Take a look at this new roundup of 30 Awesome Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials.

There's an interesting thought: Lots of browser market share is still stuck in IE6, according to this article about 8%. Total IE6 share is 24%. What if Mozilla can pick that up over time and Microsoft can't? Is it just me or does this look like IE6 (well, and a bad IE8) could screw Microsoft???

An anonymous reader writes "The cyber-bullying trial of Lori Drew opened yesterday. She was indicted for conspiring to access and accessing MySpace illegally in order to 'further a tortious act, namely, intentional infliction of emotional distress' (PDF of the indictment). The BBC has background on the case, the NYTimes covers the opening statements, and Wired has today's testimony."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walter Mossberg, who has been reviewing technology since 1991 for the Wall Street Journal in his weekly "Personal Technology" column, is convinced the companies that succeed in this type of econaclypse, as AllThingsD has dubbed the economy, will be those that focus on innovation.

Combining their forces, and allowing these apps to do the work for me is probably the closest I will be to becoming a cyborg, at least until Steve Jobs announces that we can get an iPhone implanted in our heads for Christmas in 2013.

Google adds people power with SearchWiki..

The Easter holiday may have already passed, but every day is an Easter-egg hunt for software, DVD and video-game sleuths. These nifty nuggets hold intentional hidden messages or features.

chirishnique and other readers sent in a story in AFP about a heroic supercomputer computation that has verified Einstein's most famous equation at the level of subatomic particles for the first time. "A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms. ... [T]he mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five per cent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 per cent? The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons. ... [E]nergy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905." Update: 11/21 15:50 GMT by KD : New Scientist has a slightly more technical look at the accomplishment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's SearchWiki—the feature that allows people to annotate, add, delete, and move around search results—will soon be available to all users logged in with a Google account. The company's not sure yet what it plans to actually do with the data, though.

The long-awaited 2.2 firmware updates for iPhones and iPod touch models hit iTunes at midnight last night, pushing a good deal of new features and long-awaited fixes to the mobile devices. We've already detailed some of the major new features already: Street View with walking/transit directions in Google Maps (iPhones only, unfortunately) and "emoji" face emoticons, over-the-air podcast downloading, and, while not really a feature, it's expected that 2.2 will be jailbroken before you know it. There's a good number of interface and usability improvements too, like improved HTML email formatting and location sharing, stability and menu bar tweaks to Safari, and a few other punch-list items. I'm downloading my 240MB-ish iPod update just fine this morning; tell us your impressions of 2.2 in the comments. iPhone 2.2 Update Available Now [Gizmodo]

desmondhaynes sends along a posting from the TechWatch blog detailing the sale of Transmeta (most recently discussed here). Linus moved ten time-zones west, from Finland to Santa Clara, CA, to join Transmeta in March 1997, before this community existed. Here is our discussion of the announcement of the Crusoe processor from 2000. Our earliest discussion of Transmeta was the 13th Slashdot story. "Transmeta, once a sparkling startup that set out to beat Intel and AMD in mobile computing, announced that it will be acquired by Novafora. The company's most famous employee, Linux inventor Linus Torvalds, kept the buzz and rumor mill about the company throughout its stealth phase alive and guaranteed a flashy technology announcement in early 2000. Almost nine years later Transmeta's journey is over." Update: 11/21 16:25 GMT by KD : It's not the 13th Slashdot story, only the 13th currently in the database. We lost the first 4 months at one point.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Windows only: Wallpaper Shifter is a lightweight wallpaper randomizer. The installation is 8.11MB which by portable-application standards isn't super light, but the system resources consumed by Walllpaper Shifter are extremely lightweight.
Wallpaper Shifter is a little program that starts when you login to Windows and picks a random wallpaper from your list. Depending on the wallpaper width and height, it can automagically scale it for you to fit your desktop without deforming it's proportions. It does not remain running in the background so no system resources are used.

If you need a more complex wallpaper changer that will stay active during your Window session, check out John's Background Switcher. Wallpaper Shifter is freeware, Windows only. Wallpaper Shifter 7 [via gHacks]

The BBC has a fantastic, 3-minute clip touring a frozen pizza factory that manufactures 2 million pizzas a week. There's something about precision, large-scale automation, even when the technology isn't necessary cutting edge, that's even more telling of our technological place in the world than sleek touchscreen phones and GPS navigators.

Windows only: Free file browser Q-Dir makes for a good USB drive app or installed replacement for Windows Explorer for those who do a serious amount of file swapping, or just like to be able to keep multiple folder views open at once. The app—which installs by default, but can run by itself after renaming it "Q-Dir.exe"—offers a customizable number of panes, though the default four-square is a pretty good starting point. You can save any view you like to a favorite button, along with adding shortcuts to frequently-accessed folders. There's also a quick-filter box in the lower-right for easy sorting and finding, and if you use Q-Dir regularly, you'll be glad it keeps your right-click shell extensions and offers its own "*Q-Dir" launch option on right-clicking a folder. Q-Dir is a free download for Windows systems only. Only need two panes? We're also big fans of replacing Explorer with Xplorer2. Q-Dir [via FreewareGenius.com]

Tiger4 writes "Verizon has confirmed that some of its employees have accessed and perhaps shared calling records of President Elect Barack Obama (coverage at CNN, Reuters, AP). Verizon says the people involved have all been put on leave with pay as the investigation proceeds. Some of the employees may have accessed the information for legitimate purposes, but others may have been curiosity seekers and may have even shared the information around. The account was 'only' a phone, not a BlackBerry or similar device, and Verizon believes it was just calling records, not voicemail or email that was compromised. The articles do not mention the similarity to the warrantless wiretapping or hospital records compromises of recent months. But that immediately sprang to mind for me."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Publisher Ziff Davis has printed the last edition of PC Magazine and announced it would go online-only, but fans can get a free one-year "subscription" emailed to them every month at GoReadGreen.com, along with a few other mag titles. [via]

djupedal notes a story up at the BBC about the Associated Press's suspension of the use of Department of Defense photos after a photo of General Ann Dunwoody was found to have been altered (before and after comparison). "The Pentagon has become embroiled in a row after the US Army released a photo of a general to the media which was found to have been digitally altered. Ann Dunwoody was shown in front of the US flag but it later emerged that this background had been added. The Associated Press news agency subsequently suspended the use of US Department of Defense photos. 'For us, there's a zero-tolerance policy of adding or subtracting actual content from an image,' said Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iPhone/iPod touch only: Streaming media server Orb has released free and $9.99 versions of an app that lets you watch videos, listen to music, check documents and even stream live or recorded TV to your iPhone or iPod touch. Like other combinations that use Orb's Windows-only (for now) software at their core, connection speeds and lag vary depending on the two sides of the connection, but streaming video to my iPod touch was decent enough, if a tiny bit out of sync. The main difference between the free and paid versions is a big one—the free version picks three items from each category to stream, while the paid app gives you full access to anything you want to grab. That's just about all there is to it, though you'll want to head to the app's settings to optimize streaming for EDGE, 3G, or Wi-Fi connections. The OrbLive applications are free and $9.99, and both require an iPhone or iPod touch running at least the 2.0 firmware. Check out our screenshot tour and Wii media center guide for a closer look at the Orb software itself. OrbLive Free and OrbLive [iTunes App Store via Gizmodo]

t's the end of the world as we know it, and Steve Jobs feels fine. With the U.S. Federal Reserve now predicting a recession that will last well into next year--and others predicting much worse--sales of ammunition, spam and gold coins are surging. Oh yeah, so are sales of the Apple chief's Macintosh computers.