When the next national census arrives on your doormat you now have another option to enter for religion other than Jedi, at least that is if you live in Sweden.  On its third attempt the church of “kopyacting” has been officially recognised as a religion by the Swedish government. The church is founded on the belief [...]

Precisely one year from today the world will begin to come to an end, at least if the predictions of Nostradamus are to be believed.  He said that on December 21st 2012 “In the sky will be seen a great fire dragging a trail of sparks” which would indicate a comet or meteor strike on [...]

Well that’s it!  Everybody, well some of the experts anyway seem to agree that the ageing keyboard and mouse just isn’t going to cut it any more.  It’s just not a good enough way to communicate with our computers.  It’s slow and clunky, in fact the story goes that an alphabetical keyboard would be quicker to type [...]

Microsoft UK are running a new Windows 7 competition with some really great prizes through their TechNet newsletter between now and the middle of December.  The competition is intended to bolster Windows 7 in the business space and is called Save Sam. Sam is an IT Project Manager who has purchased a large batch of [...]

PCs are going the way of typewriters according to an engineer who worked on the original IBM PC.  In a blog post to mark the 30th anniversary of the IBM PC 5150, Dr Mark Dean made the comments, saying that PCs were no longer at the leading edge of computing. Pointing out that no single [...]

Since the days of Star Wars and Star Trek, we’ve dreamed of technological advances that would make us faster, stronger and capable of doing more than ever before. Sure, we’re not quite at the point where we’re teleporting about or living in space “Jetson’s” style, but technology has made some impressive advancements, even in just [...]

It seems that whatever tech excitement that may have catapulted Pandora higher following its initial public offering on Wednesday has fizzled away into boring old economics. The online music streaming company stock opened at an impressive $20 per share, shooting up as high as $25 soon after trading began before quickly settling back down below [...]

Unless you work in an enterprise environment, IBM isn’t a name you hear very often these days.  But this small typewriter manufacturer gave birth to the PC revolution that we have today, and now they’re celebrating turning 100. IBM has had a huge impact on the world of computing and the company continues to be [...]

The Wikileaks story rumbles on as we near the end of 2010 and the latest company to withdraw its support is the Bank of America.  This follows on from other financial institutions including a Swiss bank, Mastercard and PayPal. The reason the bank gave for refusing to handle payments from the controversial website was that [...]

Using the internet to save time and money is as easy as just doing it. In fact, there is no better way to save both time and money than by getting on the web. What are some of the ways you can save time and money? Let’s have a look. First of all, let’s have [...]

It’s almost 2011 and that means that a whole slew of New Years Resolutions are ready to be made and broken. Every year, it’s the same old thing. People say they are going to quit smoking, lose weight, go to the gym, get a new car, make more money, or maybe even change their life [...]

We all take for granted now that we have fast, reliable broadband and most of us can’t even remember the days of dial-up of even acoustic couplers.  Now the BBC have put a fascinating interactive map online showing the percentages of people online worldwide from 1998 and how many of us are using the Internet. [...]

Sometimes it’s hard to see just how much the internet has really changed things. The holidays are just one example of how things are intensely different than they were before. It’s not easy to always see the differences because they tend to creep up on us a little bit at a time. For example, you [...]

Occasionally a really good news story about social networking comes along.  Today NeoWin is reporting the story of a 7 year-old Chicago girl who, as an avid Star Wars fan, took a Star Wars drinks bottle to school but was bullied after classmates told her Star Wars wasn’t for girls. Little Katie said about the [...]

Twitter users in the UK have been angry today over the conviction of a Doncaster (South Yorkshire) man who threatened to blow up Sheffield/Doncaster Robin Hood airport in a joke tweet. His appeal against his conviction failed today and the 27-year old accountant is now the first person in the UK to be convicted of [...]

Would you prefer Google how it was five years ago, or do you like the current version better? What about Firefox 4? Do you like the changes that the Mozilla team has introduced? This are just two of the examples of companies that have introduced major changes to their products. Lets take a closer look [...]

It’s been widely reported that the old IPv4 Internet addressing system is creaking under the weight of the demands placed on it and that the available addresses will run out completely by January 2012.  It’s replacement, IPv6 has now been with us for a while but it’s worldwide roll-out is hardly something that can be [...]

This is a title that bounces back and forwards between countries, but now China has claimed the top spot for the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer. The title has gone to the country’s Tianhe-1A supercomputer according to a report by the BBC, that is capable of more than 2.5 thousand trillion calculations a second.  [...]

There can be no doubt that social networking has taken off (which would make a good tweet, hmm) but recent research by research firm TNS has shed some light about variations on how we use it around the world, as reported by the BBC. The research, for which 50,000 people in 46 countries were interviewed [...]

It might be seriously frustrating and annoying for some users in its implementation, and might constantly substitute the wrong word into your text messages, but there can be no doubt that the T9 keyboard revolutionised the way we interacted with mobile phones that that it can be argued that T9 is one of, if not [...]

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has used a speech at a Nokia conference in London to call for everybody worldwide to get free Internet access and at least a low bandwidth connection “by default”, as reported by the BBC. In his call for free Internet access he highlighted the fact [...]

Twitter’s micro-blogging service has always been popular, and with people such as Stephen Fry entertaining the masses, it’s popularity can only grow as more and more people sign up to follow the musings of person A or X. Now though the service has recorded it’s 20 billionth tweet from a graphic designed based on Tokyo [...]

It could be the worst branding exercise since technology company Blick launched their glossy white Internet radios and suddenly realised they wouldn’t be able to sell them in South Africa.  Now Research in Motion, the company behind the amazingly popular Blackberry mobile phones has now registered the domain name blackpad.com. The Blackpad is rumoured to be [...]

The British Government has today launched a national competition to find the next generation of computer security experts according to the BBC.  The competition, which is primarily aimed at teenagers and school-leavers, has prizes that range from bursaries to study at University to full-time employment. Defending all of our interests in cyberspace is a relatively [...]

Yesterday I wrote about how 70,000 users blogs on the WordPress owned service, Blogetry, were mysteriously shut down by a “law enforcement agency”. Now more details have emerged and the BBC have reported that it was indeed the FBI who ordered the services’ closure because of a “link to terrorist material” and an al-Qaeda hit [...]

An experiment that began 10 years ago with children living in slums in India being given computers for education has brought about surprising results, according to the BBC. The computers were installed as holes in the wall, much in the way people would expect to find a cashpoint, and children quickly learned to teach themselves [...]

The Australian government is delaying the implementation of controversial web-filtering to conduct an independent review of websites that are due to be blocked the BBC has reported. The filter is part of a long-standing plan by the Australian government to block the countries access to dangerous and inappropriate web content, but it has come under [...]

The website for whistle-blowers, Wikileaks is apparently not bothered by the arrest today of a US Army analyst who has been arrested on suspicion of leaking classified material to the website, according to the BBC. The US Army’s detention of Bradley Manning was arrested in Kuwait and was “placed in pre-trial confinement for allegedly releasing [...]

China has stepped up its efforts to become the supercomputing power of the world according to the BBC.  It’s Nebulae machine has ranked second in the biannual top 500 supercomputer lists. It’s the first time a Chinese supercomputer has appeared in the list of the top ten fastest machines.

Apple has finally launched the new Macs, and as expected, the world is going crazy over comparisons and everything. Apple’s Phil Schiller has been vocal about Microsoft’s Windows 7 not having any negative effects on Apple’s sales whatsoever. In fact, he said that it would actually drive people towards Apple with the complicated upgrading procedure. [...]

Pentagon has been working on a special type of technology that would turn bugs in to something that would really live up to the multiple meanings of bug. Okay, I will give it to you straight – they are working on something that’ll turn normal bugs in to remote controlled ones that can be controlled, [...]

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 [...]

Every so often you have a gadget or technological device that sets the wire news on fire. Recently we’ve been hearing much ado about Windows 7, iPhone 3GS, OSX Snow Leopard, SSD drives, OLED TV, HD cell phones and need I mention the Palm Pre and Blackberry’s first all touchscreen phone. The common trend among [...]

Do you have a spare sheet of cardboard lying around and are trying to find a use for it? You can turn it into a stand for your laptop. Have a ton of plastic bags lying around? Turn them into a funky bracelet. Think this is weird? Well, these, and other ideas like them are [...]

gHacks has a diverse range of editors, living in, amongst other places, the UK, Germany and Hungary. All write in the medium of English, but learning a foreign language is no easy task. I am currently trying to learn French and German and often find myself using many computer-based resources to ease my learning, some [...]

Hundreds of websites offer mapping services, which highlight roads, railways, streets and scores of other things. Most of these sites charge for commercial use of their data and almost certainly won’t allow users to change the maps in a wiki-like fashion. OpenStreetMap is a project to provide maps, like Google Maps does. Unlike sites like [...]

Sometimes, you may urgently need to share some information with a friend or family member. Or maybe you need to access a particular file from another computer. The easiest way to do this would be to use portable media like a flash drive. But what if that’s not an option? Then you have to find [...]

It’s holiday season and while it is the season to spend time with the family and be grateful for your loved ones, it’s also the season for presents. Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, it’s likely that there’s something you really want to get your hands on. Since this is Ghacks, there’s a pretty good [...]

Now that the US elections are over and the results are out, it’s worthwhile looking at how the winners fare with technology. Everyone knows that Barack Obama actively used the Internet while campaigning but what are his views on other things technology related? Most notably, how do the new guys plan to tackle issues like [...]

Alright I’m sorry guys but this isn’t technology related at all, it’s just so funny I had to share it. Granted, someone will need to die before you can purchase this gift, however if you’re willing to wait than you too could brighten someone’s day with this pencil box full of pencils made out of [...]

As Martin briefly mentioned in ‘Publish RSS News Feeds on Twitter’, I have recently started writing a few posts here. I’m Joe Anderson and I maintain another Grand Effect blog, Webby’s World, which has been a partner blog of gHacks for several years. My blog, Webby’s World, has been a member of 9rules, a network [...]

I just realized this the other day, social sites send an awful lot of “quasi-junk” mail to inboxes around the world. This person wants to share a video with me, that person commented on my video, someone sent me a shout on Digg, someone wants to add me as a StumbleUpon friend, XXYY is following [...]

Sometimes, you may urgently need to send a fax across to someone but you do not have access to a fax machine. If this is the case, don’t worry. File-hosting site drop.io has a way to rescue you. Drop.io started off as just another file-hosting site. To stand out from the pack though, the site [...]

There are umpteen numbers of file-hosting sites on the internet. If you had to choose one to upload your file, which one would you select? What if the file could only be accessed by some of the intended recipients? You would have to upload your file to another site. Uploading files to many sites is [...]

Picture this. You just moved house and are looking out for a little furniture to tide you over till you can afford to buy something new. Or, you have an old rocking chair you want to get rid of but no one seems to want it. The answer to both these problems is Freecycle. Freecycle [...]

All of us have had to take drawing classes at some point in our lives. At school, you would have had to deal with messy paints and a teacher who shook her head in dismay at your artwork. And that’s not counting the sniggers from fellow classmates. Yes, I am speaking from personal experience. It’s [...]

I just got word from my contact at Rev Response that they are currently offering a free 1 year subscription of PC Magazine instead of the usual 2 free trial issues. The offer is only free to qualified professionals in the United States. Users who apply for the offer have to fill out some information [...]

I’m not a big social networking person. There are way too many social networks out there like Myspace, Orkut, Hi5, etc. All my friends are on one network or the other and I keep getting a bunch of invites. So, I’ve sort of joined the bandwagon and have profiles in some places. Of course, being [...]

Yesterday, I posted about the software U.R.Celeb, which allowed people to create personalized covers of popular magazines. Later on, I found a website that can do the same thing. Magmypic is sort of a combination of magazinize (is that even a word?) my picture. The site is pretty straightforward. Upload picture = magazine cover. Actually, [...]

I don’t use a lot of extra fonts on my computer. For me, the standard fonts are good enough for my needs. However, a lot of my friends are font-crazy and love to have different fonts on their computers. Fonts500 is a website that claims to have 500 of the best fonts available. The good [...]