For the longest time I refused to see the value in Twitter. Over the last six months I have changed my tune on that. Now I use Twitter primarily as a PR tool for my articles. And since my renewed belief in micro-blogging, I have found plenty of tools with which to enact with Twitter. [...]

RSS has become such a common source of information for us information junkies. Whether you are following Ghacks via RSS, your favorite news site, or your favorite blog, it’s nice to be able to get all of those feeds centralized on your desktop. For Linux there are plenty of possible RSS feed readers. One of [...]

Bing Maps has been updated today with several new features and a new look and feel. Most notably in this regard are a new button bar with each button loading a specific feature of Bing Maps. Microsoft has also added some new colors to Bing Maps but those are only the obvious changes to the [...]

Do you use Google for your collaboration tools? Gmail? Google Documents? Contacts? Although the Google suite is a very nice suite of tools that has grown exponentially in popularity, there is something to be said about keeping your collaboration tools in-house. There are plenty of tools that will allow you to set up such a [...]

When Gmail first came out I wasn’t a fan. But after a year of use I have found Google Mail to be a very valuable tool. Because I use Gmail mostly for work-related issues, I do not always like to check it within a browser. Instead I use various applications that enable me to have [...]

If you are looking for music chance is that you find it at Youtube. It really does not matter if you are looking for something new, old, rare or popular as Youtube provides access to millions of different songs from artists from all over the world. Several online services have already used that vast repertoire [...]

If you are familar with KDE you know Konqueror. Konqueror used to be one of the finest file managers on the PC desktop – period. But now KDE has migrated toward a simpler, more user-friendly file manager (Dolphin) and pushed Konqueror to serve as a web-browser only. That does not mean Konqueror can not be [...]

In this day and age, very few people have not heard of Myspace. Myspace is a social networking website. MySpace users create their own webpages and then in turn, invite “friends” who can create their own MySpace pages. This creates a huge network of people linked together by Myspace pages. MySpace is also used by [...]

Friendster is an old social networking service that was established in 2002. It quickly grew to become one of the most popular networks even though the owners decided to decline buyout offers from Internet heavyweights such as Google. More than 60 million users visit the Friendster website per month making it one of the most [...]

MySpace is without doubt one of the most popular social networking websites on the Internet even though some say it has been in decline ever since Facebook took off. MySpace login problems are as common a problem as on other websites with this amount of users. Like every big website they are a common target [...]

The Google Docs development team has finally added one of the most requested features to the document management service. The ability to share folders – and with those the documents contained in those folders – was not given until the new release yesterday. This new feature makes it more comfortable to work with several users [...]

You might have already read about it in the news elsewhere: The Twitter account of security researcher Mikko H. Hyppönen of F-Secure got suspended without warning two days ago. Mikko tried to contact Twitter support and tried everything in his power to understand why his Twitter account was suspended in first place. He received a [...]

We reviewed Yahoo Meme a while ago here at Ghacks and gave out several invites to Yahoo’s Twitter-like service. The service was in private beta back then which meant that only users with invites were allowed to use it. Yahoo Meme expands on the basic options that Twitter is offering to its users. It gets [...]

Recently I previewed the up and coming release of Ubuntu, Karmic Koala (“Ubuntu Karmic Koala Preview“.) In that article I covered some of the new features in the upcoming release. Once of those features is the new Ubuntu One. Ubuntu One is much like the familar DropBox that people of nearly all platforms enjoy. Ubuntu [...]

People who learned English as their second language usually make different mistakes than English natives. This can be attributed to a number of factors with the differences between their native language and English being a major one. Computer programs that correct spelling errors are nowadays provided for most operating systems. They usually use a dictionary [...]

Twitter can be an excellent source for spotting the latest trends. Twitter itself displays several popular topics on its frontpage which are sorted by minute, day and week. It does become more difficulty to spot trends if they are not displayed on the Twitter homepage. The two problems that arise are finding those trends if [...]

Most computer users know that regular data backups are important to be prepared when data on a computer system becomes corrupted. This can be due to hardware failures, human error or computer virus infections. Backups ensure that data can be recovered at anytime. Online services on the other hand are not usually integrated in backup [...]

One cannot really deny the fact that Google is constantly working on new features for their popular online services like Gmail or Google Docs. The latest feature is currently available as a demonstration only and not yet integrated into Google Docs. The Google Docs OCR demonstration can OCR the three image formats jpg, png and [...]

Macs don’t have a PrintScreen button, and if we want to take a screen-capture, the default program we use is Grab. Grab is great in a few ways; you can choose to use a timer before a screen-capture is taken and it can be used to ensure only a certain area of the screen is [...]

Animated gifs are largely a thing of the past. They do not play an important role anymore in today’s web design but are still popular in forums and other message boards. GifSoup is an online service that is offering to convert a Youtube video into an animated gif. All it takes is to paste a [...]

PBTweet is a bookmarklet and userscript that enhances several aspects of Twitter by changing or adding new functions to the popular social network. Before we start looking at the features a word about compatibility. The bookmarklet works with most Webkit based web browsers including Safari and Google Chrome. The userscripts are compatible with Greasemonkey for [...]

Giganews has been my Usenet provider for the last couple of years. Before that I switched from service to service only to be disappointed eventually by poor performance or connection problems. Yes, these services were cheaper than Giganews but you did get what you paid for, at least back then. The Usenet provider landscape has [...]

Looking up information like the local time, local date or local weather can be helpful in certain circumstances. Maybe you are planning a trip to another location and want to make sure to be prepared, maybe you do not want to miss the important video conference with that other company from China (or another country) [...]

Rollgator offers an interesting service that could be very appealing to businesses and organizations. The online service creates full screen RSS feed tickers of up to four RSS feeds. These full screen ticker has been optimized for large displays that include computer monitors, flat screen televisions and even walls or projectors. Rollgator could be an [...]

With the rise of file hosting websites came the desire to upload files to multiple file hosting services to have alternatives if an upload gets deleted by one file host. This had to be done manually back in the days but in the last months several services have appeared on the Internet that would distribute [...]

Many Google services come with an api (application programming interface) that allows web developers to create new web services. Google Maps is probably the most popular example. The Google Maps api is used by many web developers to create new web services that include realtime flight tracking or racing games. All of these web applications [...]

There are quite a few ways to listen to music online. Users can listen to Internet Radio, specialized websites like Last.fm, video portals or music search engines to do so. Semsix adds another possibility to the possibilities. The service offers music searches for artists, albums or individual song titles in its interface. The first difference [...]

There are many website valuation tools and software programs available for users who are interested in purchasing or selling websites. Many of them take public data such as a website’s Pagerank, Alexa rank, search engine indexation or listings in Wikipedia, Dmoz or Yahoo Directory. These website valuations usually take less than a minute to complete [...]

Found another gem at Rarst’s blog today. Is My Blog Working is an online service that can be used by webmasters and interested users to find out if a blog is responding correctly. It works by entering a blog url in the form on the frontpage of the service. The service will then do some [...]

After reading Martin’s fine article “Download Youtube Videos” today, I had to give a bit of a Linux perspective and show how to do this in the Linux operating system. Inititially I assumed this would have to be done via the command line, because that is how I have always done conversions. But I have [...]

You have basically two options if you want to convert a video from one format into another. You can either use software programs that run on the computer system to convert the videos or use online converters to do the same. Both methods have their limitations and uses. The desktop video converter can for example [...]

“Once more unto the breach my dear friends, once more!” I’ve written about Claws Mail quite a bit (see “Claws Mail: The unsung powerhouse email client“, “Claws Mail must have plugins“, “Create Message Filters in Claws Mail“,  “Encrypting email in Claws Mail“, and “Make Claws Mail aware when you need top or bottom posting“.) In [...]

Webmasters should be interested in comments and links that get posted about their websites. One very popular platform to post links on is Twitter which recently got more into the focus of webmasters when Techcrunch reported that Twitter was already the third highest traffic source for the popular technology blog. I have since then talked [...]

If you are a webmaster you will eventually stumble upon users in the access logs that tried to access pages on the website that do not exist. These visitors are presented with a 404 error page that can be customized by scripts but also simple html. It could for example point the visitors to the [...]

If you have ever had a need for an on-line shopping cart, and have ever tried to install a shopping cart, you know that making a choice can be a challenge, and getting the shop up and running can be a challenge. Not so much with Zen Cart. Zen Cart is an open source e-commerce [...]

Tobey mailed me an invite to Aardvark the other day which left me puzzled for a short time. The email basically stated that Tobey had invited me and trusted my opinion on blogging, computers and technical advisory. That’s actually a very nice way of inviting users to join a service that they know nothing about. [...]

I was recently checking and cleaning my parent’s top floor when I discovered heaps of user manuals that dated back five to ten years. That got me thinking that we – that is every person in the world – usually keep instruction manuals for devices. It’s actually a fact that instruction manuals stay longer than [...]

Virtual tours can be a very effective way of guiding website visitors who are new to the site around. This can help them understand the offerings and navigation of a website and make them feel more at ease in the beginning. Not every website needs virtual tours although they can be used for different purposes. [...]

Webmasters have to make sure that their websites and files are getting backed up regularly to be prepared when something unforeseen happens. This unforeseen event can be a hacker attack, a database crash, a fire in the data center of the hoster or human error. Whatever the cause is it can have a severe impact [...]

Online reading is not the same as reading a newspaper, book or magazine. The main reason why it is not the same are the many options that webmasters have of displaying text on their websites. They can select different fonts, font sizes, font weight, colors and many more aspects. Newspaper and books on the other [...]

Flickr is probably the most popular photo hosting and sharing on the Internet with thousands of new photos posted to the site every minute. It is great for discovering photos and locations in the world, meeting people and sharing experiences. One thing that many users do not know is that it is also possible to [...]

Oh noes, not another URL shortening service. That’s probably the first reaction of many users who read the announcement that Stumbleupon’s URL shortening service Su.pr is now available publicly. As if there were not enough services of this kind already. There are however a few aspects of su.pr that make it quite unique in its [...]

The Internet offers many people a chance to access resources and information that they could otherwise hardly – if at all – obtain. One interesting source of information is the British Newspapers 1800-1900 archive that is offered by the British Library. It allows everyone to search for topics in many newspapers of that century. Not [...]

Many users with more than one computer system face a problem if they use Instant Messengers: How can they make sure that the data of all messenger clients is synced. This might not be a problem for users who simply chat and forget but what if you use a messenger for business and need to [...]

Microsoft is currently sending out emails to users who registered for announcements about the Microsoft Hohm service which was in private beta until today. It is now possible for everyone to signup for the service and make use of it. Microsoft Hohm has been designed to help people save energy and money by better understanding [...]

Sourceforge is a website that allows developers to host their Open Source applications on. Sourceforge hosts some of the most prestigious Open Source applications on their website including 7-zip, Emule, Notepad++ or SMPlayer. Sourceforge hosts these Open Source projects which basically means that the developers have the means to create websites for their software programs, [...]

eBay, struggling to compete with the likes of Amazon.com recently announced a new fee structure in hopes to attract new sellers. Many sellers who have previously left eBay have complained that the fees were too high and when something doesn’t sell, it costs more to list on eBay than the money it brings in. According [...]

I host my website on shared hosting. My connection is too slow and unreliable to justify running my own server and I have no need to hire a dedicated server or a VPS. Consequently, many other websites are hosted on the same box as mine and I have often wondered their nature. In addition to [...]

Not everyone takes a college class just for the credit toward their degree, there are actually a lot of people who love taking classes just to learn something new, because they are bored, or because they wish to prepare themselves a little better for future classes. Among these people there are those with no money [...]

Recently I worked on some articles about blogging from various means (from within Firefox and on the desktop). One of those applications I left out of that study was BloGTK. The reason I left it out was because it wasn’t able to use the entire feature set of the new Blogger API and it is [...]