News written by James Delahunty (February, 2009)

Panasonic Corp. has revealed plans to introduce new slimmer and more energy-efficient Plasma televisions to the Japanese market in a few months time. The company has slashed the thickness of its Plasma televisions by about three quarters. Additionally, the new Plasma sets will only consume about half the electricity of models currently available on the market.

While more expensive and power hungry than LCD, Plasma is a newer display technology that is believed to have plenty of room for improvement. Panasonic is the largest producer of Plasma TVs in the world, ahead of South Korea's Samsung Electronics. The improvements to its product line-up are part of an ambitious Panasonic goal to double its combined sales of LCD and Plasma TVs to 15.5 million units in the year beginning April.

At around 1-inch in depth, a new 50-inch model will be offered from Panasonic in Japan starting in April, with a price tag around 600,000 yen ($6,685). A 54-inch model will be priced higher at 700,000 yen. The new models will make it to the North American market in Summer. The 50-inch model consumes an estimated 260 kilowatt hours of electricity a year.

While you can load up YouTube (and other flash-based) videos on a Nintendo Wii or PlayStation 3 (PS3), the Xbox 360 console doesn't make it such an easy task. You can use NXE with Windows Media Center to load a browser program, but that has its own limitations and needs you to keep on your computer. If you simply have Windows XP or similar and would like to be able to watch YouTube videos (or Google Video, or several other sources), then you can without Windows Media Center.

There has also been a similar guide added for Nintendo Wii, and a simple look at an application to download content from YouTube without needing to rely on web services.

How to watch YouTube videos on Xbox 360
The guide uses TVersity to stream directly from any YouTube URL you provide. TVersity will download, prepare and stream the content for you, where it can be displayed full screen by the Xbox 360 console. Some limitations can't be avoided, TVersity transcodes on-the-fly so a relatively modern (in tech terms) computer helps, as well as a broadband connection to avoid problems downloading from YouTube. The guide will work for any other web video you can feed to TVersity as well.

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a bill that seeks to delay the transition to all-digital television broadcasts in the United States until June 12th. The 264-158 vote delays the planned switchover from the original February 17th date. The delay, opposed by most Republicans, is supported by President Obama as up to 20 million households are thought to be unprepared for the transition.

Around 13 million people hold expired coupons to subsidize the cost of a digital converter box, which is needed for households with analog televisions after the switch. Millions of requests for coupons are currently pending as the supply has run out under demand. Those thought to be mostly affected by the switch are poor, elderly and rural households.

"We believe it is irresponsible to ask mostly rural, or elderly consumers to reach into their own pockets to deal with this transition when many folks, including the federal government, are making a profit," said Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst at Consumers Union. The U.S. Government raised about $19 billion from companies bidding for use of the vacated spectrum. Qualcomm, for example, paid $550 million to use the spectrum for its mobile video service. It was opposed to the delay.

A man has died after a mobile phone reportedly exploded in his shirt pocket last Friday. The incident happened in a store in Guangzhou, China. The man worked as a shop assistent at the store, and reportedly had recently swapped out his handset's original battery for a new one. An employee at a nearby store heard the bang and went to investigate, only to find the man lying on the ground in a pool of blood.

Local media reports indicate that the explosion severed an artery in his neck, and he died from massive blood loss. A make and model of the handset has not yet been released by Police, but local media reported the fatal explosion occurred at a Lenovo store, but it is unclear whether it was an official outlet or a shop selling Lenovo products.

Reports of incidents such as this in the past usually involve the use of a low-quality third-party battery. Handset makers, and other manufacturers of consumer electronics products highly recommend that original batteries developed for the products are not swapped out for third-party batteries, particularly because of isolated incidents such as this one.

Mozilla released an update to its popular web browser on Tuesday to address security flaws an attacker could utilize to run unauthorized software on a victims machine. Firefox 3.0.6 is available to download from AfterDawn now. The update also fixes a reported issue which caused parts of a screen to be improperly displayed after Firefox has been running for a long time. Other fixes include improved ability for scripted commands to work with plugins.

Download Firefox 3.0.6 now from:
https://www.afterdawn.com/software/network_software/web_browsers/firefox.cfm/v3_0_6

Changelog from Firefox 3.0.5

• Fixed several security issues.
• Fixed several stability issues.
• In previous versions of Firefox, some users experienced a problem where parts of the screen were not properly displaying after Firefox was open for long periods of time.
• Improved the ability for scripted commands to work properly with plugins. (bug 438830)
• Removed the client user ID from crash reports.
• Fixed issues with the display of some Indic scripts.
• See the Firefox 3.0.5 release notes for changes in previous releases.

We have recently added quite a few new guides and articles to the site as some of you may have noticed. Three of these new additions cover maintaining privacy and recovering accidentally deleted files. We all use the Internet and many of us share computers, and so we like to keep our material private whether or personal reasons, or business reasons. I'm sure we have all accidentally deleted something important too once and went into a panic about it.

Also, many of us have, by now, sold on an older computer when upgrading, usually with the operating system still intact. So the following three guides can help pretty much anybody to give a quick look over, or recommend to someone on the forum later on.

How to Securely Delete Files
This article uses a great freeware product many of you are aware of called Eraser. Eraser has the ability to make data unrecoverable (or at least unrecoverable by the standards of all publicly known recovery methods). This can be useful if you are selling your computer or have documents that are no use to you anymore, but still contain sensitive data. Additionally, this article also covers overwriting the free space of a drive to make previously deleted files unrecoverable too. It's a useful tool and a quick read.