A rather useless thing for most people, but is something interesting to know if you are curious. This program displays the upload and download speeds of multiple network connections in realtime, and can record monthly reports. Heh, it could tell you how much bandwidth your using in your own house.
Check it out: SpeedApps Cyber Bandwidth Monitor
For those of our readers in England, heres a post for you guys. Firstly, before we start, if you’ve been reading this blog all this time, we apologize for spelling words in the US way, although some of the spellings make more sense without the -u- in them..but, enough about that.
If you live in the UK, most likely, your ISP is BT and have had dealings with Virgin Media. Chances are…you have a program installed on your computer called Phorm which sits at your computer and reports browsing activity and sends it back to the company. This is such a ridiculous piece of software, that really, if it got installed on my system, I would be writing rant after rant. Instead, however, theres AntiPhormLite, which is a program for XP and Vista that runs in the background generating fake browsing activity. To save up bandwidth, it only loads the text of a page. Pretty much, it lets you do whatever you want, and screws with the company who installed it. As i quote:
Just run it and go and watch TV if you want. Someone somewhere will
assume you like to shop for red shoes and caravans and be rubbing their
hands with glee.
Brilliant! Thank you AntiPhorm
“Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with “Friend Connect” on Monday. TechCrunch speculates
that Friend Connect will be a set of “APIs for Open Social participants
to pull profile information from social networks into third party
websites.”
Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect
will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos,
events, and other data across the Web to partner sites.”
Dan Farber, from Cnet, here :
http://www.news.com/8301-13953_3-9941039-80.html?tag=nefd.pop?881
One of the particularly interesting quotes I found was this one :
“TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington reasons:
The reason these companies are are rushing to get products
out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to
control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile
and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards
one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access
that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also
causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become
OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).”
Arrington is saying that everyone wants to be “that” site that people gravitate to, and use as their main portal for their social network. But if no one is working on being a relying party, then who’s actually making sure good standards are created, and that user data can be openly (and safely) shared across multiple sites? I mean, I understand that companies that own social networking sites need revenue, which comes from ads, which are sold based on the number of people who use (and therefore see) the website and its associated ads.
It seems like theres this battle going on over the web; Free vs. Convienent. When social networking is free, people will gravitate to sites that they like. They don’t pay anything, so there’s noting stopping them from leaving one site for another if they don’t like what they’re getting. I’d think its in social networking sites best interests to make it so that user data CAN be shared easily. If it can’t, then users will go to sites where they can connect with more friends. On the other hand, some people will use social networking sites that are linked to other accounts they have (like email) just because its one less login to remember, one less thing to sign up for, and overall, its bundled with something they’re allready using. Not everyone is a social networking nut; It doesn’t help is JoeBobs Email and Social Networking can’t talk to the big social networks (like Facebook, etc.) It is after all supposed to be SOCIAL networking.
What I’m trying to say here is that its about time these social networking sites started working out ways to talk to and talk amongst one another. Its a lot like the early days of internet search engines. There were many small search engines, then there were the web crawlers, that would search multiple individual search engines, and then I think there were a few search engines that would search multiple web crawling search engines to come up with even more listings. You very quickly ended up with MANY ways of achieving the same thing, but all of them worked their own way. I say its about time we get some social network networking standards in place before things get out of hand.
I know that most people who have used Google for more than just searching as hit upon the problem of needing help. Google has a large help center, that relies on topic hierarchy or, of course, searching. However, sometimes, you really just want a manual/help file. Well…if you append ?fulldump=1 to the address of a google help center, most of time, you will get…a full dump. An example would be http://mail.google.com/support/?fulldump=1
Note that all of the help pages are frequently updated so your version may become outdated quickly.
Check out the entire list of help page dumps so far at Google OS
This is something I have been meaning to post for a while…
Hampshire College’s GNU+Linux Users Group has gathered together an extensive list of useful and/or interesting applications including detailed reviews, version and license information, and download links. Some of these applications are fairly well known ; many are cross-platform and all are open source.
Hampshire is no stranger to the free software movement: alum Benjamin Mako Hill is a leading advocate GNU/Linux and among other distinctions, serves as an adviser to One Laptop per Child project and the Wikimedia Foundation.
The dsigner who made this mouse made the shell entirely from stainless steel, using the innards and electronics from a Microsoft optical mouse. It took 8 months to complete, weighs quite a bit, but is supposedly ergonomic and fully functional.
View more pix (and individual component pix and details) here
http://thecontaminated.com/stainless-steel-mouse/
You know…sometimes, when explorer crashes, your little icons in the taskbar just stop showing up? Their still running…but their not *there*?
Well, when that happened, I used to open up task manger, kill em, and restart em. Well…turns out i dont need to do that 
Unhider shows those programs for you 
While this is one function of the program, it also lets you show the programs that normally dont show up.
Check it out, Unhider
Any of you guys run a web server at home or have a host that allows you to edit .htaccess?
Here’s a nifty little thing that makes it easier for people who know next to nothing of htaccess to protect pages. It’s also for people who *could* do this by hand, but really could be doing something better than text editing .htaccess.
Theres a nice web utility that allows you to setup the basic password protection, error pages, redirects, etc. Nice and simple
Check it out: .htaccess Editor
Heres some good backup software, each with its own strengths.
Hinx Backup Easy, is a small utility that lets you do local backups or FTP backuping, with schedules. Theres the option for incremental backups, and thats about it. Simple, and small Hinx Backup Easy
DocShield has a different niche. What happens if you’re working on a giant paper, and it just goes horribly wrong? DocShield scans marked folders for changed files and saves archived versions. Its like code versioning, but for allpurpose files. This also lets you backup your versions on an ftp server. DocShield
Finally…on a slightly different note, File Alert Monitor, does what any sane human being would be able to pull out of the program name. It works on networked drives too Check it out: File Alert Monitor
This is not for the weak of heart….or for those who have nightmares of owning a brick
Of course, theres always just waiting until June…
Anyways, ZiPhone will jailbreak your iPhone and iPod touch, as well as unlock the iPhone. Make sure the device is running latest firmware, 1.1.4, set it up as a new phone. Download ZiPhone, run the app, close iTunes, and just follow the instructions :P.
Check it out: ZiPhone
Now remember…you really could just wait until June, but heh, if you’re in a hurry 