Support GetUp’s campaign against internet censorship by the Australian government

(Click on the above image to watch the ad and put it on air)
Good, clean internet censorship? Help get this advert on the air and in the air – on every Qantas flight in the country during the next sitting week of Parliament.
The Government’s test trials on internet censorship are about to end, the results [...]

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How secure will Opera Unite be?

This morning I reposted a Download Blog intro to Opera Unite; here now is an attempted summary of an article by Betanews on possible security issues arising from using Unite as your browser based web server.

The main question is whether the Unite APIs expose users file systems. Opera’s security documentation indicates that no Unite user [...]

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Make your browser a web server with Opera’s United

The Download Blog posted a fairly comprehensive article on Opera’s new app United, which allows to transform your browser into a web server. For convenience I have reposted it here.

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Anonymizing torrent clients

It was only a matter of time before the P2P community came up with some workable options for anonymizing our activities. Sure, Tor has been able to do it for quite some time, but torrenting is very taxing on the network and transfers can be painfully slow. Recently, however, three new services have appeared that [...]

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Spezify – a new visual multimedia search tool

Spezify is a new freeform search tool for the visually excitable. Unlike standard search engines, which produce search results as a list of links with some textual clues, Spezify returns a multimedia imagery collage made up of pics from websites, video clips, ebay and Flickr fotos, and text clips from microblogging sites and sites like [...]

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Google Wave explained in 8 short clips

If you haven’t got the time to watch the 80-minutes presentation by Google on Wave, Lifehacker created a shortcut: 8 clips demonstrating Wave features. For convenience purposes, I’ve reposted the clips and the brief intros here. The list of features is not complete, but they are more or less the main ones – with the [...]

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50 most dangerous web search terms

It might surprise that it’s not words like ‘warez’ and ‘porn’ that top the list of high-risk search terms (ie those that invite malware onto your computer), but on the other hand, it is no surprise that words like ‘lyrics’, ‘free music downloads’ or ‘free ringtones’ feature as chart toppers. Malicious sites of course will [...]

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Search simultaneously in Google and Bing

… not that I really wanted to – because Bing is Micro$oft . Nevertheless, after reading in gHacks about the BingAndGoogle mashup which allows to search in both engines simultaneously, I thought I give it a go. BingAndGoogle works well: in Chrome the search results of both engines came back in lightning speed and [...]

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Get notified when downed site is working again

It’s often quite frustrating when a site is either down or still ‘under construction’, and often I forget to visit it again (or I’m simply so annoyed that I can’t be bothered to re-check). Notify Mee seems a good solution: it sends out a notification email once the site operates again; if the problem is [...]

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Social Networking, Virtual Friends and the Erosion of the Social Fabric of Modern Society

Sounds exaggerated? Maybe. I don’t know anyone, I have to say, who only lives in cyberspace, and generally press reports tend to focus on negativity that is not representative of reality. However, the following article by Mike Adams (Natural News) does present valid arguments for those contexts where people are totally disconnected from physical and [...]

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What is Google WAVE?

If you really wanna know what WAVE is all about, this so far is the video to understand it. It’s the WAVE team’s intro to the concept at the Google Developer’s Conference, and it’s a long one (1:20), but even for a non-geek like me it was great viewing.
It gave me [...]

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Filtering for Creative Commons (CC) Flickr images with Yahoo image search

Worrying about someone complaining about you using his/her image on your non-commercial blog without permission is like getting anxious about being the proverbial needle in a haystack . But if you do wanna do the right thing by the ethics created in our private-property obsessed society, using Flickr (CC) images is a good [...]

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Finally: an easy way to optimise webpages for printing

Name of the game: Print Friendly. As the video above demonstrates, after installing the javascript bookmarklet, just dump a URL into the box provided by the Print Friendly website, make a few adjustments if needed, and you can save 12 pages of paper printing out junk you don’t want or need.
[Via [...]

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BING promo does not convince me to even bother trying it

This Micro$soft promo video certainly does not entice me to even bother trying BING, the company’s new search engine for which it even has coined a fancy new marketing term: ‘decision engine’. The video focuses on business related questions; in this case it looks at markets like travel, shopping and health. [...]

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Ten Firefox extensions to keep you safe

… offered by Webware. They include my favourites NoScript, Web of Trust and Locationbar, but I’ve decided to give BetterPrivacy, FormFox and Ghostery a go too after reading the Webware post.
Click here to go to Webware for details.

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Free computer typing course

I’ve been using two finger typing for years now, and while I’ve become quite proficient at it, I have been thinking now and then about learning touch typing – especially in situations where I either produce a row of typos or nothing at all appeared on my screen despite me having entered 10 words – [...]

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Sharing files via FileTwt

Great idea if you wanna broadcast files – but only up to 20Mb. Of course, FileTwt also works for direct messages but I think in these cases I’d still prefer Dropbox. FileTwt works like many other file sharing apps: you upload the file and then notify your recipients via a tweet.
To share files or to [...]

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Gmail Inbox Preview allows checking mail while Gmail boots up

Gmail has always offered an odd mixture of lightning fast AJAX navigation and frustratingly slow load times, depending on what you’re doing. The worst offender, by far, is the initial load when you first open the page – sometimes the loading bar flashes by in a second, others it chooses to sluggishly crawl without any [...]

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Twitter surged pass Digg, LinkedIn and NYTimes – and that’s just visits to its website

How quickly they grow. Remember when Twitter was just a little pipsqueek, with less than 10 million monthly unique visitors to its site worldwide? That was back in February, 2009. Fast-forward to April, and Twitter’s U.S. visitors alone reached 17 million. Now comScore has released its worldwide numbers and it estimates Twitter’s global unique visitors [...]

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OpenID: link your Gmail and Facebook accounts

Since Facebook had joined OpenID Board in February, all that had to happen was that it had to allow using an OpenID login such as the one you use for Gmail – something that finally happened today. If you wan to use the same logon details for Google and Facebook now, all you need to [...]

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