Where’s the bag? Thanks to SwinMan, no bag needed! Using their special inside-our waterproofing technology, Shuffle’s can now be made fully waterproof at up to depths of 10 foot, without the need of bulky plastic bags. Also great if you feel like rocking to some tunes in the shower, provided you can find somewhere to clip the device. No suggestions made on our part. Let’s look at the price comparisson.

Standard 1GB Shuffle - £51.54 (Amazon.co.uk) or $79 (Amazon.com)
Fully Waterproofed 1GB Shuffle - $250 (SwimMan)

So why shell out that bit extra? Well, included in the price you get the 2G iPod Shuffle itself, the SwimMan Waterproofing Technology & a SwimMan Waterproof Headset. All-in-all, according to the official website, this is worth far more than what they’re charging for it. Also included is a one-year warranty, and a 30-day money back guarantee, no questions asked.

This package includes both the 2nd Generation Apple Ipod Shuffle waterproofed by SwimMan and the SwimMan Waterproof Headset. Shuffle comes in original package with original accessories (charging dock, iPod non-waterproof headphones, foam earbud pads, manuals, warranty info, etc.) SwimMan Waterproof Headset also comes with manual.

Is this hype? Is this worth it? Would you use it? Leave your comments and let us know, we’re interested to hear your thoughts! Sourced from Engadget.

Featured Sites: Gaming, Gadgets and Gizmos

Breaking news has just come in. All Blue-Ray & HD-DVD titles have now officially, been cracked! Stuff like this must be doing wonders for all of the major Hollywood companies, already skeptical about which format to back.

Thanks to the great hackers at the Doom9 forums, it’s not even been two months since discovering a way to extract the HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc “volume keys” to decrypt AACS DRM on individual films, and we’re already getting reports that the proffesional DRM hacker ‘arnezami’ has found the so-called “processing key” that are being used to decrypt all of the DRM that is being used on the next-gen formats. Simply put, this means that instead of requiring keys for each individual HD film, this single processing key can be used to unlock, decrypt, and backup every HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc film released to dare. No doubt that this will change soon, but all current titles on the shelves are 100% copyable. No individual codes needed! Just all-for-one, and one-for-all! According to DRM hacker arnezami, the now internationally infamous finder of the codes, “nothing was actually hacked, cracked or even reverse engineered.” So in other words, this means that all arnezami needed to do, was to keep a little list in his memory, or on a post-it-note, see which numbers changed, and voila! The key appeared. Or so Engadget make out. If, it’s kind of a wonder that nobody beat these kick-ass hackers to the job anyway…

Featured Sites: LCD Televisions | Robotics, Computing, Gaming

Well, as you can see (unless your viewing this from an RSS reader), we’ve got ourselves a new layout! If you are using an RSS feed, come visit for the sake of seeing the spiffyness. I guarantee that you’ll be impressed.

Speaking of RSS feeds, we’ve updated our RSS area in the sidebar, to display our current numbers of readers who are subscribed to our main feed. Currently? 574. That’s gone up alot… Here are the stats.

Sunday - 59 RSS Readers
Monday - 71 RSS Readers
Tuesday - 141 RSS Readers
Wednesday - 574 RSS Readers

So as you can see, some pretty impressive progress! People clearly liked that post I wrote on ProBlogger, what with it hovering just under 1,000 Diggs and all.

We’ve also changed our advertising options, and now as you can see, we have space in the header for advertising. If you’re interested, just drop us a line at Sponsorship@Techzi.net, and we’ll chase you up. Thanks for your patience during this ever-changing time!

UPDATE: A fellow Blogger requested an interview, and seeming as his blog was fairly new, why not? It could turn on to be the next TechCrunch.

Over this week, I’ve done several different interviews with people for both Profy and Techzi… Today, I managed to catch up with Gary Jones from BlueFur, the site I reviewed not so long ago in exchange for a domain. Here’s what he had to say about his company, services, and how everything works at BlueFur.

Gary, it’s great to have you here with us today on Techzi.net - Now I’m led to believe that you’re the owner of BlueFur. Is this correct?
I am part owner of the company, but my main day to day responsibilities is to look after Sales & Marketing. I am more of the front man who you see in the public and on the internet.

Great… Sorry about getting that wrong. How does your hosting at BlueFur match up and compare to that of you competitors? Would bonuses do you offer? Why should people go with you?
Most people would agree that choosing hosting is a very hard choice as there are many providers with very few distinguishing factors other then
space/bandwidth and price. We do have several distinctive features that makes us different.

One of the distinctive features is that throughout the year we provide free online courses. These courses range from MySQL, PHP and basic cPanel usage to marketing. The courses are all done live over the phone with a screen that they can watch the presenter demonstrate the course material.

Another distinguishing factor is we offer 2 automated backup tools. These tools allow you to back up your site files and mySQL with a set it and
forget it software. This software we created so that customers can feel secure in knowing that they have there own copy of there site.

Although there are many hosts in Canada we are one of the few that take Canadian Currency with servers and staff in Canada. We are one of the only providers that has 2 locations in Canada one in Montreal and one in Vancouver. This allows us to provide a unique failover solution where if
your site were to be down on one server it would come up in a separate server in a different geographical location. This means that if the
datacenter is having issues your site and email would still function to work in a separate location.

Wow… If the courses alone aren’t a good enough reason, I don’t know what is! How does the hosting work, and what plans do you offer? Do you offer customized plans to cater for all types of people?
We have close to 130+ plans and options to choose from. We have something that fits every budget and requirement. We do provide custom plans based on the requirements of an individual.

130? Brilliant stuff! Does the company have any future activities planned? Any aims or goals for the near future?
Our immediate goal is to finish our change from MonsterHosting.ca to BlueFur.com as smoothly as possible.

Ah yes, I did read up on that. So why did you decide to run the domain-for-a-review scheme in the first place? I myself was granted ZiMedia.net with it, as you know…
Part of the move of names is that we are going to loose Mind Share for the old name. I wanted to create some new Mind Share for the new name and a bit of buzz in the blog sphere with the new name. I was also looking for some honest opinions on the name from people outside of the hosting industry. The feedback thus far has been great.

Nice to hear. Can you tell us more about the team involved? Where are you based, and how many people work on the various parts of BlueFur?
Our staff all work through Tele-Office style where they work from home. We currently have 12 full time staff and several part time staff. I am
located in Surrey, BC but the staff are located across North America.

What unique approaches does your company take, to achieve the goals that they do?
We sound board a lot of our ideas off real world business people before pushing to far into it. We listen to our customers and build plans around
there suggestions to solve problems long term. We also try to have fun in everything we do.

It’s been a pleasure to talk to you. Everybody, that was Gary Jones from BlueFur.com! I hope you learned something new there! That said, I’m sure that the BlueFur hosting is great, but I’m with InfinFX, and with them we survived the Digg Effect hitch-free! Not bad going I say. They’re even using my Plesk control panel in their screenshots.

Here are the statistics after the Digg Effect struck us, after the ProBlogger article I wrote was promoted to the frontpage. Random, useless statistics live on! That said, there were some real shockers in stall, in both the browser & OS sectors.

Operating Systems

73.89% - Windows (Alot less than expected!)
19.19% - Mac (Incredible, in my opinion!)
4.93% - Linux (Still more than I’d expected!)
1.99% - Other (Wonder what, in this case?)

Operating System Versions

I only have the statistics here from Windows and Mac… Here are the CORRECTED Windows percentages. (My apologies for the original mistake! I had to copy these figures out by hand you know! )

77.55% - Windows XP (Expected at least this much.)
11.10% - Windows Vista (Really? Early adopters like myself I see, or beta users. )
11.35% - Other

And here are the Mac stats…

82.43% - Mac OS X Intel (Nice to see!)
17. 57% - Mac OS X PowerPC (Alot of people obviously still holding off updating!)

Browser Stats

70.30% - Firefox (300,000,000 downloads as of today!)
13.75% - Safari (More Safari users than Internet Explorer? WOW!)
12.38% - Internet Explorer (A decline in the market leader?)
1.98% - Opera (Very small amount of people using Opera.)
1.5% - Camino (Even less number using Camino.)
0.5% - Netscape Navigator (Pretty much nobody using Netscape.

Screen Sizes - Why? Dunno…

29% - 1280 x 1084 (An industry standard it seems now!)
23.5% - 1024 x 768
14% - Unknown (What happened here?)
7% - 1280 x 800 (My laptop’s screensize.)
6.5% - 1600 x 1200
5% - 1440 x 900
3.5% - 1680 x 1050
2.5% - 1280 x 960
2% - 1400 x 1050
1.5% - 1152 x 864
1.5% - 1920 x 1200 (The expected size of my new monitor… Still in the mail.)
1% - 1152 x 870
1% - 2560 x 1024 (Wow… Time for me to get an upgrade!)
0.5% - 2680 x 1050 (Sweet resolution man!)
0.5% - 1280 x 854
0.5% - 1280 x 768 (
0.5% - 800 x 600 (Nooo! The horror!)

I can’t be bothered posting the screen aspect ratio… Very boring, and about 80 different types. Another day maybe.

Timezones

The information is still incomplete, and flooding in by the second.

Language & Region

Again, we’ve not got the full data ready here yet.

Referring sources

Guess? Digg, via ProBlogger of course!

More information coming soon… Sorry it’s incomplete! Just thought that what we had was pretty surprising!

My favourite comment out of all the ones on Digg? “Nicely done on the article David. You certainly have a thick skin and a quick wit for all the garbage being thrown in these comments. I think your next article should be ‘a 12 year old shows Digg readers how to be mature’.” Why? They’re right… I never knew what kind of a place Digg was. Ah well, who cares. Their words, rants, flames, and general smitings have failed to deter me. The blog must go on!

5000 bricks, so little time. The new Lego Millennium Falcon promises to be the biggest consumer Lego model yet, weighing in at an impressive 32″ long! The Lego mini-figure scale-model replica promises to pack the geeky punch that Lego Star Wars fans world wide have been dreaming of, and costs a hefty $500, leaving possible buyers left clinging on by flesh and bone on the bang-per-buck ratio. Many argue that such an extravagant model is worth it, but is it? Let’s calculate the costs here… It works out to 10 cent a brick, which all-in-all, isn’t that bad.

If you have no life, are a dedicated fan, have a hole in your pocket or are looking for that little something extra this Christmas, the Falcon is for you! For those of you living in the UK like myself, you’ll find that it will set you back £350… ($700). Rather unfair I feel… At the end of they day, the Ultimate Collector’s Edition Millennium Falcon is still one hell of a cracker. Check it out now at the Official Lego Store.

Sourced from CrunchGear.

I caught up with Ray van den Bel, a professional LinkedIn networker and found out more about him, his job, and what a ‘Pro Networker’ is supposed to do! Ray was the person who originally introduced me to networking all the months ago, and what better time than now, as he sits on top of the LinkedIn answers board to ask him a few questions?

So Ray, it’s great to have you here with us today on Techzi.net - Can you explain to everyone who you are, and what a ‘Professional Networker’ does?
I always have been fascinated by the interaction of people, I always wanted to become a diplomat in the foreign office. Being at the centre of cultures and interesting people. An online networker like me is just like a networker in real life. We try to find matching people, expertise and build huge networks use best-practices in order to do that. Web 2.0 though gives us new way to interact in a quality way to each other using IM, Skype, video online, blogs, communities etc.

I know like myself you’re a Web 2.0 fan, will you explain how that effects networking?
The internet always has been a very 2 dimensional place to be; you just showed information on a webpage for others to read and to use. Web 2.0 now enables us to make the transition to a more interactive, action driven environment on which we can show our profile, our communication style, our personallity. We are trying hard on web 2.0 and web 3.0 especially (Second Life) to make a close fit to normal life interaction and that it is why its so interesting and why you can be successful doing it, also from a business point of view

Great! How do you treat networking? Is it a job? A hobby? An extra online income-stream? How many clients do you have?
The trick is to understand yourself, your own communication style and to understand the communication style of the other person or organisation, so that you can target that effectively. It was a hobby that is turning more and more into my business. People have started to notice me and my method. They like what they see and they notice that it can make a huge difference to their online strategy… At the moment I have roughly 5 clients, all very different, ranging form personal coaching (jobhunting using networks and targeted networking) to Online strategy consulting.

Ray, I believe that Nike were recently interested in hiring you to be their strategy & new business development director. Can you tell me if you’re often approached by such big companies about Web 2.0, and what the job involves?
A lot of companies realize that they cannot reach their client effectively anymore with the usual methods (phone, email, brochures etc) . They are also starting to realize that they only can if they create a targeted community to reach out to people with same interests. Web 2.0 and web 3.0 enables that if you do it the right way. That is why they approach me.

Web 3.0? I can see you’re thinking about the future already… Anyhow, I’ve got to go, but it’s been great to catch up with you!

That was Ray van den Bel everybody! Web 2.0/Social Networking Expert.

No idea why a Digg button is showing for my article I did on ProBlogger.net - I didn’t put it there. Perhaps a pingback to this article in the comments? Anyhow…

Hmm… My computer which was scheduled to arrive today never did. I was holding on, and my mum even stayed home, from work to make sure everything came fine. Ah well. Tomorrow is a new day, and if the PC is one day late, I’ll live. The fact that the coming gave a definite date though, then when we rang to check with customer service at 3PM today, it was again confirmed, is rather disappointing. I expected better.

Speculation suggests he may also be a “1980s pinball machine”. Interesting idea…

Sourced from Wired.

Gizmodo played a very smart move, acting as the ‘dumb consumer’ in the latest Apple date leak. Matt Buchanan, ProBlogger, hopped along to his local Apple Store (Soho), and asked various employees about “that new Apple TiVo”. The employees politely explained that infact, it wasn’t just another “TiVo” and that they ship on February 27th. Oops! Somebody let the cat out the bag…

According to Matt, it’s not a rock solid date, but it’s all we’ve got to go on so far. Nice digging!