Just a few weeks ago the Eyjafjallaj¶kull volcano in Iceland decided to vent a bit of ash in to the air causing flights across Europe to be halted. It took a week or more for airspace to get back to normal.

The video below shows a visualisation of the flight traffic around Europe over a time frame starting with next to no flights to everything up and running as normal. It’s quite fascinating to see all the traffic building up to what it is on a daily basis.

The flight data is courtesy of flightradar24.com and covers a large fraction of Europe. There are a few gaps (most noticeably France) and no coverage over the Atlantic, but the picture is still clear.

[Read more…]

Microsoft [MSFT] released Windows 7 just 6 months ago on the 22nd October 2009. In those 6 months over 100 Million licences have been sold making the OS the fastest selling Windows OS in history.

100 million licences equates to the OS being installed on 1 in 10 PC’s in the world according to Silicon.com.

Revenue reported by Microsoft in the last few days for the last quarter was $14.5bn putting revenue up 28% year on year. [Read more…]

Google [GOOG] has unveiled YouTube Movie rentals in what seems like a quiet way. Various movies and TV episodes are available to rent for 48 hours at a cost of 99 cents to $4. The Youtube Store can be found at youtube.com/store (although in the UK that URL redirects to a user called Store which indicates this is US only at the moment).

Experiments were done back in January by Google where they were offering $5 rentals. The new system uses Google Check-out to allow you to pay for video.

Independent, Bollywood, Manga and documentary films dominate the charts so far. We expect a formal announcement from YouTube about the store soon, we were tipped off to its opening this morning by reader Ron Ilan, creator of children’s video aggregator site creator Totol.

[Read more…]

For those of you who are MSDN or TechNet subscribers, you can now go ahead and download the final release version of Microsoft Office 2010. The Microsoft Office 2010 download is the RTM version which means “Release to Manufacturing”, ie, it’s what they will print to DVD in the next couple of months.

Microsoft [MSFT] still have the Office 2010 beta for download for those who do not subscribe to TechNet or MSDN although we expect this will close down soon as the official June 2010 launch date for the rest of the world is made available. [Read more…]

We mention iFixit quite often here on gadgetvenue. The company are responsible for taking apart brand new products as they launch and have a focus primarily on Apple [AAPL] products. As soon as something big is launched, the company strip it down and provide the step by step instructions on how to do it.

They are planning on expanding now by creating a global repair community where the project will see them create a repair manual for everything.

iFixit Highlights

* We’re opening up our guides to the world. Think Wikipedia, but for repair.
* Our platform is built from the ground up to make writing and using repair documentation easy.
* Both text and images are easily editable, and come with revision history.
* Reputation and badges reward participation, quality, and experience.
* You can get involved right now! [Read more…]

Google [GOOG] announced yesterday that Google Places is now being rolled out with pilot projects starting across select cities around the world.

Google Places is a service that shows web users the inside of shops and not just the front of the shop. It works similar to street view in that you can zoom right in to the store front and then click to see pictures in the store as described below…

When customers are searching for the right local business, the setting, facilities, ambiance, merchandise, layout, or decor can be important factors in choosing where to go. If you want to find the perfect romantic restaurant for your anniversary dinner, you’ll want to find a place that has the right atmosphere. Or if you need to find a new gym, you’ll probably want to see what sort of equipment and amenities they offer. Place Pages currently feature images from business owners and third-party sources, but we wanted to supplement those with additional photos taken by Google photographers to provide consumers with more ways to get a sense of what awaits them when they step through the door of a business.

[Read more…]

Engadget have reported that McAfee is causing big problems for Windows XP around the world at the moment due to their latest DAT update numbered 5958. The new DAT deletes the svchost.exe file causing a false positive to occur in McAfee which in turn, starts a bunch of problems on the computer such as restarts and loss of a networking connection.

The issue at the moment is only effecting corporate clients and not regular users and McAfee have already pulled the DAT file from their servers while they investigate to prevent any more damage being done. If your McAfee server has already download that DAT then it might be wise to delete it and prevent it being pushed out to XP clients on your network. [Read more…]

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) have finally announced that Bluetooth 4.0 is ready to roll. The press release indicated that the new spec will be brought to market by the end of this quarter which gives them little over 2 months to get things together. This doesn’t mean devices will be ready by that time though, but that they can start building devices with the standard.

The new Bluetooth 4.0 technology steps right past 3.0 and improves energy efficiency allowing it to be a more desirable option in mobile devices.

“Bluetooth v4.0 throws open the doors to a host of new markets for Bluetooth manufacturers and products such as watches, remote controls, and a variety of medical and in-home sensors. Many of these products run on button-cell batteries that must last for years versus hours and will also benefit from the longer range enabled by this new version of the Bluetooth specification,” said Michael Foley, Ph.D., executive director of the Bluetooth SIG.

[Read more…]

Google Chrome OS as well as other Linux builds such as Ubuntu will now be able to use multitouch gestures on their touchpads.

This functionality comes thanks to the Gesture Suite update that now allows several new gestures including pinch to zoom, two finger twist and pivot rotate to name a few.

[Synaptics]Gesture Suite works with Ubuntu, Chrome, Fedora, SuSE, Xandros, Millos Linpus, and RedFlag, and can be used with a variety of touchpad sizes, ranging from the smallest netbooks to larger notebook PCs. Gesture Suite is free… well, it will be: it’ll be bundled for free with notebooks that have a Synaptics TouchPad or ClickPad.

[Read more…]

Starting April 27, Volume Licence Partners will be able to download the final version of Microsoft Office 2010. The reason for this is that it’s reached the RTM stage, ie, release to manufacturing.

The order of which Microsoft [MSFT] will launch the software is manufacturers first on to businesses to retailers and then finally the customer will be able to pick up the software.

The last stage, customers, will be able to buy the Office 2010 software off the shelf around June time. [Read more…]

Google [GOOG] have created an info-graphic that explains how Google Chrome OS will handle printing. The image above (and displayed larger below) shows the process of how Google are planning to work with printers.

The problem with printing on Chrome OS is that it’s cloud based and for that reason, the technology just doesn’t always communicate with traditional printers that require drivers to be installed to work.

While the emergence of cloud and mobile computing has provided users with access to information and personal documents from virtually any device, today’s printers still require installing drivers which makes printing impossible from most of these new devices. Developing and maintaining print subsystems for every combination of hardware and operating system– from desktops to netbooks to mobile devices — simply isn’t feasible.

[Read more…]

On April 1, Sony made a new firmware update available for the PS3 which removed the Other OS install feature. This was just a removal on the older larger Sony PlayStation 3 console because the new slimmer version doesn’t have the feature anyway.

Shortly after installing the firmware update, one user successfully managed to get a partial refund on the basis of the console not being capable anymore of what it used to do. This case was successful and the user managed to claw back £84 from Amazon.

Sony have now made a statement which says… [Read more…]