Learn about human life, nature, and our universe, View remote slide shows, explore Wikipedia, do nice things with old hard drives and more in today’s edition of the Daily Friction.
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It’s been a long while since our last post and there is a lot to catch up, hopefully we’ll do that quickly. Update your OpenOffice.org, get a Codec pack for your Mac, send anonymous text messages, read the rules for enabling Windows Aero in Vista, build a simple IRC bot in Python and much more in today’s edition of the Daily Friction.
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Daily Friction is at it’s 200th edition. It’s been a long and fun ride until now. So congratulations!!! …. Yeeeppppp …. We have a lot of good stuff today. Get the new version of Skype, tame your process with ProcessTamer, try the Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Beta, buy a new Graphics Tablet, move your music back to your computer, and much more in today’s edition of the Daily Friction.
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It’s been known for a while that you can use the Google video embedded player through Gmail to play media files. You can actually play any file openly hosted on the internet (in supported file format).

It does not required you a Gmail login or even have a Gmail account. All you have to do is insert the URL below with the URL of the media file.

http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=URL_of_media_file

Replace the URL_of_media_file with the URL of the MP3 or media file on the web and play.

Today we feature the first Vista specific application, not something extremely useful by the looks of it, but nevertheless, it’s the first one. Find a lot more in today’s edition of the Daily Friction.
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Edit XML documents, scribble in a wiki notebook, manage your UML diagrams, learn how to easily webcast on your own and more in today’s edition of the Daily Friction.
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PayPal are to busy to accept your money, please contact them again after the holidays. Read Blake Rose’s recent PayPal communication. Hilarious.

Finally something refreshing from Yahoo. You Witness News is a new news service that uses Flickr photos and user-submitted videos to document news events. As described on the Flickr blog, “it’s a “citizen journalism” site which allows people to submit photos and video directly to the editorial desk of the biggest news site on the web.”

There aren’t too many details of how things work behind the scenes, but the crew at You Witness News will continue to work closely with established news outlets and sources while receiving submissions from users. Thumbs up Yahoo, it’s a bout time to see some refreshing and original services and no more copycats.

According to a recent study, 94 percent of business PCs in North America do not meet the minimum requirements for Vista. Beside the fact that Microsoft tend to underestimate the real requirements of it’s systems upon release in published statements, the picture is pretty gloomy.

About half of the average business PCs in North America are unable to meet the minimum requirements for Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, while 94 percent do not meet the system requirements for Vista Premium.

In comparison, when Windows XP was released, some 71 percent of the PCs met its system requirements, Softchoice services consultant Dean Williams said in an executive summary of the report.

Read more.

Upgrade your Adobe Reader, compare Apple to Dell, compile the Debian kernel, improve the scalability of your php applications, grow your own furniture, find a secret game and more in today’s edition of the Daily Friction.
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