I just wanted to remind you that Joost is running their first big Live test run tomorrow with NCAA March Madness. It begins Thursday at 12:20 p.m. EDT / 4:20 p.m. GMT and ends after the last game which is scheduled for 9:55 PM EDT. 16 games will be streamed live on that day and it will be interesting to see how the Joost client will handle that kind of traffic.

Google Code University is an excellent resource for Computer Science students and programmers in general. All videos and Powerpoint presentations published at the University are released under Creative Commons. Four different kinds of courses are available right now, they are Ajax Programming, Distributed Systems, Web Security and Languages.

Read The Words [via Digital Inspiration] is a text to speech service that is offering quite an impressive amount of options for a web application. It is not only possible to paste text that is read to you but to furthermore upload text documents in various formats, let the service read websites to you and [...]

I got the inspiration for this post from the Download Squad article “Is this web site down for everyone or is it just you ?” which mentioned a service that would check if a website was down or if it was more likely to be a problem on the user’s side. Some guys mentioned in the comments that the website checking service would display false results from time to time which in turn convinced me to write a post about other methods on how you can check if a website is up, or not.

When I was working back then for a big company I had to use a computer that they provided with no options to install new software on that computer. I still did update my websites frequently in my spare time but always struggled when I had to install new scripts or upload files to the website because I did not have access to an ftp client nor something like WinSCP.

I did review Zattoo before and received an email yesterday from a representative who filled me in on the latest news of that Live TV software. If you can’t remember the article let me explain what you can do with it. Zattoo is a company that is offering a Live TV software for several European countries (eight total) including Germany and Great Britain with which users can watch tv streams.

This article is going to list some of the best Usenet search engines that are freely available. The Usenet is considered by many a dark side of the Internet, something that those who know do not talk about and those who do not know don’t want to know about because it seems utterly complicated to begin with.

Torrent websites are much like Linux distributions, there are so many out there that it is easy to lose the track. Torrent search engines can be divided into two categories: Site search engines and meta search engines. Site search engines obviously only search the torrents that are hosted on one selected website while meta search engines crawl the databases of several torrent websites which often leads to better results.

Booklet Creator is a free online script that turns pdf documents into small books by changing the order of the pages. If you take a look at a book lying next to you you will notice that the first page will be connected with the last of the book, the second with the second last and so on. That’s that same system that the Booklet Creator script uses to order pdf document.

Am I the only one that is starting to get confused by all the online services offered by Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and others ? Microsoft seems to have jumped fully on the “Live” bandwagon branding every new online product with it. The newest is called Office Live Workspace [link] and is currently in public Beta.

There is a multitude of torrent search engines out there. Now and then a new one pops up and you head on over to check it out. Pizzatorrent is the latest in a long line of torrent search engines. An initial glance at the site pulls up an interface much like popular search engine Youtorrent [...]

A friend of mine asked me recently if I knew that it was possible to view real-time air traffic in Google Earth. I had to admit that I never heard about this before, the only thing that came close to it was the website where users could listen to live air traffic communications. He send me the link to the website which offered this service and told me that he was currently tracking a flight of a friend who was vising New Zealand.

When we read the announcement that higher quality videos would come to Youtube we were delighted that the video quality would finally see an upgrade. Apparently the conversion has started and some videos are already available in different quality versions. It still looks like Youtube is testing settings and stuff and that not everyone can access those higher quality videos yet.

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 [...]

I just read about one of the best Digg tools ever on Make Use Of, immediately downloaded it and I love it already. Digg Alerter is a simple application designed to track the stories you have submitted to Digg. You can see a list of stories, number of diggs, comments, who dugg it and some [...]

A great way to see if you are optimizing your site enough is to take a look at your meta tags and your keyword/content focus, A great Website Analyzer page I found shows you a heap of stats apart from these, which will not only allow you to check up on yourself, but also on [...]

Flickr hosts an unbelievable amount of images of all sizes on their website. One easy way to search Flickr for Wallpapers is to simply enter the term wallpaper in the search box on the Flickr homepage and browse through the results. Currently more than 260.000 images are found when searching for wallpapers.

Martin has already showed you a few screencast services like Jing and Screencast-O-matic, but here’s another I found worth sharing, since it’s siper simple and easy to use. Freescreencast.com allows you to quickly create and push button upload screencasts to the web. Once uploaded, you can either view it on site immediately, or you can [...]

Max was nice enough to send me an invite for the online application service Aviary, or more precisely the main website and the image editor application which are freely accessible after registration. Users can access their dashboard through the main interface which displays a list of featured images, collaborations and recent images alongside your latest activities.

Make 3D is a wonderful piece of code from the University of Stanford that transforms a normal 2D image into a 3D image. While the results are not true 3D images they are still very impressive. I tested the script with two images that I took last summer, one from the North Sea [link] and [...]

I just stumbled on to a very cool idea, a sort of picture research online community. The basics of PicAnswers is that you upload a photo, and ask a question related to it. If you visit the site you’ll instantly know what I mean. What might seem like a fun place at first, actually has [...]

My favorite task manager, Remember The Milk is now easily available on your iPhone, or iPod touch. You need the pro version to get the optimized RTM ($25 per year), but you can access the normal version for free. I think the $25 for RTM is worth it, not really because of the extras you [...]

If you are a fan of dark-room type apps and editors which provide much more comfort in comparison with the regular ones in terms of eye strain as well as more intuitive controls, you don’t wanna pass this one. Since the first port of the original Mac OS’s darkroom type editor was created, several other progs and online services with similar features have appeared.

I’m not a huge fan of all those tracking scripts and applications that have popped up lately. It does not really matter if they track if an email was read or a link visited, they all invade other peoples privacy. I’m not saying that I can’t see their uses, can’t count the times that I asked myself if a recipient received and read the email that I have send to him.

Windows Live SkyDrive, the online storage service of Microsoft, has left beta status today and is now available for users in 38 countries including the United States, Canada and Great Britain. The limit of 500 Megabytes per user account has been raised to a maximum of 5 Gigabytes which comes closer to services like Aol Xdrive and even Google Gmail.

I have not really put much thought into the way podcasts work until now but when I stumbled upon Dir Caster I began to realize that publishing podcasts is different from publishing blog posts. I mean you have a mp3 file and need a way to create an RSS feed out of it.

Computers are really nice for information gathering but nothing beats reading a book or newspaper on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee at a breakfast table. That’s probably what the developers of Feed Journal thought as well because they have developed an application that transforms RSS feeds into a newspaper format which can then be printed and read offline.

Newspond is a web news aggregator that scans the Internet for news and publishes them automatically on their website. That’s actually a major difference to Digg where users contribute the articles. The benefit of the Newspond system is that it is less likely to be gamed as much as you are used from Digg even with their latest algorithm change.

I received a beta invitation to Livestation yesterday in my mailbox and first thought it was some kind of spam because I could not remember signing up for the service at all. Apparently though Livestation is a legit service supported by Microsoft to provide the user with live tv and radio streamings.

Almost everyone has used PowerPoint for presentations at some time or the other. Even if you’ve moved on to apps at GoogleDocs or the Zoho suite, PowerPoint is still a handy tool to use. Most of the time, you’re limited to basic slides with bullet points and a couple of images or tables thrown in. [...]

What exactly would come to your mind if I would speak about e-books ? Would you think about pdf documents and other text documents ? Most likely yes because e-books are distributed in text documents nowadays. What if there was a more natural way of presentation, an e-book that would have all the functions of a real book (and more) ?

I’m using the Usenet (Newsgroups) provider Giganews for several years already and recommend the service to anyone who wants to sneak peak or go knee deep into Usenet. I don’t want to talk about the performance of their servers, the reliability and file retention which sets a very high Industry standard that all the other Usenet Providers have a hard time keeping pace with.

Spam is a pain and we all got used to the necessity of fighting it every single day spending our valuable time on deleting junk mails and undergoing additional security measures like captchas and many others. Is there any way to transform daily wasted time and effort spent on these measures for good purposes instead of regarding them as a necessary evil? You bet there is.

English pwns. Whether you like it or not, we all need it daily. Those who additionally enjoy learning this interesting language could appreciate a few tips on how to improve their skills even more. Since I still need to keep learning as well as revising what I’ve already learned, I’ve been visiting some websites and services of ESL type and I’d like to share a few of those I came to like the best.

I have tested several programs that can be used to search for videos on Youtube, download them afterwards and convert them to another format. The portal iDesktop offers all those functions plus the option to play Youtube videos on their website in a very nice interface. Users can perform searches for Youtube videos which are displayed as thumbnails with titles. The size of the thumbnails can be changed on the fly which means that it is possible to fit a lot (55 in my case) of videos on one search result page. The biggest size displays only three per page.

Television junkies will love Television Tunes. The website is a huge music archive of songs from known – and unknown – television series. As far as I can tell only the tunes of the original American tv series are available. All songs are listed alphabetically, just pick a letter and you will be presented with a huge list of tv shows beginning with that letter. There have to be way more than 1000 tv themes available on Television Tunes.

The online auction website eBay plans to overhaul their feedback system later this year by removing the ability for sellers to leave feedback after an auction completes. This means that only buyers will be able to leave feedback about the transaction after it completes. Some might say that this gives the buyer an unfair advantage over an seller while others would say that the move makes perfect sense.

A new version of Wordpress has been released just a few hours ago by the Wordpress team. The update is considered critical and fixes a security vulnerability and some minor bugs. The security flaw was found in the implementation of the XML-RPC which would allow any registered user to edit comments of other users using a specially crafted request.

If you are using Twitter regularly you might find the Twitter real time search script handy. Tweet Scan makes it possible to search in real time for keywords on Twitter. The result of the search is displayed on a individual page that can be bookmarked or subscribed in your favorite RSS reader. If you would for instance want to stay updated on anything related to Yahoo you could search for Yahoo and add the RSS feed to your reader.

Browsing some web 2.0 blogs, I came across a site that boasts a new kind of web search. I quite like the idea since online search is one of the least researched topics from a user experience point of view I think. Yes, Google is doing a lot and refining and tweaking and tuning, but [...]

If you don’t really have use for elaborate start pages like Netvibes, but you need more than the simple home page option in browsers, you could take a look at SpeedyMarks, a service probably inspired by the Opera speed dial function and the iPhone interface. You simply add your favorite pages and it lists them [...]

Ever wanted to know how to tie a Windsor knot, Reuse an old PC as a server or eavesdrop on a bluetooth headset ? If you answered that question with yes you should be heading out to Wonder How To, a website containing thousands of how to videos that explain things visually the easy way.

A lot of things can be wrong if you setup a new monitor or never bothered to calibrate an old one. The screen could be to bright or dark for instance. I always hated calibrating monitors because it meant that I had to press all those tiny buttons on the monitor to access the functions but it is necessary for the best viewing experience.

I normally do not write about file hoster because most simply offer the same service using a different interface and website address. Drop.io on the other hand is pretty unique because of several features. Users do not have to signup to store (drop) their files at Drop.io and the only limitation is a maximum size of 100 Megabytes per drop.

I would like to introduce an easy way to download lots of pictures from websites that name them sequentially, meaning they simply add a number and maybe some chars to every new picture added. Smugmug for instance uses one directory /photos/ on their website and puts all pictures, or at least links to them in that directory. All pictures look like number-M.jpg which makes it very easy to use a script to download all pictures within a certain range.

If you would use an image host, put up some of your images and set them to private, would you expect them to be still accessible by anyone ? This is apparently the case over at Smugmug where a private setting simply means that the pictures and image galleries are not directly linked from the homepage anymore but can still be accessed by simply entering the url directly in the browser address bar or download manager.

People use dozens of social news and bookmarking websites nowadays. All those sites offer toolbars and buttons for various browsers including Firefox, it’s just to much if you want to install all of them. Webmasters are looking for ways to submit their sites and articles to those sites with less effort.

MP3 search engines seem to appear by the dozen every week and about 11 of them disappear after a while either because no one uses them or because they have been sued by a record company. I have seen defenses against this. The first is to search and play only music from “legit” sources like Youtube or Last.fm, the other is to host the mp3 search engine in a country that is outside of the Western jurisdiction.

Considering how many people post videos on Youtube, I’m surprised I never thought of posting about this before. While Myspace has been customized to such an extent so as to make the average Myspace profile virtually unrecognizable from its earlier format, not many people have gone ahead and done the same to their Youtube profile. [...]

Myspace we got a problem, a huge one that is. You might have heard about the vulnerability that allowed anyone to view pictures that have been set to private at Myspace ? You might have also heard that the vulnerability got fixed pretty fast by Myspace. Unfortunately though not fast enough because someone was able to run an automated script that leeched the pictures of more than 44000 private profiles before the security hole was fixed.