YouTube with its vast assortment of music videos is one of the best locations on the Internet to find and listen to music. The overall site layout is on the other hand not super ideal for listening to music, especially if you want to listen to multiple songs. The only option to do this comfortably [...]

It seems that the popular file syncing and hosting service Dropbox cannot break the negative news pattern of the last weeks. The company announced a change to their policies on Friday which they received lots of flak for. The original news post on the Dropbox company blog has been updated twice to clarify the issue. [...]

For the last few days I’ve been using the new beta update to Microsoft’s smartphone operating system, Windows Phone, on my HTC handset.  I’ve written a full hands-on review of this ‘Mango’ update at our sister website Windows7News.  It’s a great update and finally brings full cloud services to smartphones with the integration of SkyDrive [...]

Video chat has not met up to the standards that we, the people of the world, hoped it might. The hope was the perhaps webcams could become the way of the next generation and that they would become the prominent means of communication with other people. The telephone would simply be replaced by the webcam. [...]

If you have a web based email account, chance is that you either use Yahoo Mail, Google Mail or Microsoft Hotmail for that account. There are hundreds of smaller email providers, but those are the big three. Microsoft recently announced new features and improvements for their Hotmail email service on the Inside Windows Live blog. [...]

It can seem to us that the internet is a limitless place, and in many ways it is. Organizations can always expand their servers to accommodate more traffic, or more content, of whatever it is that they feel they need more of. With space on Facebook, huge swaths of free room in email accounts and [...]

SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud hosting service, has been around since 2007. The service gives users access to 25 Gigabytes of free online storage, for file hosting, sharing and collaboration. While it has been a great service to store data online from the start, it felt slow at times especially when navigating folders or photo albums in [...]

As a webmaster, you have to make sure that your websites are loading as fast as possible, without sacrificing functionality. While it may be cool to have ten 500 Kilobyte images on your homepage, it may in turn lead to visitors leaving the site before it is completely loaded in their browsers. Lower page loading [...]

The shortlist for the Cloud Computing World Forum awards for 2011 have been announced. The awards “celebrate the best of the best in the global industry. Award winners and shortlisted companies receive a mark of quality, innovation and leadership.” They will be announced at th3 2rd annual cloud computing world forum event next wee on [...]

A few days ago I have reviewed the Firefox add-on GrabMyBooks which can be used to turn multiple web pages into an ePub ebook. Today I’m reviewing the free service 2ePub which is an online converter. The free service can turn several document formats into the ePub format, and several other output formats. All you [...]

The new Bittorrent related service Fetch.io has been in the news ever since it was mentioned over at Torrentfreak two days ago. Fetch.io acts as a middleman by downloading torrents to their servers. The files that are downloaded this way are automatically transcoded into mp4 and Flash video formats before they become available for streaming, [...]

It’s not been a good few weeks for technology companies with all manner of high-profile hackings being reported, not just on technology websites such as gHacks, but worldwide on the early evening news bulletins. There’s no sign things are going to calm down any time soon either with Sony still in the news for tentatively [...]

Which web service or program are you using if you need to send a friend, business partner or your mom a file? The majority of you will likely answer that they use email or a file hosting service. I do prefer email myself, as it means that the files are send directly to the recipient, [...]

I use online file viewers for two core reasons. First, they allow me to view files even if the computer system I’m working on has no compatible viewer installed, and second, they mitigate the risk of opening files from questionable sources. Sandboxing is an alternative for the latter, but that’s a rather technical solution, and [...]

The experimental online service BurnBit can be used to create torrents out of any file that is hosted on the Internet. That’s interesting for webmasters who want to reduce the bandwidth usage of their server. BurnBit ensures that users who download the file get it delivered from the web server and at the same time [...]

There is always risk involved when you execute software on your local system. You can reduce that risk by updating your operating system regularly, running up to date security software or executing suspicious files in a sandboxed or virtual environment. When you review as much software as I do, you are grateful for every additional [...]

FilesTube is a popular meta file search engine that lets you search file hosting sites for hosted files. It supports a variety of file hosts, from Rapidshare and Mediafire over 4Shared and Megaupload to Filesonic and Fileserve. The search engine is extremely popular, with an Alexa metrics rank of 145 at the moment. When you [...]

Many digital cameras store the camera’s serial number in the photo’s EXIF information, which can then be used to identify photos taken with that specific camera. The new web service Stolen Camera Finder uses this concept to locate photos on the Internet. You can upload a photo taken with a particular camera to the service’s [...]

I’m well known for being a PC minimalist. I even make a bit of a fuss about this in my book, Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out, that if you want to have to keep repairing problems in Windows one of the best ways to achieve this goal is to keep installing software into it. There’s [...]

Sometimes you may just want to download a few songs that you have just discovered on Youtube. There are lots of desktop applications out there for that job, that can download the videos from the video hosting site Youtube, and some even offer conversions into the mp3 format. Fetch Mp3 is an online service that [...]

Would not it be great if you could get a two paragraph summary about Shakespear’s Hamlet instead of having to read the whole book? The answer is no of course, but bare with me for a moment. Sometimes you do not have enough time to read all of a text document. Maybe you have a [...]

I use Twitter for a lot of things. One is to help promote my writing (both my fiction and technical writing). Because promotion seems like a 24/7 job, it is critical that the tools I use be easily accessible, low maintenance, and can run all day without causing any undo stress on my system. I have [...]

Podcasts have been around for a long time, and with good reason. Podcasts are a great way for users to retrieve and save various forms of educational and entertainment audio broadcasts. From indie writers, to major journalists, to just about anything you can imagine, you can find a podcast. But where do you find podcasts [...]

If you are a Ubuntu fan, you know the change is coming. As of Ubuntu 11.04, the default media player will migrate from Rhythmbox to Banshee. When I first read this announcement, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed. I was a fan of last.fm and knew, in order to stream last.fm in Banshee [...]

With my on-going search for making my life ever-easier, I have turned to using smaller applications to keep my readers and fans informed. This can get to be an overwhelming problem when you are tweeting, facebooking, blogging, and – oh yeah – writing. So instead of adding to my already-large collection of tabs in Chromium [...]

As a writer of ebooks I have to constantly be promoting my works. There are three main ways to do this for free: Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Of the three, Tumblr allows me to be the most flexible in what I post as well as allows more people to see what I’m posting. But I [...]

If you are looking for a VPN solution for your Linux machine or network you have more than likely examined such solutions as OpenVPN. Many of the Linux VPN solutions require complex, time consuming set ups that can drive the new user crazy. Fortunately there are other solutions that do not require extensive knowledge of [...]

Are you a Facebook junkie? Do you find yourself constantly posting status updates? And…more important…do you constantly  upload photos of yourself, your friends, your animals, and your computers to your facebook account? If the latter is the case, do you find the standard method of uploading photos to facebook cumbersome? Don’t you wish there was [...]

If you are a fan of Pandora Music and a user of Linux you know that Linux is a bit behind in the app space for this service. There are only a few possible clients and, until now, those clients simply were not options. The official Pandora client, due to flash issues, could bring your [...]

As most of you know, Samba allows your Linux machine to work with Windows machines (and vice versa). Without Samba Linux would be locked in an unable to play nicely on heterogeneous networks. So what most Linux users do is install Samba to allow file/folder sharing and network browsing. Typically speaking, Samba is very easy to install [...]

The buzz word in computing in 2010 has been tablet, as popularised by Apple’s iPad.  This year we’ve seen tablets go on sale using Google’s Android operating system and Windows 7, and we’ve seen both RIM and HP announce specialised tablet operating systems for their own devices. During this time both Android and Windows 7 [...]

Well, we’ve all been wondering which would be the next company to withdraw support for Wikileaks and now we know that it’s Apple.  An unofficial Wikileaks app that allows you to read content from the website on your iPhone or iPad has been pulled from the app store, as reported by TechCrunch. The app, which [...]

How do you keep track of topics of interest on the Internet? Do you visit news site, subscribe to RSS feeds, email newsletters, Google Alerts, Twitter? Many Internet users are overwhelmed by the information at their disposal. Montage is a new online service by Microsoft Fuse Labs that allows everyone to create visual web albums [...]

One of the aspects of being a webmaster is to make sure that your web pages are compatible with the most popular web browsers. This requires some tweaking and hacks, especially if Internet Explorer 6 comes into the picture. Validating web pages is just one aspect of this. Most browsers handle invalid elements well so [...]

The majority of computer users is using their computers at least partially to work with documents and spreadsheets. Microsoft Word is still one of the most popular text editing applications on the Windows operating system. It is a professional software program that comes at a price, or does it not? Many users are looking for [...]

Twitter is offering RSS feed links on public profile pages and the user’s own profile. The problem with user profile feeds is that they cannot be copied and pasted into many RSS readers since they require authentication, which many web based readers and some desktop readers do not support. The solution? Gtweet, a service that [...]

Some webmasters believe that offering partial feeds of their news entries only in the RSS Feed drives more visitors to their website. While that may be true, it has an adverse effect as well. The feed subscription count will drop, as some users will unsubscribe from it, especially if the webmaster has offered full-text feeds [...]

All seats are not equal in airlines. And we are not talking about business and economy class difference here. If you have bad luck, or make the wrong choice you may end up with seats that have less legroom, are near the lavatories, do not recline correctly, have limited storage space or other limitations that [...]

File hosts offer storage capacities on the Internet for users who do not have their own storage space, for instance by running a website, and for users who prefer to host files on free file hosts for distribution and bandwidth reasons. The majority of file hosting sites users tend to upload the file to one [...]

Docs.com is an online document management, creation and publication tool that is closely tied to Microsoft and Facebook. Without going into to much detail, Facebook users can use the service to read, create or edit their Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents. Close ties to Facebook make it possible to share documents with Facebook friends, and [...]

Favicons are small icons that help identify websites. They are used as a visual representation of a website both in the web browser and at many online services. The three most prominent locations of favicons are the browser’s address bar, the tabbar and the bookmarks folder. Many webmasters like to create custom favicons to add [...]

As a web developer, you have to make sure that your website displays fine for the most widely used screen resolutions. Doing so ensures that site visitors have a good user experience on the website. We have already covered several programs, like the Computer Monitor Hotkey Resolution Changer or the Resolution Changer, to change the [...]

You sometimes may want to save a web page, either for archiving or reference purposes, or because you like to read the page on another device or at a time without Internet connection. While it is possible to save web pages as HTML files it is often considered to be a weak option, as you [...]

On the Internet, when something makes click and becomes very popular overnight, it takes usually less than a month before similar services are offered to the public, often with a similar or slightly modified feature set. URL shorteners, those services that turn long urls into short ones, are very popular on today’s Internet. Why? I [...]

The computer keyboard is the core input device on most modern computer systems. People use it for all writing purposes on the computer, from writing documents and emails to chatting with friends in chat rooms and updating the status at popular social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. Oh, and some use it to [...]

The popular bookmarking service Delicious has been in business for several years. In that time, features have changed and the service even moved from its old domain del.icio.us to delicious.com. At least one major feature has been missing ever since the service was created, despite the changes that have been introduced throughout the years. It [...]

It is not really clear to me why url shorteners have become that popular on today’s Internet. Sure, Twitter may have an impact on that, considering its 140 word limit per message, but there do not seem to be a lot of other applications for url shortening services. Despite that, popularity has risen and more [...]

Bittorrent offers a very popular way of downloading files from the Internet, or even a local network. The protocol is however very dependent on the seeders, that is the users or servers the complete files are distributed from. Users can speed up downloading and seeding of files with so called seedboxes, which are dedicated servers [...]

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) makes it a lot easier to keep up to date with the latest updates on Internet services and websites. Many websites nowadays offer RSS feeds to provide their readers with an alternative to visiting the site manually, or subscribing to an e-mail newsletter. Feed readers like RSS Owl or the online [...]

A new European project, kick-started by 22 European companies and organisations aims to develop an application development environment that will work across all platforms by providing a web-based approach, according to the BBC. The move which is backed by €10M in funding, aims to create apps that would work on any device from Internet TVs to [...]