Till now, YouTube was a place only for watching videos. Still, with other sites getting their act together, it was only a matter of time before these guys pulled up their socks and took a look at the services they offer. What am I referring to? Well, the next time you’re watching a video and [...]

One important task of being a webmaster is optimizing the elements of a website to provide visitors with a fast loading page. Unoptimized images can increase the page loading time tremendously. It was not uncommon ten years ago to see site headers with 100 Kilobytes and more. This has thankfully changed and it is only [...]

Printing web pages can be quite a headache sometimes. More often than not, half the page is taken up by advertisements, menu bars, empty space, and other information that a user just doesn’t want. You pretty much wind up wasting printer ink on a bunch of junk information. One way to make printing more relevant [...]

Tag Galaxy is one of the Flickr Tools that visualizes Flickr image browsing utilizing tags and planetary constellations to show their related tags. A search for night for instance displays the related tags light, sky, dark and city rotating around the central tag. The interesting aspect of this display is that a click on any [...]

Keeping up with web proxy servers on the Internet can be a time consuming task. Proxies come and go that quickly that one could say it is nearly impossible to keep up unless someone would use scripts to check the web proxies automatically. The web proxy server list posted on Ghacks dates back two years [...]

Ever wondered about the actual size of an object and how it would compare to everyday items like a sheet of paper? Do the additional 6.4mm depth of the HTC Touch Pro in comparison to Apple’s iPhone really matter? It is easy to compare the values and see which device is larger or thicker but [...]

Offering the biggest storage capacities of all the file hosts on the Internet will surely drive some traffic to a file hoster’s website. Oosah did just that with the announcement that they would offer 1 Terabyte – that is 1024 Gigabytes – to everyone signing up for their file hosting service. And while they surely [...]

I never quite understood why most people shy away from going to a library. After all, 9 times out of 10, the information you are looking for is available at your local library. In fact, libraries have an excellent collection, not only of books but also CDs, DVDs, scientific journals, etc. One common reason people [...]

Just four days ago a post entitled How To Sort Feeds In Google Reader Alphabetically Again was published on Ghacks that helped users of Google Reader to sort their feeds listing alphabetically again. The default sorting is alphabetically which becomes void when the user begins to drag and drop feeds around in Google Reader. Four [...]

You have got casual Internet users and advanced Internet users and the way they search is totally different from each other. The casual Internet users enter a search term in a search engine and go through the results. If they cannot find what they are looking for they either stop in frustration and get the [...]

Stanford School of Engineering started their Stanford Engineering Everywhere program which provides full computer science courses on a newly created website. This is not only useful to computer trainers but everyone who is interested in computer science in general. The available courses are divided into three categories which are Introduction to Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence [...]

Google Reader sorts the feeds alphabetically which is probably the natural way of sorting news feeds. Once the user begins to move feeds around by dragging and dropping them to another location the sorting turns from alphabetical to one that does not sort the feeds at all but adds new feeds at the bottom of [...]

Regular visitors might have spotted the new Webcasts menu entry in the header area of Ghacks already. I signed an agreement with a company that is providing free webcasts to interested visitors of Ghacks. Webcasts are presentations that are held in either Windows Media Player or Real Player about specific technology related topics. The webcasts [...]

It is virtually impossible to get a clean shoot of a tourist attraction in most parts of the world. Since that is rarely the case most pictures that are taken while on holiday show a few or even many tourists on the pictures that block part of the object from sight. Several image editing technologies [...]

Joshua writes about cool interesting stuff over on his own blog Extendably. Feel free to check it out, I’m sure you’ll like it.   No matter what your opinion is on MySpace, the announcement of the MySpace Music store and service is big news. Perhaps the real question should be, “Why so long?” After all [...]

The file syncing and hosting service DropBox was covered before at Ghacks and I recently had to check it out again because I needed a way to sync some files with a business partner of mine. Dropbox uses a combination of software client and web client which provide both access to the files unlike normal [...]

It’s been remarked upon of late that the concept of beta software has changed dramatically over the last ten years. Perhaps Google was a major influence (sigh… Gmail) or perhaps the Internet in general. The terms ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ have become muddied and confused over the years. Here is what these initial releases once meant: [...]

Employees that have their own computer with Internet access sometimes have the great urge of doing things that are not related to work. They might be reading online news, playing games, listening to music or trying to download at work. Everyone must have been in the situation that he needed to download a specific file [...]

One of the first things that users do when they get a broadband Internet connection is to visit so called speed tests on the Internet that measure the upload and download speed of a connection. This is great for bragging rights but also a good way to check if the advertised speeds are the real [...]

Iterasi is a dynamic bookmarking service that provides users with the option to capture entire webpages instead of just bookmarking an url or thumbnail of a website. Iterasi saves every element of a website including links and images which is an excellent way of keeping track of interesting articles, link lists, order or signup confirmations [...]

Whenever I want to discover some new music these days I got to 1 of 3 places; Amazon, Wikipedia and Last.FM, in that order. Amazon has got perhaps the most useful database of user reviews on the web. Eg, most of them are actually half-coherent. Amazon also shows associated artists which are useful because once [...]

It is interesting to see that online backup providers (or online file storage solutions, call it what you will) are becoming increasingly popular even though external hard drives in the 500 to 1000 Gigabyte range becoming cheap as pie at the same time. Backing up data online definitely has some positive effects to it like [...]

If Hurricane Season has a meaning for you you might be living in an area that is seeing its fair share of hurricanes and tropical storms. One of the most important cautionary matters is to be well informed about new and existing hurricanes and storms and the path that they take. Stormpulse is a website [...]

Solar Roof is a Google Maps mashup that can calculate the solar potential of a roof. If you ever wanted to find out if it would make sense to put solar collectors on your roof you can do so now by using the free service. This can be quite an efficient first analysis of the [...]

Have you ever wondered how your babies would look like if you would have one with your partner? Now you can find out at the Make Me Babies website. Just upload a photo of yourself and your partner, wait a moment and take a look at a picture that could show your future child. Think [...]

Pimp My News is a RSS News Feeds aggregator that turns all available RSS News Feeds into podcasts which can be listened to online or downloaded to the computer. The user can add up to ten feeds to his playlist which can then be turned into podcasts. Pimp My News provides two ways of subscribing [...]

It can be hard at times to follow musicians if you are a fan of them: Where are they right now, when is their next live concert, when does their next CD come out, will they come to my town? Most people get their music business news from music magazines, band websites and music portals [...]

Yappr is an online community that brings users from all over the world together to improve their English language skills. It’s a community driven website with a strong focus on community and social aspects. The user begins by selecting his native language from 14 available ones including English itself which is probably there for native [...]

Before you start inventing, creating, investing and publishing you should do a patent search to see if anyone else came up with the same idea. While it is usually a good idea to let a patent attorney handle the research everyone can get a quick overview by himself completely without costs. One website that is [...]

Do not publish your email on the Internet. That’s is one of the first lessons to learn when you start using the Internet. Once your email has been cached by a search engine it will sooner or later be discovered by bots that crawl the Internet for this valuable information. All kinds of protection have [...]

Many businesses look up information about their prospective employees and business partners on the Internet trying to discover as many information as possible about the person or business. Journalists need to find those information for their research as well. There are additional parties and reasons for looking up website information. One great service that is [...]

The first question that should be addresses is why would someone want to find a cell phone number? Finding means searching obviously and I can think of a few reasons why this might be useful. The first and foremost is to discover the identity of someone. If you only got a person’s cell phone number [...]

Estimating the value of a website is no easy task for a script because it has to take many factors into consideration and cannot access the most important ones which ware obviously website traffic and monetization. The script can pull data from third party information like Alexa, Compete and Quantcast but those are not as [...]

The following article explains how to add pictures to MySpace. The process itself is not overly complicated and everyone should be able to follow the steps. Please leave a comment if you have any questions about the process. There are basically two possibilities to add pictures to MySpace. The first is to upload pictures from [...]

I use Digg (on occasion), StumbleUpon and sometimes Google News. The New York Times and Techmeme satisfy the rest of my needs. I didn’t really think I could be interested in yet another crowd-powered news aggregating website… Mixx, Reddit, Regator, Social Median,  Soshable, Propeller, Sphinn even… whether they’re the next Digg I have no idea… [...]

Google is testing new ideas and implementations before they go public for everyone. The testing grounds for Google Search are called Google Experimental, a publicly accessible area where everyone can test out a few new features that might make it into the public Google search. Three ideas are currently listed on that page: Alternate views [...]

Anime are popular, mangas are popular and hentai is, well popular to. That integral part of Japanese culture has long made its way into the West and kids are crazy after manga stuff. Face Your Manga tries to take advantage of the fact by providing its visitors a way to create their own Manga avatars [...]

Flickr is best known for being a photo uploading and publishing portal with a vast community of contributors. Lesser known is the video portion of the website. Uploading videos is limited to Flickr pro members currently but everyone – even guests – are allowed to watch them on the Flickr website providing the owner of [...]

The file hosting website eSnips provides access to various communities that have been created for users with the same interests. You find communities about art and fun but also music. The music community is divided into communities for different music genres like rock, metal or rap. Each music community offers a large amount of music [...]

Online media converters have several advantages over their software counterparts: They do not bog down the system and do not require software to be installed on the local computer. They are usually also easily accessible and convert media rapidly due to servers in the background that are used for the process. One of the best, [...]

It’s getting pretty hard to get excited about online image and photo editors seeing as they’re a dime a dozen. However just today I discovered one which I particularly liked and thought I would share with you: Pixlr – The online image editor Pixlr had been developed by a Swedish guy who launched the service [...]

A new version of WordPress has been released today and I’m currently in the process of updating all of my WordPress blogs with the new version. That’s always a lot of work because I tend to prefer a manual update and not the automatic option that was implemented into WordPress a while ago. Over 60 [...]

Am I the only one who is getting enough of those third party Twitter Api services that all use (i)tter in their domain name? Despite it’s pretty silly name Monitter, which apparently stands for Monitor Twitter, offers an interesting service. Users can enter up to three terms in the three columned main interface which from [...]

I switched to Google Reader after using various other online RSS News Feed Readers like Netvibes, desktop applications and Firefox extensions. I would say it is the best overall news reader that I tried so far but it is having a few quirks that annoy the hell out of me. The first thing that I [...]

Most people I know use YouTube to watch a few videos online. While YouTube definitely has the best collection of videos on the Internet, the quality of most of their videos leaves a lot to be desired. Then again, you can’t really blame them since they’re catering to a wide range of internet connections. The [...]

Users sometimes ask me how I manage the software updates list that I maintain and publish on every Wednesday and I always reply that I use mostly RSS News Feeds for it. I never mentioned that I can use them for almost any website I come across no matter if it offers an RSS News [...]

The Yahoo-Microsoft-Ichan soap opera got pretty damn annoying for a while there. In fact It wasn’t even so much Yahoo and Microsoft, it was billionaire investor Ichan who really made it all so stupid. I got nothing wrong with people making money, lots of money. In fact I wish I could. However I do resent [...]

Imo.im offers a way to connect to various Instant Messengers using their website or a client that can be downloaded and is currently available for Windows. Supported are many popular Instant Messenger networks like MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM and ICQ. The Imo.im team was rather busy since my last review of the service and [...]

I’m not that sure why someone would want to upload files to multiple file hosts unless it was for questionable or backup purposes. But I’m not in the position to question motives but to review two services that spread files to multiple file hosts. RapidSpread and TinyLoad are two services that basically provide the same [...]

The Traceroute command displays the list of Internet hops that lie between your local computer and the remote computer. It provides an excellent way to identify connection problems because it is actually showing you the hop that is causing the problems. Just Traceroute (via Digital Inspiration) takes this a step further by issuing a traceroute [...]