Too many people and too few ethernet ports? Connectify lets you share any internet connection on your pc with your friends’ or coworkers’ laptops or mobile devices, by creating a virtual hotspot (not just an adhoc link) on your Windows 7 machine. This means you can share not only old-style lan connections, but also UMTS, or even a wireless connection if the hotspot owner charges for the service (but i didn’t tell you…)

Connectify is still in beta, and derives from Virtual WiFi, a feature developed by Microsoft Research, scheduled for inclusion in Windows 7 but never “officially” included in the OS. Nomadio was able to turn some of the code left in windows 7 final release into this useful app.

Ever wanted a better version of a random image you see on the web? Images in blog articles or online newspapers are often too compressed to be appreciated, or just too small to fit your desktop background. Now, there’s a chance you won’t need to stretch crappy compressed thumbnail-sized jpegs anymore: it’s called TinEye.

TinEye is a reverse image search engine: it uses an image identification technology to compare your image to the others already in his database. This way, you can track the image history back to her original source, find slightly different versions, or simply a bigger copy.

The best way to use tineye is through the firefox plugin: this way, rather than having to submit an url directly on the search engine home page (you can even upload one from your pc), you just have to right-click on any image and select “Search image in TinEye” to open a new tab with the results. It’s really effective and easy, comparing to google’s keyword-related image search, although tineye greatest limit seems to be, at the moment, a still little image database…but they’re crawling.

Wanna have some fun with youtube videos? Try replacing the word “watch” in a standard video’s URL with “warp.swf”… for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=something becomes http://www.youtube.com/warp.swf?v=something…this is the result

If you have a netbook, you should really give Jolicloud a try. Jolicloud is a linux distro based on Ubuntu, designed to make life easier to netbook users. It’s still in private alpha, but so far it’s my favourite OS for the aspire one. Easy installation, everything works out of the box, it’s fast, elegant, big icons, interactive-social dashboard, apps are netbook friendly (e.g. firefox comes with the the Meerkat plugin), supported apps and websites (through prism) are added weekly to the dashboard and can be added in just one click. I tried windows XP, 7, several linux distros, and even osx, and they were all pretty fast and usable (after a ram upgrade and an hdd mod), but being really “netbook friendly” is a totally different thing.

Today I got 8 invites to the Jolicloud Private Alpha to share. If you want to try it out, comment here (don’t forget to leave your email). First come first served:)

Short urls can be useful to shrink long links to a more tweetable size, but when it comes to recognize where they actually point to, they say little. This way, the space-saving urls often become little time-wasting machines, bringing you to places you don’t want to see (spam) or pages you’ve already visited.

Long URL Please is a firefox plugin (but also a bookmarklet for other browsers) that scans every website you visit and automatically replaces short URLs from 75 different services with the original link, letting you choose if it’s worth visiting or not. Here’s the direct link to the firefox add-on page.

We knew it. The whole Google Wave invites thing has become huge, with people asking for invites everywere. So it naturally deserved her downfall meme. Here’s Hitler going crazy for still being out of the wave:

Ok, don’t worry, I don’t want your personal details, nor I want you to enter an ebay auction, a lottery, a contest, or something like this. I just want you to know that if you really want a google wave invite as soon as possible, you might consider my advice, ’cause my method did actually just work for me:)
The basic idea is simple: listen to the blogosphere. Set up your google alert to send you an email every time a blogger says “invites” and “wave” in the same sentence, and keep your eyes open on gmail. Then, go to search.twitter.com and search for “wave invites -please”, get the feed for the search (ok, here is the feed), put it on you firefox toolbar and refresh it every time you feel inspired. Then, if someone is offering, be quick and ask kindly. Even more, you might consider searching for invites in different languages, in order to reach countries where the “market” is smaller…for example, “wave invites” is “inviti wave” in italian and “wave einladung” in german.
Don’t forget to use a service like scr.im to tweet or share your personal mail…
Of course, this method works for every beta invitation the blogosphere has to offer. Let me know if it works for you, and sorry for my english, i’m italian so i’m still practising:)

After Facebook, Google Reader, Digg and many others (for a complete list, visit konamicodesites.com), Konami code hits theglobeandmail.com: just visit the homepage and press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Shift + Space on your keyboard to enter a “console” mode, then type “contra” to get a SNES background…

If you hate locked files like us, you’ll be happy to discover the easiest way to ged rid of restrictions in pdf files. Next time you need to copy or print a stubborn .pdf, just upload it to pdfpirate.net, and you’ll get a free download link for a way more friendly version of your document.

Ok, this may not be the first NES into a NES catridge attempt, but this time the result is really clean. Airz from benheck’s forum stuffed a cheap chinese media player, a controller, a 2.8-inch LCD, 4GB of storage, a rechargeable battery, a TV-out and a lot of eighties retro nostalgia in a Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt catridge.