Having just finished my PB+J (Jif and grape) sandwich, I had to share this comic Shane sent me months ago. It was on my MacBook Pro and I forgot all about it until I backed it up last week before dusting it and re-installing Leopard on it.

Anyway, this comic totally made me LOL (for real!). You’ll have to be using that thing called the CLI (command line interface) in either UNIX (you OSX users) or Linux to get this. I can’t tell you how many times a day I try to do something on my Mac in Terminal and I get the dreaded “you’re not important enough for me to listen to” error. It’s almost to the point I’m prefacing every command with sudo now. Ya, I know, dangerous, but it still prompts for the password at least.

Enjoy the joke and if you know if more geeky jokes like this, let me know in the comments.

One of the biggest gripes with most for all the other iTunes wannabe types is the lack of Mac software. Universal yanked its content from Apple’s popular video downloading service for its own little venture with the likes of Fox called hulu. As you may have guessed, hulu is Windows only and at this point, is a private beta. Sources have indicated to SvenOnTech that only a few episodes are available for viewing of each show and it is using Adobe’s Flash technology. Your stuck to your PC screen.

SyncTV wants to change all that. It wants to share the video love with Windows, Mac, and Linux users. Giving each of them a client, now everyone can enjoy their favorite shows, now or later. Unlike hulu, all shows will be downloadable and will eventually even support portable media devices. What ever you choose to download, you can go a la carte or get every episode of every year. No restrictions. While this all sounds like iTunes, sans the Linux version, Apple won’t give you any of its content in HD. SyncTV does. To prove how good it looks, SyncTV is showing off its service on a 1080p HDTV at CES this week.

As for content, this seems to be the limited aspect of SyncTV. Only recognizing one show, Dexter, SyncTV has a long way to go before it can take on Apple or even hulu. Fortunately though, the Internet has removed the boundaries of “popular” and with “networks” such as Revision3 and ZiffDavis, featuring DL.TV, the old school TV networks may find itself lost in the shuffle just a few short years from now.

Paradial has recently announced the new availability of RealTunnel for a couple of new platforms. RealTunnel can now support not only Windows XP and Vista, but also Windows Mobile and Linux platforms, along with XMPP (Extensible Mesaging and Presence Protocol.) More platforms supposedly will be made available in the coming months.

RealTunnel provides excellent connectivity and call completion on all the major operation systems. Paradial first released RealTunnel back in 2002. It is the most mature, advanced firewall NAT product on the market today, and is also very cost effective. It is also the only product on the market that supports any SIP client/registrar, and the only supporter of application, voice, and video sharing across any and all firewalls with no network or firewall modification.

RealTunnel is used not only by the leading telecommunications carriers, but also by telecommunication and video conferencing manufacturers and SIP/IM vendors. Espen Skjæran, CTO at Paradial said that: “The availability of RealTunnel on Windows Mobile allows mobile operators and service providers to expand their product offerings by easily deploying IP-audio / IP-multimedia services with maximum call completion rates to end-users on mobile devices. This RealTunnel release also shows Paradial’s commitment to making RealTunnel available on all major end user platforms and to support all popular IP-communication protocols”, said Espen Skjæran, CTO, Paradial. More info is available at www.paradial.com.

PVR (Personal Video Recorder) has become all the rage since TiVos DVR (Digital Video Recorder) has spawned its popularity into the computer market in last few years. With Microsoft’s Media Center Edition of Vista and Apple’s pending iTV release, 2007 looks to be the year that PVRs break out and becomes mainstream. With third-party software already out for both platforms that do the PVR game pretty darn well, it’s any wonder that they will be working even harder to impress potential customers with their offerings. Competition is a great thing, ain’t it?

SageTV is one such competitor that wants not just one side of the market, but all of it. SageTV Media Center 6.0 is a full out PVR oozing with features many TiVo users have come to love. But SageTV goes the extra mile with features that TiVo can’t match such as playing unencrypted DVDs, video from sites such as Google TV, and it even has support for global DVB broadcasting standard, as well the ability to play virtually and music standard and video file. Like the TiVo, you can pause live TV and bring a recording with you for later viewing. Unlike TiVo, there is no monthly fee and you won’t be nickel-and-dimed for features like shows on the go as it’s all included in the one time cost of $99.

But wait, why stop there? SageTV knows that not all timeshifting viewers have a Windows box so it has made the Media Center available for you geeky Linux users, too! Mac users can join in on the fun with the just announce version of SageTV Placeshifter software. This makes SageTV the only cross-platform PVR for OS X, Windows, and Linux users. With the Placeshifter software installed, you’ll be able to view recorded shows, watch live TV, play music, or browse video files from anywhere in the world with a broadband or via a local area network (LAN) connection! It’s highly doubtful iTV will be able to pull of this task and we know Microsoft’s offering does not. BeyondTV? No Mac client. ReplayTV. Nope (it doesn’t even have legacy support for its old hardware boxes!)

Placeshifter comes bundled with Media Center and additional licenses can be purchased for $29.99. With the power and beauty of no monthly fines, er, fees, SageTV could be all the rage in ‘07.

SvenOnTech informed you of one way to watch Flash-based movies from your Mac last week and this week we’ll show you another one entitled Democracy Player. As America spoke yesterday with swinging the House to the Democratic party, the Participatory Culture Foundation has cleared its throat and brought to the Mac, Windows, and Linux world an interesting player for us all to enjoy and love for free.

Democracy Player is an open-source player that brings all sorts of content to you. With over 700 channels to chose from, you could spend a lot of time with this nicely laid out player. If you find a channel that you really enjoy, you don’t have to even view the movie in a small window. With a flick of a few keys or a click of a mouse, you can delight it in full screen.

But what really is Democracy Player? Well, the authors themselves tell us that it is a player that lets you get, “the best internet TV shows in one powerful application: any video RSS feed, video podcast, video blog, or BitTorrent file. Fullscreen, high resolution, 100% free and open source. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide.”

In a nutshell, that’s it. Using the freeware Quicktime plug-in Perian, the Democracy Player will bring you hours and hours of fun to your Mac, PC, or Linux host for sure. Now go download it and waste esteem some time!

I’m not a huge fan of Entourage but use it because Apple Mail doesn’t handle Exchange very well. I do love, love, iCal and will use it to view events since Entourage will synchronize to it. Yet still, I have to use Entourage. I still live in a PC/Mac world and thus there doesn’t seem to be much choice. But for some, there is Chandler.

Chandler is, “a next-generation Personal Information Manager (PIM), integrating calendar, email, contact management, task management, notes, and instant messaging functions.” It integrates nicely with iCal as it will easily accept ics files. It loves sharing calendars with others in the office or those around the world. Speaking of around the world, different time zones is a trivial thing for Chandler to handle and you’ll never have a missed appointment because your PIM didn’t know if you were coming from Cali or going to London.

The exciting aspect of this open source project is the teams vision for it. They see it being used by not just home users but power users with high-volume traffic. The office is what this is built for yet still the average Joe can grab it. No one is forgotten in this formula.

With its similar color toned look-and-feel of iCal, there is a low learning curve for current Mac users. You Windows or Linux users may have to learn a thing or two, but it won’t take too long to get it. Did I say Windows and Linux? Yes. That’s right, this is a cross-platform application that really brings everything together. Allowing just about anyone (sorry, no OS/2 version) from any office or home to collaborate with one another.

With such power and a price of free, this is a definite item to take a look at and see if it’s right for you. Still in its early stages, the Chandler team eagerly puts in overtime to get this one step closer to 1.0. Some may say it’s not a prime time application, but I would say at least it looks a lot better than Entourages calendar view.

Any Net Op or Sys Op worth their salt has Nmap in their arsenal of tools. Nmap is a very powerful network tool that’s been around for a good long time with its roots in UNIX. My first time using it was on a Sun SPARC 20 running SunOS more than a decade ago. (Ouch, did I just date myself?) While not the prettiest thing on earth, it may just be the most powerful.

But what if you don’t need all the power of Nmap and you don’t feel like compiling it to run on the Mac? Then the good folks at 10base-t (we’ve already told you about their excellent DropCopy application — we’re beginning to fall in love with these guys) has something just for you. It’s called IP Scanner. Ya, not as sexy (in a geek sense) as Nmap, but to the point no doubt.

IP Scanner is a shareware software that will scan your network in one quick sweep. It will look for various devices on your network, such as Windows, Linux, and Mac hosts. It will also find routers, switches, and printers. If IP Scanner is unsure what it found, it’ll announce that in the table view and allow you to double click the name to see more details about it. One device on our network looked like it was a router but we couldn’t figure out where this additional router we didn’t know about came from. Well the details page shed some light for us when we saw that the Manufacturer was Sonos. Ya, it was our ZP100. We also identified our NAS by this method, too. Very nice.

What we did miss, however, was our Airport. It didn’t show up. It was plugged into our Sonos ZP100 and we don’t know if that had something to do with it, but it was on the same sub-net, so it should have found it. Maybe the Sonos hides it, though we did the scan from our MacBook Pro which was attached to the AirPort, so you’d think it would have seen it being it was the actual device that was getting us on the network.

If you’re a person in need of a quick and easy network scanner to just see what’s on the network, IP Scanner is a great tool to have. For $25, even the curious could grab this and get a deal out of it. As an added bonus, 10base-t throws in IP Broadcaster which not only announces who you are with some more detail (for IP Scanner and like software) but also adds a menu item that reveals either your LAN or WAN address. Oh ya, you also get some daemon action, too (Net Ops will love this.) Good times.