Archive for October, 2009
The World Wide Web – just where the hell would we be without it? We’d all most likely still be fascinated by ham radios. However, for all of its greatness the Internet has a major downfall in the very area it triumphs – worldwide access to one network. That means people in the US, India, France, Pakistan, Russia and the UK can all read this post and many others like it.
Convey This is a language translator aimed at blogs and company websites that overcomes the language barrier. It’s basically a small button with around a dozen flags and corresponding language names in a drop down menu below it. When you select you desired language from the list, the web page will be instantly translated using one of several popular web translators such as Google Translator
I think this is excellent and it could really increase international traffic to a blog or business site that is showing potential in far away lands. By giving people the option to read in their own language you may just be gaining a reader for life.
And it’s not hard to set up easier. The most novice blogger could have it set up on their site in a matter of minutes. The most complex aspect is entering the HTML code but most platforms such as Blogger allow you to copy and paste it into a widget anyway. Convey This is available here.
Offers.com is the leading coupon and special offers website on the World Wide Web these days – having worked damn hard to get there over the past six years that it has been online. Every single day the upload hundreds of new offers and coupon codes for us consumers to devour and save money on.
Some offers I seen after just a few minutes of browsing could save you up to 50% – not bad for the Christmas shopping!
Recently, they launched a new feature on their website called ‘Locker’. This new feature allows you to store and track offers from certain companies and websites without even having to register. Beside every offer on the website there is a ‘Watch this offer’ button, once you click it the offer is stored in your locker on that computer. However, if you want to have access to your offers from multiple computers or devices it’s recommended that you sign up with just an e-mail address.
Seriously though, if you want to save big bucks online and in retail outlets – Offers.com.
Archos is presenting the first Tablet PC with Windows 7 incorporated, natively: Archos 9 PCTablet. Taking advantage of the touch-screen technology included within the new operating system. Now, with Windows 7 out in the market, you should expect to see a lot of these products in the next few months.
Want to know some of the features included in Archos 9 PCTablet?
- VGA-out port.
- USB and audio jack ports.
- 60 GB hard disk space available with an extra 25 GB for online use.
- Wi-Fi 802.11b/g and BlueTooth 2.1
- 9-inch screen.
- FullHD support!
- Intel Atom processor included.
- 1.7cms thick and 800g of weight.
And how much does it costs? £449.99 in the UK. That’s where it will only be available for now, or you can buy it from their website.
Here’s also a quick review made by TechRadar.
The netbooks seems that they are going to take the market (Windows 7 was already built thinking in netbooks), but having this devices available already, including a great OS like Windows 7, sounds like an excellent idea to me.
“I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” – Roasalia de Castro
This famous quote and many others like it inspire hundreds of thousands of people to buy a big backpack, a pair of Levis jeans and hit the road every single year between college and ‘life’. Yet, sleeping in a bus stations isn’t too appealing. And seeing as this is a technology site I thought I’d offer a solution – CouchSurfing.
Couch Surfing basically means living life to the fullest and recharging your batteries on people’s couches. And now there is a social network by the same name that is dedicated to finding you a place to lay your head down at night. They now have more than one million members who are travelers and hosts willing to let you spend the night on their couch. All you have to do is take out your iPhone while you’re on the coach to Budapest, do a little search and give whoever lives there a call to see if you can do a spot of couch surfing. Easy.
The site covers in excess of 55,000 cities in over 230 countries all over the world so no matter where you’re going you’ll find somewhere.
Ever fancy creating your own Star Wars party? Well GoAnimate is a free, easy-to-use online animator that lets you do that. You can use their online animator to recreate some cool cartoons and shows such as my Star Wars rave below.
There are tones of themes for you to select from and within those themes there are dozens of scenes so you can thoroughly alternate your cartoon and make it really special in comparison to some of the crappy 2D animators out there.
To the left of the scene creation screen there is the library which contains hundreds of people, objects, effects, sound effects, speech bubbles and loads of other cool items ready to be inserted into your scene.
When you click on a person or object you can customize them by changing their size(this allows you to add depth to your scene by making far away objects small etc…) or making them do something as you can see in the screenshot above.
For the most part, this service is free. However, you can buy an online currency called GOBucks to buy extra characters and features which frankly I though were unnecessary and didn’t make my experience any better. So in short, stick with the freebies!
I have to say, GoAnimate is by far the best animation tool online at the minute. It’s free, addicting and it creates good quality cartoons that aren’t obviously the product of some rubbish online animator.
Back in the day a simple notch on the bedpost was enough to track how often you got down and dirty. Well now there is a web app called BedPost that lets you track your sex life.
It’s still in its Beta stages but you can sign up for an invitation. Using the online calendar you enter when you had sex, with who, how good it was and how long it lasted. The idea is that after a few months of tracking you can look back and analyse your results such as what days you most commonly got lucky for and at what time of the day it was.
This is a unique app that’s worth a look by the more ‘active’ of our readers. Check it out here at www.bedposted.com .
Windows 7 will be out in the street in a few days more (October 22, this Thursday) and Microsoft Press is giving us a very useful book for free: Windows 7 Deployment Essential Guidance.
This e-book contains ten chapters from another official Microsoft Press book: Windows 7 Resource Kit (not for free, of course). Contains all the necessary information about Windows 7 deployment planning, execution, automation and tools involved in the process.
Here’s a summary of the topics involved:
- Planning Deployment
- Testing Application Compatibility
- Developing Disk Images
- Migrating User State Data
- Deploying Applications
- Volume Activation
- Using Windows Deployment Services (WDS)
- Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT)
But that’s not all: Microsoft also published as a free download the Chapter 23 of the Windows 7 Resource Kit, “Supporting Users Using Remote Assistance”.
Enjoy!
Twitter has become one of the best ways to stay up to date with the news and current ‘Trends’ as they’re called on the service. However, in order to stay informed on one particular subject you have to search for it manually.
TweetAlert is an app that will follow subjects and trends that you have an interest in and when one is tweeted, it will be re-tweeted by your account so you can see it there when you next log in.
It literally takes less than thirty seconds to sign up to a trend using the service by filling in a quick form which you can see above. After that you’ll see the trends and topics on your twitter homepage.
It’s available here: http://code-or-die.com/tweetalert/
BitSnoop is a new torrent search engine that is supposedly better than its rivals because of a new tactic it uses when searching for torrents; indexing and combining of torrents and getting rid of duplicated ones.The torrents are generated by Tracker Match. It locates all the relevant trackers to your search and removes duplicated torrents or ‘bad’ torrents to avoid slow downloads.
I think that the homepage which you can see above is quite nice as it’s minimalistic – after all it’s there for one purpose and one purpose only. Google has had much by employing the purposeful look by using minimal text and images. The results, seen below, are also well presented and spaced out; again a minimalistic look.
Overall, I thought it was okay. I didn’t really notice much of a change in my regular download speed but the fact that it was taking away duplicated torrents was comforting, I guess. Check it out for yourself here.
The Internet is full of little puzzles, games and downright impossible mazes. Windosill is a cool new game that I found which follows along the same lines.
Basically, the game window is really big and each level – or Windosill- consists of a room or scene of sorts. It’s up to you to find the small cube to place above the exiting door in order to proceed. The first couple of levels are easy but at the minute I’m stuck on the level with the big bird! (If anyone gets past this tell me how!)
You can download the full game but at a small price. Other than that, you can play half of the game on-line for free. You can also download the game whether or not you activate the full thing for ‘better performance’.
Check it out here if you fancy wasting hours…and hours…
