Blip.me is a free app that is a fun, useful, and turns your mobile phone into a push-to-talk two-way radio to keep in touch with your friends. An app that can be used both with Android and iOS devices and lets you send and receive short messages. An added advantage over walkie-talkie is that the message can be played back later, if it is not convenient to play it right away.  Blip.me app is available free at the App store and Android market.

Instagram combines retro looks with modern connectivity to make a truly addictive little app. Take a photo, and you can add depth to your photos with one of 18 or so filters, depending on what style you are going for; then upload your pictures to Facebook, Twitter, or other social media. Instagram can be downloaded for free through the Apple App Store.

Buy It: Free

If your kids are in the sports, Coach’s Eye is the perfect gift idea this season. Spend quality time with your kids and make them feel special. Be their coach in a fine way even if you have never coached before. This new iPhone app will enable you to record, watch and review plays. Whether it’s baseball, hockey or any other sport, you can go over with the kids on their playing techniques. Review play by play, whether it is swinging technique, shooting, free throws or kicking, so they can capitalize on their strong points and concentrate on correcting their weak points.

You can be your own coach if you let someone record your play actions while you are playing. Then replay it in the leisure of your home and identify what you should or should not be doing to improve your skills.

Buy It: $0.99 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9b_cPFBK60

Hackers exploited the 3 major browsers on day one of Pwn2Own.  As expected,  IE8, FireFox and Safari were all penetrated within minutes of the competition starting.

Most impressively, Peter Vreugdenhil, was able to exploit a vulnerability in IE8 on Windows 7 allowing him to bypass  the operating systems DEP (Data Execution System) security mechinism designed to stop this sort of attack.  Vreugdenhil, a first time Pwn2Own participant, earned a $10,000 prize for his efforts.

The only browser left standing after day one was Google Chrome.

[via ComputerWorld]

[singlepic id=225 w=200 h=200 float=left]After a few betas & as many release candidates, Mozilla has finally released Thunderbird 3.  It packs all kinds of new features like tabbed emails & a schpankity new search function.

I knew it was a bit of a crap-shoot with my twenty-some add-ons, but I was genuinely surprised to see that Lightning no longer worked when I did my update.  D’oh.  I definitely need my GCal sync back in TBird, so hopefully they’ll come up with an update soon.  I also freaked out a bit when I was in the default “smart folder” view, but it was simple enough to switch out of that view at the top of the left pane.  One final gripe is that the new IMAP sync process seems to be taking a while on the first go; not unexpected, but still a bit of a pain.

Go get you some scary early-adopter goodness here.

**Follow-up:  holy hell is the “synchronization” feature unbelievable.  I may not be a typical case, but I’ve got five IMAP accounts setup in Thunderbird, & after installing TBird 3.0, it automatically proceeded to “synchronize” all of my accounts (two of them GMail accounts with thousands of listserve emails).  Know what that does, boys ‘n girls?  It turns your accounts into a sort of POP3/IMAP mashup so that you can access your emails “offline.”  I couldn’t even get the program to slow down long enough to stop it from trying to “download” multiple tens of thousands of messages (locally, to my PC), so I had to kill it from the task manager… twice.  At any rate, I finally managed to get the settings changed so it would quit downloading all my emails, but it’s still going ahead & indexing them (something that’s needed for the new search feature).

I have my accounts setup as IMAP for a reason!  I’m sure I’m mostly to blame for this, since I really only glossed over the “synchronization” settings, but here’s hoping this warning will save someone else out there from making the same mistake.  I’m seriously questioning why this setting would be the default…

**Update – as you can read in this post, the Lightning/Sunbird team is hard at work on the compatible release.  I just downloaded & installed the latest nightly build & it’s working so far.  They also have a nightly build for the Google calendar provider available.  The only hiccup I’ve noticed is that creating a new event (in my “Home” calendar) won’t show the event on the main calendar page, but it does show in the “Today pane”).  Other than that, I’m happily back in action.

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Anyone who anticipated the release of ET:QW will know that this bit of news from developers Splash Damage is par for the course.  Fall it is, then!

Like many titles as of late, Splash Damage apparently needs additional time to polish this title prior to release.

Oh, & I guess in an attempt to make up for the delay news, they’ve finally released some official footage of the game.  Looking good, boys… needs more tapir.

Slowly but surely, it seems Google will be opening up it’s Chrome extensions site…

Currently in a developer only mode, the Google Chrome Extensions site has started allowing contributions.  No word on when we’ll be able to start downloading Chrome Extensions, but I’m happy to see the official distribution site finally starting to show some forward momentum.

[singlepic id=220 w=250 h=203 float=left]The ExpReview crew have run the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat benchmark on a rig in both DirectX modes to point out that differences do indeed exist.  The shadows look a bit more realistic, and the tessellation in DX11 brings a bit more details to some of the textures.  There’s a slight performance hit for the increase in eye candy, but that’s to be expected.  Check out their results, including nice, big 2560×1600 screenshots.

Looks like Infinity Ward’s move away from dedicated servers hasn’t helped much in the realm of cheating; the, ahem, main goal of the move.

The Call of Duty hacking website has published a video that shows their latest hack in action. The hack appears when activated, shows the position of all players, reduces recoil on the guns and adds aiming/firing accuracy.

Good thing IWNet’s already banning all those hackers!  Oh, wait, they’re not?  Oh.  Moving on then.

Torrents of Microsoft COFEE have been springing up everywhere and the hype is ridiculous.  Obviously, it’s illegal to pirate software.  Furthermore, the EULA for this particular software is limits it’s use to law enforcement officials only.  Other than that, most everything else you’ve heard about this stuff is false.

COFEE, or Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a set of tools and a GUI that Microsoft has created to assist undereducated law enforcement officials with basic computer forensics.

An officer with even minimal computer experience can be tutored—in less than 10 minutes—to use a pre-configured COFEE device.

This is not some wild, as-seen-on-tv, NSA creation.  It’s just a compilation of tools (about 150 or so) for information and evidence gathering.  A rootkit and some automation. Most everything included with COFEE is available, in some form, all over the internet.