Okay, so the Playstation 3 outage from yesterday wasn’t actually related to Y2K, but it may as well have been.  After all, the big fear of Y2K was that date processing difficulties involving the flop-over from 99 to 00 would permanently disable and/or damage all manner of computer software, most of which involves keeping the date properly.  The thing that disabled the PS3 yesterday?  A calendar error.

For some reason, the old-style Playstation 3 console believed 2010 was a leap year.  So when 2/28 became 3/1, the internal clock of a lot of PS3s said 2/29 which caused those Playstation 3 consoles not to connect to the Playstation Network.  It also disabled the offline game-playing abilities of a lot of other PS3 games.

The glitch was a pretty bad one for Sony, as it hit PS3 units world-wide before mysteriously correcting itself.  Why did it resolve itself?  Nobody really knows, and Sony’s not explaining matters.  They probably reset the secret Sony fail timer on the old units.

As part of the ongoing dumbing-down of society, there’s now a keyboard that will help you avoid using actual words during the process of communication!  Srsly!  They’re called Fast Finger Keyboards, and they features an incredible array of time-saving shortcuts for such common online phrases as L8R, LOL, THX, and TTYL.  There’s even a handy shortcut for www. (and I’d imagine one for .com, too).

I have no doubt that this is going to catch on as people get more and more used to TXTspeak and auto-fill-in features.  The company made their big debut at the 2010 Toy Fair in New York a few weeks ago, and the Fast Finger keyboard is going to be everywhere one of these days.  I mean, it’s bound to the F-row keys, and those are rarely used anyway, so why not make them a little more useful by adding some shift-text options?  Or, I guess alt-text options.  I’m not sure how it works for those higher-up keys.

If my keyboard had an LOL button, I’d still not use it.  If I can’t bother to type in LOL by hand, obviously it wasn’t that funny to begin with, IMHO.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I love the Olympics.  Summer Games or Winter Games, if it’s on I’ll watch it.  For some events, like hockey or curling or snowboarding, I’ll specifically search it out to watch it.  Otherwise, I’ll tune into the network coverage and just watch whatever’s on, even if it’s ice dancing or biathlon.  However, thanks to the wonderful NBC Olympics website, I don’t have to wait for them to show what I want to see on tape delay.  They have full video coverage of every event, including preliminaries, training runs, and more!

However, all is not perfect.  The Boss Button isn’t very effective, so if you’re going to partake, I suggest you either do it at home or be able to alt tab out of the browser in a hurry.  Other than that, this is a treasure trove of Olympics videos, image galleries, news stories, blogs, and more.  It’s amazingly cool and the video streams perfectly, so check it out!

RIM has fallen behind in the smart phone wars.  They can’t compete with Apple and Google and whoever else is launching a handset, so they’re concentrating on their core business of professional users while trying to appeal to the average buyer whenever possible.  Here’s one thing you can say for the Blackberry:  They certainly are tough.  An Ohio woman found this out the hard way when her Blackberry saved her from a bullet.

The 22-year-old woman was in a bar with her boyfriend, who had a gun.  While handling the gun, it discharged and he shot her in the leg.  Or thought he did:  as it turns out, the Blackberry gave up its life to protect its user.  Try finding that kind of loyalty in an iPhone!

Of course, the device wasn’t alone.  It was aided by the denim and a neoprene or plastic-looking protective case.  Either way, that’s pretty impressive that the handset was able to deflect, or at least slow down, a bullet to the point where the person getting shot wasn’t hurt.

Image: Engadget

So, Google Buzz happened.  What’s Google Buzz?

Well, long story short, it’s Google marrying everything it offers together:  YouTube, Google Reader, Gmail, Google Talk, Orkut… it also combines Twitter, FriendFeed, and probably some other things I can’t think of right now since I’ve not used it yet.  That said, apparently it’s getting to be very popular in part because users have no control over how it sets itself up.  You log into GMail and it’s there.  With any service that just pops up, there are some privacy concerns.

If you’re a Gmail user, you use an Android-based phone, or you don’t want your exact location sprayed out all over the Internet, you might want to log into Google Buzz’s control center and check your privacy settings.  Odds are that’ll be the first thing I do when I get home, as I’m not the type to share all my information with everybody I’ve ever emailed.  I recommend you do the same thing, too.

Have you tried Google Buzz yet?  If so, what do you think?  Is it going to be your one-stop social networking destination, or is it just another thing for you to ignore until it fades into the background like Google Wave?

See it in full at io9.

Image:  Make-Secret bar in office

Let’s say you went out this Christmas (or after Christmas) and you picked up a whole bunch of new, energy-efficient LED light strings.  Even on sale, those aren’t terribly cheap.  So, there’s a neat and fairly easy way to get yourself a little extra mileage out of those lights:  use them as house lights!

All you do is take a standard pole-style light, get a $2 socket adapter from basically anywhere that sells anything, and then you plug your LED lights into your lamp, put the shade around them, and voila!  I never would have thought of this myself.  It’s killing two dollar-sucking birds with one stone.  You get to avoid light bulb bills, you cut down on your energy bill, and you get to reuse those expensive LED lights.  It’s like a perfect storm of money-saving tips, three in one.

Of course, you have to have one of those type of floor lamps, or some way to string those lights inside a lampshade.  They’re pretty cool-glowing, so that’s probably safe to do.*

*May not be safe to do.

Image: AP, via Engadget

In the spirit of the season, everybody here at the various Shaks wishes you and yours a happy and healthy holiday season.  So, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, joyous Kwanzaa, or a wonderful whatever you celebrate.  If you don’t celebrate anything, then… hey, it’s Friday!  Happy Friday!