside to see a bigger image of the graph above. If you live in the UK and pay for the service of one of the providers above, get out a tissue box — you’ll need it.

T-Mobile HSPA+ sign up page now live.

No, it’s not news on a shiny new HSPA+ device. But it is something that will lead to that. T-Mobile USA now has a live signup page for HSPA+ information regarding the network and upcoming supporting hardware. If the silhouette on signup page is a legit image of the first HSPA+ phone, one could guess that it’ll be touchscreen only, judging by its svelte outline and all.

But further digging into the page’s source code reveals something very interesting — the name “Vanguard”. Those keeping track will know that the “Vangaurd”, an HTC-built device, has also taken on the names “Vision”, “G1 successor”, “Blaze”, and “Unicorn”. Plenty of titles and plenty of mystery. The leaked HTC Vision shots that have been floating around show a pretty decent looking device. On top of that, if Android 3.0 drops on the first HSPA+ device (as it has been mentoined), we’re looking at quite a back to school gift (wink wink…). Looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer. All I can say is if HSPA+ is indeed a feature of the upcoming HTC Vision, count me in!