Chances are you are already entrusting this mystical cloud with your data by dropping it into the famous box, watching it skydive, uploading it with unseen simplicity or just backing it up securely with Mozy (ran out of metaphors on this one). The catch is, this fluffy “cloud” in reality consists of hardware that doesn’t come in lite or free versions, thus inflicting these otherwise great services with individual usage caps on free accounts, usually set at around 2GB with the exception of SkyDrive which has some other disadvantages, though. Of course, obtaining additional on-line storage with a paid membership is a decent choice… Until you familiarize yourself with the idea propelling Wuala.

Wuala takes a unique approach to secure online storage. After registering for a free account, you immediately get 1 free gigabyte of online storage managed through a convenient cross-platform client (JRE required). What? 1GB, are you kidding? Behold, this is merely the beginning. Obviously, if you are serious about full-scale online backup of the majority of your data or just need to store/share large files in a long-term fashion, 2 gigs just won’t cut it and Wuala’s 1GB won’t even cut through half. That is, unless you buy additional storage at competitive rates or, even better, begin trading your local diskspace for remote space.

Wuala doesn’t stop at simply storing user data in encrypted form on their back-bone servers. It boosts its overall accessibility, speed and reliability ahead of the competition using deliberate redundancy – by spreading encrypted chunks of received files over a vast network of peers who decided to become “pro” members merely by giving up an unused portion of their hard drive in exchange for secure online storage accessible from anywhere and due to the very nature of the system expandable to sizes never seen before with free accounts.

Who is eligible to participate in this storage-trading network you ask? Well, all you need is some spare space on your HDD, reliable internet connection and the ability to meet a requirement of staying on-line in the long term for at least 17% of the time. What if you fail to meet the last criteria later on? Don’t worry. If your on-line presence drops, you won’t be allowed to upload more until you match up again but you will NOT lose your data. Clearly, your disk space is of little use if it cannot be accessed at least now and then. Therefore, the calculation determining the amount of online space you receive in exchange for your local space takes into account two factors: amount of shared space and your online presence. Simple math tells us a realistic rate to expect would be somewhere between 170MB and 700MB for 1GB of your harddisk space, which is not bad, provided you have some spare gigabytes to pass around. I, for instance, have been online for about 35% of the time (and rising) since signing up a few days ago, thus earning a total of 8GB online so far for the 20GBs shared with the world. With my 0.5TB HDD half-empty, I’m aiming for about 100GB of online space in the future… Oh, did I mention Wuala keeps old file versions and lets you share uploaded files, create public groups or set up folders on your computer to be synced online regularly?

To make myself clear, I still don’t put full trust in the “The Cloud” with my data. I always use it to either mirror my data to remote storage for backup purposes or upload files of less importance with the mere intention of sharing/accessing them online. If your data is really valuable to you, never rely solely on remote storage, no matter how extremely safe and secure it allegedly is.

Got some spare gigabytes to share with the internets? Don’t hesitate to join in! Got more questions about security, privacy and sharing options? Check out the extensive FAQ.

To grow accustomed to the way M2 sorts e-mails, one has to first get rid of prejudice created by most other e-mail clients about how this kind of application is meant to work. Once you get to know it, you either love or hate the way it works. In most clients, we were used to sorting messages into virtual folders where they can be moved and stored for later referenfce. By default, M2 seems to be a bit clumsy at this since it throws all your mails into one “Received” folder and as your mail database grows larger, it becomes a total mess that is seemingly hard to put in any reasonable order. This first impression is probably the main cause of people rather switching to their ol’ reliable Outlook Express or similar external application. However, a good way exists to sort messages in a convenient way, in M2 called filters.

These virtual boundaries are not much different from typical folders as we know them. They too can be used as a storage place for your e-mails with one little difference – filters are by its very substance always affected by rules that you set. These can be affected by pretty much everything that the e-mail container holds, ranging from the sender’s address to the entire message body contents. And besides that, they can be extended by the use of regular expressions. Messages then only appear in the filters they were assigned to. By default, they also still appear in the root “Received” folder but this can be easily changed by enabling the “Mark messages as filtered” option, which basically ensures that they don’t appear anywhere else but the places they are set to, which cleans up the root folder significantly.

Let’s have a simple example. Say you would like to set a filter (folder) for all newsletters. What you do is add a filter and either have it learn what messages it should draw into itself by initially moving the e-mails in it by yourself. Or, you can choose another approach. For example, you create the filter, set it to retract all messages from address news@letter.com and check the “Filter existing messages” option so that all existing mails in the root folder are re-labeled (virtually re-positioned). Assuming you also checked the option to Mark messages as filtered, all items from this address now only appear in this filter, nowhere else. And should a new one arrive from this address within a second, it’ll be automaticly assigned to this filter. Adding new addresses to filters is very easy, all you need to do is right-click the concerned item and select Show in > Filter name > This filter and add a rule. Opera asks you if you’d like to add current sender address and you can also choose to again refilter all existing mails.

My setup using this threaded technology now works like this: All incoming messages that have not a filter assigned appear in the “Unread” folder placed at the very top of the tree. From here, I can either “Read (K)” them, thus moving to the “Received” folder, delete them right away, assign them an existing filter or create a completely new category based on the unique content of that particular item. Other messages falling into one or more categories are automatically moved into their respective categories and I can read them after switching into those particular views.

This is a rather basic setup using little of M2′s strong sorting skills but it’s worked for me so far and can be further extended by applying advanced rules. Along with the quick search capability based on indexing, that is built into M2, this powerful system provides you with good options to label and very quickly locate e-mails you need to refer to at any one time. The final important thing to mention is that these filters with their rules and contents can be exported into the standard *.mbs file for backup purposed.

Navigating through your folders and files in Explorer using keyboard instead of mouse is rather a matter of personal preferences and comfort (as long as we ignore the “I wanna look more pro” part). Simple and widely recognized navigation hotkeys like arrow keys, PgUp/Dn and Backspace aren’t worth mentioning. However, in complex folder structure with many objects in it, this kind of navigation becomes a bit clumsy since it often takes longer to hop to the object of interest than it would take with mouse. The solution to this can’t be easier than it is.

When looking for something specific within the folder structure, you usually do have an idea of what the name of the container or file is and it’s therefore easy to quickly identify such an object, which is moreover in most cases alphabetically sorted. Still, even using the ABCs for easier navigation can become a bit obsolete in stuffed folders. Fortunately, Explorer ain’t as stupid as it might appear and if you simply type the beginning of the object’s name, it immediately tries to find a suitable match and points to it by selecting it. That’s it, just use a small part of the object’s label to quickly get to it as though you were using Launchy or similar app launcher with the difference that Explorer takes care of this by default too.

To provide a simple example and clear out any confusion, imagine we want to quickly navigate to the Windows’ wallpapers folder to tinker with some of them. Say your system partition is labelled Primary, go ahead and type “pri…” within the MyComputer window, then hit Enter as soon as it gets selected. Our final destination (C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper) can be easily reached in a similar way, perhaps by typing something like “wi”, “we”, “wa” while always hitting enter in between, of course. The number of chars required to select the desired object is naturally dependent on the amount of objects in a folder as well as the variety of their labels. But it does work pretty fast in most cases.

This kind of quick navigation should be supported by virtually any file manager under Windows, including Frigate (advanced implementation of this feature), TotalCommander as well as registry editors and other applications listing folder structure or any other elements. Another way of quick navigation through your folder structure is by engaging an application launcher like formerly mentioned Launchy. Though, the disadvantage resulting from this is a much larger database that has to absorb much more data if you set it to index your whole drive and its contents.

NetCPS – the easier way

This little tool called NetCPS (a single executable file) is rather simplistic, no fancy features as the author (credits to Jarle Aase) says. It pumps 100MB of generated data (without accessing the HDD which could mess with the final result) and then displays the result in form of average speed stated in both KB/s and MB/s. Sourcecode is available for download as well in case you’d like to do some further tinkering with it. Freely usable unless you intend to use it on behalf of military or government.

Example of use:

Server-side end-point: netcps -server
Client-side end-point2: netcps *IP address/hostname of the host*

Additional switches to change the default port (4455) and default amount of transfered data (100MB) are supported. Use the -help switch for further instructions.

Iperf – the powerful way

This tool on the contrary is rather advanced while still maintaining its portability and small size. It can measure performance with many different settings but those are optional and not neccessary for the essential purpose of finding out what the network’s throughput is. You can affect a lot of settings by changing them with various switches. Take notice of the example screenshot for instance, where the port used is changed to 1234, amount of sent data set to 200 MB, interval of reports set to 2 seconds for better accuracy and report format set to MBytes. Iperf can be run as a solid Windows service as well. Here’s a download link to the compiled Windows version of Iperf (a single executable).

Example of use:

Server-side end-point: iperf -s -p 1234
Client-side end-point2: iperf -c *IP address/hostname of the host*

Many additional switches and settings are available for advanced use of this nifty utility. The usual -help switch brings up further instructions again.

If so, meet an interesting start-up called ScrnShots. Besides having a fancy 2.0 name it provides you with a few effective tools for keeping the screenshots you take in order and for ease of linking to them and embedding them into a web page. One of such tools would definitely be tagging that can be applied on each image to make it easier for you to find your way to it later on. The function allowing the user to view existing screenshots in an orderly manner through the web interface surely comes in handy too but the thing I find most useful about this service is that it prepares a few links to various sizes of the picture for you to simply copy&paste these into your site to have the pictures embedded as links which take you to the host upon clicking them. Here, viewers can leave comments on your screenshots and view them in full size. One last thing especially addicted screenshotters could appreciate is getting a personal RSS feed updating anyone who should be interested in new shots you take and a partly customizable widget made up of 1 up to 10 thumbnails of your latest “artwork”.

ScrnShots preview:

All this would be kind of clumsy if you had to use ScrnShots’ online uploader every time you want to share a screenshot. Fortunately there’s a very lightweight (5 files) desktop version of the uploader available for download from here that makes it possible to snap certain area on your screen and tag/describe the image before uploading it. There are versions for both Windows and Mac, however, I got an error message when trying to run it on my system. Hopefully that only happened on account of the application being a 0.7Beta and the new version to come will be working properly. If you do give it a try, please let me know whether the desktop uploader worked for you or not.

Let me introduce several tutorial indexing sources whose purpose is to organize and categorize the best of tutorials available online.

Tutorial Center

This one is indeed a center with pretty broad scale of issues dealt with in the wide selection of collected links to tutorials. It’s no use giving examples of categories since you can hardly think of any application that would be left out (at least of the best known ones). Submitted tutorials are examined to make sure only the high quality ones make it to the list.

Tutorial Vault

Tutorialvault’s focused on graphic and coding tutorials which are hand-picked and split into just several main categories, basically those most often sought after like Photoshop, Flash, PHP, CSS ones and a few others. Although Adobe apps apparently lead the chart here, the other categories are nicely filled as well. So far over 2300 pieces and counting.

Tech Screencast

This collection of screencasts only deals with issues related to web development in its heavier form and contains videos providing useful hints about different technologies and programming/scripting languages used to propel websites – RoR, ASP, PHP and more. The number of published screencasts is not that high but their quality seems pretty good to me.

Bonus: Inkscaper’s Dreamland

I couldn’t resist adding this one at the end, although this resource is purely aimed at the OS vector graphics editor Inkscape and graphics made in it. I must admit I haven’t used Inkscape much so far but after seeing what these guys can do in it, I knew I had to give it more attention, perhaps as much as GIMP deserves. Should you be a designer or just someone who deals with graphics in their free time, you definitely don’t wanna pass this valuable screencast.

Shared Talk – Interlingual

This website is simply AWESOME. I’ve only registered recently and had the opportunity to only talk to several people for a short time but so far I’ve loved the way this service works. It aims at throwing people with the same desire of improving their language abilities together and allowing them to quickly and easily establish a communication channel for practicing it. The sweet thing about this service is that the website runs on highly developed Flash mainframe with tabbed interface and the communication with others takes place immediately without the need to install any kind of VoIP software. The only thing required for participation in voice chat is allowing the Flash applet to access the audio HW of your computer (either for current session only or permanently for this website) through a classic Shockwave dialog that appears while the voice channel is being set up. That is, after a quick registration where you fill in your profile and state the languages you know or want to learn plus the approximate level of your knowledge to enable the others to decide whether they feel like talking to you or preferably someone else. There are some additional functions too, like adding people you like to your “Network”, sending and receiving private messages and searching for an ideal language partner to share the experience with.
Featuring 113 languages in all, not only English (though, it is the most common indeed).

Listen and write – English

Frankly, this particular site does not appear too sophisticated at the first sight but the content’s what matters most and that’s what cought my attention in this case. Transcribing dictations in real time is what’s being dealth with here and I should say their system works better than I had expected at the beginning. You can use the embedded player to listen to the whole dictation or rather the other one below it which only plays a short part of it while you’re typing in the words you hear. That’s where it actually starts to be interesting. The system is pretty smart and it checks the typed-in words immediately to either auto-complete them or correct your mistakes in real time. Moreover, it repeats this small chunk of audio over and over until the text written by you matches what’s being said, consequently switching to the following chunk in an automated manner. The level of English in these listening exercises differs which is indicated by a number below each of them, thus making it easier to pick the one matching your abilities. RSS feeds for those exercises are available to keep you up to date as well. Some advanced statistics and features like performance diagrams are available after the registration. With the hope for slightly improving this site’s appearance to make it more catchy, I myself consider it a keeper.

BBC Learning – sole English

I’m consent about the general public being aware of various language courses broadcast by BBC, largely through the TV network. But did you know it offered a well-organized and comprehensive online course as well? With daily updated sources of grammar explanations, emphasized vocabulary in articles, audio/video stories, quizzes and thorough summary of idioms and phrases, it becomes a valuable vault of resources related to English in every way. Grab the RSS feed to have the upcoming lessons delivered as soon as they come out.

Every now and then I switch the current presentation mode in my browser to make an unsuitably designed page (too low or too high contrast, badly styled elements, etc.) draw in a way that ensures a good readability at all times. Whether your reason to change the style of websites you visit is to make them more legible and accessible, ease the strain in your eyes caused by bright backgrounds for better comfort or just make them look as fancy as possible, it can be easily achieved by using custom or even pre-arranged CSS files that come with Opera.

The two basic modes between which you may switch at will are called the “Author mode” and “User mode” while the former mentioned is according to its name a mode where the original stylesheet file bound to that particular website is used, whereas the latter mentioned doesn’t have a solid form since its appearance depends which custom stylesheet is used. For a good start, you may want to give it a try by simply pressing the Shift+G trigger hotkey which immediately switches from Author to User mode and vice versa. You can see some significant changes taking place among the contents of that website and the point is these changes can be simply adjusted to suit your ideas and requirements.

Take the built-in “High contrast W/B” stylesheet for instance. You get a dark-room-like environment with well visible elements atop it where especially longer texts are far easier to read. Now it’s possible to simply copy the contents of %Opera_root_folder%\styles\user\Contrastwb.css, paste them into the default CSS file used by “User mode” which can be found in %Opera_root_folder%\styles\user (after making a backup) and perhaps even mess with the code a bit to make it better for your needs. Of course you have the opportunity to start from scratch and code your own User mode design entirely by yourself, just don’t forget to use the “!important” statement with your definitions to avoid any interferences with the original css used for websites. The possibilities are virtually limitless.

Just a note that the following under View > Style > Manage modes… should be checked in order to make your stylesheet affect the display method correctly:

• My stylesheet
• My fonts & colors
• My link style

Check out the example below (download in case you don’t wanna bother making your own CSS):

User mode (customized)

Happy customizing.

I’ve always thought highly of surfing in fullscreen which is in some way more comfortable. Besides, using Windows’ cool-switch feature ensures ease of switching to other apps w/o any problems. However, there had always been a drawback making me put this feature aside a bit. The thing is that Opera with enabled tabbed browsing won’t display the tabs panel when in fullscreen mode, making it quite confusing and more difficult to keep order in websites you have open in all those tabs and control the amount of active tabs. Fortunately, there’s a rather simple way to resolve this problem.

You can easily force Opera to display various bars in fullscreen by editing the action taking place after pressing the F11 key. To do this, you’ll have to open the Advanced tab in Preferences window (Ctrl+F12) and continue to the Shortcuts menu. Here, you can edit the default keyboard layout. In the editing dialog, paste the string “Platform Windows-Unix-MCE, F11″ into the search field and double-click on the right side of the appropriate line. Now you can add a short statement to achieve desired result:

original action definition: Enter fullscreen | Leave fullscreen

altered action definition: Enter fullscreen & View page bar, # | Leave fullscreen
# determines the position of that particular panel on the screen (1-4 for left-bottom)

Additionally, you may want to add another statement with the string “status bar” instead, to display, surprisingly, your Status bar which also provides useful info (targets for anchor links, etc.) or quick access to custom buttons.

If you’re still not satisfied with the final result you got, try to take a look at some excellent ready-made custom buttons @OperaWiki.info offering even more advanced solutions for customizing fullscreen browsing in Opera. Just remember that you can copy & paste the code of these buttons to make the F11 key adopt that customized behavior rather than having to use a separate button to achieve the same result. Also, access to the sidebar is still enabled in FS by pressing F4 key.

Inspiration:

Have fun making your browser more OPERAtional :)

Now I’m sharing the little knowledge I’ve gathered with all Opera-mates.

Issue #1: How to view my transfers in a regular tab, instead of an illegible overview sqeezing in the toggle sidebar.

Solution #1: Go to the Appearance dialog (Shift+F12) > Buttons tab and select Panels to see a small square button with two arrows pointing to the right (> >). Now toggle-open the sidebar, choose Transfers here and drag & drop that lil square button between the label Transfers and the close button (x). From now on, enlarge any sidebar panel, including Transfers, into a nice wide tab by simply hitting the 2-arrow button.
Solution #2: Use Opera’s built-in hotkey Ctrl+Alt+T (editable in Preferences) to quickly access Transfers in a tab.

Issue #2: On active transfer, open Transfers tab in background, rather than in foreground.

Having Transfers tab open with every single transfer may get pretty annoying, especially with multiple downloads at once. It took me quite some time to re-discover this option after reinstalling Opera some time ago, although the place to find this setting is so much obvious. Simply go to transfers tab (Ctrl+Alt+T, see above) and in the View menu (glasses) select the desired option. Simple enough, huh?

Issue #3: I want “Open folder” item back in my context-menu !!!

Have you noticed the disappearance of “Open folder” item in Transfers’ context-menu? I did because I used it quite often before it disappeared from Opera, usually when I wasn’t fast enough to click the “Transfer complete” pop-up quietly sinking into taskbar. Disabling this feature seems to have been just a side effect of adapting Opera to Unix environments.

Nevertheless, you can fortunately get this useful feature back by editing one *.ini file. Close Opera, go to defaults folder inside Opera’s root folder (Program Files, most likely) and open “standard_menu.ini” file (after backing it up, just to be sure). Here, edit the original line 1627:

Platform Unix, Item, 69697 = Open transfer folder

to make it look like this (w/o the first string):

Item, 69697 = Open transfer folder

Restart Opera and enjoy the good old “Open folder” option.

Thanks for this tip goes to Tamil. Happy surfing, OPERAtors ;)

I loved that movie when I saw it and I still do. It even made me ignore my lack of talent and draw (yes, on a real paper, using my very own clumsy hands!) a picture, which is fairly untypical of me and hardly ever found in my regular schedule. Having had my own computer out of order for some time now, I had lots of time to spend on a homework we got in school – writing an English essay that would resemble a classic fairy-tale.

I meant it to be inspired by the movie from the very beginning but still wanted to make it somehow original. Then I got a few ideas on how to adapt the basic story to the IT environment and internet culture and thought that those ideas weren’t that bad after all. After one whole afternoon spent on writing (again, on a real paper instead of word processor canvas), I came up with something that may not be exactly called “art” but I still liked it myself and wanted to share it with the web community. Though, I do recommend watching the movie first, if possible.. no, I’m not adding a torrent link here.

Link: Gate to the Net – Bridge to Terabithia for Geeks via Scribd.com

Description:

The excellent and beautiful movie “Bridge to Terabithia” inspired me to write this remake as a school essay. Specially designed for people with a slight insight into the technology world and internet stuff.

System requirements:
Fantasy Unlimited 2.0
Friendship Understanding 2008
Emotion Extension Pack Free
+ Technical Inaccuracy Ignorance Engine

If you happen to like it, I’d appreciate another digg.

I obviously had to download had to download Google Earth to test this application but after that everything went on smoothly. Users have four options which are all accessible from the main page. The first is to load an hourly snapshot of all active flights (over the United States) into Google Earth, the second to load the latest flight incidents into the software, the third to view the live inbound traffic of a selected airport and the last to track a specific flight of an airline that is available.

I do not have that much experience with Google Earth but was not it possible to get into some sort of 3D mode in there ?

Some time ago I downloaded a freeware editor just to see what it has to offer and I was really surprised by its capabilities when I finally got to giving it a try. This light-weight yet powerful editor is called Q10 and it’s available as a free download on the website of Baara e-studio. As a portable application fitted into smallish 350 kB with a number of neat features and dark-room nature it beats any competition I’ve heard of. Another nice thing is that it always launches in full-screen and actually doesn’t even have any menu thanks to keyboard shortcuts by which it is controlled. To display these, one must press F1 key. I’m better saying that right away coz it took me a little while to find out.. :)

Now shortly to the features themselves. Notes inside the text, spell checker, alarms, auto corrections, auto completion, auto-save, sound effects, portability.. that’s just the basic outline. All kind of info is displayed in the status bar including words, lines, paragraphs, chars and pages count as well as time and full path to the currently edited file (optional). You can change basically anything in this tiny piece of software since all settings it uses are stored in an *.ini file. These include changing all the fonts, colors, backgrounds, margins, infos displayed on the info bar, etc.

Q10 can be either obtained as a version with installer or a compressed archive according to your taste. An IMPORTANT note about this software would be that you may need to change the line ending format to DOS instead of Unix by pressing Ctrl+P and selecting appropriate item under the “Misc” tab so that your text files wouldn’t be saved with ugly squares in place of line breaks. Also note that Q10 can open recently edited files but if you delete the last edited, you need to press Ctrl+N for a new clean file or else you’d have to change the file format manually by pressing Ctrl+E and selecting the right option again. That’s just a trivial inconvenience though and it’s no big deal. Let’s go nuts typing !!

In a form of an online service, reCAPTCHA offers exactly that. After signing up for the service, you’ll be able to place a captcha module on your website and avoid automated abuse while helping to read and store books of the past. With this special type of captcha engine, users are besides writing an already known word correctly into the widget’s field also required to recognize an additional word gathered by digitizing books which the OCR system wasn’t able to recognize due to various defects in characters.

Besides an obvious advantage of this service that makes real use of captcha, there are other great advantages to it. It’s easy to install thanks to plugin support for major CMS like WordPress, it’s accessible for eyesight-disabled people and it is based on high security standards that make it nearly impossible to penetrate. Moreover, the whole system can be quickly updated whenever a vulnerability is found without the webmaster having to worry about it. It’s also capable of IP filtering.

Should you wish for a great, free, customizable service with its own API that transforms waste of time into a useful and valuable activity while protecting your website against the dirt of spam? Here you go.

In that case, you might appreciate the possibility to immediately start a conversation with anyone without needing to install a Skype-type application on your computer and registering for an account it requires you to have. Additionally, if typing contests aren’t your favorite sort of competition and you spend a lot of time writing text messages via regular messengers, this could be a good way of saving a bit of it.

The only thing you need to get connected via voice is a light-weight, no-install application named PicoPhone. Squeezed in negligible 55 kB, this simple-interfaced utility enables you to establish a connection with another party or receive a call by just letting it run in background while it carefully listens to incoming calls on a default or another specified port.

If acting as a server however, you of course do need to make sure that you can receive the incoming connection on that particular port by enabling it in your firewall or setting a single port forwarding rule in case you’re sitting behind a router. But that’s where the worries end and fun begins. Input the IP address of the party you want to join along with custom port number (if changed) separated by a colon, hit dial and talk.

Besides instant voice communication with support for conference sessions, this tiny piece of SW is also capable of delivering text messages thus allowing you to resolve voice drop-outs or exchange other vital information. The Preferences menu inside the program lets you change a range of settings including codec used (3 different codecs available), port used for incoming connections, audio volume levels and thresholds as well as incoming-call actions.

To achieve a good quality of communication, you may need to adjust your system’s sound settings using sound control panels but that’s in fact something you need to go through with any other software of this kind. Why not for instance send this small tool to a friend of yours and start practicing foreign languages right away…

Just a note that the program initially connects to an external server to obtain some information to successfully establish aconnection but doesn’t require nor share any of your personal info. As stated on its homesite: “Picophone connects to www.vitez.it to obtain the list of picoservers and the public IP address of the computer, where Picophone is running. Its connection attempts are not spyware.”

Let’s get started by taking a glance at an interesting website that accumulates English students from all over the world and besides providing some learning resources suggests ways to talk with the other learners world-wide using either Skype or MSN as the main framework. I think active talking is the biggest problem concerning foreign languages, all other activities seem to be much easier compared to it.

Speak-English-Today maintains a database of people who are willing to break the weird feeling of talking to other English learners and start improving their and their partner’s capabilities of self-expression. Experience conversation with people from different countries, it’s even fun sometimes. The initial courage will pay off in the end. Paid courses with native speakers are also available, optionally.

How about some listening exercise? High quality (maybe rather prestige) listening materials often cost fortune but you can try out some interesting listenings at ESLVideo without paying a single dime. There are several videos for each level of knowledge under which you can find a survey asking you question related to information mentioned in the video. There aren’t many of them so far but it’ll take you a few tens of minutes to go through all of them.

Finally, two useful online tools to help you with the studies. The first one would be an amazing Flash application called Visuwords that allows you to put in any word and consequently shows all words related to the one you provided connected with varied lines that show their relationship. Types of words are distinguished by having different colors explained in the legend.

The second tool is a definition dictionary called LingoZ, sort of a wiki for vocabulary that allows people share their definitions, vote for them or just search for them and browse glossary if they don’t intend to register.

Good luck with your studies :)

Although some reviewers expressed their doubts about its design, especially the placement of the buttons when compared to the high-end devices, I must say that I actually do like it and don’t have the least problem with the easy navigation at all. There are 3 color versions of this smallish block that you can choose from – black-silver, graphite and pink.

Since the size is really tiny (70 x 43 x 11.5 mm), you’d have no trouble carrying it anywhere.

The supported formats are MP3, WMA (DRM 9&10), AVI, JPG, TXT, VRA which is enough to have fun with it. Videos need to be converted to a particular AVI format/size to be played on a 2-inch display with 262 000 colors. Details in the videos played on this device are fairly sufficient to watch just about anything on the go in a very good picture quality. Images can be of any size. Listen to the radio using built-in FM tuner, read lyrics or any other text file in a text viewer or record the surroundings using a miniature mike inside the device.

Just note that the quality of recording isn’t too high if you don’t put it near the source so that you shouldn’t be disappointed later on. Built-in Li-Pol accumulator can support this device for up to 15 hours and can be recharged very quickly via USB link (standalone recharger is not included in the package). I’d also recommend buying other earphones than the default ones because they lower the playback quality a little bit.

Other functions of this player would be support for ID3 tags, 8-mode equalizer including one dedicated to your custom settings, 3 bookmarks in text files, support for language study (meaning several ways of repeating) and a single preinstalled game – Tetris. For its price/function rate this little entertainer is a very good choice and has been serving me very well for several weeks. I don’t have a single complaint myself.

Of course the more people participate in suggesting what comes next the more accurate the suggestions can become. In order for this system to work, you need one place where anyone could express their idea about the future. There is such place and it’s called FutureScanner, a website (kinda Digg clone but with original idea) for collaborative future forecasting. Individual submissions are separated by category and a year when they’re expected to come true.

On the main page you can display the most popular or new items and also use advanced filters to only display some particular ones. Each of these can be voted up or down thus filtering the waste out and keeping the most interesting forecasts at the top of the list. IMHO Memebox still needs to work on the design a little bit, especially to make it work properly in Opera (!) but it appears to be quite promising project now. Commenting and RSS feeds are already implemented.

Interestingly enough, this is a third case of an event that happens quite often to me. This time, about half a year after having an idea of making a website that would allow people to work on guessing the future, I hit on a brand new startup that does exactly that. Though, I must admit they did quite a fine job. Weird how different people come to the same ideas, sometimes I feel a little like being plugged into some kind of network. Oh wait a sec, I am.. :D

NapSounds.com is a very simple website aimed at providing a good content rather than an amazing design. What you can get here for free are daily updated power-nap sounds that are able to help you enjoy a few-minute rest every day to “recharge your batteries” in a short time. Power-nap is actually a really short rest during your day which – if performed the right way – can equal up to several hours of sleep. Power-nap sound containing varied sound effects and melodies picked for this purpose is the thing that should help you enjoy your short rest the right way.

These power-naps also contain special binaural beats, sounds split into 2 stereo channels and then merged by human brain again, though you need stereo headphones to make use of them. Besides daily updated preset naps you’re also allowed to compose your own nap according to your priorities. Just note that due to the nature of these sound tracks, you should only listen to them when you’re not doing any activity (like driving a car) and avoid listening to it if you suffer from epilepsy or are pregnant.

Once when messing with command-line features a bit, I found out that a simple 1-line code can bring my CPU to 100% load in a second for as long as I want. If I really wanted to test the reliability of my CPU fan or water cooling system, I would run this tiny code for pretty long time like a few hours to make my CPU sweat a bit. Now to that simple code – bring up the Run window by pressing Win+R and start command line by putting cmd in it. Here comes that simple loop:

for /L %i in (1,1,#) do help
(replace the # with a number determining how many loops will be executed and also how much time it’ll take to finish the task, depending on your CPU’s performance)

Pretty simple, huh? It does nothing else than to repeat displaying command-line’s built-in help which should raise (according to my multiple tests) every single-core CPU load to 100% and maintain it at that level for the time the script is executed. That’s all folks !