Mozilla Fennec

Is a full-fledged, add-on-powered mobile browser something you want for your phone? Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s Vice President for mobile, works every day to make it happen. Read what Sullivan has to say about Fennec, iPhones, Android, and all things mobile.

Sullivan leads the team at Firefox maker Mozilla creating a mobile version of Firefox, dubbed Fennec, which would be available as both a pre-installed browser on cooperating phone makers’ models and as a free download for as many phones as possible. We’ve taken screenshot tours of the first alpha, and newer betas and alphas are available for download for touchscreen Windows Mobile phones, Nokia tablets, and for desktop testing.

Sullivan talked with us by phone just under two weeks ago about where Fennec is at the moment, what platforms we might see it on, and what it could mean for the future of web development.

Read the full interview on Lifehacker.com…

ItsHidden.com

If you’re of the mindset that what you do with your BitTorrent client is your business and not that of people snooping, sniffing, and prying at your packets along the way, ItsHidden offers a free VPN server to anonymize your activity.

ItsHidden uses 128-bit encryption on the secure tunnel created between you and the ItsHidden servers. Based out of the Netherlands, ItsHidden takes advantage of the legal climate there and doesn’t log any activity passed through its servers.

To access the ItsHidden VPN, you need to sign up for a free account and make a small configuration tweak to your respective operating system to enable the VPN. They include step by step instructions for Windows XP, users of other systems will either have to use them as a template or look up the specific steps for their OS. ItsHidden requires no software installation.

During our test run with a large Linux distribution, connection speeds with the ItsHidden VPN enabled were only negligibly decreased from our standard torrent speeds without the VPN in place. Check out the link below for more information and if you know of another service for anonymizing your internet activity—torrent-related or otherwise—let’s hear about it in the comments.

via Lifehacker.com

You can buy them online from hundreds of websites, share them with friends, or spend $600 (seriously—that’s the average) at the book store. If you’re committed to saving serious cash, you can also spend $0 on books this semester.

One caveat—I’m not going to BS you with dreams of open-source and digital textbooks, despite how nice they sound in theory. I don’t know what uni you go to, but at mine, that’s not realistic. My professors use AOL.

Every university has a stockpile of free books: the library. Depending on how irresponsible you are, you might never otherwise enter the library, but this should be your first stop during textbook season. It is the crux of this whole concept.

Find it

First, you have to find your book at the library, which requires a surprising amount of creativity. At the basic level, novels and famous works are easy. When you get into very specific textbooks, it gets harder. The first thing you should try are the intercollegiate book sharing networks; they put hundreds of libraries in your range for free. Libraries frequently get textbooks as part of a donation, and they’re not going to burn them (unless Follett pays them enough money).

Next time you see books that seem obscure, like A Communist Anthology of Native American Poetry or The Children’s Compendium of Short Stories About Pregnancy, know that you can find the material elsewhere. Selections, collections, and compilations are filled with re-packaged old content—another tactic of evil publishers. Even books like Freakonomics and The World is Flat are mostly made up of old material. At the library, you can use online databases or other compilations to piece together your own version of the same book.

You’ll also have to fudge the editions. The most recent edition of your Conjuring 101 textbook won’t be at the biblioteca. Publishers make miniscule changes in a book so that they can release a new edition each year and make more money. But that means that normally you can get through 92nd edition classes with a 2nd edition text, since the changes are often subtle: page numbers are shifted, chapters are switched, etc. The best way to wade through an old edition is by looking through the table of contents and finding the old version of the new topic you’re supposed to read on.

If it all fails, hit up the research/reference desk where your school probably employs a lackey whose sole responsibility is to find material for you.

Keep it

Now that you’ve found the text you need, you’ve gotta keep it for 3 months—and late fees aren’t an option. The most reliable tactic is to rotate different copies of the same book. When your textbook is coming up for its last renewal, order another copy of the same book from a different library. You can keep alternating between two or more copies for as long as you need. Depending on your library’s policies, you might have to order a different edition. Registering another account at the local non-university library also frees up some rule-bending.

Or put that copying machine to work at your work-study job.

Gamble

I call this “textbook gambling”—that is, with this method you’re not even going to try to find a book until the moment you need it. A lot of the time you’ll find your professor has added at least a book or two to your syllabus that you never once crack open for class. You’ll get half of your books for free by not buying books you never use.

Sometimes, teachers will cut a book last-second or the university syllabus requires a certain book for College English, but your teacher doesn’t use it. Sometimes, the teachers’ lectures cover all of the reading material and there’s no need to read at all. These variables can eliminate a lot of your books—so if you’ve got the guts for it, skip buying books in advance.

It’s a little tricky; at any time, the teacher might deploy a surprise reading assignment. Until you can obtain a permanent copy, ask the TA to make copies of the first few assignments (tell them you added the class last-second).

Between library savvy and a little textbook gambling, you’ll cover 60-100% of your books. Use the usual tactics to fill in the gaps—i.e., buy used and borrow as often as you can.

via Lifehacker.com

We’ve come a long way since animated GIFs and video-game-style MIDI files were considered cutting edge computer-provided A/V entertainment. Take advantage of today’s high-quality video with one of these five most popular video players.

Photo by horsager.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite video player. We’ve tallied up the votes and now we’re back to share the results. Below you’ll find the five most popular video players among Lifehacker readers. If you’re dissatisfied with the features of your current player, it’s a great shopping list of alternatives.

The movie used in the screenshots below is Big Buck Bunny—a completely open-source generated and Creative Commons-licensed short movie.

Media Player Classic (Windows, Free)

Media Player Classic started out as a project to preserve the simplicity and lightweight playback of the old Windows Media Player while keeping codecs and features current for the present generation of video. The outcome is an extremely lightweight, free, portable, and self-contained video player that has built-in codecs for a wide variety of media playback. The upside of such a design is you can use it on a machine that doesn’t have the proper codecs installed for the video you want to watch. The downside is in some instances—although rare—it can conflict with an updated codec you have installed on your machine.

MPlayer (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

Originally designed to fill the void of a lack of adequate Linux media players, the development for the robust media player MPlayer has branched out and now includes versions for Windows and Mac, among others. MPlayer supports a wide variety of content and, perhaps owing to its Linux roots, pays extra close attention to hardware and hardware optimization to squeeze the most playback power out of your system.

GOM Player (Windows, Free)

GOM Player is another entrant in this week’s Hive that, like VLC, excels at playing damaged and incomplete video. Originally designed as the streaming media player for GOM-TV, a Korean TV network, it is available outside of Korea with the GOM-TV streaming functionality disabled—although folks outside Korea still have access to the live streaming of StarCraft matches (StarCraft is so wildly popular among Koreans playing it is practically a national sport). GOM Player also includes a wide variety of sub-title tweaks, an important feature for a player from a country that consumes a lots of foreign media.

VLC (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

VLC is a media player with far-reaching appeal. It is available for over ten operating systems including systems as obscure as BeOS. Built with open-source code and fueled by free decoding and encoding libraries, it has a history of innovation and performance; it was, for example, the first player that could play back encrypted DVDs on Linux. VLC allows you to play incomplete or damaged videos, so you can decide if it is worth finishing a download or repairing a video file. VLC can also play a variety of formats not commonly supported by media players, such as a raw DVD ISO file or AVCHD—a format currently used by many HD camcorders. VLC is available as a portable application.

KMPlayer (Windows, Free)

If you like all your media player’s settings at your fingertips, KMPlayer has a lot to offer. The right click context menu is absolutely enormous and gives you nearly instant access to all manner of settings, including screen ratio, playback speed, video bookmarking, filters, and other effects. You can set KMPlayer to change its skin based on what media type you’re playing or if you’re running it on a media center you can use an overlay skin to provide easy remote-based navigation. KMPlayer supports an extensive number of formats including DVD playback and is easily customized to your specific needs.

via Lifehacker.com