Connected Internet

Gaming On A Mac

Michael Lankton — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:50:43 +0000

The first counterpoint of any PC advocate in a Mac Vs. PC argument is gaming. The fact of the matter is, none of us Mac owners bought a Mac for the purpose of gaming in the first place. However, the argument is valid. It’s the one area where the PC is, and always will be, superior.

Recently I introduced my oldest son to UFO: Alien Invasion, an excellent, open source, modern interpretation of the gaming classic, X-Com: UFO Defense, or simply UFO Defense if you live in the UK. X-Com has been my desert island game, the one game I would choose if I had to limit myself to just one game for the rest of my life, since about 1995. Turns out that IGN agrees with me, as I saw that they had voted it their best PC game of all time in 2007.

Anyway, it’s done my old heart good seeing my 15 year old dive headlong into UFOAI and really get into it. It rekindled a nostalgia in me, something that isn’t hard to do, for beloved games from yesteryear, and I began to populate the Mac with games for the boy to discover and for me to revisit.

So, here are my recent experiences with Mac gaming, both with apps that run native on the system, and others that we need a little smoke and mirrors to run:

Native Gaming As the name implies, native represents those games that are ported to run directly on OS X and Apple hardware. Most of the blockbuster PC games do receive ports, although the timeliness of their arrival depends on the developer.There are a couple of developers that specialize in porting games to Mac, and a couple of the big publishers are also pretty good about releasing Mac and PC versions simultaneously. Id Software has always been good about providing Mac binaries for their games, and Quake through Doom 3 can be played natively on a Mac. So can Doom through Final Doom, but you’ll rely on one of the source ports that popped up after Id made their source open.I recently got the wife Sims 3, which supports PC and Mac out of the box. I was pretty surprised when I looked in the package and saw that the Mac Sims3 app contains a Windows install of Sims 3. Turns out that EA utilizes Cider technology, a proprietary fork of WINE, to run their Windows games on Mac. WINE is a system service that runs a Windows API compatibility layer on a non-Windows system. So far no complaints from the wife about how it runs, so I can’t bash their decision not to port when the Cider technology represents a way for them to potentially offer all of their games for Mac consumption.
Also, a lot of older Mac ports that were made for Power PC architecture run just fine. Apple has included a Power PC emulation layer in Leopard called Rosetta, and so far all the old PPC titles I’ve played haven’t shown any sign at all that they were running under a wrapper. The only question is, how long does Apple keep Rosetta in OS X? Is it going to disappear in future versions the way Classic support did?
DOSBox This excellent DOS emulator is just the ticket for old MS-DOS games no matter what platform you are on, and that includes Windows. So far I have had great luck with the original X-Com games, some old LucasArts adventure titles, and a couple of old DOS first person shooters. They all run better under DOSBox than they ever did on the old PCs I used to play them on. DOSBox is an open source solution, and you know how I love to support free software. It works great.
VirtualBox As much as I love Sun’s VirtualBox, it’s not up to par for Windows gaming. As an open source project, it will be, but until then…..
VMWare Fusion or Parallels VMWare Fusion and Parallels both do the same thing that VirtualBox does, you just have to pay for the privilege, unlike VirtualBox which is free. However, they both do something that VirtualBox doesn’t: provide Direct3D support under Windows. I’ve been using Parallels this week to play some old Windows titles, and while it works great for the most part, the key phrase with both VMWare and Parallels is YMMV.Some games work perfect, some display slow performance that makes it a deal breaker, some stutter on cutscenes, and some have weird issues with keyboard assignments. On the whole, games play just fine for the most part, and faster than on any PC I’ve played them on. Of course, the PCs I played them on were about 10-15 years old, so I would hope that modern hardware wouldn’t be too tasked with these old bits of code.I recommend VMWare and Parallels for gaming, provided that you don’t mind the odd, but frequent display of off-kilter behavior with the peripheral portions of the game like cutscenes and menus. You need to play around with compatibility modes for executables on games that have issues. Sometimes that is all it takes to go from unplayable to nearly perfect. Also, searching the web produces quite a few links to home brewed widescreen patches of these old games, if 1024×768x16 on your 24” LCD isn’t your thing.
Open Source Projects You aren’t the only one who experiences gaming nostalgia, and in some cases enough of the right people are suffering it for a certain game that new projects have arisen. I mentioned UFO: Alien Invasion already. In 2002, the developers behind Star Control II, the best space opera of all time, went open source, combining the code from the PC and 3DO versions of Star Control II and unleashing The Ur-Quan Masters on the world.My 15 year old is also playing this game, and thinks it’s brilliant. He asked me why Mass Effect wasn’t as much fun as a near-20 year old game that could be made to run on a cell phone, and I had no good answer for him, just an agreeing nod. I’m sure there are many more cool projects out there that recreate gaming classics, and I welcome your mention of them in the comments section.I’ve had a lot of fun this last week revisiting some old favorites, and getting into some crusty old games that I missed the first time around. Should the Mac be your first choice for gaming? No way. Is there a lot of gaming to be had on a Mac? Absolutely. If you’re a Mac user that’s really into gaming you already have a PC, a 360 and/or a PS3 anyway.

Tags: Apple, DOS, Gaming, Virtualization, Windows

How To Keep Your System Tighter Than Fort Knox

Joseph Plazo — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:21:52 +0000

Miscreants lurk out there on the world wide web. The moment a fully updated and well-patched copy of Windows XP connects to the net without a firewall it goes under attack. I verified this. The other day, I revved up a laptop that had nothing but XP Pro on it and surfed the web. It had no virus scanner, no firewall, no rootkit detector. The system was naked as a newborn babe.

Thirty minutes of visiting random sites and the system went down. Hard. A post mortem revealed something ghastly. Over fifteen web bugs, viruses and malware infilitrated the windows core- from the browser down to the OS itself. That was bad. And to think it was fully patched. Unlike the Apple OS, Windows is vulnerable to attack without third party protection.

Do you run mission critical websites? If you do, keep it safe. Don’t only patch it up with windows updates, make sure you throw in strong protection that keeps the marauders at bay. Virus scanners are a first step, but they’re not enough The following keep your system iron clad:

Eset Internet Security. Eset keeps winning awards. Not only does it detect more malware than industry giants Norton and Mcafee, it is also light on resources and results in negligible false alarms. More importantly, it takes amazingly low disc space. I don’t understand why basic software like AV consume almost 100MB these days. They even justify the bloat by calling them Suites! Eset refused to tread this path and offers a comprehensive system just a few megabytes large. At full protection mode, Eset provides firewall, rootkit and virus protection. The user will notice no startup slowdowns or lag during application operations. Games don’t stutter and video processing sails smoothly. In fact, the only thing the user will notice is the absolute lack of rogue viral software.
Spybot Search and Destroy Eset affords solid virus protection but middling spyware and adware prevention. Dialers and porn hacks somehow circumvent Eset and install flashing ads that make me cringe at work or connect to sites that make the girlfriend throw the book at me. For non viral malware, you need the best antispyware around. Now, you can opt for pricey spyware tools that miss many bugs, or you can install a free solution that affords near impregnable shielding. To date the only solution I find viable is Spybot. Sybot regularly upates and provides two modes of protection. The first is with an online TSR called a teatimer. It scans for adware like behaviour and blocks installation. The second is with browser innoculation. Adware tends to modify browser code to spam the user with ads. Spybot patches browser vulnerabilities and prevents integration. For instance, the well known alexa tool bar fails to install with the addition of Spybot.
Threatfire Heuristics. A virus and antispyware system is only as good as its last update. Signature updates are indispensable since they let the software identify rogue code and facilitate its removal. Fail to update and the system remains vulnerable to invasion. That gives rise to many malware authors writing code that disable the update process. Crippled, the AV suite becomes impotent. Threatire resolves to mitigate the problem with a system that scans for malware and viral behaviour without the use of constantly updated signatures. You can let threatfire run without core upgrades for a few weeks and it will still catch rogue software- provided they attempt undesirable actions. I’ve tried threatfire standalone, meaning it remained the sole means of protection. It suprisingly kept 15 out of 17 intrusion attempts and did so without impacting system speed. That’s good batting average in my book.
TrueCrypt Encryption. Imagine that all your viral, spyware, malware and heuristic protection were breached by a determined hacker. Do you still have hope of safeguarding your financial data? Yes, if you have truecrypt installed. Truecrypt creates a hidden container file on your drive that keeps the most important data you have. It’s hashed up in 256 bit soup and can be opened only with a password. Hence if the online hacker (or holdupper who steals the notebook) attempts entry, he faces a brickwall. Even an 8 core processor will take a hundred years attempting to break the code!

What have you got on your system right now? Got financial data an confidential company reports? Then make sure you’re insured. Download the latest system protection today.

No tag for this post.

10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows 7

Everton — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:25:32 +0000

We recommend! Click Here to Turbo Charge your PC and internet

The original post in my ‘10 Simple Ways’ (XP, Vista) series was written 3.5 years ago and is still the most popular post on this site. For the last two years I’ve been running Windows 7 News, the leading site for Windows 7, so it’s time to share 10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows 7.

Windows 7 is fast, but you can always have more speed, right? These Windows 7 tweaks are suitable for all levels of users, but, if you’re looking for more advanced tweaks then check out the Windows 7 Forum. Don’t have Windows 7 yet? Then click here to pre-order and save 50%.

Faster Window Switching

Disabling the Minimise-Maximise animation can make your PC run a lot faster. Disabling is easy:

Go to Start and type in ‘SystemPropertiesPerformance‘
Go the Visual Effects tab
Uncheck ‘Animate windows when minimizing and maximising‘ and click OK

Speedup Windows 7 Boot Times

Windows 7 only uses one core to boot out of the box. By increasing the number of cores used you can decrease the boot time:

Click on Start and then ‘Run’
Search for Run and type ‘msconfig’
Click on the tab ‘Boot’ and click on ‘Advanced options…’
Check ‘Number of processors’ and enter how many your PC has (usually 2,4 or 8)
Click ‘OK’ and ‘Apply’
Reboot

Remove Unwanted Fonts

Fonts, especially TrueType fonts, use quite a bit of system resources. For optimal performance, trim your fonts down to just those that you need to use on a daily basis and fonts that applications may require.

Open Control Panel
Open Fonts folder
Move fonts you don’t need to a temporary directory (e.g. C:FONTBKUP?) just in case you need or want to bring a few of them back. The more fonts you uninstall, the more system resources you will gain.

SpeedUp Windows 7 Shutdown Time

Windows 7 shutdowns a lot faster than Vista or XP, but it can be improved further by making this registry change which reduced the time Windows waits to kill processes:

Click on Start and type in regedit and hit Enter
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControl
Right-click on WaitToKillServiceTimeOut and change and lower the value
The default is 12000 (12 seconds) but you can lower this to any number
Click ok and restart PC

Tags: Windows 7 Tweaks

Please Take The Site Survey

Everton — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:40:31 +0000

One of the new ad networks I’m trying out, Burst Media, has a nifty little site survey tool to assist in targeting ads more efficiently. If you have two mins can you please take the survey as I get access to the results, so I’ll be able to learn more about my readers!

Take The Survey

Tags: Survey

Add Microsoft Translator Widget To Your Site

Everton — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:49:07 +0000

I registered a few months ago for the Microsoft Translator beta a few months ago and I finally got my invite through today. The code was very easy to generate and now translations are available for my site in nearly a dozen languages. You can see the Microsoft Translator in action in my sidebar.

The approach taken by Microsoft is much better than the approach taken by many WordPress Plugins, that just create lots of duplicate pages that search engines don’t like. The widget is also ultra-fast, and as far as I can tell very accurate. However, if you speak any of the languages supported then please let me know.

So far, I’ve used my invitation to create widgets for 6 sites and I’m not sure how many are left, but I’m happy to share my spare invites. Just leave me a comment below stating why you need a translator for your site.

Tags: Microsoft, microsoft translator, plugins, robots.txt, translation, Wordpress

How To Build an Empire on Free Information

Joseph Plazo — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:30:19 +0000

This morning my best friend and I were comparing notes on the latest money making schemes that took our fancy. He shared how his newly launched thesis site made money selling dissertations. The upside of it was that it grossed him $8000 a month (there are tons of lazy students out there… even PhDs!). The downer was that it cost him $5000 to maintain. Writers, adwords marketing and hosting ate into most of the profit. He took home $3000 to show for his hard labor- which more or less was what the janitor in our building made for less effort.

I, on the other hand, expounded on how my 4 year old online recruitment site kept on raking it in with advertising revenues despite it being free for employers and a large drop in pagerank. SERPs remained unaffected despite the same and traffic drove adsense and affiliate sales through the roof. The downside came from the seasonality of earnings, with the site barely scraping through during the brrr months.

Three drinks into the gettogether, a third friend joined in and threw in a gem to our money-mining discussion. He shared how Instructables.com made him close to $1000 extra a month. We listened spell bound.

For the uninitiated, instructables.com is a relatively unknown how-to site. The visionary developers organized a repository of free information that focused on the theme of creation.

The site attracted innovative minds. Members joined in order to dissect in full color, video and text, methods of creating something new or doing something better. Think of it like a giant library that teaches one how to do things without emphasis on theory. Everything here is to the point. On site, you can find plans on how to create a more comfortable slipper, fashion a laser gun out of DVD player and even wow your friends with a free energy robot that never runs out of steam.

My friend monetized all this in conjunction with ebay.com. He simply searched the auction giant for in demand items, matched them with building plans from instructables and promoted a better item. Here’s how he did it.

Check out What’s Hot. Ebay lets its members discover hot searches as well as wishlists. Currently, items like modified PSPs and novelty gadgets like low powered laser guns and sonic blasters command moderate interest. Users either bid for these actively or post a request for the sale of the product. The trick is to identify these hot items and cash in.
Scan Instructables.com for Plans. The next step is to obtain plans on the How-To site for building instructions. Once found, it’s a simple matter of building the device in small quantities depending on projected demand. My friend admits canvassing around other auction sites for demand. If the desire for the item is strong, he has the item built en mass by students wanting part time income. He’d pay about $10 to $30 for assembly depending on complexity.
Market The Product. This is the easiest step. My friend didn’t even bother to learn copywriting. According to him, that would be reinventing the wheel. Instead, he scanned ebay and auction sites like atomicmall.com for listings that commanded a lot of bids. These, he called ‘Hookers’. Hookers draw in eyeballs and convert well. The plan is to copy the ad copy of the Hookers and make substantial modifications to preempt any complaints. He also plugs in numerous pictures that highlight the features of the item. Now, since the product is not the average off the shelf item, he levies a premium for customization. Prices like $300 for an item that cost $50 to build is not outrageous because people are willing to spend a big amount on unique items.

My friend’s most recent product line includes an electronic zapper that kills bacteria in the body. He’s made about 6 sales selling it for $250. Cost of goods? $80. He found the plans for free and has made over a grand selling it.

Are you ready to be the next web maven?

No tag for this post.

How To Beat The Recession With the Web

Joseph Plazo — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:23:55 +0000

Companies by the hundreds are closing down. These aren’t just mom and pop businesses. Big guns like GM declared bankruptcy. The government refused bailout for AIG and declined help to Ford. Now we have the Madoff scandal. Each time a gargantuan falls, it takes several thousand employees with it. Who knows, the very next company to crash and burn might be yours. Are you ready to face that possibility?

If you’re web savvy or at least have a fascination for the digital superhighway, the threat of layoffs shouldn’t scare you. There are more than a hundred ways to make a living off the web and live the lifestyle you enjoy now. Simply cash in on your passions or skills and monetize them online. Consider the following avenues:

Market eBooks on DigitalPoint. At least ten friends of mine make close to $200 daily selling ten page ebooks on forums.digitalpoint.com. Simply think of a special skill that you think others may value and put it into words. These books don’t need special formatting. Use Adobe Acrobat o PDF Factory to convert the maual into PDF. Zip it up and advertise it on the forum. Before you know it, you’ll have inquiries and people will be sending you cash. You can charge anywhere from $5 to $97 for your information. It won’t cost you a cent to maintain operations since shipping is not required. What information sells? SEO and SEM are top sellers. If you know blackhat, that can make you wealthy as well. The most popular ebooks on that site, nonetheless pertain to making money online. So, teach people to make money, and you make money!
Run an AntiScam Blog. One of the more searched words on the web right now is “scam.” The reason is simple. People turn to the web for advice prior to purchasing a new fangled product. Say Mr. Crawford wants to buy this new hair regrowth serum called HairBack. It costs $99, which is a lot. To avoid buyer’s remorse, he fires up his netbook an keys in “Hairback Scam” . Presto, zero results. He buys the product.The story would be different if Google spat out ten websites calling it a scam. Thats where you come in. If you like debunking crap products, simply create a blog that shoots down worthless products. Dissect the failures of the product, making sure to liberally sprinkle the site with the word “scam”. You’ll end up ranking very highly in the search engines for product reviews with the word scam attached. People visit your site, see your article and they make you money because your blog is populated with ads and affiliate links (you have them, don’t you?) It’s almost like money on automatic pilot. One of the sites I direct, shamelessreviews.com, draws in ahuge amount of traffic from people using ’scam’ in the search box. It often converts when the visitor clicks on affiliate links offering alternatives to the scam product debunked on site.
Offer Services at Elance.com Freelancers unite! Elance allows budding entrepreneurs and even the unemployed to offer their services at no cost. At this site, employers and employees are matched, with employers posting their requirements, and you bidding for a part time contract. Contracts involve everything from translating documents, copy editing, to SEO work like managing PPC campaigns. Since you’re not chained to one employer, you can draw multiple streams of revenue by working on numerous projects at your leisure. Your bedroom becomes HQ and office. You don’t commute nor do you face the taxman. Your income is directly proportional to the amount of work accepted. It’s truly a dream job for many.

Take a step back and take inventory of your skills and passions. What do you like doing? What do you know better than the average joe. Once you discover this, promote it. It doesn’t take fancy web skill to announce your talents to the world.

Are you ready to be your own boss?

No tag for this post.

How Not To Do SEO For 2009

Joseph Plazo — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:44:26 +0000

Web start-ups face a daunting task of getting known. As of last count, over a billion pages literally litter the web. That’s a billion competing pieces of informtion swamping yours. Compound that with the short attention span of the average surfer. And the problem of ever shifting viewer loyalties. No wonder many netrepreneurs surrender and pack their bags in less than a month. Have you ever given up in despair?

Startups need web visibility. They crave keyword dominance that lead to online brand equity. This problem becomes a need that lends itself well to “expert SEO services”. So, it’s no wonder that enterprising entrepreneurs have begun launching SEO companies.

I’m confident that you may have received the occasional email to “increase your ranking” or “be the top ten in google”. Visit the webpage behind these emails and you’ll be treated to a glossy website that promises exotic services like directory submission, keyword optimization. Do these make you salivate? Think again. How many of these really make an impact to your online web presence? I’ve been into SEO for almost a decade now, and I’ve realized that many paid services simply do not work. The following are among the poorest SEO tactics you can buy:

Submit to 10000 Directories. Nobody visits the HappyLuckyNine.com directory and its ilk. That goes for human vistors and search engine bots. These sites have negligible impact on your real world visibility and do little for keyword ranking. I find it odd, therefore, that SEOs offer the “premium service” of blasting your site to 10000 directories for a low price of $299.95. Listing in such directories may even be harmful as some search engines consider such sites link farms.
Blog Spamming. Run a blog? Then you must be a master of patience. You probably receive hundreds of comments each day from people called “BuyViagraOnline” and “HoodiaWeightLoss Now”. I don’t know about them, but I’d sue my mom for giving me such a name. But seriously, blog spamming benefits no one. It irritates the blog owner and does zilch for search engine ranking. One reason is that search engines devalue most blog comments. Another is that blogs tend to infuse the NoFollow attribute to comments. Be wary, therefore, when an SEO offers to send your URL to thousands of blogs using an automated software. You’ll end up on the receiving end of very angry email.
Article Submissions. “We send your articles to 1000 article repositories for $99 only.” Is that a good offer? It depends. If it were 2002, that would work to your advantage. Today, that’s no longer the case. Articles can give human readers a reason to visit your site if they like your information. However, it does not have favorable impact on search engine rankings because the engines hate duplicate content. The algorithms used by google filter out copy that look similar to another. If 90 documents look the same, expect that they’ll be consigned to the supplemental search results- or worse- to the sandbox. That means your $99 for thousands of duplicate articles just ended up in smoke.
.Edu Spamming. Some SEOs think that edu domains hold a mystique for the search engines and offer to send your links to .edu blogs. Alternatively, they offer to broker off the sale of your links on .edu sites. This arrangement benefits only the SEO and the edu site that receives your “charity donation”. True, the search engines accord great respect for educational sites- but if it sees an external link to your poker site on Harvard University, it gets suspicious. Nothing screams “paid link” louder than unrelated sites on the footer of educational webs. We all know how worthless paid links are.

Whoops. I think I just eliminated 80% of most paid SEO services. So what else can you buy from them? I’ll cover that in the next article. Meanwhile, hold on to your cash!

No tag for this post.

New Theme – Best Ever!

Everton — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:21:19 +0000

I’ve been through many WordPress themes over the last 4 years, but the one I added last night is definitely the best ever! It’s very clean and simple to use, and more importantly, very, very fast even with all my many plugins and tweaks running.

The feature I love the most is the featured posts carousel, which once I have time to play with more, will really help drive users deeper into my sites. On Windows 7 News for instance, a high proportion of our traffic is to the homepage, thanks to people searching for ‘Windows 7′ and ‘Windows 7 News’ where we are 2nd only to the Microsoft pages on google. This theme once I add to Windows 7 will definitely help drive users to the best sections of the site.

I’m also happy that I’ve gone back to a 2 column theme, which improves the site’s readability.

If you see any bugs or just want to let me know what you think, then please leave a comment.

Tags: landing page, SEO, Wordpress theme

How To Deal With Your Mobile Stalker

Joseph Plazo — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:00:27 +0000

It’s late at night and you’re chatting with your wife. Suddenly there it is again

“RING RING!”

Your cellphone’s buzzing. The number’s unknown and it’s the upteenth time that someone’s ringing you- but doesn’t answer when you (or your irate wife) picks up. Your wife suspects an affair. You swear there isn’t. Still, you’re in hot water.

Don’t you just wish that you can trace that call and set the law on him? The sad fact is, it’s quite tough to trace cellular calls. Landlines are easier. Even if the number’s not listed, you can have the law track down land calls in a jiffy. But don’t despair. With a bit of savvy, you can still corner that miscreant haunting your cellular. Here’s how to unmask the sneak:

Simply Search The Internet. Type the cellular number down in google- there’s a strong chance that the number will come up. For all you know, it can have appeared on facebook, myspace, twitter or even mafia wars. People tend to leave all sorts of details around. Google is your friend and if this number was posted anywhere, even on an obscure forum page, it’d come up. From there, it’s easy. Simply track down the fellow behind the profile, post, or account information. To facilitate this, type down the whole number, including the country code, like 559-898- 0920. That will eliminate false leads and drop the target right onto your lap.
Mosey to Cellphone Directories. Sites like Nonpublished collect cellular numbers, carrier, and even billing statements. The information is provided free and can provide a few good leads. Take note that info on sites like these tend to be a little dated, but at least you’ll have a jump point like the owne’rs previous address.
Tap the Reverse Search Sites. These webs (popular ones include Free Reverse Cell Phone Directory or National Cellular Directory) offer one service and do it well: track down mobile numbers , region, account holder and even billing address. The initial queries come free, but subsequent ones carry a price. I don’t know about you, but even a $30 charge is worth it if some shmoe is wrecking my relationship or costing me sleepless nights. This way, you stop the prankster dead on his tracks. Imagine how HE would feel when you show up at his doorstep the very next day? Sweet karma!
Block Your Cell. If you feel that you can’t really trace down the prankster (for instance, he keeps changing numbers), then fix the problem on your end. First, change your number. Second, give it out only to trusted associates. And third, avail of the carrier’s service whereby your number appears ‘anonymous’ when you call. This will confound your prankster, and until he gets the new digits from your associates, you’ll have a breathing spell.
Give Him A Dose of His Own Medicine. If all the above doesn’t work, then fight fire with fire. Gather your good friends together and disseminate HIS cellnumber around. Ask your friends to miscall the miscreant ten times to fifteen times a day. Preferably after midnight. He’ll get the message. The downside is that you can give him ideas. The next day, his friends can start a phone barrage on you and your friends.
Ditch Mobiles Altogther. It’s the extreme but it works for many people. Renowned author Timothy Fenriss asserts that people are chained to their mobiles, pagers and email. He says that you can reclaim your life by using these devices less than 10% of your day. Sure, it can be jarring at first, but once you learn to distance yourself from them, you’ll taste an unbridled freedom. Plus, no one can stalk you anymore.

So, are you ready to ditch that mobile? Good luck!

No tag for this post.

Recommend A 3 Column WordPress Theme

Everton — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:50:17 +0000

I’ve been using the theme on this site for over a year now, so I’ve decided it’s time for a change as I need something new to fiddle with! There are so many good wordpress themes out there so to speed up finding a newA theme I thought I’d enlist the help of my readers.

If you know of a good 3 column wordpress theme, both free and premium, then please leave a link in a comment. The theme needs to have:

High readability
A good location for the search box – I think the field on this theme is too low
3 columnns – one at least 160 wide and the other at least 300
Update: A 2 column theme with a good footer is an option
Space in the header for a 728 banner
Better integration of RSS subscription options
Space to show at least one featured article
A customisable hompage layout
A high fold for single.php pages
Widget support
good support for 2nd level cat pages in the header
fast – don’t want tonnes of js

Tags: Wordpress theme

Where’s my iPhone 3GS? No Stock In The UK

Everton — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:20:32 +0000

I ordered 2 iPhone 3G S phones online last week. I thought I’d give O2 a call today to see where they were and I was disappointed to learn that the iPhone 3G S was out of stock. I was told to call back tomorrow as they might have some news on stock. Carphone Warehouse also don’t have any iPhone 3G S phones in stock, and are displaying the following statement on their website:

The iPhone 3GS is currently out of stock: Due to the phenomenal demand for the new iPhone 3GS, we’ve temporarily run out of stock online, over the phone and in our retail stores.”

I’m never sure if it’s a deliberate ploy by companies like Apple to limit supply at launch to make a product more desirable. If not, then why can they never ensure there’s enough stock to meet initial demand. Luckily I haven’t put my Sony Ericsson for sale on eBay yet, so at least I’ve still got a phone to use.

Tags: Apple, carphone warehouse, iphone 3G S, O2, X1 Xperia

Launching Otaku Gadgets

Everton — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:55:07 +0000

After taking a minor break from blogging in 2008, I’ve been working even harder than ever in 2009. What has really spurred me on has been the success of Windows 7 News, that I run jointly with Martin from gHacks. Having an official blogging business partner is great as two brains are better than one, and we can also share the load.

We’ve since launched Windows 8 News which is growing nicely, and we’ve just launched our latest joint venture. We both have always wanted to do a dedicated gadgets site, so we’ve launched Otaku Gadgets.

We chose gadgets as the subject matter as it’s a subject we are both passionate, so it makes it easier to produce posts. We’ve also recruited a great team of authors to help grow the site quickly, who are creating some great posts:

I’ll be doing occasional posts so that you can see the best posts from across our blogs. I’ll be doing this manually until someone shows me a way to automatically post article titles from multiple RSS feeds (help!!).

Windows 7 News

Windows 8 News

Unofficial Windows 8 Concept Video

One Tip A Day

gHacks

Tags: Gadgets, Otaku gadgets, Windows 7

Mobile Broadband Speed In Your Hands

Everton — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:27:23 +0000

The Broadband market is a battle field. Not the one fought with guns and swords, but, the one which uses mobile broadband speeds and enticing offers. Top broadband suppliers, like O2, Virgin Media, BT, Orange, T Mobile, 3 and Vodafone, fight their way out to woo consumers, with various attractive broadband packages.

The Promise…

Internet access speed has always been a priority factor that influences consumers while they choose a broadband connection. Currently, for meeting the demands of heavy internet users, like business men or even gamers, broadband providers like BT and Vodafone, are rolling out bundles which offer speeds of 8Mbps and 7.2Mbps. On the other hand, for a normal or light user, ISPs like T Mobile, 3 and O2 offer packages with access rates of 4.5Mbps, 3.6Mbps and 1.8Mbps. Moreover, some of these mobile broadband providers also bundle their offers with some exciting free gifts, like a laptop or a dongle.

The Reality…

Leaving the excitement aside, it is frequently observed that the practical internet access speeds are much lower than the advertised speeds. There are various websites which let users run small tests to determine what broadband speeds they are actually receiving. Many consumers end up achieving only about a quarter of the promised speed. However, one must know that it is not always the broadband supplier who is at fault.

Who Is To Blame…?

There are several factors that govern mobile broadband data transfer rates. The number of people using the broadband services in the vicinity, or in the same household at a particular instant of time is an important factor that affects broadband speed. Temperature, various components in the earth’s atmosphere and even the equipment used by the consumer, all in some way or the other influence mobile broadband speed. It is quite surprising, but true, that the software on the computer or laptop of the end user also plays an important role in determining the download rate of web pages.

Making Things Better…

Ensuring that you’ve got the right hardware is the first step toward improving your broadband speed. Modems used for mobile broadband, support different speeds. Make sure that the modem you use can support the speed of the package that you want to subscribe to.

Moreover, hardware companies usually update their software from time to time. Keeping a regular check on these updates could also be helpful.

Signal strength varies within a household itself. When the signal is weak, some modems automatically use the 2G technology for data transfer. On the other hand when the signal is strong, they switch to the faster 3G technology. A simple relocation of your modem within the house to a place where the signal strength is strong, maybe near the window, might just do the trick.

Tweaking your Internet Browser settings or using a faster browser could help as well.

Many users are comfortable with using Windows XP on their computers and laptops. However, this operating system needs to be tuned when using mobile broadband. Newer OS like Windows Vista or other Linux based ones, save you the trouble of tuning.

Sometimes, unwanted software can slow down performance considerably. Some of these software might be configured for automatic start-up during boot-up of the computer. Such programs might also end up eating precious memory, thus causing other applications to be slowed down. In order to check if you’ve really got unwanted applications slowing down your broadband speed, use a different OS on a CD to boot up and run the broadband speed test. If you get higher speeds with the new OS, then you definitely have some cleaning up to do. If you are not sure of which applications you need to get rid of, you can as well get some professional to do it for you.

Presence of other radio-wave devices in the vicinity can affect mobile broadband speed too. Sometimes televisions, mobile phones, internet radios or microwave ovens can make an impact on the broadband speeds. These gadgets use the radio signals in the same range of frequencies as the mobile broadband. Plugging them out or maintaining a considerable distance from them could be helpful. Neighboring WiFi networks can also interfere with internet access rates, especially in urban areas. Tweaking your router settings or changing the channel of your network might be of some use in this case.

Another simple thing you could do to get fast download speeds is using the network during off-peak hours. Early mornings usually do give high broadband speeds. Like they say ‘the early bird gets the worm’. You can also compare broadband speeds, packages and offers in broadband suppliers website.

Tags: Broadband, broadband speed test, dongles, mobile broadband

How To Take Cool Shots At Night

Joseph Plazo — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:59:12 +0000

Wherever you go, you’d see the flash of digital cameras. These are the newtoys of the millenium. People print pix, create digital albums, and upload to social networks. Visit Facebook and witness how the average user has created a virtual storybook of his daily life in pictures. It’s the next best thing to having an autobiography!

Photos taken in the daytime are no-brainers. They often come out perfect, especially in sunlight. It’s a different matter when you shoot in the evening. Low lighting affects the shot and there’s always a strong chance the picture would look underexposed or washed out. A pity, especially considering that a majority of outings and escapedes occur after dark.

Are you a late night goer who’s a shutterbug? Try these techniques.

Set your flash to REAR FLASH if you must use it. Rear flash fires shortly before exposure ends, thereby illuminating the background without making the subject look like a frightened ghost.
Invest in a flash diffuser. Diffusers further soften the glare of harsh flash and provide a more naturally skin tone.
Bring a tripod or gorilla pod. Shots made in the dark require the aperture open a little longer than usual in order to take in more light. The light is necessary to compensate for the poor ambient lighting. If you fail to use a tripod, your arm or hands make cause camera shake. The shot can be easily ruined!
Increase film speed by using the Shutter Priority. The faster the film speed, the less your shot will suffer from the dreaded shake. Daytime shots can do with 1/60. Night is a different story. You’ll need at least 1/150. If it’s really dark, go for 1/300.
Increase your ISO. ISO determines light sensitivity. Standard ISO is 100. For nightshots, you may require 200 ISO or 400 ISO. Be warned that higher ISO can result in grainier shots though.
And finally, if your shots still turn out horrid despite the careful camera tweaking, there’s always post processing. Adobe Photoshop is your friend! With a bit of tweaking, you can adjust gamma and brightness, thereby transforming a ruined shot into a perfect masterpience.

Are you ready to for the next great album?

No tag for this post.

Please Don’t Screw Up HTML 5

Michael Lankton — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:36:41 +0000

HTML 5 is upon us, and it should change the way we deliver web content. That is, if the browser makers and web designers don’t screw it up.

Whether you use a Mozilla or Webkit based web browser, chances are that once you’ve installed all the plugins you need, your web surfing experience is pretty complete. Good looking, dynamic web content abounds, and the web browsing experience delivers a lot more than it did 10 years ago.

Maybe you’re using a computer you don’t own or have the ability to install software on. How is your internet experience now? What if the site you need to get on requires Flash and you don’t have it? HTML 5 addresses that by adding elements for video and audio, and every web browser that is HTML 5 compliant will work, no plugins necessary. Much simpler, much more elegant, and everybody gets the same experience regardless of platform.

The good news is that Mozilla and Webkit both understand the HTML 5 elements for multimedia content. If your browser doesn’t grok the HTML5 multimedia elements, it’s incumbent upon the web designer to embed fallbacks that utilize Flash, javascript or whatever to deliver an alternate delivery, or at least a message letting you know that your browser sucks.

Flash and javascript should only be used as a fallback though. We finally have a clean, platform agnostic, resource friendly means to deliver rich web content. Please use it everyone. My fear is that people will keep using proprietary delivery systems like Flash, and it’s time to move forward and away from it.

Browser developers: please educate your users and developers and support the elements that HTML 5 provides to deliver rich web content.

Web designers: quit using Flash and javascript to achieve something that a simple video tag could do.

The same web experience. Regardless of operating system. Regardless of web browser.

Tags: html, Mozilla, Web Design, Webkit

How To Choose Your Next Digicam

Joseph Plazo — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:57:19 +0000

Until just about 5 years ago, folks still fell in line to buy film. Choices were simple. You either got the 36 shot roll of film, or the 21 shot. A few blest individuals got to use Advantix which allowed printing of thumbnails. That saved on printing costs since you can easily identify which shots deserved to jump into the bin.

Today’s different. People no longer buy film. They buy glossy photo paper- lots of it. With the advent of amazing digital camera technology and high quality inkjets, every home can be a photolab. The passion for pictures has exploded to the point that many folks have at least two cameras in a household.

Are you planning on getting your second or third digicam? I know I am. Upgrading digital cameras has reached the same fervor as changing cellphones. Here are a few tips before you swipe the Visa:

Know how much you’re willing to spend. Some Kodak cameras cost under $30. Others cost over $3000. While the pricier ones offer more features, ask yourself if you’ll ever need them. For instance, do you really need the cam that has 58 preset modes or can go 300 ft under water? Keep to the budget!
Check what storage facilities it may have. A year ago, digital cameras accomodated up to 1GB of SD or Compact Flash. Today, we have cameras that can read 16GB or 32GB cards. Be wary of what your chosen camera can take. I once bought a 8GB SD car that couldn’t work in my Pentax. What a waste!
Consider the form factor. Are you the fellow who likes snapping his cute dates on the fly? Then you want a point and shoot that fits in the pocket. Or maybe you enjoy taking huge zooms of wildlife? In that case you need an SLR. Cameras come in all sizes and shapes and configurations. Take an inventory of your lifestyle and decide how you plan to use your camera. Otherwise, it’d end up dead weight.
Forget Megapixel Unless You’re an Ad Man. Manufacturers compete in the megapixel arena. Simply put, more megapixels mean larger printouts. If you’re the average Joe, you’d probably never need more than 5MP, which makes decent 8″x11″ prints. Resist the temptation to burn cash for a 24MP camera which is necessary only for billboards.

Choosing a camera is a fun and exhilarating endeavor. Before you hit the store, know what you want first, then scan the web for potential brands you may desire. Reviews from sites like dpreview.com can save you from buying lemons. Once you have made an informed decision, march to the store and reward yourself.

Happy shooting!

No tag for this post.

OpenOffice.org vs Google Docs

Michael Lankton — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:17:49 +0000

Microsoft Office has ruled the world of computer productivity since the Windows 9x era. Really, how many of you are still using Corel or Lotus? I thought so.

While non-Windows hardware represents a very small slice of the pie, it’s still a factor because in a perfect world we would all be using the same apps for productivity regardless of platform, and standards would be usable across platforms.

Office does have a Mac port, and while it’s incomplete (no Access), it does allow users to have the exact same environment on Windows and OS X, with documents that work on both systems.

What about the rest of the world? While you can run Windows and Office in a virtual machine, until fairly recently this wasn’t such a good option because our hardware wasn’t up to the task of running emulated hardware with near native speed. On top of that, now you need A) a Windows DVD, B) an Office DVD and C) virtual machine software to run them. Not the most seemless solution for enterprise or Joe User.

I played with StarOffice a long time ago, and didn’t spend too much time with it due to it’s immature state. I revisited early this spring when I tried OpenOffice.org, and found that it’s feature set had come along swimmingly, and I switched from MS Office to OpenOffice.org. I like that OpenOffice.org does a decent job with MS Office documents. I like that it runs on many platforms, so that whether I’m on the Mac, using Windows, or running the unix flavor of the month, I have the exact same work environment. Besides lacking ports to Amiga OS 4 and MorphOS, OpenOffice.org pretty much covers all the hardware bases.

With MS Office, you’re looking at approximately $300 for the full version, and I don’t know what licenses cost businesses. That, or you’re stealing to use it.

OpenOffice.org is free. Free as in free. You’re not paying a dime, or breaking any laws to use it.

I have been so impressed with OpenOffice.org that I have said something I wouldn’t have thought five years ago: I believe that OpenOffice will eventually replace MS Office as the productivity suite standard, and that’s a Good Thing.

The alternative is Google docs. Think Office minus Access, except as a web app. Google docs is in its infancy, but I can see it progressing to the point that it’s as full featured as you’d need it to be. I have never been a believer that online apps would replace compiled apps, and that eventually we’d all be using dumb terminals at home. However, I can see the benefit of Google docs. No matter what piece of hardware you are on, with a compatible web browser you have the same productivity environment.

My personal feeling is that people like a sense of tangibility that web apps don’t provide, and I think that OpenOffice would become people’s preference over Google docs.

What do you think?

Tags: Google, Google Docs, OpenOffice.org, productivity

Migrated To New Server Over The Weekend

Everton — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:35:44 +0000

I’ve had to move servers again and the migration was completed over the weekend. I’d like to thank my new hosts WiredTree for a very professional move, which had no major hiccups. Already users should see major speed improvements on the site, which will increase over the coming weeks as we tweak the server.

I decided to move away from my previous hosts Liquidweb because the way my bandwidth usage was going thanks to Windows 7 News, which has grown a lot faster than I’d expected (or hoped!), I was going to break through my 2TB bandwidth usage in a month or so. Buying more bandwidth wasn’t economic with Liquidweb, and in fact it was actually cheaper getting a second dedicated server which would give me a second allowance.

However, I decided to move because I was getting a bit frustrated with the turnaround on support issues. One of the problems of being UK based is I tend to be going to be bed when site usage starts to peak, and of course that’s when problems occur. So, I wasn’t happy that LiquidWeb were too slow to respond to issues, particularly when I wanted to sleep!

So far, I’m very happy with Wiredtree and their support has been fantastic. My new server is a beast and is probably over-specified , but I’ve done this deliberately as I’d rather pay more for additional reliability and sleep! Reliability has recently become a more pressing issue as I now depend on the income my sites make to pay my bills, whereas before the income was just a bit of extra pocket money.

Here’s my new spec:

Intel Dual Xeon Harpertown 5420 (2.50GHZ 12MB Cache)
16GB ECC Registered
Primary Disk: Hardware Raid-5 3×250GB 7.2k RPM SATAII 16MB Cache
Additional Drive: 250GB 7.2k RPM SATAII 16MB Cache to run mysql databases
Remote Backup Space: 50 GB Remote Backup Space

As you can see I’ve also added an off-site backup option. Losing my server would be an absolute disaster for me. If you are not backing up offline then I highly recommend that you download a backup every couple of days.

Tags: Dedicated Server, hosting, liquidweb, mysql, Online Backup, wiredtree, Wordpress

When Should You Remove Ads From Your Site?

Everton — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:59:32 +0000

I’ve read many blog posts advising as to when aspiring bloggers should add banners to their sites. In my opinion the advice given in most posts that you should only add adverts once you’ve got an established readership is wrong. A good blog should always be attracting new readers, so why should new readers be treated any differently to readers who were lucky enough to see the blog in its infancy without ads?

My advice is, if you are going to monetise your blog, then you should do so from day one. This will also allow you to experiment with placements and different networks when the numbers are not critical e.g. a 10% reduction in earnings from a bad decision will only be worth cents in the early days, whereas a bad decision when your site is successful could cost you hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars.

When I’m experimenting with new ad types, I tend to look at a combination of two factors in deciding whether or not to maintain the ads on my sites. If a new network meets both criteria, then I run their ads.

CPM

The only CPC ads I run on my sites are Google Adsense ads. This is because these were the first ads I added back in 2006 when I decided to try and make an income from this site (my first site), so I have a lot of knowledge about how they can perform. In fact, Adsense is still one of my best performing networks from a eCPM perspective.

For my other networks, I only run the ads if the CPM meets my min requirement. This used to be $1 CPM but I’ve recently raised it. I set a CPM floor, because in my opinion I’d rather not show ads that have low CPMs because the payments at the end of the month aren’t spectacular and also because they tend to be cheap and tacky ads, or aren’t paying enough to warrant forcing readers to look at them.

Ads I’ve removed because the CPM are too low include Google Adsense for Feeds ads. The CPMs I saw there were obscenely low, less than $0.10. Many users use RSS to get an ad-free reading experience, so subjecting these users to ads when I was making less than $20 per month just didn’t make sense.

Fill Rate

Running a high CPM ad is no good though, if the fill rate is too low because all it means is either lots of empty ad spaces, or if you are using an alternate network, unnecessary delays to page loads while the ad network registers yet another page impression they can’t monetise.

An example of a network I removed despite a very high CPM was Vibrantmedia. Their InterestAds sounded perfect, paying a guaranteed CPM in excess of $4. However, the fill rate was less than 0.5%. This meant that on almost every pageload there were noticable delays while their script ran with no ads being served, so I removed their script.

Another example is the Videoegg ads you might have seen running in my footer and header earlier this month. The CPMs again were decent at just over $2, but again the fill rate was too low to justify the additional delays to page loads.

Do you assess any other factors when deciding whether or not to display an advert on your site?

Tags: ad network, adsense, cpm, eCPM, making money online, RSS, vibrantmedia, Videoegg

Top Five iPhone Games

Everton — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:17:22 +0000

After weeks of deliberating I finally ordered, not one, but two iPhone 3G S – one for me and one for the new Mrs Blair. They should be arriving next week, and I’m already creating a list of apps I want to install. Portable video games are hot as a pistol, and the iPhone platform is just perfect for this form of entertainment. The screen is pretty large, thanks to the non-existing keypad, and the phone registers any change in position, which allows you to use the phone itself as a game control. Among the pretty rich range of iPhone games, here are the five best ones that I’m going to install first on my brand new shiny iPhone!

Aquatica

This game is a really nice and soft underwater adventure for iPhone. You make your little amoeba swim around in the light blue ocean and eat other microbes to grow bigger and more handsome. It’s similar to the popular PS3 game flow. Actually so similar that is has created accusations of plagiarism, more about that here.

Blimp

Blimp reminds of Aquatica but it’s the other way around – it’s a flying adventure. You must fly to the right places and pick up the right stuff. This game environment is really, really good-looking, and you play it using the iPhone as a controller, that is, tilting the phone to control your flight.

Let’s Golf

This is nothing less than a truly entertaining golf game for the iPhone. As a matter of fact, this is as close as you get to console gaming on the iPhone right now. The game play also reminds a lot of the usual golf games – aiming, hitting, putting with easy controls. You can customize your character, buy new clothes for reward points, and so on.

Zynga Live Poker

This is an astonishingly good multiplayer poker game for the iPhone. The game play reminds a lot of genuine online poker, and you can play against thousands of other players around the world. The usual poker rules apply, the betting is what you’re used to, and except for the lack of a real-money option, this is real poker on the iPhone.

Peggle

In Peggle, you must try to nail a number of pegs with balls that come out of a small cannon at the top of the screen. You set the direction of the cannon, tap the fire button and the ball comes bouncing around like crazy. If in ten balls you manage to nail all orange pegs, you advance to the next level (a total of 55). It’s a classic “game”, and the iPhone version brings it alive very nicely.

Tags: Apple, iphone 3GS, iphone games, mobile games, Smartphones

How To Make Quick And Safe Bucks Online With Forex

Joseph Plazo — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:30:00 +0000

95% of new investors fail the forex game. That’s a fact. The average bloke jumps into the market with a $10,000 investment hoping to hit a goldmine. He purchases scores of forex indicators off ebay to get an edge. Then he tries autotrading robots amounting to a thousand dollars. Then reality sets in. Losses accumulate until the account is wiped out. All the fancy tools and indicators amounted to nothing.

I’ve seen it happen too often. I’ve had friends bled of a hundred grand in a month. I personally lost $20,000 the first time I tried 5 years ago. It’s not the game for the faint hearted.

Worried? Should you keep away from this money making industry then? It depends.

One reason most fail at this endeavor is that decisions are made on an emotional level. The amateur trader spots a trend, bets on it, makes a profit… then he enlarges each succeeding bet thinking he’s on a roll. Big mistake. The larger the bet, the more monstrous the potential for loss. The next position he enters reverses and tanks up everything he’s bet. A whole day of winning obliterated in one move.

So what does the trader do? He illogically bets larger on succeeding trades, hoping to make up for the whopper losses in one move. It’s a spiral from there. Logic is thrown out the window. Emotion dominates succeeding moves until the account registers 0.00 US Dollars.

The trader contemplates a skydive from the 30th floor.

Making money online with forex houses can be very rewarding. But it can be seriously deadly as well. For those wanting quick bucks from the forex market, I offer the following tips:

1) Check your Emotion at the door. Make trades when you’re neutral. Avoid trading when your pride is stinging- you’ll end up dashing into illogical maneuvers to redeem yourself.

2) Issue online trades shortly after the release of fundamental news data, not before. When information like CPI, GDP or Unemployment is released, the market reacts. Violently. If you made a trade prior to the release, the trend can reverse abruptly to you expectations and annihilate your account.

3) Resist the urge to overspend on all those cutesy $100 trend prediction indicators so popular on ebay. Scammers wrote many of those just to make a buck from losing traders. If you must purchase one, the only one I recommend is the fx4caster written by trading genuis Tom Yeomans. It’s the one tool that worked consistently well- and which most forex houses would love to ban. I’ve personally made megabucks with it- especially when paired with standard market tools like the MACD, 20 day moving average, stochastics and Aroon indicators.

4) Join forex support groups. Fxfisherman.com and Forexfactory.com bustle with thousands of traders on a mission: to beat the market and the forex house. What these people discuss daily is more valuable than any thousand dollar ebook you can buy on the market. They have have real experience and are raring to share.

5) Finally, bet safe. Making money online with forex is easy when you don’t risk all your eggs in move large move. Avoid exposing more than 10% of your equity on a currency pair. Diversification is key. You’ll appreciate this more if you’ve been exposed to the world of online affiliate marketing: the more websites you have attacking numerous markets, the more money you’ll make. But when you focus on just one niche… and that niche dries up… you’ve pretty much kicked the bucket.

Happy money making!

No tag for this post.

Download Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 Trial Version

Umar — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:56:07 +0000

The team of popular anti-virus software has recently released a free version of Kaspersky Internet Security 2010. Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 has been released on a trial basis and can be used totally free of cost.

While it is free it doesn’t limit itself by not offering great features that you will need to have a complete and secure internet experience.

Key features of Kaspersky Internet Security includes

Unique Safe Run Mode for questionable applications and websites
Kaspersky Toolbar for Internet browsers to warn you about infected or unsafe websites
Special Game Mode to suspend alerts, updates and scans while you play

Some of the improved features include a Security Application Monitor that gives you full picture on programs installed on your PC and Identity Information Controller to give valuable data an extra layer of protection.

In addition to that it offers advanced identity theft protection, including improved secure Virtual Keyboard and urgent Detection System to stop fast emerging threats. Last but not that least it features the Next generation proactive protection from zero-day attacks and unknown threats making your machine a safe place to browse on.

Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 Trail is available for fee and can be downloaded from the link below
Download Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 Trial

Tags: 2010 trial, download, Internet, Kaspersky, kaspersky internet security 2010 trial, Security

Fun With VirtualBox

Michael Lankton — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:03 +0000

In 2002 I switched to Mac. As those of you who have been paying attention know, I was a dyed in the wool NeXT guy, and I had OPENSTEP on my primary workstation from about 1997-2002. I kept an assortment of other machines on my network running FreeBSD, Solaris, various linux distros, and the occasional hobby os like BeOS.

Since my switch to Mac, my home network has diminished to just a couple of machines, and overall, I get more satisfaction from the working environments I use now than the many I used to play with. However, for the last few years with my primary workstation running on Power PC instead of Intel, my hobby os options were limited.

Since I upgraded to an Intel Mac this spring I’ve been playing with operating systems again, thanks to the marvelous virtual machine. Many of you are familiar with VMWare and Parallels. I use Sun’s excellent and free VirtualBox, which is fast catching up to VMWare’s feature set.

Here is the lowdown on a handful of alternative operating systems and desktops, coming from the perspective of a hobbyist who’s been out of the loop for a while.

Aros Aros is a free Amiga OS clone that’s been around for about as long as I’ve been into operating systems. Until recently, there wasn’t much to show for all those years of effort. This year, Aros received a port of OWB, a webkit-based web browser, and all of a sudden the Aros system is starting to resemble a usable operating system. Like the other Amiga os’es (Amiga OS, Amiga OS 4, MorphOS), Aros boots to a usable desktop in less than 10 seconds. This always makes me smile, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve had Amiga-envy for the last 15 years. I swear to God I will have hardware that will run Amiga OS 4 and MorphOS, someday. Anyway, back to Aros. Aros is not the linux kernel and GNU system running a proprietary GUI. Aros has it’s own kernel, which is both good and bad. Good, in that the world does NOT need another linux distro, and BAD because it slows down development compared to how fast things would proceed if they used linux. Think development community: Aros has a handful of people vs. linux, which has a huge, global development community. Aros is not quite ready to be an everyday desktop, but it’s getting close, and I’m excited. I think Aros is looking good, and once they have the holes filled in, will make both nostalgic Amigans and operating system enthusiasts happy with a fast, responsive, fun to use system. Until the people behind Amiga OS and MorphOS wise up and port to Intel, this is Amiga OS for the rest of us.

Aros

Haiku Haiku has been around for a while, with nothing to show the world for their efforts. Then recently I saw they had a developer’s Virtual Box image and gave it a try. Haiku is not linux-based, and is an admirable attempt to recreate BeOS from scratch. From what I can see they are doing a fantastic job. I had a usable desktop in 10 seconds, and it looked and behaved exactly how I remembered BeOS. This os is going to be ready for public consumption soon. Playing with it reminded me that BeOS never made me a convert, but I do admire what the Haiku team has accomplished. It was a very pleasant surprise to find Haiku in such a high state of functionality. Now that they’ve recreated BeOS, I definitely want to keep an eye on them to see where they are going to take it.

Haiku

Syllable I used to play with this back when it was called Atheos. Syllable has it’s own kernel and GUI, which is usually a plus, but I have two knocks against Syllable. One, the newer server version of Syllable uses linux, which signifies to me that they are on the cusp of abandoning their proprietary kernel and become yet another linux distro. Two, the GUI is dull, dull, dull. Please, aspiring os and GUI designers, if you are going to work on os projects, do better than to model your GUI on Win95 and/or Gnome.

Syllable

OpenSolaris Another disappointment. I used to like Solaris, one, because it represented “real” unix, and two, because CDE made you feel like you weren’t in Kansas anymore. OpenSolaris is indistinguishable from any linux distro. It would have been nice if they would have differentiated themselves by turning Java Desktop into a desktop environment, but instead they use Gnome. Yawn. I’ve seen this before guys. I can use Ubuntu if I want this and have, like, oh, maybe a million more software packages available to me. Solaris is still strong in the market because it’s a platform for a lot of specialized software, but in terms of GUI design Sun went lazy and gave us just another Gnome desktop.

OpenSolaris

Etoile Ok, Etoile is not an os, but a GNUstep-dependent desktop environment that is much more similar to OS X than it is OPENSTEP. I spent 3 days trying to build Etoile and GNUstep on FreeBSD 7.2, and eventually gave up. I did play with the developer Virtual Box image for a minute or two. Since the last time I looked at Etoile, not much has changed. Perhaps I am pissed at Etoile because it’s near-impossible to compile, or perhaps it’s just the incomplete, barely functioning status it is in. Maybe in another couple of years the Etoile team will have produced something worth reviewing. This could be something cool, if any of it worked. They should keep the lid on this until it’s functional.

Etoile 0.4.1

GNUstep GNUstep has been around a long time as well. GNUstep is not an os, but a set of frameworks that duplicates the OPENSTEP spec that NeXT made for the NeXT Mach OS, and then Solaris and Yellowbox (OPENSTEP on Windows NT). I include GNUstep, because as a rabid NeXT/OS X advocate, I always hoped the project would bear fruit. I was hoping for better than Etoile delivered at this stage in it’s development, and GNUstep, while it doesn’t act like a NeXT system, at least is starting to look like one. I can’t condone the use of X and Windowmaker to achieve the desktop they have. What they need to do is replicate Display Postscript and ditch X altogther. GNUstep and GDPS is a desktop environment I would get excited about, and hopefully it will happen someday. In the meantime, for those of you who never used a NeXT, it will give you a small glimpse of the great system that was.

GNUstep

OPENSTEP 4.2 The last version of the NeXT Mach OS released by NeXT prior to being swallowed by Apple. This is the real deal folks. I am happy to announce that if you have the cd and the floppy install images this installs and works great in Virtual Box. In fact, I have been having a blast playing with my all time favorite os, which I haven’t used at all since 2003. This desktop environment was so far ahead of the curve that people are still copying it. If you manage to find a copy and get it running, email me for tips on getting DHCP working. No modern web browser, and unix source code can be painful to compile on this non-posix compliant BSD 4.2 system, but it’s genius through and through. If you’re into os’es you’ll see that and appreciate it.

I got mail from Steve!

OPENSTEP 4.2

Connected on OmniWeb 3

I can’t explain my fascination with GUIs and operating systems. Perhaps it is just fun to learn a new way to do things, or find a way that is better than what you are used to. Sun’s VirtualBox is free, it works great, and will allow you to play with some alternative desktops without having to add hardware to your space to do so. Incidentally, Windows 7 works just fine in VB, so if you are on a non-Windows machine and need something like Access that is Windows-only, you’re in luck.

No tag for this post.

Fastest Way to Search Websites that belongs to one person

Umar — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:00:52 +0000

After visiting a website I like, I’ve always wondered: are there any other sites like it? Perhaps about a different subject but written in the same style/presentation that I’ve grown to enjoy. I’ve had this thought many times but just dismissed it and carried on little did I know that I wasn’t the only one to have it!

SpyOnWeb.com is the answer to my question! Just enter the IP, URL or even a Google Adsense/Analytics code and the website will retrieve any other websites registered with the same information e.g. if you give a Google Analytics ID, SpyOnWeb.com will search for all sites carrying the same code and then will display all the URLs on one page!

SpyOnWeb.com takes the information from public sources, then structures it for your quick and convenient search for the websites that probably belong to the same owner. Their web crawler picks out the following data including ip address, Google Adsense id, Google Analytics id, Yahoo publisher network id, Yandex direct id.

Some of the searches really had me doing a double-take! Who knew that the LifeHacker guy had so many websites to his name! Give it a try & don’t be surprised if spend a lot of time on this.

Check out SpyonWeb

Tags: fastest, find, find web owners, Search, web owners, website

Windows 7 Pre-Orders Start Tomorrow

Everton — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:58:51 +0000

From tomorrow individuals in the US, Canada and Japan will be able to pre-order Windows 7 and save up to $100 off the full prices. Microsoft haven’t set an end date for the offer, merely stating that they have a sales target in mind and that they will pull the offer once that has been met.

The Windows 7 pre-order offer will only be available from major retailers. Over on Windows 7 News we will be creating a list of links to stores that will be accepting Windows 7 Pre-orders:

Windows 7 Home Premium: Usually $120 will be available for Pre-order for $50

Windows 7 Professional: Usually $200 will available for Pre-order for $100

Other versions of Windows 7 will be not be available for pre-order, although they might be in the run-up to Windows 7 Launch day on 22nd October 2009. The full prices for Windows 7 has also been announced:

Windows Vista	Initial Pricing	Today’s Pricing	Windows 7	Initial Pricing
Home Premium (Upgrade)	$160	$130	Home Premium (Upgrade)	$120
Business (Upgrade)	$200	$200	Business (Upgrade)	$200
Ultimate (Upgrade)	$260	$220	Ultimate (Upgrade)	$220
Home Premium (Full)	$240	$240	Home Premium (Full)	$200
Business (Full)	$300	$300	Professional (Full)	$300
Ultimate (Full)	$400	$320	Ultimate (Full)	$320

To learn about the differences between each version then check out our Windows 7 Features section.

Tags: Buy Windows 7, Pre-order Windows 7, Windows 7

Kick Them Out. Permanently

Joseph Plazo — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:13:05 +0000

Installed a Suite lately? Whether it’s Mcaffe or Norton, Office or StarOffice, they’re vexingly difficult to purge from your system. That’s supposed to be a feature too- not a flaw. Egotistic suites think they’re doing you a favor by clinging on in perpetua long after you’ve ‘uninstalled it.’

You don’t have to suffer misbehaved suites anymore. Mosey over to AppRemover (www.appremover.com) and grab their free software. In just seconds, the entire suite down to its toes and dlls will say adieu. Appremover does the job and does it well. In fact, it’s so good, it even uninstalls perfectly!

Say hello to happier Windows performance!

By the way, it loves Windows 7 too!

No tag for this post.

Create Your Personal Profile In Google

MoiN — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:54:18 +0000

Ever wondered what type of result’s you’ll confront if you type in your name in Google? Google, in its attempt to make sense of the bazillions of personal info pages out there, have given an opportunity for you to define your presence on the internet!

Before, if you did a Google search of your name it may have shown a link to your facebook/orkut and/or forum profile.

Google intends to do away with that clunky method and replace it with a page that is customized for you and by you! You can add info about yourself (likes dislikes etc) share info that you’ve found on the web and include links to your blogs and other profiles such as facebook, linkedin, etc. People can also contact you (if you choose to share your contact details that is) and you can even add photos via Flickr and Picasa! In short it becomes a central location for all things ‘You!’

Once your profile is made just allow it to be searched by name, and then go ahead and Google yourself! See the results! To create your own personalized profile at google, visit Google Profiles.

No tag for this post.

Compare Your Site’s Performance Vs Your Competitor

MoiN — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:46:09 +0000

As a website owner or web developer one of the most important areas you may focus on is speed. Getting the website to open as fast as possible for your visitor. Some people like to wait and see their users response to the sped of their website, others (the smarter lot) try to raise their standards by continuously optimizing their sites. One questions that frequently pops into the developers head is `I wonder how fast my website would be versus xyz.com?’

Well Webslug is your answer! In essence WebSlug is a side by side comparison between 2 websites, simply enter your website URL and another website that you’d like to compare against, click on compare and let the battle begin! Webslug simultaneously loads both websites and notes the time each takes to display a full page – at the end of the `race’ Webslug determines a winner and even will tell you how many times the websites provided have been used for comparison (in percentages)

It records all of this data to give you links to the fastest websites that it has tested down to which were the fastest browsers detected during the test as well as the fastest O/S!

It’s definitely the go to tool for the finicky Web owner and/or developer to whom speed is everything!

No tag for this post.

The Largest Digital Collection of Online Books Got Better than Ever

Umar — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 12:29:43 +0000

With so much information out there on the internet one wonders how much of it is useful i.e add to your knowledge so it can benefit you in the future. Once again Google is attempting to answer that question, with Google Book Search!

In its most simplest form Google Book Search is a tool that searches the full text of books that Google has scanned, converted to text, and stored in their digital database.

So what are the advantages? Well one is that you’ll now be able to trace and read a book even if its out of print. Of course there’s always a chance that you might not find the book you’re looking for but With over 7 million books in its database, I’m sure you can’t complain about not having enough choice!

Presented using a clear and simple interface you can browse educational books and even some of the most popular magazines of this century! Google will even direct you to some of the most recommended books it has and will even display book by choosing a random topic.

AS of writing GoogleBooks is the largest digital collections of books online and it just got better check out these features:

1. Embed part of a book of a the link to a book on your web page or blog
2. Better search within each book
3. Thumbnail view
4. Contents drop-down menu
5. Plain Text Mode
7. Improved Book Overview Page

Inside Google Book Search

Tags: booksearch, Google, google booksearch, search books on google

How To Fix Your Crappy Battery Meter

Joseph Plazo — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 09:44:26 +0000

I love my laptops. Not many admit they love work… but I do. It’s great to take work on the road, on vacation and even at parties where you pretend you’re having fun. That’s the reason I carry my laptop more often than I do my phone. These miracle tools ensure that not a single hour is wasted.

Most laptops have gotten more efficient. Lithium ion battery technologies and shrinking microprocessors have allowed most of these gadgets to last almost 6 hours without AC. That’s quite a boon. Back in 1999, a laptop runs one hour on batteries… then croaks. Now, you can crunch spreadsheets all day and have enough juice left by 8pm to check your twitter updates.

Batteries have improved, but amazingly battery meters haven’t. Have you noticed how inaccurate Windows XP reports remaining time in huge jumps? At first, it’s 100%. Then 20 minutes later it’s 70%. An hour after then you’re down to 20%. It appears that the default battery icon fed by laptop ACPI is crap. You think you’re out of juice, but you actually have more. Much more.

A programmer apparently got fed up. Perhaps it was the stress of an erroneously draining battery that drove him nuts. Maybe he simply got tired switching batteries that looked dead, but had lots of time left. Whatever the reason, he decided to write a brilliant battery meter. Unlike the XP meter, his program actually profiles voltage drop across the usable life of the battery, giving you precise stats down to the last minute and percentage of battery life. The meter reports data like “3 mins left, 2% remaining.” Now that’s cool!

If you’re as pissed as I am with the XP meter, you’d love this:

http://www.geocities.com/mosc_007/index.html

Have fun!

Tags: battery meter, XP

Build Your Playlist And Enjoy Millions of Free Audio Tracks

MoiN — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:42:14 +0000

We Recommend! FixTunes To Organise and Fix Your Music Automatically!

Ok, so you have the latest walkman/MP3 player, have a collection of your favorite tunes on it and you’re the type of person who listens to music 24/7 – be it work or play! That’s great…until you hear the latest tune that you absolutely MUST get! In order to do so, you need to either go out and buy the CD or search for song, find a vendor who’s selling it at an affordable rate, download the tune via iTunes (or whatever) into your Music player, and update your playlist before you can enjoy the song – chances are, in that much time the next Big tune will be out!

Enter allmusic.fm, boasting 500 million (yes you read that correct) tracks to choose from — you literally can search for ANY song and then later on save it to your playlist – which can also be shared with others! Consider it your Giant iPod on the internet which contains all the songs you can think of – and all you really need is an internet connection, a computer with a soundcard, a browser, and no matter where you are, in which part of the world – you’re ready to bounce to your tunes!

Built with a clean, simple yet effective interface, allmusic.fm has a `Featured’ list as well as a `Top’ tracks list which you can listen to as soon as you enter the site. Of course you can search for your particular tune too and you can listen to them without even registering yourself! However in order to actually SAVE your playlist for future listens you need to register and then login to the site (which is the basic attraction of allmusic.fm, besides registration is Free so why wouldn’t you register?)

The fact that you can also share your playlists with others gives you some basic social networking aspects as well try getting your iPod to do That! All in all this is one site to book mark!

Tags: allmusic.fm, iTunes, MP3, mp3 player, online music, playlist

How To Find Any File On The Internet

MoiN — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:39:59 +0000

Finally! I can breathe a sigh of relief! Being a PC power user I tend to install a lot of software (which range from music composition stuff to PC maintenance)

and one of the biggest issues I face is finding files that are either required to run something (e.g. dll files, the latest .NET framework etc) or just something that I happen to be hunting down (e.g. The New Batman theme song)

Until now I’ve been using Google with a variety of “search hacks” and literally hundreds of keywords to get what I want. Sure I eventually found specific sites that catered to specific needs but these are few and far apart – I can easily say that searching (for me) is one of the most time consuming processes I undergo almost on a daily basis.

Well no more! An amazingly simple and powerful solution lay in my inbox today – a weblink to be exact: www.findthatfile.com. Simply put what Google is to information , Findthatfile is to files. No matter what you’re searching for , be it a system file, a bittorent file or a specific desktop wallpaper – it will hunt it down and give you a direct link to it! You can even add your own media to the site.

To quote their mission statement:

“findthatfile.com’s mission is to provide the most comprehensive file search on the Internet encompassing Web, FTP, Usenet and P2P resources including 43 file types and 200+ file extensions including over 90 file upload services like RapidShare. We search as deeply as possible to identify and serve the most relevant data possible including properties, meta data, extracts and more.”

It doesn’t get any clearer than that!

Tags: findthatfile, Google, Search

AntiVirus And AntiSpamBee Plugins For WordPress

Everton — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:53:40 +0000

Last week my server was attacked by a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack for about 5 days, which took my sites down for about 4 hours. My host liquidweb responded brilliantly and although they couldn’t stop the attack, they tweaked my server so that it could handle excess load from the attack.

The incident made me think long and hard about my site security. One of the services the team I manage for my ‘day job’ is an online backup service, and we are also doing penetration tests and putting in place disaster recovery plans. I decided that I needed to put a disaster recovery plan in place for my online ‘night job’. Losing all of my hard work over the last 4 years would be absolutely disastrous, as well as the potential loss of income which initially started as extra pocket money, but which I now rely on.

As part of my security review, I’ve been looking at my WordPress installations and the plugins used. One plugin that I’ve added to my site as a result is the AntiVirus WordPress Plugin. This plugin scans your WordPress blog daily viruses, worms and malware that are designed for WordPress. If the WordPress AntiVirus plugin sees any attacks it sends an instant email to the site admin.

Another plugin from the same author that I’m not using, but my business partner Martin is, is the AntispamBee WordPress plugin. This offers a viable alternative to Akismet for anti-spam protection. I haven’t tried it myself as I’m quite happy with Akismet and I prefer it to other solutions as the processing isn’t done on my server. It doesn’t seem to create many false positives which is my prime concern, but I can’t really tell as I don’t check my spam folder anymore as there are too many comments in there.

What steps have you taken to protect your blog?

Tags: Akismet, antispambee, Antivirus, plugins, Security, Spam, Wordpress

Using Multiple Ad Networks To Increase Blog Earnings

Everton — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:01:03 +0000

It’s been a long time since I’ve produced a post about making money with blogs. I used to share my tips regularly in my MyBlogEarnings posts, but I stopped sharing my earnings and tips, because I didn’t want people to think that I was boasting, and also because some of my colleagues found out and I was getting a bit uncomfortable with them knowing about my second income.

One tip that I really want to share though is how to use multiple ad networks to increase blog earnings. Over the last couple of months I’ve been working really hard to grow traffic to my sites by creating more posts, both myself and through recruiting authors. On this site for instance, 3 new authors have been added who are doing a fantastic job, and on Windows 7 News that I run jointly with Martin, we’ve added 4 great authors within the last month.

If one of your objectives from blogging is to generate an income/second income, then creating additional traffic isn’t going to benefit you if you don’t find a formula for generating money. For most bloggers this involves joining one of the many advertising networks out there. What I’ve learnt over the last couple of months is that being a member of multiple networks allows you to soften the blow of one network performing badly, through the use of alternate urls.

Most ad networks allow you to add code for other networks, or an alternate url, when they don’t have a paying ad to show. Some networks go one step further and let you even set a minimum CPM that has to be hit, and if not the impression gets handed over to the alternate network. I’ve joined a couple of these networks and I’ve connected them up in a chain, so that if one network doesn’t hit the min CPM I’ve set, the impression is handed over to another network who also has a min CPM to hit, and so on, until my final network is reached who guarantee that every paid slot is filled.

What I do every day or so is see how each network is faring in terms of campaigns and eCPMs, and adjust their min target up or down depending on how the next network in the chain is performing. E.g. if the network behind is performing well, then I raise the CPM so that the network behind gets more impressions, and if the network behind is performing badly I lower the CPM to improve fill rates. Overall, I think I’ve managed to improve my eCPMs by around 20% through juggling multiple networks.

I’ve been paying particular attention to Adify, because from next month there will be fundamental changes (very bad changes IMHO) to the way their ad network will work in the future, which will significantly reduce my earnings. I’m trying to counter this by setting my Adify CPM mins, so that no low paying ads are shown and so that any high paying ads still help to bring up my average CPM.

Other benefits of working with multiple networks include being able to negotiate better revenue shares. I’ve managed to successfully get higher percentages on a few occasions; never assume that the offer on the table can’t be improved. Always ask if you can get a better rev share before joining a network – the worst that can happen is they say no.

Tags: Adify, alternate url, Blogging Tips, cpm, making money online, MyBlogEarnings, problogger

How to Protect your PC using USB Flash Drive

Umar — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:53:42 +0000

Once in a while a software comes along that solves a major issue yet it leaves you surprised with is plain ingenuity.

Leaving your computer out in the open is a Green signal for co-workers (usually of the malicious kind) to play a prank on you or, even more seriously, intentionally damaging or stealing valuable information that you were working on at the time.

This is where Predator comes in. Designed for Windows Xp and Vista, the aim of Predator is to replace the conventional (and often forgotten) CTRL+ALT+DEL lock mechanism found in Windows with a unique alternative ie to use your USB device as a security lock.

To get started you need to download the freeware of predator ,connect your USB thumbdrive, run the software, set it up and then comes the innovative part , when you’re going to move away from your computer just makes sure you save whatever needs to be on your USB drive (documents, spreadsheets etc) and just pull out the USB drive and take it with you! There’s even no need to use the “Remove hardware safely” option, just yank it out!

While you are away from the computer The keyboard and mouse will be disabled, your screen will be blanked out, the ability to use the Task manager (by pressing CRTL+ ALT + DEL) will be disabled AND if someone tries to access your computer the software keep a record of all attempts, after 3 unsuccessful attempts it will sound an alarm from your PC.

Once you’re back at your desk just plug your USB device in and you’ll automatically regain control of the screen, keyboard, mouse as well as view the log file to see if anyone has tried to access your computer.

It really is a straight forward little software and its unique memorable system is bound to help with protecting your data!

Here are some Advanced Security Features:

PREDATOR records all security-related events in a log file: start, alarms, stop. By reading this log, you will know if intruders have tried to use your computer while you have been away.
PREDATOR frequently changes the security codes recorded on your USB drive. If an intruder manages to copy your key, this copy will not work because the codes on your own key will have changed in the meantime.
PREDATOR disables the Windows task manager when you remove the USB key. Nobody can stop it with Ctrl-Alt-Del.
PREDATOR lets you regain control of your computer if you lose your key: when you start the software for the first time, you set a password that will unlock your session if you lose your key.
PREDATOR can sound an audible alarm if somebody enters an invalid password.

And finally, PREDATOR allows you to protect several PCs with the same key.

Tags: drive, flash, PC, predator, protect, protect pc, Security, USB, usb protection

Analyse Website Color Contrast with Checkmycolours

Umar — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:33:36 +0000

When it comes to building up a new website ask any web designer what is one of the most time consuming tasks and you might get a surprising answer!

Its not coding the site, its not checking the database connectivity, heck even security isn’t that frustrating – its the colors! That’s right, many hours of the web developers time is spent searching for the right color combination or tone that will set the stage and mood for the website and its users.

The point is to make it easy for everyone to be able to read, understand, and ultimately appreciate what your website has to offer, A color combination done right can have visitors coming back just because everything they saw looked pleasant. Get too experimental though and your web based eye candy could turn into a stress test for the visitors eyes!

How do you choose colors that work well together?
It would take an entire book to answer that question properly, but there are some basic guidelines to selecting colors. The most important is to use colors with high contrast for the text and the background to aid readability.

Checkmycolours is an online tool for web developers that determines whether the website being developed is pleasant even to those people suffering from color deficits (e.g. Color blindness etc).

To get started with CheckmyColors all the developer has to do is enter his/her websites URL and hit enter! The website will then process all the different colors it can find on your site and will determine if there are any unsightly `gaps’ or clashes between your sites contrast/brightness and colors. It will even tell you where the color clash is (i.e. which element and/or tag) .

Based on calculations and standards suggested by the World wide web consortium (aka W3C) CheckMyColors helps you make your site much more visible to your readers. The search result looks like this

The tool helps you in making a site that has colors that work in harmony with each other. You can now avoid making a site that creates an eyesore for the user and turn them away from visiting your website. It times to build a acceptable interface that suits all types of people!

Tags: Checkmycolours, Web Design

The Perfect OS

Michael Lankton — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:22:00 +0000

I’ve written several articles where I bash a particular operating system or heap praises on another. I’ve held a fascination with operating systems, and with graphical user interfaces, since around 1995, when I was introduced first to Digital Unix, and then BSD and linux shortly thereafter. In 1996 I began my love affair with all things NeXT when I began using OPENSTEP, and in very little time had switched all my desktop functions to that environment. In early 2002 I broke down and bought my first Power Mac, and most of my home usage has been on Mac OS X since then.

Graphical user interfaces are usually tied to a specific operating system (though not always), so for the purposes of this article I am including the GUI as an aspect of an operating system.

It’s a testament to the genius of unix design that a 39 year old operating system is so prevalent in 2009. Unix introduced so many operating system features we take for granted that they aren’t worth enumerating. Suffice it to say that all operating systems have taken some degree of inspiration from unix.

I am certain that someday some clever group of young developers will create an operating system that is just as revolutionary as unix was in 1970. Maybe not in my lifetime, and it’s very likely that 20 years from now I will still be cd-ing and ls-ing my way around a unix shell prompt. For now, the perfect underlying os is still some flavor of unix.

Here are the salient points regarding what I think makes a good operating system:

A full featured command line interface Nothing helps you learn the guts of your os like CLI navigation. You become familiar with the filesystem hierarchy in a way that sticks with you more than looking at it in a GUI file browser. You also become familiar with what commands accomplish what in your os, the very same commands many of your GUI programs are running to do what they do. I do not want to be wholly dependent upon GUI tools, because there may not be an application that does, or does as efficiently as a CLI command, what it is I need to get done.
Memory protection We take this for granted, but it bears mentioning. AmigaOS4, which in all other respects resembles a modern operating system, doesn’t have it. Rogue applications can not be allowed to drag the os down with them when they crash. For that matter, apps with runaway memory and cpu usage can’t be allowed to bring the system to it’s knees. I don’t know if they fixed this in Vista, but I still experience regular instances of IE6 making XP unusable without a reboot.
Stability The os itself should operate flawlessly. Mac OS didn’t even approach that until OS X. Windows didn’t until Windows 2000. You should be able to turn on a given box and only need to reboot when required by software installation and operating system updates.
Efficient resource management I admire operating systems that do more with less. Of course, memory and cpu management also have a great deal to do with an os’es speed. I have always gotten a stiffie watching videos of MorphOS and AmigaOS4 booting to a usable desktop in like 5 seconds.I was so shocked when I booted up my laptop for the first time and saw that Vista running Aero was using 700 megs of ram after a boot. This on a machine that only had a gig in it. It made me wonder, so I rebooted OS X on my Power Mac, and it used 300 megs from a fresh boot. Later that day I installed and configured FreeBSD on my laptop, and with a 3D accelerated desktop, FreeBSD running Gnome + Compiz only consumed 128 megs of ram. Linux with a similar setup on the same laptop eats about 500 megs of ram. I know that I could trim those numbers down somewhat by disabling unnecessary services, but it tells you a little (admittedly not the whole story) about the various systems’ resource usage. Operating systems should use as little memory and cpu as they need for a task. There are plenty of resource greedy applications, I don’t want my os to be one of them.
Multi-thread performance This would have been a non-issue not too long ago, and maybe that’s why so few people cared about Be OS, an os that was too far ahead of it’s time to survive. Now that 2 cores are standard, it’s important that our os takes advantage of more than one core. It irks me that I have this monster, 8 core Mac Pro, and for the vast majority of my time on it, it performs like a single core machine because the os and applications aren’t taking full advantage of all those cores. Going forward, multi-thread performance is a very important issue.

Now for the GUI that lays on top of that perfect os:

Simplicity Making an interface complicated isn’t good design. It doesn’t show how clever the designers were. Just the opposite. Whether you are an extremely adept computer user or a hopeless idiot at the keyboard, simplicity is best. We don’t want Joe User to hurt himself. However, anyone can design a simple interface. The trick is to have an interface that is simple, incredibly intuitive, and yet the more advanced functions are available to those capable of using them without making them jump through hoops to find them. A good GUI stays out of your way and helps you get the job done faster and easier.
Consistency I want my GUI to have a consistent look. Applications should never be allowed to draw attention to themselves by not looking like an app native to the os it is running on. Maybe NeXT didn’t have the most beautiful interface to some, but by God, every app running on a NeXT os looked like a NeXT app. Apple has finally gotten better about this now that brushed metal is finally gone and all cocoa apps look like iTunes.
Elegance I know that for some of you, using elegance and sophistication in describing a GUI is going to sound like I need to get a life. I also know that a great many of you reading this will know exactly what I mean.We spend a lot of time using a computer. Why not do it on an interface that is pleasing to the eye, and makes computer use in general more enjoyable? This is entirely subjective, and whether you find OS X to meet these criteria, or Enlightenment is more your cup of tea, smart interface design coupled with good looks wins users over.
Look at what a loyal following NeXT still has, 13 years after it’s last os release, and how mimicked it’s interface still is by X window managers. Why does Amiga still have such a big following, going on two decades into it’s irrelevance? Great design wins people’s hearts.

The perfect os hasn’t been built yet. For me, Mac OS X comes as close as any have yet. FreeBSD-based unix layer and it’s higher level os and GUI sourced from OPENSTEP, it comes very close to making me 100% happy.

Tags: GUI, Linux, Mac OS, NeXT, os x, unix, Windows

Work Smarter And Faster with WizeHive

MoiN — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:52:51 +0000

Wizehive maybe the most unique interlink between between twitter and a CRM! In essence, its a Twitter for the business people, you post updates on what you are working on (such as news, links, questions etc) and you get responses from people within your company. You can see what’s the most discussed topic within a workspace (which is basically a project with you and the other involved members), who the most followed people are (which is a great way to discover who is the most influential in your company) and Conversations can be viewed in the form of a thread (Just click on the title to see the whole thread).

Unlike its competitors though WizeHive adds task management options such as the ability to create tasks, set a completion date, assign tasks to yourself or others and so on. You can even have people view images (or any other file for that matter) bound to specific messages.

The highlight of WizeHive is that for each workspace you create it allows you to create separate customizable databases too – think of the organizational benefits! Contact lists and events (e.g: meetings etc.) can now be neatly stored and called upon when needed (at the time of writing I haven’t explored the other benefits yet – but those that I have mentioned were a breeze to implement!)

WizeHive is free for up to three people and up to 50MB of storage, and then fees start at $8 a month for a small group, with additional fees for extra storage. Add-on apps built on top of the API will cost less than $10 a month.Check out more Features here.

Tags: CRM, twitter, wizehive

Backup, Sync, Share And Access Your Data Anywhere Easily

MoiN — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:28:10 +0000

Phenomenal – that’s the word that comes to mind when trying to describe the amount of data being transferred over the internet, with the average user storing hundreds of gigabytes alone its not surprise that Hardisk manufacturers are running amuck to increase the size of their drives by the second!

However with this increase in data the average user also faces another issue, how to access this info when needed? Sure its great to have your Desktop stuffed with data but what happens when you need to show that portfolio to your client ultra quick with the least amount of fuss?

Enter SpiderOak! A service that allows you to Backup, Sync, Share and Access your data no matter where you are – because its all stored Online! Featuring a unique zero-knowledge privacy policy (which means that they’re using an encryption so diverse and strong that even the people at SpiderOak can’t see the data you’re storing) – SpiderOak allows you to harness the power of the internet to securely backup, sync, and share your data regardless of operating system (Mac, Windows and Linux) or location (external drives, network volumes, USB keys, etc.) using just one centralized account!

Using an advanced de-duplication process your data is uploaded 10-15 Times Faster than other online storage providers it also means that your data is compressed and optimized before being placed on the spideroak servers, what’s appealing is that you are only charged for the compressed de-duplicated data! eg. If your file was 5MB SpiderOak could compress you data to 2~3MB and you will be charged for the 2~3MB not the whole 5!

What’s even more appealing is that SpiderOak is offering 2 GB of online space free, for life, Including all the benefits of a paid account! Just download their free software and get started! Check out these additional benefits:

Backup, Sync, Share, Access & Storage
Multi Platform Support – Mac, Windows, Linux Compatible
100% Zero-knowledge Privacy
Add any number of computers at NO additional cost
Storage & time saving De-Duplication
Perpetual Deleted File & Historical Version Storage
10-15 Times Faster than traditional backup solutions
Wholly Fault-Tolerant Design

Tags: Online Backup, spideroak

My Eyes Have Been Opened To The Power Of Twitter

Everton — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:18:19 +0000

I have to confess that until last month I tried to ignore twitter because I thought it was a waste of time. I was convinced that there was no real value in twitter and that it was another distraction like facebook that I didn’t need. However, just as facebook turned out to be a very useful tool (I met my wife there!), twitter is also becoming a very useful tool for my sites.

I think my conversion really started when I installed the BackType Connect WordPress Plugin on my site. This plugin captures comments that are left on other sites when one of your posts is added, including tweets. Suddenly on my sites I could see firsthand how many times my posts were being shared with twitter users. Seeing this previously hidden activity made me think, why not share my posts myself and try and build a twitter following?

As Daniel quite rightly points out, Twitter has a much cleaner process for sharing links and stories, where posts don’t get buried a la digg, or where a small minor of users control what everyone else gets to see. Also, because Twitter has reached a much wider userbase than sites like Digg or Reddit it could allow sites to tap into a wider base of readers, rather than just fellow bloggers who are all reading exactly the same blogs.

I just wish I’d taken twitter more seriously 3, 6 or 12 months ago. My twitter follower count is still quite small as it’s only one month old, but I’m working hard to grow it by investing in tools, as well as increasing my interaction with other twitter users and following everyone who follows me on twitter. Equally, the amount of traffic to my sites from twitter is still so small that so far I’ve only seen a few (very small) but I’m determined to now develop twitter as a significant traffic source for my sites.

Whether i’ll every reach the levels of sites like TechCrunch, where twitter is now the 2nd largest single source of traffic after Google is unlikely, but that’s not going to stop me trying!

Tags: Blog Traffic, Digg, facebook, TechCrunch, twitter, twitter tips

Now Read This Site Better With Mobiles

Everton — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:50:47 +0000

After successfully testing the WordPress Mobile Pack over on Windows 7 News, I’ve now installed it on this site as well. Now a simpler version of the site will be displayed automatically to users browsing the site with mobile devices.

The new mobile site supports the following:

Auto-browser detection
Automatically removes interactivity and media elements (such as script, Flash, movies, and embedded frames) from the posts and pages depending on handset capability
Breaks large pages into smaller ones to make easier to read and load
Shrinks images to fit smaller screens
Simplifies styling to ensure mobile compatibility

I decided to do this because more and more users are using their mobiles to browse the internet. Despite being a mobile internet evangelist for the last 10 years or so, I currently don’t use my phone for more than making calls and sending emails and SMSs. This is because my Sony Ericsson is just too clunky to do anything that doesn’t involve the keyboard as the touch screen is too hard to use. If I want to use the internet I have to get the stylus out which is a disaster as I’m left trying to browse using my fingers, the stylus and the keyboard which is just too fiddley. It’s also too slow. I hate wanting to do something simple like getting a number, and then having to wait because the phone has randomly decided to freeze for a few mins.

I’ve decided that I’m going to replace my Sony Ericsson X1 with an iPhone 3G S. The UI is just amazing and although I’m very anti-Apple because I hate getting on the bandwagon, I’ve (grudgingly) had to concede that the iPhone is the best phone on the market, just like the iPod is the best mp3 player. If I’m not careful I might end up paying through the nose in a few years and buying a mac!

I was tempted with getting an Android phone, but there’s just not enough apps out there to choose from, and also I haven’t seen a decent Android handset yet. The user experience on the iPhone is just amazing, and there’s great support for the apps I need – web, iGoogle, gmail, SMS and email.

I hate my Sony Ericsson X1 so much now that I’m going to buy myself out of my contract with T-Mobile in a few months, so that I can get an iPhone. I shouldn’t be too much out of pocket though as I will be selling my Sony Ericsson X1 on eBay.

When I do get my iPhone, what apps should I install first?

Tags: Android, Apple, iPhone, iPod, mobile browser, smartphone, sony ericsson X1

Got Trash? Don’t Fret -You Got Cash!

Joseph Plazo — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 08:25:51 +0000

Earlier, I mentioned how easily you can make $200 a day with $5 cost. But did you know you can actually make $900 a day at almost no capital expenditure?

I discovered the method years ago when a relative gifted me a pair of shoes. Not just any kind, mind you. These were Louis Vuittons. $400 kicks that turns heads…. but in the wrong way. I tell you, those were butt ugly shoes. Any sensible man wearing them would scream tycoon… but he’d also look very cheesy. Who wanted to go around in a pair of brown kicks that had ugly monograms looking psoriatic? Not me.

The shoes stayed in the closet for months until my mom said I may as well dispose of them. I tried in the newspaper, magz and on bulletin boards but no one bit. Then I tried ebay.

With an asking price of $50, people bid up to $220. Yep, I recall that number till today because I spent it all on a decent sound system. There indeed is money in trash. Well.. branded trash that is.

Momentum picked up. I then started disposing of assorted branded goods I rarely used. Lacoste, Ck, even Hugo Boss. I often got 50% to 80% of what I originally paid for them. That’s when I hit on an idea making cash off second hands: use other people’s trash!

I had friends with branded stuff that just grew mold in the closet. With my camera and their permission, I snapped up shots and posted them on ebay. True enough they sold- with next to no cost from me. I just bought the item from my friends at a low price which was far lower than the winning bid.

I then started visiting second hand branded goods stores. Befriending the owner was the first step. The second step was asking permission to take shots of their goods. Many readily did. The shots ended up on ebay. If the item sold, I came back and bought the item and shipped it out. If it didn’t (which was rare), I lost 50 cents listing fees.

This method alone can give anyone a comfortable life. There’s no need for initial cash outlay. Consider it a blend of JIT systems with online marketing. Acting as the middle man, you can squeeze a massive profit from those hunting for bargains.

Ready to visit the flea market?

Tags: eBay, LV, prada

Windows 7 News Is Looking For New Writers

Everton — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:11:36 +0000

If you haven’t heard of Windows 7 yet then you must have been living on a different planet this year. Windows 7 is due to be launched on October 22nd and will replace Windows Vista. I setup a new site, Windows 7 News, before the official name was set (at the time Windows 7 was only the codename like Longhorn was the codename for Vista, so I got very lucky here!) and with Martin’s from gHacks assistance the site has become the number one source for Windows 7 News.

The site now receives nearly 1m unique visitors per month and is still growing rapidly. We are looking to add to the Windows 7 News editorial team to help sustain this growth. Not only will you become an important part of a vibrant and rapidly growing site, but you will also get paid for your posts!

Applicants must meet the following criteria:

Be interested in Windows 7 and Microsoft operating systems in general
Read all the news about Windows 7 as soon as they come out
Write interesting and compelling articles
We are particularly interested in editors who can write ‘how to’ and modding guides
Have proven writing experience

Interested? Then send an email to jointheteam@windows7news.com with samples of your work, preferably about Windows 7 (or another Microsoft OS).

Tags: Windows 7

Turned CommentLuv Plugin Back On

Everton — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 10:25:14 +0000

I’ve managed to get the CommentLuv Plugin, which is a great way of encouraging readers to leave comments, working again on this site. CommentLuv adds a link to the last post from the comment owner’s site automatically, which can help readers get valuable backlinks as well as traffic from other curious readers.

This is a great idea for a number of reasons:

If the post has a punchy title and the comment is left on a popular post or blog, then it will get traffic
The link automatically updates with the latest post, so it just keeps on giving
The link points to a post rather than a blog homepage, so it could give vital deeplinks
If the blog has removed nofollow from links, then readers will get a double benefit

It only captures comments from the point it is turned on, so start leaving comments now! If you’re a Feedburner user, then you need to make this change to get the most out of CommentLuv.

Tags: backlinks, Blog Traffic, Commentluv, Feedburner, nofollow, plugin, Wordpress

How To Make $200+ A Day on Ebay

Joseph Plazo — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:40:40 +0000

Did you know you can make megabucks with a $4 item?

A few days ago, a local call center requested for a motivational speech, particularly one that empowered their agents to ooze charisma over the phone. It was an easy job. I simply gave the basics of tonality, pacing and leading as well as emotional infusion. The crowd loved it. Management happily paid me $170. That wasn’t exactly something to jump up and down about… but not bad for an hour’s work. I packed up my projector and had my assistant shut off the recorder. (It’s my practice to record presentations made.)

Back home, I unwound a bit with eBay, a large box of Yellow Cab pizza and cans of soda. The $170 disappeared in a flash, what with the pizza costing $30 and the rest going to a pile of $3 to $30 ‘good deals’ eBay offered me. My wallet was forlorn but my belly satisfied. I started to grumble about inflation.

Then it hit me. There were scores of guys selling $3 items and making a decent living off it. If they could survive off it, there must be something to it.

I scrolled the ebay listings again. Whew. Hot items with multiple bids included low priced $3 CDs . Most were of the ‘how to kind’. My mind started freewheeling. What if I jumped into the bandwagon?

Next to me were a pile of CDs containing my different audio and visual lectures. The titles looked good:

“How to Charm Your Boss Out of A $900 Raise”

“How to Make $400 a Day in Forex”

etc.

I selected a few and whipped up draft listings under my ebay account. Normally, I’d dispose of high end Pradas or iPhones on the auction giant. Today, I’m attempting the opposite end of the spectrum.

I created compelling ad copy, and snapped up pix of the home made CDs. No fancy labels, mind you- this way it looks customized and rare.

I decided to start the auction at $3. Shipping was pegged at $10. I clicked LIST and away they went.

Hours later, I checked my PC.

I had bids. In fact, the average CD had 8 or 9! I got excited

On the third day, end of the listing, all CDs had a winning bidder with the price jacked up to $9 to $20.

I shipped out five CDs that day. Net profit was good. I incurred .3c cost per CD and just $5 for shipping (each CD left in a paper sleeve). I charged $10 for S/H and bidders paid anywhere from $6 to $20. All in all, I earned a margin of at least $15 per CD. Now that was something.

But I wanted more.

I entered my eBay account again and availed of the option “Make Second Offer” to the losing bidders. This option lets them purchase a lost item at the winning price. Now, I didn’t have big expectations, but I did not have anything to lose by trying.

Next day I checked my account.

My jaw dropped. Almost everyone responded. That was about 9 new buyers per CD!

The post office did good business with me that day.

So how much did I earn?

Go do the math.

Good luck!

Tags: cash, eBay, make money online

Apple Announced iPhone OS 3.0 Availability

Umar — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:52:55 +0000

Today, Apple announced that their iPhone OS 3.0 will be launched on June 17, 2009 which is just prior to the release of the new iPhone 3G S. The company reveals that the new update will be free for iPhone users. On the other hand iPod touch users will have to pay $9.95 for the update.

Apple previously previewed the features of iPhone OS 3.0 at Apple’s media event in March. At the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today, several additional features and clarifications were mentioned today regarding MMS, Find My iPhone, “Tethering” via USB and Bluetooth

A new feature “Find my iPhone” for MobileMe subscriber that will allow customers to track the location of their lost iPhone by sending alerts to the device and performing remote wipes for data security. If you’re lucky to find the lost device, wiped iPhones can be restored by syncing with iTunes.

Unfortunately, MMS will not be available for AT&T customers until late summer, as much as several months after the launch of the new operating system. A number of other wireless carriers throughout the world will be supporting MMS at launch.

In addition to that Apple also announced “Tethering” a feature that allows you to share your internet connection with your laptop via USB and Bluetooth. It will be offered on a number of carriers at launch, although AT&T will not be supporting it for the time being.

Other great features includes

Cut, Copy & Paste
Landscape Keyboard
Spotlight Search
Voice Memos
Improved Calendar
Enhanced Stocks App
Stereo Bluetooth
Parental Controls
MobileMe Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe

Apple iPhone 3.0 Software update page

Tags: Apple, iPhone

Adify Ad Networks Commits Online Suicide

Everton — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:59:48 +0000

I try to not make calls or send emails at work in anger, and this is the first time I’ve done this on this site, but the Adify Ad Network that I’m a part of have just made one of the stupidest business decisions I have ever come across, which is surely going to lead to a number of publishers reducing the number of ad impressions they deliver via Adify or who will leave the network completely.

If you haven’t come across Adify before, in addition to selling their own campaigns they provide ad network services to companies like Forbes, Six Apart, Dennis Publishing and The Guardian newspaper allowing them to run their own private ad networks, where they can sell their own campaigns and offer them to publishers who are accepted onto their private networks. In total, Adify power 180 networks on behalf of other companies.

The beauty of being an Adify Publisher is that you can apply to multiple networks and if accepted, ads from all networks that you are a member of are served via one set of ad tags, and Adify manage the whole process to ensure that the ad from the network with the highest paying ad is always displayed first, ensuring that fill rates and eCPMs are as high as possible.

The mad decision that my Adify representative has just told me about, is that from mid July Adify will no longer allow publishers to manage their network memberships through one dashboard and one set of ad tags. Now publishers will have to setup a separate account for each network they are a member of i.e. join multiple networks rather than ‘one’. This will mean that publishers will only be able to show campaigns from one network at a time, rather than from multiple networks at a time:

Dear Valued Publisher:

We would like to inform you of some important changes we are making that will affect the way you use Adify and the networks of which you are a part.

Although these changes potentially affect many customers using the Adify platform, due to your large quantity of sites and network relationships you may need special assistance.

Here’s a very brief summary of the changes we are making that affect you:

Starting in mid-July…

- Adify is moving toward an architecture that maximizes our capacity and scalability.

- In order to achieve this goal, each account may only be associated with a single network.

- Therefore, each ad tag may only run campaigns from one network (plus Adify Media campaigns approved by that network).

- If you would like to continue to have advertising on your site from multiple networks, you will need to use separate accounts. Your primary account, with all of the historical reporting it contains, may be associated with one of your current networks.

I’m currently a member of six Adify networks, so it will be impossible for me to maintain my earnings because I can only queue ads from one network at a time, rather than having a pool of six to choose like I do currently. I could try and manually manage my six networks by juggling them each day based on what campaigns they have running, but it would be too much work (I have 3 sites that have different types of content, geo profiles etc so I’d have to optimise each site differently) and I’d probably be better off just handing over my banner impressions to one big network.

Adify just don’t seem to understand that their attractiveness to publishers was from being able to bring together small networks who by themselves can’t sell enough campaigns to attract business. They claim this change is to allow them to make the service faster and more scalable, but they obviously haven’t consulted with publishers, because they are going to lose a lot of ad impressions as publishers leave the service.

I really hope that Adify realise that this is a big mistake, otherwise I’m going to have to join the mass exodus away from Adify. Otherwise Adify’s platform will only get more efficient because it is serving significantly fewer ads.

Are you an Adify publisher? How is this change going to impact you?

Tags: ad network, Adify, Advertising, eCPM, fill rates, forbes, making money online, Six Apart

5 Biggest Tech Letdowns

Michael Lankton — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:12:21 +0000

Buzz. Hype. It’s what surrounds the advent of every new technology that comes down the pike and is hailed as The Next Big Thing.

It’s fun to look back in retrospect and remember the genesis of technologies that truly have become inseparable from our everyday lives. It’s even more fun to look back on the belly flops and have a laugh at the expense of others. It’s the basis of all comedy, really.

JAVA The promise of “code once, compile anywhere” never really panned out. First of all, for a long time our hardware wasn’t really up to the task of JIT compiling, with Java apps needing a lot of cpu and displaying workstation-unfriendly behavior. Is it me, or now that we are using machines with specs that would have made our heads spin a decade ago, Java still leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. An incredibly smart idea that was never really implemented in a way that made us all converts. Java is an important technology, it’s just not ever going to change our way of life the way they made it sound like it would back in the early days.
Linux Yeah, linux. I use it, but only because it’s hardware support is better on laptops than FreeBSD. But I digress. Linux has failed in a lot of the areas where it really could have been a better mousetrap. As unix clones go, it has an enormous development community, and with more people having their fingers in the various parts of the OS broken stuff gets fixed fast and hardware support is above average. However, linux isn’t really any more than a free unix clone, and BSD has been around doing that job for a lot longer, and better.

Why does a 3D accelerated X desktop under linux eat over half a gig of ram on my laptop when the same accelerated desktop running on FreeBSD on the same machine only takes about 128 megs? I have always felt that BSD was lighter, leaner, more straightforward, and had better memory management than linux, and the above example kind of illustrates the point.

Linux should have ditched X and come up with a new windowing system, should have mandated some sort of GUI standards that made the new interface compete with and/or surpass the mainstream computer desktops. Oh wait, Apple already did this with OS X. My frustration with linux is that it could have been more than just another unix clone, and in that department, minus hardware support, I believe that BSD is superior. They stayed inside the box with linux, and it could have been great if they had gone outside of the box.

I understand very well that linux is just a kernel, and the surrounding os depends on what distro you’re running. It doesn’t change my gripes. Linux suffers from being a really good unix clone that didn’t take any chances, therefore, there isn’t anything revolutionary about it.
Microsoft Windows Despite being a unix guy, I was three quarters of the way toward my MCSA back when I was still trying to get an IT job, so I know more about the OS than you might think, given that I only ever use Windows at the workplace. I have never had a good relationship with this os, and it’s always frustrated me that it’s the status quo. Windows is just so lame in so many regards, but you’re probably on a Windows machine reading this, so they’re doing something right(It’s called a “monopoly”).

Being number one has a tendency to take away a lot of your drive, and Microsoft is no different than anyone else. Never one to innovate, they have managed to take some of the better os ideas being thought up and clumsily implemented them in Windows. As of Windows 2000, Windows has actually been useable, in the sense that you could turn your box on and leave it running. Might not sound like much, but hey, you couldn’t say that for previous versions. Vista pretty much undid the good work that Microsoft had done in getting their os fairly stable, and even die hard Redmond advocates didn’t have much nice to say about it.

The Windows interface design remains unintuitive, clumsy, and hard on the eyes 14 years after Windows 95 hit the streets.

Administering a Windows network is so much more complex than it needs to be.

Why does this os still have a registry? Who thought that bs up anyway?

Who came up with the crazy filesystem layout?

Why does this os not have a complete and sane command line interface?

Everything that Microsoft has done to simplify this os has made it an arcane, bloated nightmare. And don’t get me started about the proprietary mindset in Redmond. Remember the Internet Explorer debacle from a few years back? How about Internet Explorer itself, that crap, non-standards compliant piece of ****. Oh, and I just love ActiveX. For God’s sake, we don’t have enough crap in the registry, let’s put web browser plugin stuff there too.

OK, I’ll take a deep breath and try to sum up my dislike of all things Windows. Being the dominant presence on the global computer desktop, Microsoft was in a position to lead, to innovate, to excel. Instead, the entire existence of Windows as an os and a GUI can be described as mediocre. I guess people don’t question it, because they simply don’t know any better, but for those of you who, like me, have been around the os and GUI block these last couple of decades, you know that there are better ways to skin a cat. Microsoft let millions of computer users down when they should have been leading the way.
Bluetooth The only good use for this so far has been the PS3 controller, and even that sticks in my throat a little because I can’t use my universal remote to control the damn thing. What are these Bluetooth devices that are supposed to make my life so much better anyway, and where are they?
AMD Remember when AMD gave Intel a really good black eye with the introduction of the Athlon? For a while there, AMD was THE choice for performance CPUs.

Prior to the Athlon AMD and Cyrix were spoken of almost apologetically by the people who used them, and were little more than commented-out lines in linux and BSD kernel configuration files for the rest of us. The Athlon knocked Intel on it’s ass, and that is always good for the end user. Look at Intel now. You wouldn’t think of using anything but an Intel,, and even Apple computers have Intel under the hood. That string of innovation was spurred by competition, and we all benefited from the results.

ATI was a nice grab for AMD. Too bad it’s the only area they compete in anymore.

It’s tough to think of just five, I could write all day about this stuff. Perhaps you disagree with my inclusion of Windows as a technology, and I’ll just point out that nothing else on this list affects as many users.

In the last decade we’ve seen a lot of technology appear and become integrated with our lives in a way that seems inextricable. Developing new tech is like gambling, and picking the right horse will always be a hit and miss affair, so we’ll always have plenty of gaffs and missteps to laugh about.

Yahoo Adds Exciting New applications to Yahoo! Mail

Umar — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:16:49 +0000

Yahoo! has recently announced the launch of their new applications support for Yahoo! mail. Yahoo has introduced new applications to give their users experience like never before. Currently, it feature tools for applications such as Paypal, Photobucket, Picnik, Zumo drive and OtherinBox.

Yahoo users will now be able to use these services right from their inbox. For example users can easily send money via Paypal or use Picnik services to edit images without using any third party application.

Here’s what these applications do.

Picnik: Picnik is an online photo editing service. Currently it can import photos natively from Facebook, Myspace, Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Yahoo Image search and also offers options to upload from a computer or to upload from a website.

Photobucket: Founded in 2003 Photobucket is one of the most popular image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It is usually used for personal photographic albums, remote storage of avatars displayed on internet forums, and storage of videos.

Zumo drive: ZumoDrive is the hybrid cloud storage for any kind of media. It allows you to access your music, photos, and documents from anywhere with your favorite applications.

Paypal: PayPal is an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. PayPal serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. It’s probably the easiest and fastest way for online geeks to transfer their money from one place to another.

OtherinBox: OtherInbox is an Austin-based company that builds technology to automatically organize emails from online shopping and social networking sites, enabling users to focus on messages from real people. It organizes shipping information, payment reminders, and upcoming sales and places them on your calendar. This all happens in just a few minutes without any software to install or filters to configure.

To get started simply click here and sign up to use the new applications.

Tags: otherinbox, paypal, photobucket, picnik, yahoo mail, Yahoo!, zumo drive