Great news for those of us on the last few days of the month without international cap. Some guy, name still unknow, has come to the rescue to our problem by offering a local web proxy service called ZA-Portal.

ZA-Portal is not only a web proxy but they offer other services such as rappid leech, a type of rapidshare service, aswell as mirrors to some sites and even script based games all on local bandwidth.

The question on everybodies lips now is will this service be offered for longer than a month or two without shutting down like previous attempts like this. Users ons the MyBroadband forum reports that speed on the proxy service is exceptionaly good and I can speak for it aswell after testing it out. The owner of ZA-Portal also announced a 2nd and 3rd proxy in the pipeline as demand is very big at the moment.

All and all I would say this is great news for us local users and only time will tell if the service will be either suspended or change into a paid for service, although the owner of ZA-Portal said that would never be the case.

Good luck ZA-Portal, we hope you stick around for long.

Wanna see how many users are downloading Firefox 3.5 right now?

Mozilla launched http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/ so users can see in real-time how many downloads are happening of the new Firefox 3.5 release. What it does is display the amount of Firefox 3.5 downloads per second happening, grouping it by country aswell. It also shows the total amount of downloads completed per country.

By the time I posted this entry there was already 747000 downloads completed, from which South Africa contributed 1300. Not bad considering the download is only available for a few hours now. Go check out the live stats at http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/

Firefox 3.5 was released today. Firefox 3.5  is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use.

Some of the noteable features are:

• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

I have been running the beta version of Firefox 3.5 for some time now and have been very impressed to date, especialy performance wise. So if you’re a Firefox fanboi go ahead and download the Firefox 3.5 now. Download available here or locally here.

Great news for all the Capetonians, looks like we have a great week lying ahead for us with clear skies the whole of the week.

Temperatures will be peaking at 24 degrees by friday while maintaining a average 23 degerees througout the week. Weather looking allot better than last week, lets just hope it last throughout the weekend aswell.

According to a user on the DSTV forums the MNetHD channel’s bitrate has been dropped from previously 12Mbps to 10Mbps.  Now the question is how can this be proven and what impact does a 2Mbps drop have?

DSTV runs on the Intelsat 7, 10 satelite and the owners of the satelite has quite allot of details about the channels available on the internet. A simple browse to http://www.satcodx3.com/ will reveal a list of satalites with information about all the channels on each satelite. Upon browsing to Intelsat 7, 10′s channels and choosing to view the MNetHD graph we can clearly see the drop in bitrate.

So now the question is how does this affect the quality of the channel? Well lets just say that a standard dstv SD channels’ bitrate is 2Mbps, this means that MNetHD’s quality dropped by a whole SD channels quality. The bad thing about this is that even before Multichoice lowered the bitrate, it was still way below the norm of HD channels out there. If we take DiscoveryHD, a channel that is not on the DSTV bouquete, for example it runs at a amazing 19.75Mbps. Now that is true HD quality.

Multichoice aparrently deleted the thread on their site about the posts revealing this and later on brought it back but merged it under a picture breakup thread.

Multichoice should just stop their anti competativeness, just a few months back we got a price increase, now that more and more people are starting to use the HD channel they are dropping bitrates in a effort I believe to save on satelite bandwidth costs. Come on multichoice, get real and start offering us a real HD channel with real HD quality, and perhapes more than just 1 HD channel. Stop trying to bullshit the consumers by trying to cover up changes like this or not even anouncing it.

If you don’t know by now, which I believe is hard because every feed is flooded with this, Micheal Jackson died yesterday after having cardiac arrest.

It hasn’t even been few hours after his death when the jokes started to roll in. Some people take it as offensive where others say death should be celebrated with fun times.

So I have decided to do a Friday Eye Candy post every friday that will showcase some of the hotest babes out there. Yea geeks check out babes too.

So to start it off with here is Nikkala Stott

Where You’ve Seen Her: Nikkala Stott has posed everywhere from Maxim to FHM and is definitely one of the hottest women in modeling.  She’s also from England, and between her accent, her hotness, and her quote below, she’s got be be a freak in the sack.

Pointless Quote: “I’m up for steamy sex.  It is my kind of exercise.”

Acording to Disaster Risk Management a chemical container carrying potentially harmful chemicals washed up on Camps Bay beach this afternoon.

The owner of the container, whose name has not been confirmed, has been tasked with removing it, Disaster Risk Management’s Charlotte Powell said.

Acording to News24 and Powel from Disaster Risk Management the container contains a form of Cresol chemical, used to produce various household cleaners and disinfectants. While exposure to the chemical at low levels is not harmfull, inhaled it can cause irretation and pain.

Full story at News24

The Barkas cargo ship from China caused great havoc yesterday morning in the west coast town of Jacobsbaai, Saldanha when it ran upon the rocks the previous night.

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Neotel, South Africa’s second telecommunications opperator has joined twitter. This just shows us another way in which Neotel is trying to enhance their communication with its customers and the public. Neotel is also in talks with MyBroadband, South Africa’s leading broadband community, to be more involved online to clarify things better to public out there.

You can follow Neotel on twitter @NeotelNow @NeotelSA @NeotelConnect @NeotelRep