Radio station is open source

Link via lunchoverip.com, community radio stations in Sierra Leone and other emerging democracies are being powered by a free open source software, released by MDLF in Prague, which allows people to run a radio station from a single computer for free. [story at BBC]

What's new in Vista?

TechNet Mag has an article by Mark Russinovich (of Winternals and Sony rootkit-busting fame), the first in a series, about what's new in the Vista kernel and why.

It's pretty technical, but Mark breaks down some the more difficult-to-understand stuff for a reasonably sophisticated reader.

Not Just A Pretty Face By Serdar Yegulalp

Rip DVDs with VLC

VLC Media Player is one of the most versatile media players ever. What it lacks in looks, it more than makes up for in functionality. It can read and save all the major formats of video and audio, and much more than that, it can rip DVDs. This is a pretty simple process, if you know what you’re doing. Plus, it saves you having to buy expensive DVD ripping software!

See Real Caffiene for a quick instruction.

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is topping the social voting by providing thorough posts, showing hard work, and giving useable posts that consolidate CSS, web design and tech tips that we all need.

"we smash you with the information
which will make your life easier. really."

Review of Rootkit Detectors

Six Rootkit Detectors Protect Your System

While many security suites have a basic level of detection, these standalone tools will do a search-and-destroy on the rootkits that may be hiding in your system.

...includes freeware.

Freeware hard disk tools

Raw Copy
Raw Copy copys a disk as a raw image from one drive directly to another. This utility is designed for people who have faulty drive and want to transfer the data directly to another drive without doing a file by file copy. This saves the need for operating system re-installs and allows drives with an unknown file system to be copied (including from console game machines, data recorders, mac etc). The program has a built in data recovery function which will attempt to recover data from bad sectors to ensure all the available data is restored from the drive.

HD-Workbench
HD Workbench can evacuate data from a potentially failing disk to a 'known to be good' disk by creating a sector by sector copy (including the MBR, partition tables and boot sectors), or by writing the data to a raw disk image file.

via the excellent xtort library

Free Personal Video Recorder

GB-PVR is a fully featured Personal Video Recorder (PVR), allowing you to schedule TV recordings and view and pause live TV. In additional to this PVR functionality, it also acts as a media center allowing you to watch movies, listen to music, view pictures and listen to FM radio.

GB-PVR also supports specialist hardware decoders including Sigma Designs XCard, Hauppauge PVR350 and Hauppauge MediaMVP. GB-PVR also supports multiple tuners, allowing you to record more multiple channels at one time.

Link...