Cranking out news for the geeks, music buffs and gossip junkies, my way. -Greg

BillGuard is an INCREDIBLE new service that helps you keep from getting charged for things you weren’t aware of. BillGuard is advertised as “Antivirus for our bills”. I think this is an easy label to understand for most, but doesn’t do it justice. Imagine you’re at a ball game and send a text message to say hello on the big scoreboard. Now imagine a month later you notice on your phone bill that there is some $2.99 a month service that is reoccurring and you find out that by sending that text to the scoreboard you had automatically signed up for a some text a month service. Well BillGuard is basically a service that would find things like this on your credit cards and more. The data this service collects, references, and analyzes is amazing. They also allow users input to help validate the fees and errors even further. The service is free for your first card and then you can upgrade the service to $4 a month for unlimited cards. The question I asked myself as I watched the video from was “How worried about security is BillGuard with regard to my financial information I’m going to give them?” Well, watch the video because they answered it! Overall I think this idea if awesome, especially for those who don’t comb their statements meticulously. I think the video below from the recent TechCrunch Disrupt will explain in much greater detail how the service works and what they provide. –Greg

Check out BillGuard

Video Link

“In two years, this type of piracy will be over,” said Ludvig Werner, chairman for the Swedish arm of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. I say “Not bloody likely”. It’s not that piracy is right or wrong, its just simply cheap and easy. Cheap and easy will beat out right or wrong almost anyday. Now I’m not saying I condone piracy, as I of course pay for all of my movies, music, and software. Getting back to the fines and jail time, isn’t this a little steap? I mean The Pirate Bay didn’t host any actual content for download, but only a list. Because they provided a list that its users help to create, these guys being the blame, just pure nonsense. -Greg

I’ve noticed more and more that when I travel to The Pirate Bay, I get stupid pop-ups, redirects, and a bunch of crap loading that I don’t want to load. I still push through and continue my journey till I find that 100% completely legal file that I need for testing purposes. I rarely stray from TPB, but I’m starting to look at the greener grass, places that have less crap trying to force its way into my PC or browser. Lifehacker recently put out a nice little list, 10 to be exact, of alternative sites for Mininova, which closed its doors to the general, I call it my alternate list for TPB. Anyway, I wanted to share this list with all of my fellow torrent leechers, because its a great list! Make sure your only downloading legal files and seed more than you leech! -Greg

*Update – #1 Best torrent site in my opinion is Demonoid. It’s better than TorrentSpy reborn! -Greg

Here is the list:

1. Torrentzap

2. Fenopy

3. ExtraTorrent

4. KickassTorrents

5. BTjunkie

5. Monova

7. isoHunt

8. yourBitTorrent

9. The Pirate Bay

10. ShareReactor

Visit Micro Center, www.microcenter.com

Micro Center has just opened it’s first store in Missouri, in Brentwood. I got an ad in the mail yesterday for it and I have to say at first glance I was nothing short of excited! Looks like a NewEgg.com or TigerDirect.com, but in a store! It’s huge with more than just a computer junkie’s dream of over 5000 available parts, but also  includes thousands of books, and software titles. They have big name pre-built PC, Macs, and notebooks and they even have a huge knowledge bar where your able to talk face to face with experienced tech and figure out whats best for you new PC or how to fix your existing one. I did a bit of price comparison this morning and found that the price difference is unbelievable!  

Intel Core i7-920:         Newegg – $288.99           Micro Center – $199.99

OCZ DDR3 1600 6GB:       Newegg – $114.99 (after rebate)           Micro Center – $79.99 (after rebate)

Seagate Barracuda  2TB (ST320005N4A1AS-RK):   Newegg – $199.99       Micro Center – $179.99

You do the math, that’s a savings of $144, an average savings of $48,  just on those 3 items alone. I’ve built several machines from scratch, bought a ton of parts and accessories, and I always use TigerDirect or Newegg. Sorry guys, but there’s no question here where I will be shopping from now on. Not too mention where I may be spending my weekends, lol -Greg

Make sure you visit Micro Center for your next purchase!!

So it looks like Google is about to release its Chrome OS sometime this week. I’m curious how it will stand up to Ubuntu, which is obviously the most popular and average user friendly. I will be loading it up on a VM and play with it, but I’m not even thinking about the possibility of replacing my main OS, Win 7. Linux is great, but Windows will always be my primary OS. -Greg

Android now has the “Bump” app that’s found on iPhone. I saw the commercial quite a while back for the iPhone that showed you a neat little app designed by the people at Bump Technologies that allowed 2 iPhone users to share pictures simply by bumping the 2 phones together. I was ready to go get my girlfriend and I an iPhone that moment, literally I wanted to run out and buy them right then. I’ve since had several moments of weakness where as I almost bought an iPhone. Android of course changed all that, now I just internet window shop the Android phones, and impatiently wait for the day that AT&T finally gets an Adnroid phone, so I can RUSH OUT AND BUY ONE! Anyway, as I was saying the Bump app allows 2 phones that share the app to share media by just setting the media they want to share and then bumping the phones together, isn’t technology wonderful! -Greg

 Get the app from Bump Technologies

Here’s a YouTube video of the app in action..

This has been a magnificent end of the year for Microsoft. Windows 7 is proving to actually be the excellent OS they set out for and now they have AV too! OK so their AV is not so new, but I was reading an article today from LifeHacker.com, all about it and they have really impressed me and several of the leading AV websites. I was actually just talking to my Dad the other day about how it looks as if AVG (my personal fav.) is not making the cut for top performers. Microsoft Security Essentials is doing it and they are doing it big. It detects 98% of the major malware, its not a resource hog, in fact it actually has good marks for being less of a resource user than most. Best of all its FREE, as long as your Windows can pass the “Genuine Validation” you can get it for free from Microsoft. I’ve already uninstalled my AVG and am currently running it on my new Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, mmm mmm good! -Greg

Here’s more on it from lifehacker.com:

When it comes to keeping your Windows PC secure, all of the scare tactics and overblown virus stories out there make it hard to feel safe online. The fact of the matter is that you don’t need to pay for Windows security.From time to time we like to go on long, opinionated rants about subjects that bug us. This is one of those times. So let’s have a frank and honest discussion about Windows security, and leave the scare tactics and FUD for money-grubbing corporate marketers.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a Great Antivirus Application

The release of Microsoft Security Essentialshas changed the landscape of antivirus software. We’ve finally got a completely free application that protects against viruses, spyware, and other malware—without killing system performance like some of the “suites” tend to do. In my personal experience, it barely slows down the machine and rarely affects my work—and during a deliberate attempt to download some viruses (for testing purposes), it immediately found and blocked them from doing anything.You don’t have to take my word for it, however. Not only did AV-Test.org find that it detects 98%of their enormous malware database, but AV-Comparatives(a widely known anti-malware testing group) found that MSE was one of only three productsthat did well at both finding and removing malware, including the leftovers. It was also the only free product to grab their “Advanced+” rating—the top honor for an anti-malware solution.

The more tech-oriented readers will probably note that MSE does not do any fancy heuristics to detect viruses that aren’t in the database already, which is a feature offered by some paid solutions. In my opinion, this feature is usually unnecessary and a massive system drag if combined with a healthy dose of not installing questionable nonsense.

Here’s the rest of the story..