The rise of digital cameras and the move to digital photo formats made image manipulations a lot easier. Now everyone can fire up Photoshop or a comparable tool to make modifications to photos that are not detectable for the human eye. Often, this is used to optimize the output, e.g. increase an area’s brightness level [...]

Ever wondered if it was that cold or hot last year as it is this year? Then WunderMap might be your go to weather application, as it offers to take you on a ride back in weather history. All you need to do to get started is to key in a location that you want [...]

We have talked about Dropbox’s new camera import feature previously which allows you to import photos from digital cameras that you connect directly to your PC to your Dropbox storage. This can be useful if you use Dropbox to store your photos anyway. Free users may run into space issues pretty soon though, as individual [...]

Torrific offered a handy service for users who needed to download torrents files but could not use Bittorrent software or seedboxes for it. The service basically did all the hard working for the user. It downloaded the files attached to the torrent to their servers, and provided users with direct http download links. Torrific unfortunately [...]

The messaging platform Twitter can be used for trending purposes. The more users talk tweet about a certain topic, the more popular it has to be. While it is not possible to say that with absolute certainty, as other factors like automation play a role as well, it can often act as an indicator. Twitter [...]

Users who have been using the file hosting service Megaupload to host their own files were in for quite a shock when they received notice that authorities had taken down all company servers and files. For some it meant to upload the files again to another file hosting service, others who only had copies of [...]

With file hosting sites closing left and right after the Megaupload takedown, it has become fairly uncertain if your file hosting service will offer you access to your files the next time you try to connect. Bitcasa is a new file hosting service that is similar to Dropbox in many regards. Bitcasa just like Dropbox [...]

You probably remember the My Permissions service which I reviewed about a week ago. It basically listed direct links to a dozen or so permission pages of social networking sites. Among the sites where some of the most popular sites on today’s Internet, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn or Dropbox. The service offered little [...]

I recently funded my first Kickstarter project, a board game called Warparty that I have high hopes for. If you have never heard about Kickstarter before, let me explain the basic concept. Kickstarter is a funding community that brings designers and developers together with people who are interested in their projects. You can create a [...]

The Virustotal online virus scanning service is one of the services that I use on a regular basis. Whenever I find a great looking software in a “not so great” location, I use the service to check the software out before I execute it on my system. This is for instance the case when software [...]

Dropbox Automator monitors Dropbox folders of your choice to perform automatic actions on new files that get added to the folder. This includes uploading documents to Google Docs and photos to Flickr, converting documents to pdf, adding a watermark to photos or uploading the files to an ftp server of your choice. Setting up Dropbox [...]

The Stop Online Piracy Act in the US is getting ever more publicity with GoDaddy one of the high profile companies to suffer from supporting it as we wrote a couple of days ago.  In our previous article Martin summed up SOPA very effectively. If you are living in the United States, you should have [...]

You do not have that many options when it comes to watching multiple videos about a certain topic on YouTube. Logged in YouTube users can create playlists, everyone else could play a playlist if available, or click on individual videos that are listed in the search results, categories or video suggestions. Show Me Nonstop is [...]

Dropbox is more than just another cloud file hosting and synchronization service. It is a very flexible service that can be used for advanced tasks, for instance to load torrents into uTorrent remotely. VideoDropper is a free add-on for Dropbox that can be used to save YouTube videos into Dropbox. This can be useful under [...]

Zumocast is an application for Windows or Mac computers. It is a media streaming application much like Libox and what Apple has recently done with iOS5. Zumocast makes your computer a convenient media streaming server which is accessible through any web browser, mobile devices or iOS devices. It is refreshing to see that there is [...]

Desktop applications are usually first choice when it comes to adding effects to images and photos. Online services can however be an interesting alternative, considering that they are often more accessible and require no installation whatsoever. Picfull is a free online image filter service that can add a variety of filters to selected photos. The [...]

If you look around at what technology has brought us in 2011 it’s been a truly momentous year.  The iPad 2, new exciting Android tablets with the proper tablet version of the OS, Windows 8, the HP TouchPad with WebOS, Windows Phone ‘Mango’, Ultrabooks, cameras with GPS, multi-touch in laptops, new super-efficient Intel and AMD [...]

Sometimes you may need to create a quick chart without access to a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc. You could say that installing the spreadsheet program would resolve the issue. But that’s only possible if you are working on a computer where you have sufficient rights to do that. And that’s [...]

Most webmasters have started to learn HTML before they moved on to programming languages such as PHP. With PHP come databases like MySQL as the primary storage for project data. Many popular online applications, such as WordPress, use the PHP and MySQL combination to power sites online. You usually do not need to know PHP [...]

Password strength has become more of a issue in recent years. While it has always been important to select secure passwords, advancements in processing power and distributed computing (for instance cloud computing) have made it more of a pressing matter. Passwords that may have taken weeks or years to crack in the past are now [...]

I have been following the demise, or shall I say shutdown, of myp2p.eu closely in August. The site was without doubt one of the most popular destinations for people from all over the world to watch live sports online. It all started with a few tweets about domain issues back in August, but it quickly [...]

This free software package is completely browser based. Installation is very easy; just download a plugin from the File Labs site. After a small installation you have a seamless editor that enables you to modify audio files. You do not need to upload any files because this is run entirely locally. The general user interface [...]

Etymology is the study of a word’s meaning in history. If you are not a scientist trying to find the origin of a word and the changes it went through throughout history, you are probably most interested in the original meaning of a word. This can be interesting from two perspectives. You first may want [...]

Applying effects to a photo can be a rewarding experience. Most image editors come with a basic set of filters for that purpose. This makes it possible to turn a digital image into a new piece of art. Examples include turning a photo into a mosaic, changing an image into a black and white image [...]

Users with the file synchronization and hosting service Dropbox running on their system needed to take good care of the authentication files of the service. These files were generated during first authentication on the system. The issue here for many users was that a third party could copy the authentication files to sync all of [...]

Have you ever posted a link, image, text or video on a website or forum only to receive the discouraging “it is old” reply? Maybe you have sworn to yourself that you will never again post already known contents on that site. And while you could make sure of that manually by running a series [...]

Many websites nowadays offer to send updates to the visitor either with the help of RSS feeds or email. Some websites on the other hand that you may find useful come without those options. If you want to stay up to date, you need to find a way to create custom email alerts or feeds [...]

Back in the 80s life was not easy for people enjoying a good television show. If you missed a show it meant that you either had to be lucky to watch rerun before the next episode or to know someone who taped the show on VHS. If you were unlucky you missed the show with [...]

It feels rather strange that Google decided to retire the Google Labs section of their site which often showcased new Google services and features that at least sometimes were turned into full blown products at a later time. Strange because the end of Google Labs was not the end of Google experiments. One of the [...]

Sometimes you do not want to or cannot install another security software on your computer system to scan for malware. Maybe you do not have the rights to install software on the computer or you have a program installed and do not want to risk incompatibilities. The alternative is an application like F-Secure’s Online Scanner [...]

Since you are reading this blog I assume you get a lot of tech related questions that you need to answer. In my family it is my mom who is asking me questions about sending images as attachments via email or deleting lines in an Excel document. And while that feels very basic for me, [...]

If you had one day to live, what would you do? You probably know that question and I personally find it very hard to come up with an answer to that. Day Zero takes the question a step further by asking you what you would like to do in the next 1001 days. It is [...]

The rise of smartphones and other mobile handheld devices has increased the importance of optimizing websites for smartphones and other mobile devices. There are three core aspects that need to be taken into consideration. The size of the display which is often a lot smaller than standard desktop display resolutions, the technologies supported by those [...]

I recently began to take a closer look at ambient sounds and noise colors, e.g. white noise, to improve my sleep. I personally do not sleep that well which can be mainly attributed to working in front of a computer monitor all day, and to my sensitive hearing. To make matters worse, I live in [...]

If you are browsing the Internet at work, chance is that you cannot visit some websites. The IT department may have blocked access to sites that may distract you from work related tasks. This may be Facebook and Twitter, web proxy sites to prevent you from circumventing the block, entertainment sites like YouTube and adult [...]

I have to admit that I have not used the Wolfram Alpha search engine as much as I should have in the past year. The specialized search engine, the company calls it a computational knowledge engine, offers some interesting features that other search engines do not offer. One of those features is its password generator, [...]

Lorelle just informed me that the public Google Plus RSS Feeds service Plusfeed has shut down because of an increase in pricing over at Appspot (which is run by Google apparently). It feels rather strange that Google has not added RSS feeds to their social networking site Google Plus yet, and with PlusFeed gone, there [...]

Are you a Twitter user who is following all users that are following you? Or do you limit your friends list on Twitter to real life friends, business contacts and family? The first group of users is taking more risks than the second, but none are really 100% safe from malicious tweets and traps. A [...]

Today’s digital photo cameras produce large image files that are usually in the Megabyte range. While that’s not a problem for Gigabyte Flash cards or Terabyte hard drives, it can become a issue when you try to send the photo via email or publish the photo on the Internet. Sending photos as email attachments is [...]

The world wide web, the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee is 20 years old today.  The worldwide web isn’t to be confused with the Internet, even though they’re commonly considered the same thing.  The Internet, which is the physical infrastructure of servers and the protocols that enable them to interconnect has been around for much longer.  [...]

I have reviewed Chrome Live Sports yesterday, a Google Chrome extension to watch live sports in the browser. I was asked if there was a comparable extension for Firefox, and while I was not able to come up with one, I have the next best thing: A football, and other sports, live stream aggregator. When [...]

One of the things that you need to make sure as a webmaster is support for various screen resolutions. The rise of mobile browsing, especially on smartphones but also on low resolution devices like tablet and netbook PCs, has made this step even more important. A website that is not offering optimized contents for popular [...]

When I research a domain or website, I sometimes want to find out about other websites that the company or owner maintains. Why can this be important? Lets say I want to buy a website about Grand Canyon Helicopter Tours. With a reverse lookup I can make sure that the guy who is selling the [...]

I just bought an expensive domain and website, and would like to share one of the things that I did to verify the seller’s legitimacy. Among other things, I check a website’s whois information and hosting information to make sure they match with the information in the sales letter. If they do not match, or [...]

Microsoft’s Remote Connectivity Analyzer is a tool for system administrators to verify that the Internet connectivity of specific Microsoft services is setup and configured properly. The online tool has been initially released under the name Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer back in 2010. It has now been rebranded to take into account the availability of [...]

There are lots of different ways to utilize the power of Twitter. Many people use it simply at its most basic level, posting tweets to their followers while scanning those of their friends. Others use the service to advertise their business and spend hours identifying the best ways to market their products through the website. [...]

RSS feeds are not officially supported by Google Plus yet, that’s bad if you want to follow a specific user on the new social networking site. Sure, you could add the user to a circle to read all (public) messages on the Google Plus website, or visit the stream of that user directly to access [...]

When it comes to the attitudes with which various people approach the concept of email we find highly fragmented groups, even within the confines of such a relatively small group like techies. Some of those who use and enjoy technology on a daily basis see email as a welcome and acceptable part of that electronic [...]

Before I book a hotel or flight, I do extensive research on the Internet to find out more about the company, building or location. Sites like Tripadvisor or Seatguru are a great help, as they combine marketing information with third party information from people who actually used the service in the past. Those information have [...]

Managing a workspace as an independent contractor or micro company works much differently than in the past. There was a time when the independent contractor would either go out and find their own office space and pay for an entire office or stay home and work from bed. Those were pretty much the only two [...]