I have longed for an ebook reader for some time, but the most popular one – the Amazon Kindle – has long been reserved solely for the US market. Whilst it has many competitors, like the Sony Reader, I had to wonder about how many titles were available for such platforms. I used to use [...]
Quickly capture screens and share them on OS X with Skitch
Macs don’t have a PrintScreen button, and if we want to take a screen-capture, the default program we use is Grab. Grab is great in a few ways; you can choose to use a timer before a screen-capture is taken and it can be used to ensure only a certain area of the screen is [...]
XNJB: Transfer music to and from a MTP MP3 player on a Mac
When I switched to a Mac, I did not purchase an iPod for a few months. I previously had a Creative Zen Vision M media player. Unfortunately, this device was not mass storage, but utilised ‘Media Transfer Protocol’. Whilst several pieces of software on Windows provide the facility to move music to the device, OS [...]
Cool uses of QR codes
In March, Martin discussed QR codes, a form of 2D barcode that phone cameras can rapidly decode, with appropiate software (which can be found easily on Google). The practical uses are for phone numbers to be quickly entered or websites to be quickly launched; QR codes can feature in magazines, websites or on packaging, for [...]
Help the fight against phishing with Phishtank
For anti-phishing tools to work, phishing sites must be identified to analyse and to warn people about. Sites like Web of Trust allow users to share information about phishing sites, but scores of similar tools exist and as it would be counter-productive for each to maintain their own database of phishing sites. PhishTank centralises phishing [...]
Make Wikipedia more usable with Vector
Wikimedia recently conducted a study into how to make their projects, like Wikipedia, more usable and user friendly. The study highlighted a number of interesting points, like that many users had never been to Wikipedia’s homepage, instead finding articles through search engines. These points have helped steer development. One of the first things to come [...]
Download and install Ubuntu faster with a Minimal CD
I recently found the need to install Ubuntu on a machine with a poor CD drive (and no USB ports) that could not read large amounts of data, but could manage to read smaller amounts of data. As such, the machine could not read the 700MB but could read smaller amounts, like 10MB. I found [...]
Log in to websites with your site’s URL as your OpenID
A few years ago, Martin covered OpenID, an open authentication system. Since then, it has become increasingly popular and a wide range of sites, from AOL to LiveJournal provide OpenIDs, and OpenID login is also quite common. OpenID is particularly popular for blog comments, with Blogger now integrating support for it. An OpenID is an [...]
A standard compliant web browser and editor: Amaya
Some web browsers don’t fully respect web standards and many WYSIWYG HTML editors produce absolutely revolting code. W3C set out standards as to how HTML (and XHTML etc) should appear and whilst some choose to ignore these, some are devoted to the following of these standards. Sticking to standards can therefore lead to issues with [...]