Digital Space

Free Icons

2009-09-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

http://www.freeiconsweb.com/

Reference: List of Online Backup Services

2009-08-30T09:11:00.000-07:00

Online Backup Services that offer a 'free' account:

Linux, Windows and Mac:

SpiderOak (2 Gig free)
Dropbox (2 Gig free)
Box.net (1 Gig free) Browser based
My Other Drive (2 Gig free) Browser and Java based

Linux:

Ubunto One (2 Gig free)

Windows and Mac:

Mozy (2 Gig free)
IDrive (2 Gig free)
ElephantDrive (1 Gig free)

Windows:

DriveHQ (1 gig free, pause at 50mb,cross platform if you use web + ftp)

Online Backup Services that do not offer a 'free' account:

Linux, Windows and Mac:

Jungle Disk

Windows and Mac:

Windows:

Intronis (no pricing info on website or info about free account)

Mac:

BackJack

Others I have yet to look at:

- CloudBerry
- Memopal
- FolderShare
- FilesAnywhere
- Mesh
- SwapDrive
- XDrive
- Steekr
- eSnips
- Yuntaa
- Dropboks
- Omemo
- Openomy
- Yahoo! Briefcase
- MyBloop (interesting, need to take a look)
- SkyDrive
- Drop.io
- Wua.la
- Omnidrive
- in.solit.us
- Badongo
- AllMyData
- DivShare
- MediaFire
- MegaUpload
- OrbitFiles
- ADrive
- Syncplicity
- ZumoDrive
- BeInSync
- Tilana
- MyDocs-Online
- ATT OnlineVault

What's happening @ Digital Space

2009-08-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

It has been a busy week for me. Wife and kids are in South Africa on vacation. I'm stuck at home looking after the garden and house.

I've spend the week trying to find a replacement comment system for blogger. If you use blogger as your blogging platform, you would agree the default comment system is not what you can describe as full featured. After looking around and trying out a few, I finally settled on Disqus. You can read more about it here. The unfortunate side affect of changing the comment system is that all the old comments are stuck hidden on google's database.

While I was changing the templates, I also added retweet buttons (real easy to do - read here). I also added summary posts on all the main pages by using a guide I found on Blogger Widgets.

I've added another topic: z/OS. This is the operating system I spend at least 8 hours a day working on (the rest of the day I play with Linux and blogger). z/OS will be a very niche topic. I can't think of that many people that would be interested in this. The mainframe folks are a dying breed. At 37, I am the youngest in the my team and that is very sad indeed. Hopefully there would be someone out there, that would benefit from the tips that I will provide. As I get older the need for documentation is increasing. At least I will be able to search my own content for past examples of how to do stuff.

Off topic:

I watched District 9 this weekend. Been born in South Africa myself and lived there up to 95, I can certainly relate to the characters in movie. Having Afrikaans as primary language, I could follow the subtle humor not present in the subtitles. I liked the movie. A very different sci-fi movie as compared to Transformers.

URL shorteners

2009-08-14T20:43:00.001-07:00

URL shortening is a technique on the WWW where a provider makes a Web page available under a very short Uniform Resource Locator in addition to the original address.

List of URL shorteners:

Topic (Linux) This week's updates

2009-08-11T20:20:00.000-07:00

Topic (Blogger) four tricks to improve your blog

2009-08-07T05:46:00.000-07:00

Topic (Linux) Creating spectacular screenshots with Gimp

2009-08-06T06:42:00.000-07:00

Want to create screenshots like this ? Read more...

Lossless Image compression with Yahoo's Smush.it tool

2009-08-04T12:46:00.000-07:00

RSS Icons

The icons above look similar, right ? The one on the right is 19.5% smaller in byte size. The tool that was used to compress the RSS icon is called Smush.it and you can get it here. Smush.it can process JPG, GIF, and PNG images that are up to one megabyte in size.

How does it work ?

Smush.it uses a combination of algorithms (ImageMagick, pngcrush, jpegtran and gifsicle) to identify the image type and to convert GIF files to PNG files, strip unneeded chunks from PNGs, strip all meta data from JPEGs and stripping repeating pixels in different frames from GIF animations.

Cross browser validation for your blog or website

2009-08-03T17:34:00.000-07:00

If you want to validate that your website or blog work in all browsers and on all operating systems, there is a free online web service that will screen print your URL on a number of operating systems and across a multitude of web browsers.

The webservice is called browsershots.org. You submit your URL and they will create screenshots of what your URL looks like on the following operating systems: Linux, Windows, Mac OS and BSD. The list of the browsers that they can screen print is very impressive. What is even more impressive is that the screen prints are from top to bottom of your blog / website.

I ran linux.digitalsp.com through the gauntlet of tests and it took roughly a hour or so to complete. During the testing you can check up on the progress and afterwards you can download the results (screen prints).

The screen prints are extremely usefull. I noticed on my site that there were a number of widgets that do not display correctly in some browsers.

Topic (Linux) Enabling flash in Google Chrome

2009-08-02T19:38:00.000-07:00

Want to watch flash videos with Google Chrome for linux ?

Read more...

Topic (Linux) installing Google Chrome on Ubuntu

2009-08-02T17:41:00.001-07:00

Installing Google Chrome on Ubuntu is as easy as downloading and double clicking a file.

Read more...

Topic (Linux) remove stuttering when playing flash video

2009-08-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

If you have a CPU that supports dynamic frequency scaling and you experience dropping frames or sound stuttering during flash video playback, this post might be for you.

Read more...

Watch tweets geographically

2009-07-31T20:48:00.000-07:00

Watch the twitter public timeline geographically with Atlas (Fresh Logic Studios). The twitter option is under the "experimental" tab. Atlas can do a lot more that just watching other twitters. This is definitely a website to bookmark - highly recommended.

A similar service is twittervision. It always shows twitter activity on a map, but it is not nearly as impressive as Atlas. It only shows one twitter at a time.

Find tweets nearby your geographical location

2009-07-31T20:25:00.000-07:00

A really cool web tool to find nearby twitters is called nearbytweets. You can find by zip code, specify a radius and on top of that, you can enter a keyword to search for.

Another similar web service is geofollow. I prefer nearbytweets - it has a much cleaner interface.

Another service is CityTweets.net. It has a limited number of cities:

City Pages

A

B

C

D

P

R

Raleigh, NC

S

T

Tokyo, Japan

W

Washington, DC

Online Book Publishing: Lulu

2009-07-25T19:21:00.000-07:00

If you have a great idea for a book, but you don't want to spend money trying to sell you book, there is an online service just for you. The online service is called Lulu.

Just upload your manuscript, photos or digital files, use Lulu's formatting tools to get everything set up just the way you want, from size to binding to cover art. You're the proud parent of a brand new digital creation, ready to publish and sell. The publishing process couldn't be easier. Lulu gives you all sorts of ways to sell your fabulous new creation to the whole wide world - you set your own price, Lulu will print and ship each item as it's ordered, and you collect 80% of the creator revenue on every sale.

Then your book is, if you choose, automatically listed for sale on the Lulu Marketplace.

Image Hosting: ImageShack

2009-07-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

ImageShack is an intuitive and easy-to-use free media hosting service. It can be used to upload images, flash files, and movies, and share them with friends using any imaginable means.

Free:

Space = 5.0 GB
Bandwidth = 10.0 GB per month

Paid:

10 GB Disk / 15 GB Bandwidth: $10/mo
25 GB Disk / 50 GB Bandwidth: $25/mo
100 GB Disk / 200 GB Bandwidth: $75/mo

How to check for broken or missing links on your website

2009-07-24T06:13:00.000-07:00

To prevent the dreaded 404 or page not found message, check your website once a month with a online validator:

http://validator.w3.org/checklink