If you’re looking to set up an elegant portal for your online identity that brings together social networks and other aspects of your online presence, Flavors.me is as simple and easy to use as it gets.

Photo by Tyson.

Flavors.me is intended to act as a splash page for your virtual identity, routing viewers towards the aspects of your online persona you want to share. You can pull from over a dozen services including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Tumbl.r, Last.fm and more.

Haven’t willfully submitted to the CLIQ’s new update yet? Well, you might want to hold off, because it looks like the new code is causing more heartache than good. A variety of reports on T-Mobile’s official support forums echo the same overarching complaint, which is that messaging is a disaster zone ever since version 1.3.18 took hold — long freezes when using the messaging app or widget, messages not getting sent or being sent multiple times — basically all the things you really don’t want to happen on a device that touts its social connectedness. For what it’s worth, we’ve personally seen this happen on a CLIQ since the update, so we know there’s something going on here; T-Mobile says that the complaints have been “forwarded… to the appropriate people,” so hopefully we’ll see some resolution soon. In the meantime, users experiencing issues are advised to not perform a master reset — important advice, considering that’s one of the first fixes many users might entertain.

Firefox/Chrome: If you love using your keyboard and shun your mouse, you’ll definitely want to try gleeBox, an awesome add-on that lets you effortlessly browse the web without your mouse. Check out the video inside to see it in action.

Click on the picture above for a closer look.

Browsing the web without a mouse isn’t easy. Without any add-ons at all you’re stuck furiously punching the tab key to move through all the available links on the page. Other add-ons help you to navigate without your mouse but often not very intuitively.

Western Digital has yet to actively market its “advanced format” hard drives — in fact, there’s a decent chance you’ve no idea what we’re talking about if you weren’t tuned in on December 11th. In short, it’s a technology that alters a hard drive’s sector size from 512 bytes (the standard for the past three decades) to 4096K, which enables the ECC data to be stored in a more efficient manner. Just recently, WD began to ship Advanced Format Caviar Green hard drives, and the benchmarking gurus over at Hot Hardware strapped one in to see exactly how much of the hype was warranted. For starters, they debunked the thought that Advanced Format drives offered more usable space; Windows reported 931GB of free space on both AF and non-AF 1TB drives. They also go on to explain how to make AF drives play nice with Windows XP, and on the testing front, they found that an aligned AF Caviar Green drive could (mostly) hang with the higher end (and more expensive) Caviar Black. Pop that source link for the full skinny, particularly if you’re a WinXP user looking to snag a new drive.

WD’s ‘Advanced Format’ Caviar Green HDD gets benchmarked, minor benefits found originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Dell’s refresh of the Mini 10 didn’t exactly knock our socks off when we got a chance to spend some quality time with it last month, but it did prove to be a solid performer and did as advertised, playing back 1080p content with aplomb — so long as you did it within a player that could make the most of a Broadcom’s Crystal HD accelerator. Now you have a chance to try it out for yourself, with Dell announcing the machine is shipping and, at $409 with a six-cell battery and a 250GB hard drive, it won’t break the bank either. Just steer clear of Quicktime for movie playback and get the most recent Flash beta on there pronto, yeah?

Dell’s Broadcom Crystal HD Mini 10 now shipping to beta Flashers worldwide originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

There’s hardly a shortage of tablet news these days, but Viliv is managing to cut through somewhat with its relatively robust S10 Blade. Introduced (and toyed with) at CES this year, the Atom-powered device is now up for pre-order at Dynamism (sort of, anyway), with the big reveal being the heretofore unannounced starting price: $699. We get the feeling that some of the more well-appointed units will end up costing far more than that, but at least you know you can get 10.3-inches of resistive multitouch action into your life for less than a carbon fiber Mustang hood. Or pretty much anything else that cost over seven Benjamins.

Viliv’s S10 Blade netvertible priced at $699 and up originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

What would have been a perfectly fine, eco-friendly, nicely paced, and Apple-free podcast is ruined by a surprise appearance by jetsetting Engadget Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky.

P.S.- KHOTAR. Keyboard Haptic Operation and Tactility Assessment Review. Think about it.

Hosts: Nilay Patel, Paul Miller
Guests: Ross Miller, Josh Topolsky
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Mighty Mike – In Bloom (Mike’s Rockabye Mix)

Hear the podcast

Don’t count on your navigation unit seeing a sudden improvement anytime soon, but Raytheon has announced that it’s landed an massive $886 million contract from the U.S. Air Force to develop a new element of GPS called the advanced control segment (or OCX, somehow). Once complete, that promises to not only provide a range of enhancements for military GPS use (including anti-jam capabilities and improved security), but improved accuracy and reliability for civil GPS users as well. Details are otherwise a bit light, and this contract only represents the first of two development blocks, but it looks like GLONASS and Galileo may have to step up their game a bit further if they want to stay competitive in the great sat-nav race.

Raytheon scores $886 million contract to improve GPS capabilities originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

High profile security breaches into cloud-based applications like GMail and Google Apps serve to remind us that when people and companies stores all their information “out there” then security measures are of critical importance.

tweetmeme_url = ‘http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/02/multi-factor-authentication-and-the-cloud.php’;tweetmeme_source = ‘rww’;

In most cases the security breaches are “front door” attacks where a hacker has exploited a weak password or the password recovery process. “Security Breach” has many connotations: an insecure applications, unpatched servers, back-doors or inside jobs. But where a hacker exploits a weak password or a user’s use of a favourite password across multiple sites, who is to blame? Perhaps the only failing in such circumstances is that the application allowed a weak password, or rather that it used single-factor authentication.

Time’s running out for the FCC to present its National Broadband Plan to Congress next month, a set of sweeping regulatory changes geared at making broadband widely and readily available to every nook and cranny of the country — and as the day of reckoning draws near, chairman Julius Genachowski is starting to talk specifics about how the Plan’s going to look. At a speech hosted by the think tank New America Foundation today, Genachowski revealed a few key initiatives geared overall to reach the goal of reclaiming a whopping 500MHz of spectrum to apply toward wireless broadband data over the coming decade. A big part of that puzzle will be something called the Mobile Future Auction where existing spectrum owners (ahem, TV broadcasters) could be given the opportunity to voluntarily — emphasis on “voluntarily” — sell off their airwaves in exchange for a portion of the auction proceeds; it’s claimed that as much as $50 billion in value could be “unlocked” by more efficiently using some of this spectrum, where only about half is currently being used in even the most populous markets. They’ll also be making some moves to encourage more innovation with unlicensed spectrum — an area that has already brought about paradigm-shifting technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth at 2.4GHz — and proposing the launch of a Mobility Fund as part of the Universal Service Fund’s reboot to help build out infrastructure in underserved areas. It all sounds ambitious, yes — but if some of the claims the FCC and others are making about projected wireless data utilization over the next few years are even close to true, drastic action appears to be well-justified.

FCC’s Genachowski previews broadband plan, demands half gigahertz of spectrum for the task originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.