Things can’t be too good for Murdoch and his hangers on these days.  Not only is there the mess in Britain but other countries have become alarmed about the corporation’s influence.

It isn’t just countries worried, but regular people as well.  So much so that a new Firefox addon Murdoch Alert has been released which actively alerts about News Corporation controlled websites.  A Chrome extension Murdoch Block actually blocks those websites.

More details at News Junkie Post.

If 3D printing in reality is too much check out this 3D printer which operates in-game using a horrible amount of redstone circuitry, pistons and other tricks.  Certifiably insane but ingenious at the same time.  He’s from New Zealand and there was wool involved but I’m not one to spread rumours…  This particular version prints an 8x8x12 block.  Each 8×8 slice has to be loaded so it’s a bit of work but the results speak for themselves.

Cody Sumter and Jason Boggess are running a project by in the MIT Media Lab called Minecraft.Print(). As the name suggests it’s all about printing out parts of your Minecraft world via 3D printing. They sum it up in 3 steps.

1. Play it – Make cool stuff in Minecraft
2. Prep it – To avoid printing the entire world, you specify the region by placing a combination of specific blocks (obsidian, diamond, gold, iron) at two points to define the 3D area to print.
3. Print it

Minecraft.Print() outputs a standard model file ready for 3D printing.

They printed a portal companion cube and the Enterprise but there’s endless possibilities here. The video explains it well;

h/t: Gamepron

Google has a couple of new things in the works.

One of them is yet another attempt to squeeze into the social media game called Google Plus or Google+ or G+ or whatever.

G+ uses friend circles which are frankly more like walls. We use these walls in real life so that different friends don’t react negatively. In this way the G+er can bitch about work to one circle of friends while remaining friends with the oblivious boss on another circle. Be interesting to see if anything slips. Google sum it up delicately and well as ‘sharing just the right things with just the right people’.

G+ also has an obvious ‘I’m available’ hangout state which might be helpful to those that get inundated with bothersome requests for attention if they dare check their social site.

I do not yet have an account there as they are trickling out the accounts but will probably let you all know more when I get in. I’m not going to pretend I have high hopes. It’s not that I think G+ will be technologically deficient and indeed it’s not hard to be ‘better’ than Facebook. The core thing is most people are already on Facebook and it’s that gaping hole of no friends that is going to make it hard for G+ to succeed.

Google have also been busy in Gmail, their successful webmail service. To see what it’s about go to email settings then themes then select one of the Preview themes. This cleaner new theme is probably going to be the new default soon.

Well Firefox 5 was out on the 21^st June. I’ve barely gotten used to Firefox 4 released around 3 months ago. The rapid releases are a reaction to the rapid release schedule of Chrome, another popular browser.

This release doesn’t seem to have any whiz-bang features but it does have a solid set of under the hood improvements to improve the overall experience for developers and users of the browser. There’s security fixes, improved Linux integration, better standards support, many performance improvements and better spell checking in some locales.

So the result is looking the same as Firefox 4 but is a richer, faster experience.

Let’s gloss over the promised extra ads from Microsoft and the sale itself. Let’s gloss over the downtime. Let’s even gloss over the frequency of people who are on Skype appear offline but are both online and available. While we’re at it let’s gloss over when messages you or they sent appear hours later.

Skype was free, Skype was easy, it was enough to gloss over a lot.

Skype has installed crapware on one of our systems without my permission.  I’m not impressed. Skype has installed crapware called ‘EasyBits Go on many Skype users systems with or without permission, including business users. It appears that only Windows users have been affected.

It cannot be properly uninstalled. Skype have confirmed it’s not malware exactly but have not kept users informed nor provided a solution to the problem.

If you’ve been affected you can get rid of it following these steps.

I am unsure why Skype would do something this foolish.   As for EasyBits go I think it’s quite clear why they took part in this. As they said, “Since the update, game sessions have jumped from 850,000 top daily game sessions to over 7 million game sessions globally yesterday.” Well, isn’t that peachy?

Now anyone, please, is there a better alternative to Skype than Google phone?