Tech Round Up 9-6-09

Every Sunday I am going to attempt a new feature here on Brad’s Tiny World, a weekly tech round up featuring some of the more interesting Product Reviews, Geeky Hacks, and Tech News.
Product Reviews
Sitecom 10-port USB hub review
Running out of USB ports for your peripherals is annoying, and daisy-chaining powered four-port hubs is messy and a waste of plug sockets. A ten-port USB hub, like this one from Sitecom, is much more elegant.

Tooble.tv: 5 High School Students Stick It to the Man with Online Video Downloader

So, Sony BMG doesn’t want you to embed that AC/DC concert footage in your blog or grab the audio from that footage as an MP3? They’d probably have a fit if you stored that footage as an MP4 on your computer and distributed it wherever you liked or – worse yet – remixed it to your heart’s content.

Thanks to Tooble.tv, a fascinating tool that plays footsie with all kinds of copyright law, you can do all of the above and more. Only high school students would have the audacity (or sheer naivete) to pull off a stunt like this.

Gadget Concept: Rings That Allow You To Answer Your Cell With The Phone Hand Gesture
Remember when the hands free mics for cell phones hit critical mass? You’d see people in the grocery store or walking down the street talking to themselves, until you realized they had one of these jammed into their ear. Then the Bluetooth headset craze ran wild and once again many a sane people were deemed crazy by fellow commuters and city patrons.

Hacks
Automatically Buffer Youtube Videos
Many Youtube users do not like the fact that Youtube videos start playing as soon as the video is opened. This objection has several reasons. The most prominent ones are that users with slow connections can experience pauses during playback as the video download speed is slower than the playback speed of the video. Another reason becomes apparent if users open multiple videos at once on Youtube. All of these videos start playing as soon as the page has loaded which is obviously not a good experience.

Geekagami
Origami designs you have never seen before.

USS Enterprise and X-Wing Fighter Origami

8 quick tips to turn you into a Flickr expert
Beneath the key features we are all aware of – photo uploading, image tagging, organizing groups of images into albums – is a deeper layer of functionality.

Some are poorly publicized parts of the Flickr service, while others are add-ons you can use to extend beyond the basics. All of them can help you to use the service more productively.

We’ve picked out the best…

Tech News
Technorati now hiring bloggers (and biting the hand that feeds them?)
Technorati used to be the darling of the Blogging industry. Unfortunately they have lost some of their shine in these past years with declining market share, bugs and downtime, and an unclear strategy for the future.

Apple To Kill Off iPod Classic, Double Down On Touch, iPhone Developer Predicts (AAPL)
Apple’s annual iPod/iTunes product event will take place this Wednesday in San Francisco. In addition to announcing new iTunes features, Apple will almost certainly introduce an updated version of the iPod touch, and perhaps the iPod nano; rumors suggest they’ll both get cameras. (Video cameras, ideally.)