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Items of Note: Gozer has joined the Twitter community after much pressuring from Aaron. Be sure to follow him @Gozer360!

Listener Feedback: Twitter user woden325 let us know that there is a great disk wiper available called Dban. This is in reference to the harddrive story we talked about on episode 126. A full review will appear on an upcoming episode of The Geekcast

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Geek This Week

Aaron: This week is the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. It airs on Friday and is a two-hour episode. Aaron talks about the series (with very little spoilers) and how it’s changed the sci-fi world.

Gozer: Resident Evil 5. Background of resident evil experience. Res 1 on Saturn, Res 2 on N64 ( a friend’s) Res Code Veronica + Res 3 Nemesis ( delorean) on Dreamcast, Gamecube deal with Resident Evil 0 and Res 1 revamp. Then one of the best games of all time, Res 4. Played a demo disc of it and was not used to it at first. Bought the game and loved it, played it six times, 4 on gamecube and 2X on Wii. Resident Evil 5 is not as good as 4. Still enjoying it but with alot of frustration. Biggest frustration being the inventory system. Pull up your inventory in real time, more frustrating than intense. you can only hold 9 things, res 4 u had a briefcase that u could make bigger. I do like the quick inventory using the d pad. Sheva – needs to be smarter. Can’t tell her what weapon to use. Gotta play this game co-op. Still enjoying the game and the different scenarios. * spoiler* I just beat an old man version the golem dude from res 4 and some half bat half lobster thing that was fairly easy to beat. New multiplayer is dlc for $5. If it’s just deathmatch, iam not getting it. Just run towards each other, stop and shoot would suck. Gotta do some cool zombie mode like left for dead or something like one player is human and the other sends waves of zombies at him during certain points in the match.

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Tech & Game news:

From Lifehacker.com:

Google Chrome Beta Updates, Boasts Improved Speed and New Features

Google Chrome has released a fresh new beta that integrates many of the features available in the nightly releases, including significant speed improvements and a few cool new features. Apart from the speed increases—which claim a 25% boost in their V8 benchmarks and 35% on Sunspider —the new beta includes form autofill, full page zoom, autoscroll, and a tab drag feature for breaking tabs into a side-by-side view.

http://lifehacker.com/5172576/google-chrome-beta-updates-boasts-improved-speed-and-new-features

National Center for the History of Electronics Games

What It Does

Situated at Strong National Museum of Play, the National Center for the History of Electronic Games™ collects, studies, and interprets electronic games and related material and the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other.

Collections: The Center defines electronic games broadly to include video games, computer games, console games, arcade games, handheld games, and toys that combine digital and traditional play. The Center’s collections—nearly 15,000 items and growing—are therefore broadly inclusive and encompass not only games and game platforms, but also a wide variety of other material such as packaging, advertising, publications, electronic-game-inspired consumer products, literary and popular inspirations of electronic-games imagery, historical records, personal and business papers, and other associated artifacts and documents that represent or illustrate the impact of electronic games on American life.

Meanwhile, from May 30 through November 1, 2009, Strong National Museum of Play is hosting Videotopia, a traveling exhibit from the Electronics Conservancy. The show features more than one hundred restored and new arcade video games—from the earliest machines through the first to utilize microprocessors, ROM chips, and 3-D graphics to today’s simulator games. The exhibit enables museum guests to explore the history and technology of the games by playing them on site.

http://www.ncheg.org/

Apple previews iPhone OS 3.0 features.

On Tuesday Apple previewed the new 3.0 OS version of the upcoming iPhone software. Among the added features were copy & paste, which many were looking for. The full run-down of features are as follows:

GPS/mapping tweaks
In-app purchases
Landscape mode in all apps
MMS
P2P networking
Push notifications
System-wide search

The OS is available now for developers and will ship in the summer. iPhone owners get the upgrade for free, while iPod Touch owners will have to pay $9.99 to get the new features.

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Test A Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast

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How To: Update Facebook selectively from Twitter.

Twitter updates are great and even better, there is a Twitter application for Facebook that allows your Facebook status to stay in sync with your Twitter updates. Unfortunately we tweet much more than Facebook friends would like to see and that can really gunk up people’s newsfeeds. Now there is a way to selectively update Facebook via Twitter.

SelectiveTwitter is a FaceBook application that will update your facebook status from Twitter but only when you explicitly say so. SelectiveTwitter only updates with tweets that end with the hashtag #fb. The hashtag is added when you tweet and is intentional. By doing this, you are always in control of when your Facebook status gets updated.

To install the application head over to http://apps.facebook.com/selectivetwitter/ and enter your Twitter ID. Once you hit enter, allow the permissions when prompted. That’s it! The app will monitor your Timeline for the hashtag and push the Facebook update when needed. It also drops the #fb so it’s not a cryptic item at the end of each post.

There are some important things to remember:

* Tweets have to end with #fb. It won’t update if the tag is anywhere else in the tweet.
* The app won’t work if your twitter updates are protected.

Information from http://www.twi5.com/selective-twitter-update-facebook-status-from-twitter/1860/

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Ask A Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast

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Hack: Make Free Ringtones on the LG Dare

Why spend money buying ringtones for songs you don’t like or for parts of songs you don’t want? There is an easy and free way to get the songs you want onto your LG Dare with a program called BitPim. BitPim is a program that allows you to view and manipulate data on many CDMA phones from LG, Samsung, Sanyo and other manufacturers. This includes the PhoneBook, Calendar, WallPapers, RingTones (functionality varies by phone) and the Filesystem for most Qualcomm CDMA chipset based phones.

Download BitPim from http://www.bitpim.org/. Once it’s open you’ll have to create a port using your phone. I tried using usb to do this but had trouble so i connected my phone via bluetooth and it created a port. Go to find phone in the menu in the top, with the magnifying glass. Go to ringers, then to the musical note with the plus sign. Search for your mp3 file then open it in bitpim. Import into bitpim.

Then you have to convert the audio file. Change the sample rate to 48,000. Change the bitrate to 96 or 112. Click convert, may take a minute. Then it allows you to adjust the current position of the track. Click ok. It might warn you that the track is too big. just click yes. Then you’ll see the new ringtone in your ringers section of bitpim. Click send to phone and replace all.

BitPim runs on Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

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The Geek’s View: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast

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Related Episodes:

1. The Geekcast #186 – Gaming and eBooks
2. Geekcast #14
3. The Geekcast #187 – Review of the Xbox 360 Wireless N Adaptor
4. The Geekcast #185 – Google Voice on Your iPhone