Its been a good ride driving this site on my own most times for the last 10 years. It has went through a few variations mainly centered around tech news and such with a good amount of musical or just plain weird news peppered throught.

But, as with all things, they must change. Today I am announcing another link in the evolution of Phat1. We will no longer be posting any tech related news to the site. All older articles with still be available at a link I will disclose at a later date. The new site will focus on an older passion of mine– Custom knife-making.

This will happen on or around Sep 1st 2011. Stay tuned for more details.

AT&T released some very interesting tidbits of info. Among them, the following:

AT&T has worked tirelessly to address this data explosion through a wide variety of means.  For example, it has purchased spectrum on the open market when available and has added thousands of cell sites and additional backhaul capacity to its network grid.  AT&T has also deployed distributed antenna systems, 24,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the country, and Wi-Fi Hotzones in heavy usage areas—such as Chicago’s Wrigleyville, New York’s Times Square, and others—to off-load traffic from its mobile network.  All told, AT&T invested $21.1 billion in capital expenditures to upgrade its wireless network between 2008 and 2010.   These types of measures, however, are increasingly inadequate solutions to AT&T’s growing capacity constraints.  AT&T is using up its spectrum at an accelerating rate, and the wireless broadband revolution is just beginning.

That, at least to me, sounds like the very truth of the matter– 18 months ago.

SOURCE: mobilizeeverything, PDF Link

UPDATE: Feb 8, 2011 The commenting system will remain offline until later in the week. We are trying to assure that things are locked down as they should be. Stay tuned.

Suck it!

UPDATE : Feb 3,2011 The issue has been traced to the permission that was allowed to the Disqus commenting plugin. This has been addressed and fixed quickly. Our underlying issue is with the way Google lists our site in their search results. Such as this page. If that presents a warning page it just means that Google hasn’t reviewed the site again. The whole thing has been disruptive and not destructive.

UPDATE: Feb 19 2011 After 2 weeks of investigation I have no reason to think that there was any sort of bug within the Disqus wordpress plug-in itself.  Moreover it was traced to another less than secure plug-in who shall remain nameless.

So, just to be clear– I found no problems or issues within the Disqus plug-in. In fact, it rated pretty high on the phat1 security scale.

However 64 bit users were left out. Although we had some users report success using this method, over 80% of the feedback I personally received indicated quite the contrary. Almost all users were still looking at the following.

Today that will change.  There are probably other options to achieve the same result but this is a sure-fire way to get there easily.

Testing Machine

Sad face because of a limited amount of system ECC RAM.  The system I am using today is a Dell Precision Workstation 470 using the stock configuration. A fresh installation of Windows 7 Ultimate was performed prior to writing this article. All Windows updates were done along with installing Apple iTunes/Quicktime and Google Chrome.

The solution? Enter Ardfry Imaging and their fantastic PSD codec. The issue that most users faced could be addressed with a two minute install and reboot.

Installation

Download the codec using one of the links in this article, and double click to start the install just like any other windows program. Ardfry provides a 15 day free trial to make sure the solution will work for your machine. The full license is only $19.95 USD, which is a small price to pay for a fantastic program.

You are then presented with the standard Windows installation routine.

And the EULA.

More Windows installation action.

And more

Interestingly at this point the setup routine seems to invoke another MSI installer that proceeds to install what seems to be a 32 bit version of the codec. Our guess is that it installs both 32 and 64 bit versions instead of specific OS version via detection.

And then the obligatory “Setup must restart your computer” dialog.

And after a reboot, voila, PSD thumbnails appear just (almost) like any other image file we normally encounter.

There are some optional settings available in the start menu program group that was just created. Users may want to have a look and see if anything may apply to their particular machine or needs.

And then suddenly while I browsed PSD files on a Windows Home Server share, an explorer.exe crash.

Success!

So I rebooted the machine once more. And all seems to be fine now. And I am able to browse and view the thumbnails via network shares with no issue.

Viewing PSD files.

There you have it. A long drawn out blog post instructing you how to install a simple windows program.

I would like to thank David with Ardfry Imaging for supplying the software for testing and reviewing today. So head on over to Ardfry.com and check out their programs. Don’t forget to show some love to the developers that bring useful tools to the party.

Sadly, there is no publicly available codec for the Photoshop PSD format but the newly released Microsoft Expression Blend 3 design tool (which, by the way, is nothing short of amazing for WPF and Silverlight design) includes such a codec so installing Blend 3 automatically installs the PSD codec. For those who don’t have a need for Blend and don’t want to install it, here is a little hacking guide to install the codec (a 256KB dll) and use it separately:

Keep reading to see just how easy it is to add the a PSD thumbnail preview to windows in 3 minutes or less

If you attempt to view a folder of PSD files on Windows 7 it will resemble this.

Why Microsoft didn’t include this ability in the first place is anyone’s guess. A quick search on the topic produces some very interesting replies from people from within both Adobe and Microsoft answering questions publicly.

Also note that this method has been tested on both 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista. You MUST be an Administrator on the local machine to perform this or any codec installation.

Codec Installation: Two files and two steps.

The two necessary files you will need to download are below.

1. The actual codec file from Microsoft PSDCodec.dll . 
2. MS Visual C++ 2008 SP1  Redist Package (x86)

Installing the files

First install the C++ package. You can learn more about what this package is and download it directly from Microsoft if you prefer by visiting this link. When installed you may be prompted to restart your computer but it is not necessary yet as we will be restarting after the next step.

Once that is complete, Copy PSDCodec.dll to some location on the harddisk, e.g. “C:Program FilesCommon FilesPSDCodec” to install the codec in it’s new home.

Registering the codec

Now its time to register the codec. And not register in the traditional sense by entering in all your personal information but instead by using Windows built-in tools to register .dll files as command components in the registry.

From an administrator’s command prompt by clicking the start button, and then clicking “run”. In the windows that opens type “cmd“. That will open a command prompt window. Now issue the following command to register the codec with your computer:

regsvr32 “C:Program FilesCommon FilesPSDCodecPSDCodec.dll”

Now Its time to reboot your computer and the log back into your machine.

Success

That’s it, Windows  Explorer should soon begin to display thumbnails for all PSD files that were saved from Photoshop with the “Maximum Compatibility” option (most are). As a added side effect, WIC-aware image viewers such as FastPictureViewer Professional and even Adobe’s own Bridge automatically benefit from the codec installation and uses it to open and display the same PSD files with full fidelity.

I hope this help those who were faced with the same issue. Please a comment below.

Cheers.

UPDATE: Some readers report that this method does not work for 64bit versions of Windows 7. I am investigating other workarounds to this issue. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 2: 05/26/2010 I have posted another software solution here. Leave us some feedback to let us know how it works for you.

UPDATE 3: 10/10/2010 After 138,000 downloads, there are still very few comments. We still get lots of hits on this page every day. This seems to be an issue that MS has so far, failed to address. If this method works for you, or if you used the codec from Ardfry or even if you have another working solution, please drop a comment and share with everyone.

Thanks to its powerful and simple API,

more than a hundred applications already use Ping.fm to update all the main social networks and Seesmic commits to maintaining and improving the Ping.fm platform. Not only has Twhirl supported Ping.fm for about a year, but we are also preparing to open Seesmic apps with our own plug-in architecture so we understand and care about the developer community. Ping.fm co-founders, Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough, are joining the Seesmic team full time and will keep improving Ping.fm as well as integrating it with our Seesmic applications. The number one request from Ping.fm users is to have more powerful clients support postings to their social networks, so they should be pleased to know Seesmic applications will be adding this functionality. Seesmic is also welcoming ping.fm angel investors as shareholders and advisors Joi Ito (@joi), Reid Hoffman (@quixotic) who was already a Seesmic shareholder and Mohamed Nanabhay (@mohamed). Seesmic applications on Blackberry,  Android,  Web,  Windows and OSX via Air

We will all have advanced Ping.fm integration very shortly and therefore will instantly support 50 social networks.

We’re in full Google Nexus One bat-poop-crazy mode for the next 24 hours or so. And as such we can tell you that the official support page went live for a fleeting moment. And as quickly as it appeared, it vanished, leaving us what you see above. And don’t be alarmed: We’re still expecting the Nexus One to launch with Android 2.1, never mind the picture. Also of note is that the “Terms of Sale” page apparently confirmed the previous pricing numbers, though it, also, has disappeared. [via TmoNews] (Thanks, Jerry!)

And be sure to join us for a meta-liveblog Tuesday as we expect the launch of the Nexus One. In the meantime, check out the N1 chatter in our forums.

Source: Android Central

I leave you with this