Woo-hoo! Leopard is out.. Great.. Get a life. [SHOW ME]

Partly because I just completed portal for the second time, and partly because I’ve always wondered - here’s how you extract the end credits music (which is both really well written, and also sums up the whole game.) WARNING - If you haven’t completed the game, don’t extract the portal music, as it contains spoilers for the game.. Of course, you can use the same program to extract other music from Half Life 2 & Episode 1/2.

The first thing you need is a crafty download - the program gcfscape, available [here] is the answer. It allows you to extract .gcf files in Half Life 2, which are like zip files, to their component parts. For the portal music, navigate to & open the file “portal content.gcf” which can be found in your “Valve” installation folder in “Steam\SteamApps\”. When opened, navigate within the file to “portal\sounds\music” and extract the file “portal_still_alive.mp3″ by right-clicking it. You can also get the Half Life 2 songs from “Steam\SteamApps\source sounds.gcf”

A bit of (traditional) Friday humour - also there wasn’t a lot going on in the world of tech when I wrote this post. It’s hard to imagine how the humble desktop PC has evolved from these brick-like beauties.. And it really wasn’t that long ago to be honest. Only 25 years or so - wow now I do feel old. [SHOW ME]

There has been a growing trend over the last year or so of ISPs moving away from "all you can eat" broadband for £17 a month. Even though the initial uptake by customers, for such a good deal, was huge with the likes of Tiscali quickly becoming the biggest ISP in the country, I don’t think they took customers wants into consideration - we all know it was about the profit margin anyway, right? So now as customer complaints soar, the ISPs have to act or else lose their customers to competitors. The old, cheap, uncapped* [sic] packages couldn’t handle the huge volumes of bandwidth even the most average users are consuming. With the likes of Youtube, BBCi and 4oD/4 online - and the likes of Skype calls, online gaming and radio - the ISPs can’t handle the strain on their networks. And as storage space increases on PCs and restrictions become lifted, people are downloading bigger files than ever before - and bandwidth just can’t keep up.

So their solution is to price their broadband packages with clear monthly limits imposed, which makes so much more sense than the old method. What we get, as long as everybody plays by the rules, is a stable network that can be priced according to usage. The basic surfer can get by with a 4Gb limit, even consuming Youtube videos, once in a while. And if you spend a lot of your time downloading huge files, surfing, engaging in new media then your service can have a higher limit.

So why has it all started to happen now? Well I can see two reasons - the biggest of these is just the huge amount of demand a normal user has for the internet nowadays, as mentioned above. However the second reason I call the virus effect. If you think of tech know-how as being the virus, and the people being how the virus travels, the effect goes like this: Technical knowledge starts fairly thin, just between the geeks. They know the network is unstable and will crumble under pressure. The only people that also know this are other geeks. And they complain about the problems, without actually being heard. However, as the general knowledge about the internet and bandwidth increases (making the virus more potent) and as usage increases (easing transport) there will be a certain point - like a flash point - where everyone becomes tuned into the problem. The virus goes beyond the geek, because most people can now understand the bandwidth issues and get the new concepts. And add to this communication between family members / friends and the like, the problem becomes even easier to realise. You can normally see this in the "wild" when news stories start covering things as news that a "geek" has been aware of for months or even years. Producers and researchers are becoming tuned into the problems, because more people are talking about it and are interested in it, making it news. So the infection is accelerated. I think that’s what we’re seeing and why bandwidth problems, uncapped service and new pricing structures are being studied by ISPs.

A recent post shows that some people are starting to get access to IMAP features within Gmail. This surely points to a staggered roll-out for the facility for all users - although obviously we don’t know the time frames involved.

This means that, if you choose, you can access your Gmail through your email client on your desktop - without the need to use the archaic POP3 protocol. Using IMAP is slicker because the inbox on your desktop is syncronised with the inbox in your Gmail. If you read a message on your desktop, it’s flagged as read in Gmail. If you delete a message, it disappears online too. Compare this to POP3, where the messages are simply downloaded and stored locally, with any changes you make locally staying that way.

This is good news for users, but is it in Google’s best interest? Advertisement revenue will disappear for those people using POP3 or IMAP when they move away from the website. Do Google have different plans to to use some other way to deliver advertising? It’s purely conjecture, but I’m assuming ads within emails if they are still going to get users to click-through. How else could Google do it? Maybe Google think the number of users will be insignificant to their cause. Only time will determine the facts.

As most of you know, I very rarely post anything of a personal nature on my blog, just because I don’t believe that’s why I write this blog exists - you need a source of up-to-date tech news and I try to provide that. But all being said, I do post sometimes things that have no relevance to tech, and this is one of those occasions (sorry).

As some of you who know me really well can attest, I am a big Ferrari F1 fan. Yesterday Ferrari won the drivers and construction championship after a very trying and controversial season. So I thought I would do my bit and congratulate Kimi Raikkonen on a great win and a great season.

40 people have been arrested from Cisco today, in Brazil, when the authorities alleged Cisco had imported $500 Million worth of equipment illegally into the country. The amount owed includes the costs of fines, unpaid duty and interest. Somebody needs to be fired for this massive mistake (which you can only assume that’s what it is) if only for the tumble the stock is going to take because of the news. It will be interesting to see if Cisco appeal and what happens at the courtroom. [SHOW ME]

31 hours and 4 minutes since they set off from the east-coast of America, they arrive at the west-coast. How? Because their car is the ultimate geek machine. GPS, police scanners, thermal imaging cameras, laser jammers & LCD displays all make up the ultimate Cannonball Run across The States. The previous record was 32 hours and 7 minutes, which has been beaten by guts, determination and technology. Read the full 6 page article/story on Wired. [SHOW ME]

Obviously written because I’m a big wordpress fan - this very blog uses it, and I can’t sing the wordpress group’s efforts in creating an awesome piece of software. However, there is always room for improvement and it always amazes me how the users in the community can take the software and adapt it for their needs. Normally writing plug-ins for wordpress is enough, but sometimes they’ll shoe-horn the software to do something the developers never thought of. Have a look at this tutorial of usable tips and tricks, which includes the source code, to transform your wordpress blog into something a little different. I think I’ll have a little look myself… [SHOW ME]

That’s right, after Apple decided to rob the users of their right to unlock the phone they had paid through the nose for - the group that originally provided the utility to unlock the iPhone, have released an update that gets around Apple’s latest attempt to render the phone useless.

Even though telephone companies in certain states in the US are not allowed to prevent users from unlocking their phones, Apple decided to go ahead and do it anyway. And because of the users taking Apple to court for restricting their rights - Apple are reminded that ‘iBrick’ing the phones is not cool. But now maybe users (stupid ones admittedly) that were not aware of Apple’s latest efforts have a way around the ‘iBricking’. And the other more tech-savvy users have a way to update their iPhones to the latest firmware without risk of winding up with an expensive shiney black turd - like that guy holding the iPhone above. [SHOW ME]