history

We've covered a number of Web history tracking and organizing tools in the past, but Wikipedia Diver may be one of the most interesting, albeit niche. This Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.

Each visited page is presented as a small red globe that you can click on to advance the timeline. There's also a source list of every site you visited, that will take you right … Read more

Sony's announcement of the PlayStation 3 Slim on Tuesday was no surprise for most gamers and industry experts. Parts that once cost a small fortune, such as hard drives, processors, and special disc-reading lenses, continue to fall in price and take up less space. It's only natural the machines that use them would shrink as well.

The PlayStation 3 was physically the largest of the three current-generation home consoles, followed by Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii. With never-ending lust by consumers for smaller gadgets, the current configuration was just not cutting it.

What's surprising about the Slim, though, is that Sony was the second-most recent of the three companies to have released its console, yet it's the first to offer a completely new form factor. Microsoft was the first out of the gate with a North America release of the Xbox 360 in late November 2005. Sony and Nintendo followed suit with the PlayStation 3 and Wii, respectively, which were released a week apart from each other in mid-November 2006.

The closest either Nintendo or Microsoft has come to a redesign since is Microsoft, which began including an HDMI port and increasing the included storage, alongside a major revision to the system software which allowed games to be played off the hard drive.

In the case of the PS3 Slim, it's actually the fourth generation of the device. During that three-year period, things like the included storage space jumped from 20GB to 120GB. And a recently unearthed patent at the FCC filing shows that a 250GB model is just around the corner.

So is it normal to release a heavily revised version of a gaming system within three years of the initial release? It depends on who you are. Let's take a look at some notable shrinkage from the last three generations of consoles. I think that you'll notice a trend.… Read more

The Sega Genesis, put on the market to challenge Nintendo, turned 20 on Friday. And after a long and enviable stint, it became a classic game console that, to this day, is remembered as one of the few that made its mark without actually leading the market by the end of its generation.

Sega has had one of the most tragic histories in the video game industry. In the early 1990s, it had Sonic; Nintendo had Mario. It had high-quality, third-party titles; Nintendo had high-quality, third-party titles. It had the Sega Genesis; Nintendo had the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Battles over which console was better were waged on playgrounds across the world. The Nintendo fans said Mario and the SNES were the kings of gaming. Sega fans said Sonic and the Genesis held that crown.

Today, the Genesis (and Sega's console business) are relics of the past. In the 20 years that has lapsed between the Genesis' release and today, despite Mario's enduring presence, the video game industry has changed dramatically. Nowadays, battles are waged over price as much as they are waged over games. And Sega, the once-beloved organization that kept a blue hedgehog as its mascot, is a third-party developer.

But it's the Genesis--and its success--that we remember today.… Read more

Reunion is a popular, long-lived, Mac-only genealogy program that can help you organize, view, and show off your family tree. Of the many genealogy options out there, Reunion tends toward the higher end, but it comes with many extras--and boasts a long, stable track record--to justify its price.

This app comes with much of the functionality you might expect, making it easy to quickly add family members (with predictive text), fill out notes and various data fields, cite source documentation, quickly perform searches, import data from other programs (essentially, from any app that uses GEDCOM files), and even run customized … Read more

John Quincy Adams might not be re-tweeting Ashton Kutcher and Shaq anytime soon, but he does have a Twitter account now. The Massachusetts Historical Society has launched a Twitter account, @JQAdams_MHS, and will officially start tweeting Adams' personal diary entries on Wednesday.

Adams died in 1848, right around the time that people first started flooding the San Francisco Bay Area in search of quick money. Except then it was in the form of gold, not venture dollars from Sand Hill Road.

As an Associated Press article explained, "a high school student touring the sixth U.S. president's archives … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If those organizations attacking Google's book search settlement with publishers spent as much time lobbying Congress for better laws concerning those issues, perhaps the controversy would go away, Google's chief Book Search engineer suggested Thursday night.

Google's quest to convince the world it has nothing to fear by its settlement with publishers came to the Computer History Museum Thursday where Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Book Search, defended the settlement before a few hundred attendees who submitted written questions to John Hollar, president and CEO of the museum. Last year, Google settled a lawsuit filed by publishers … Read more

Privacy advocates aren't pleased with Google Web History, which records the sites you visit, searches you make, images and videos you view, and even sites you haven't been to but may like. When you create a Google account, the option to use Web History is checked by default. Opting out doesn't mean Google doesn't collect the information, just that you don't have such easy access to it.

It feels like I've been using Gmail for five or six years, but I found my Web history begins in January 2007, according to Google. The entries … Read more

Can't find a video file you watched months ago? Not to worry, this nifty little app makes recovering video or audio files from your cache a snap. However, its save function didn't work at all in our tests.

VideoCacheView is a free app that launches a small, one-pane window with a row of icons in a toolbar. It appears unassuming for a few moments, then--quick as a wink--it automatically fills its pane with a list of video and audio files it detects in your Web browser cache. This little app performed alright in our tests: it recovered video, … Read more

QuickWiper provides users with a simple program to cleanse your computer of unwanted files and folders. In addition, it provides several key features that help clean the hard drive even more, making it a great all-around product.

Most users will not have any trouble jumping right into QuickWiper. The screen consists of only a few command icons, and whenever the mouse is held over them, a brief description is provided. While there is a Help file, most users can skip it and start immediately cleaning their computer. Wiping a file or folder is an easy task. Users simply click on … Read more