It seems the age of humdrum, crippled browsers on consoles might finally be coming to an end! Though the details are very slim, with the only source being an unnamed insider very close to Sony, it is exciting news indeed if it turns out to true.

Games consoles have always had feeble browser offerings, with PS3's default browser generally considered one of the worst and most unreliable. Porting Firefox to the PS3 would make a lot of sense, especially if Sony intend to inroads against the competing XBox Live service. Or perhaps they need a proper web browser for their newly-announced iTunes-killer...?

Obviously this is very much a rumour, but it would make a lot of sense -- and it will probably appear quite soon, considering how hard Sony are pushing for a larger slice of the console market at the moment.

I wonder if Flash and the ability to stream videos from sites like YouPo YouTube will be included....

[via CNET]

If the stark black screen and white text of the Windows command console doesn't do it for you, you might want to check out Color Console. It's a free application that has all the features you'd expect from a basic Windows command prompt, and then some. For example, you can change your color scheme to yellow, orange, blue, or "matrix," which is a custom black and green skin.

While the color feature is nice, Color Console also has a few tricks that are a bit more functional. For example you can open up multiple console windows in a tabbed interface. And you can easily copy text from the console and paste it into any Windows application. There's even a beta print feature that will let you print the contents of a console window in full color.

[via Brown Thoughts]

The command line. It strikes fear in the hearts of many a new Linux user. They open their terminals reluctantly, and there the prompt sits, with the cursor blinking in rhythm with their racing hearts. What does that blinking cursor want? It's expecting something... It wants something...

All right, so maybe it's not horror movie material.

But it is intimidating for many new users. Navigating the command line might be a mystery to you, or maybe you've read a little about it and wonder: out of all those commands, which ones am I really going to use? Which ones are the most help in a given situation?

Either way, we've got you covered. These are the commands we've found are most useful to new users. They range from basic navigation to commands that are great for troubleshooting.

GameTap is sort of like Netflix for old video games, except without the mailbox. For $10 per month, you have access to an online library of older video games from a variety of consoles ranging from PC to Nintendo.

The company currently offers access to 864 games, and the catalog is growing. Now GameTap is planning to launch a new site that will provide access to about 30 popular games for free. Titles will include Metal Slug, Joust, and Rampage.

The site will be advertising-support, and is set to launch on May 31st.

[via Ars Technica]

I spend about half my time in Windows with at least one command prompt window open, and usually more than one. Some things just go smoother with a CLI to work with, though that obviously depends a lot on what kind of computer user you are. But after a few days this week of having three consoles open constantly I began to wonder about tabs. My web browser has tabs, my text editor has tabs, why not my console? A Google search turned up a few-but not many-options, and the winner was called, simply, Console. It's an open source project that gives you a nice, configurable, tabbed interface to keep all your consoles in. It customization options are plentiful, letting you choose fonts, colors, transparency, background images, shortcut keys, even cursors. You can also set up as many different kinds of consoles you want-you're not just limited to the standard Windows command prompt. You can run any Windows command line app in its own tab, e.g Windows PowerShell (Monad), Cygwin, your favorite programming language's interactive prompt, or even Zork, and you can set each one up with its own keyboard shortcut. It's not a perfect app, though: it's easy to use, but some of the settings are cryptic and documentation is non-existent, and though I wouldn't call it a memory hog, it does take up more memory than the regular Windows prompt, especially if you're using several tabs and some of the eye-candy options. But it is a very cool app, and one that could easily become an indispensable part of your workflow. Oh, and it stores its configuration in a .xml file, which makes it portable-storage-friendly. Since the Sourceforge download pages can be a bit confusing, here's a direct download link to the latest beta version (or you can grab the latest stable version here).