Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Monday, June 22, 2009

Collecta Searches News and Images in Real Time [Search Engines]

If you're in the market for some real-time search results, Collecta offers filtered news, blog comments, images, and more at a really rapid clip.

We've covered methods of monitoring real-time searches before, and previously mentioned TweetGrid certainly wins the prize for most parallel search options. Few sites, however, offer the kind of filtering that Collecta does.

Collecta can search Twitter, Identica, and other microblogging services in real time, putting microblog entries are displayed in the central column, while articles and news clippings are displayed on the right. The left column houses the search box and the filter settings, allowing you to drill down to just stories, blog comments, microblog updates, and photos. While you're searching, you might want to cut down on noise by filtering out re-tweets. If you have a favorite real-time search tool, sound off in the comments below.

Collecta [via DownloadSquad]

GDocBackup Makes an Offline Backup of Google Docs [Downloads]

Windows only: Tiny utility GDocBackup makes short work of downloading an offline copy of your Google Docs files.

After installing the utility, simply enter your Google account details into the configuration screen, pick a backup folder location, and click the Exec button to download all of your documents. You can even choose the format that you want to export them as—so if you wanted to download all presentations as PDF format, you can easily do so. Once you've run a backup once, the utility will only backup changed files on subsequent backup jobs—even though the backups are manual, it's still worth a look if you want a simple, non-instrusive method for backing up your Google Documents.

GDocBackup is free and open source, available for Windows only. Readers using Linux or Mac can check out the GDataCopier Python script, or OpenOffice users can use an extension to sync documents back and forth.

GDocBackup [Google Code via gHacks]

TiVo coming to Time Warner Cable, potentially lots of other providers

It's been a long, messy road, but now that TiVo's beaten a victory out of EchoStar in that seemingly-endless DVR patent lawsuit it sounds like the company is trying to exert some muscle -- it's already in talks to bring its service to Time Warner Cable, and sources have told Bloomberg the ultimate plan is to eventually collect royalties from every pay-TV provider in the US. That might sound bullying and even a little trollish, but keep in mind these patents have withstood pretty much every legal challenge EchoStar could throw at them, so TiVo's operating from a position of some certainty here -- especially since it's got license agreements with huge players like Comcast and DirecTV to use as leverage in negotiations as well. Of course, none of this solves any of TiVo's actual problems with its products, and the company's topsy-turvy balance sheet has some analysts thinking its ripe for a buyout by one of the bigs, so things could change dramatically at any minute, but for right now it sounds like your chances of getting the TiVo interface on your cable or satellite company DVR just went up, and that's almost certainly a good thing.

Filed under: Home Entertainment

TiVo coming to Time Warner Cable, potentially lots of other providers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Acer rolls out new budget-minded Aspire laptops

They may not be quite as thin and light as Acer's Timeline laptops, but the company's latest trio of Aspire models will at least save you a few bucks, and give you some decent enough specs as well. On the low-end of the lot are the 15.6-inch AS5536 and the 17.3-inch AS7735Z (pictured above), the former of which packs an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor, 3GB of DDR2 RAM, ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics, and a 320GB hard drive, while the latter sports a Pentium T4200 processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics, and a 250GB hard drive. Both of those, however, are bested by the 15.6-inch AS5739G, which dials things up to a Core 2 Duo T6500 processor, 4GB of RAM, NVIDIA Geforce GT130M graphics with 1GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, and a built-in Blu-ray drive -- all for just $750. Look for all three to be available this month, with the AS5536 and AS7735Z running $480 and $600.

Filed under: Laptops

Acer rolls out new budget-minded Aspire laptops originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Disney Netpal hands-on (with video!)

We got a quick look Disney's little Netpal Eee PC rebadge, and found our not-too-high expectations slightly exceeded by the fairly slick skin Disney has slapped on top of XP. The Netpal platform is really Disney's primary contribution here, since the computer underneath is vanilla Eee PC other than the fairly stylish "boy" and "girl" skinning job. The shell, however, is a locked down environment that allows parents to white list web sites and email addresses for kids to access, along with a list of allowable apps -- kids aren't restricted to just Disney's set of experiences, little Bobby can master PowerPoint in between play dates if his parents don't mind. Standard netbook sluggishness is of course a drawback, but the extensive parental controls, kid-friendly interface and $350 retail price are all good omens for rising above the general shoddiness and usual misnomer of "kid tech." Video is after the break.

Gallery: Disney Netpal hands-on