The UK’s rail service can be excellent at times, and annoying at others. Hundreds of thousands of people travel by train every day in the UK to commute or to go on holiday. As such, they have just released an official iPhone app (it’ll work on the iPod touch too) for the train service.
Basically, you set up the app by entering your home location. You can then enter in other locations such as where you work or where you’re going on holidays. Then, you can check schedules and status updates on trains so you won’t ever miss your train. The best feature on this app is by far the ‘next train home’ feature. By simply telling it your location it tells you at what time the next train leaves for your home station.
You can download it here through the App Store.
Today, reports have surfaced saying that Twitters visitor numbers are decreasing for the first time ever. Apparently, visitor numbers fell by 8% in October. However, in this writer’s opinion Twitter isn’t floundering. These numbers merely represent the differences between Twitter and the rest of the web.
It’s interesting that these numbers are recorded for October. October is a month where people are settling back into school and college, winter’s coming in and the summer social bubble on the Internet has truly popped as people head back tot their normal routine after holidays, time off school and plenty of sunshine and tweet-worthy activities.
I think people are simple more busy and are tweeting from their portable devices instead which easily make up half of Twitter tweets. Instead of taking out the laptop while relaxing in the sun they’re cramming themselves into the Subway and letting everyone know about it from their phones.
Twitter are also rolling out new features such as Lists and now their GeoLocation feature which we discussed here the other day. Suggestions that Twitter is floundering are just hype. Until Twitter’s influence and micro-culture starts to evaporate – don’t believe any of these kind of statements.
Here at Crenk we have decided that we’ll share our knowledge about technology and related subjects with you our readers. So we’ve released the first of what will be a collection of PDF manuals for you to enjoy. The first one is our Ten Minute Guide to the Blogosphere.
In it we detail such things like choosing you blogging platform, promoting your blog, using social networking for a blog and keeping your blog going once you’re over than initial hump.
It is available here to read free of charge.
Be sure to Tweet this post and share the PFD with your friends.
-Dean Sherwin
Author of Crenk PDF
Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week.
Google has previously said they are working with Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba on the project. It is expected that Google will be very careful are launch and will only endorse a small set of devices for installation.
There has been a lot of news around the Google Chrome OS, including Linux OS and reports that it was going to launch back in October.
So you decide the living room needs a make over. The first task? A lick of paint. So it’s off down to the DIY store to fetch yourself some tins of lovely paint. Having spent $40 on paint and brushes, drank 9 cups of tea, kicked over two cans and fell off your ladder you stand back to admire the new paintjob.
Dang! Not looking to great is it?
This is a mistake made my all of us at some point. And yet it could have so easily been avoided if we have of known about ColorJive before now. Basically, you upload a picture of the room you would like to paint (it’s best if there’s good lighting and its of a high resolution). Then, simply select which colour you would like by using their custom colour selecting tools.
I think this is a really great app that saves a lot of time and effort. It also works really well. One would expect it to be buggy or require a lot of manual input, but no; within a few minutes I had great pictures of of painted rooms without any of the effort of actually painting!
Now you have a good idea of what you living room/ bedroom, bathroom or kitchen will look like before you waste your whole Saturday painting only to do it over on Sunday.
Ah Black Friday – it makes headlines every year. Shopping malls all over the US are packed with people grabbing what they can, doing a 100m dash to the cash register while hurdling over three piles of fighting shoppers all while the kids follow behind, trying desperately to keep up. Was is two or three years ago that a security guard was killed when the shop’s doors burst in on top of him? Crazy…
And the Internet is already getting ready for its own Black Friday. Advertisements, sales and offers are creeping in all over the place. Dell for one have knocked off a whopping $334 dollars from this laptop:
And eBay is swelling with week long auctions for Christmas gifts such as iPhones, watches, iPods, laptops and the likes. So what other bargains have we found?
Well how about a Sonia Bravia 40” TV for just shy of $1,000. Or a 120Gb Zune for only $200. You can also get a FujiFilm FinePix A170 with 10.2 megapixels for less than $60.
Black Friday is already staring to climb up the Twitter Trends chart and I’m sure that by Wednesday it’ll be sitting there high and mighty as we all tweet about what we’re going to buy, what our plan is to outsmart the other shoppers (which will undoubtedly fail) and how much money we’ll save. All I can say is that I’ll be doing the bulk of my shopping online. It beats standing around in the freezing cold all night waiting for a shop to open.
If you’re looking for more money off when you go shopping next Friday (or indeed do it online), we suggest you check out Offers.com and Ask Deals for coupons and information on where items are the cheapest.
For the first ever time Flickr has teamed up with a photo printing service for its users to use. Snapfish (owned by HP) will be Flickr’s preferred photo printing service and will be integrated with Twitter to make it easier for the users to export their pictures – and thus make it the preferred service of the users.
At the minute, users have to upload their pictures to an independent printer of their choice. However, because they’ll be able to export whole albums, photo streams etc… at the click of a mouse I can certainly see this being a promising endeavour for SnapFish. However, they will have to give some of their profits back to Flickr obviously – but because they’re available in 22 countries they’ll definitely be turning a profit this year.
Yahoo!, who own Flickr, have come under fire in recent times due to their management of the brand and the controversial decision to include video on the photography site (this has led to several online groups against videos on Flickr being founded). However, they still have over 4 billion photographs on the site and it’s growing by 100 million each month, so SnapFish won’t be complaining.
I’ve seen a lot of strange Twitter accounts. Even one supposedly controlled by a blade of grass on a golf course. But this one really takes the biscuit. Someone has started a Twitter account for Big Ben. And I don’t mean Big Ben from down the street. I mean the gigantic tower in London with a big clock on it next to the House of Crooks (I mean parliament!).
Not surprisingly, Ben hasn’t really got a lot to say for himself. After all his sole existence for the past few hundred years has been to alert Londoners to the time of day. And of course his lack of opposable thumbs may be an issue. So his Tweets look a little something like this:
It appears as though Big Ben tweets his “Bong Bong Bong” on the hour every hour so all his fellow Twitter users know what time it is. What a gentlemen our Big Ben is. Be sure to give him a follow to keep his spirits up during the cold London winter!
Last summer Dell mentioned they were going to launch their tiny Inspiron Zine PC and now its here. It looks like an excellent addition to any home theater or desktop, especially if you configure it with a terabyte of hard disk space, 8GB of RAM, 64-bit Windows 7, a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4330 graphics card capable of blasting out 1080p, and its upcoming optional TV tuner. Sounds like hot competition for Apple’s newly updated Mac Mini.
There’s no Intel Atom processor or the NVIDIA Ion platform on board as we had hoped, but we’re still satisfied with the highest-end processor available on it, the 1.8GHz dual-core AMD Athlon Neo X2 6850e. Decked out with all this goodness, the Zino’s not the cheapest home theater PC in the world, but its price of around $700 fully configured ain’t bad. Or if you go with its basic trim, you’ll have a fully functioning PC for a rock-bottom $229.
Don’t like having the same theme as everyone else on your Wordpress blog and can’t find one just right for you? Well then just create your own – no coding necessary. WPTheme Creator is an online web app that allows you to generate your own custom Wordpress theme by simple entering in things like how many columns you want and what colours you would like certain aspects to be.
As you can see in the screenshot, the options are fairly basic but they return good results when you really put some thought and effort into creating your new Wordpress theme.
The generated themes will run on Worpress programs up to the most recent one – 2.8 right the way from the fairly ancient 2.1 Wordpress release. One you have finished creating your theme you simply click ‘Save’ and then download it as you would any other theme. Then, go to ‘the Appearance tab in the wp-admin screen of your Wordpress blog and upload the theme, then click Activate once it has finished installing. Your new generated theme will be active on your blog.
The world of computing and IT has made some big jumps in the last decade. The once powerful Microsoft has started to take a backseat to other companies gaining a strong market share in a variety of industries such as Google, Apple, Yahoo, to name just a few. As the playing field changes, so do the technologies, and virtualization has become a way businesses are now doing business.
We’ve seen an increase in cloud computing, reducing the need for physical technology expenditures and manpower to maintain them. We’ve seen conferences, webinars, communication, all taking place online using online applications that help facilitate these needs.
Techinline Remote Desktop offers virtualization services that offer secure and trouble free connections between PC’s across the globe. While a powerful tool at the corporate level, Techinline is also useful for small businesses, saving on travel and other related expenses.
This instant connection to solve your customer’s technical needs is useful especially if you’ve got clients in multiple locations. Why hire someone for each location when the technical needs associated to software can be handled virtually from one location with Techinline.
There are a lot of remote pc apps out there, so add this one to the list and give it a try If you’ve used remote PC web applications, I’d like to hear your take on it. And if you used Techinline Remote Desktop, let us know your experience and if you’d recommend it.
Like you read it, you can download files using the BitTorrent network without actually using .torrent files with a new Firefox add-on.
“Well, yeah, I know that” you might say “those are called magnet links”. Yes, it is true, magnet links exists already; and they don’t use the .torrent file to download, they use DHT protocol. But unfortunately, magnet links are not so easy to find; even though there are some popular clients (like Vuze and uTorrent) that already support magnetized links.
But now, you can find those very easy with the Firefox Add-on Magnetiser. You can install it, look for the Torrent that you want to download, click on magnetise, select the torrent client, and your download will start.
One small consideration though, the Add-On it is not officially out just yet (officially meaning that you can download it directly from Mozilla site); but you can download this add-on from here (just drag-n-drop the .xpi file intro Firefox.
