Last week, Martin posted about how Yahoo was planning to shut down its Yahoo! Music store on 30th September, 2008. The store would take its DRM servers offline on this date, in effect stranding all those people who had paid money for DRM-labeled music. Apparently, Yahoo have realized the foolishness of their decision and the [...]

It’s been a long time now since Yahoo acquired del.ico.us. Like most Yahoo acquisitions it was a great service and grew rapidly in popularity, but unfortunately was left to stagnate somewhat. Frankly del.icio.us was one of the founding Web 2.0 services, along with Wikipedia, Amazon and Ebay. It’s the most popular social bookmarking service, even [...]

I have been working with the WordPress script that powers this blog and several of my other for almost three years now and can say that the overall experience is quite positive. It’s easy to setup and maintain and provides a good level of customization. So far so good. Several issues appeared over time that [...]

Flickr users have the option to turn off the show “All Sizes” option when uploading photos to the popular image hoster. This can have the effect that the original size of the photo that has been uploaded to Flickr is not available for viewing and download. The api on the other hand does not care [...]

The file hoster Rapidshare seems to have seen a huge increase in premium users, those users that pay for the service to receive a faster transfer rate and other comfort functions, since they introduced the new system that saw a removal of the captchas but a introduction of a speed limit for guest users. Premium [...]

Google released a new service today called Google Knol, a service aimed to take on Wikipedia and in my case will definitely beat it after a while, although there are some differences which I think will make both services live on. While Wikipedia is strictly collaborative work, Google Knol is not necessarily. If you write [...]

I’ve previously written about Librarything, a book cataloging service, and now here I am again with another similar service, Goodreads. This service is very similar, but there are a few features which I like more here, making this a better solution for me. The basics are the same. Fnd your books, add them, share them, [...]

I follow developments of both G.ho.st and Windows Live Mesh with interest and this week has seen new releases for both. What I find most interesting is that both developments have a very similar aim or goal, but at the same time are very different. G.ho.st is not so ambitious as to try and become [...]

As I’ve said before, I’m not a big twitterer… I would say I average maybe 1 Twit every 2 days, in fact I don’t know why I even still use the service. I was never turned off the service from down-time or anything like that, Twitter could go down a whole day or two and [...]

Livewatch is the server monitoring service that I’m using to monitor my dedicated servers 24/7 to make sure that they are running. The main advantage of Livewatch over similar services is that you can check every element of the server and not only the http connection. It is for example possible to check the http [...]

Okay, I probably get a little more excited about Windows Live then you, but you may be interested in a couple of the updates which where rolled out over the last couple days: Windows Live Mesh If you managed to get into the Mesh Technical Preview a few months ago then you would have seen [...]

I must admit I had never heard of Bubbles before I tried out the time tracking service SlimTimer. Bubbles is a Windows only ‘browser’ which lets you create site specific ‘bubbles’ to run in the system tray. It can actually be very useful for any web service you find yourself constantly using, but as of [...]

Online storage services are slowly moving from being pure file hosting websites to those that provide additional values to their users by offering desktop applications and file operations like syncing. I reviewed the Dropbox service just a few days ago that provided a desktop client to its users that could be used to drag and [...]

Another Day, another Adobe Air app, that’s just the way I like it! I love Meebo, and the only reason I don’t use it is that it’s a browser based application. That’s a bit of a paradox, since that’s the whole point of Meebo, but I love the people behind it and love the app, [...]

I bet we could all use a reminder from time to time and what could be better than to receive a recorded call with your own voice that is reminding you at a scheduled time? Phonevite takes the concept a bit further by offering anyone the ability to record messages on the Phonevite website or [...]

Wondering how much traffic can be pulled through the network you’re working in during certain period of time or how quickly your network components work? Yeah, be a networking proffesional or a regular home user with a small LAN (like me :) ), it’s always good to know what’s your network capable of. But how [...]

Rescue Time is a web based time management and analytic application that collects its data from a software called Data Collector that is available for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OSX and even Linux. This is a huge advantage over other time management applications that require manual input of the data. Rescue Time collects the [...]

I stumbled on to a service for managing multiple twitter accounts and at first I thought it was going to be one of those second rate sites, I was put off a bit by the 16×16 logo I saw on the referring page. However when I got to Matt I was instantly pulled in.This is [...]

It’s Olympic year and this time we’re heading to Beijing to watch the best athletes in the world battle it out for glory. If you’re lucky enough to actually be going to Beijing for the Olympics, then you’re sure to enjoy yourself. However, if you’re like me, you have to make do with trying to [...]

Google Earth is definitely an application that is fun to play around with. Chance is that you will stumble upon some strange sights sooner or later. Plugins make the discovery process easier and it is surprisingly easy to load and find interesting places using those plugins. They basically provide everyone with an ability to load [...]

I don’t know how many of you have tried Google Sites, which is a Wiki like application available for Google Apps users. Although the application itself lacks a lot of features (more on that a bit later), the framework, the development and the way things are going is awesome. You can use Google Sites for [...]

Sigh. Yes, I got excited about RSS Bandit a couple of days ago after it was released in Alpha with NewsGator and Google Reader Syncing capabilities. I have yet been able to get this to actually work and have found the program so buggy as to be unusable. It frequently crashes, spiked the CPU and [...]

I’m not using Instant Messengers and also do not use the Web 2.0 equivalent in the form of Twitter and comparable services. That’s something that stuck with me since I began using the Internet in the early 90′s and I never changed my stance on the subject. Instant Messengers are nevertheless highly popular and Everton [...]

With the rise of Instant Messengers and their web counterparts like Twitter came the problem that users who wanted to post text paragraphs had to divide them up because of the text size limitations of the clients. To be honest I’m not sure why there is such a limitation in first place but maybe I’m [...]

Bandwidth usage can be extremely different for Skype users which can be attributed whether computers are being used as Skype Super-Nodes. A Super-Node is basically a computer that is running Skype and not preventing the software access to the ports 80 and 443 which are used to route traffic from other Skype users who are [...]

BBC Languages is a website by the BBC that is providing language courses for several popular languages such as German, French, Spanish and Chinese. A language portal was constructed for each language that is used as the main hub for that language. From there students can get a quick fix of the selected language which [...]

I’ve been a user of FeedDemon RSS reader ever since it became freeware. It’s a fantastic application and has a lot of great features, not the least being synchronization between NewGator Online and multiple devices such as Mobile phones and desktops. However good as NewsGator Online is, after a while I began wishing FeedDemon synchronized [...]

It’s been about a month now since I introduced Plurk here at gHacks and now that I have had a chance to properly test it, here is an update on the developments over the last few weeks. The first thing I began to realize was that although Plurk has a great way of managing threaded [...]

Open It Online is a Firefox extensions that is compatible with Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 and offering the user a way to open and edit documents directly online. The benefit of this approach is that the user does not need specific tools installed to view and edit the files on his computer, all he [...]

I have spent this week struggling with colour schemes for my blog. I found deciding on a colour scheme to be an incredibly frustrating process, and what I finally settled on was fairly safe but not very original or exciting either. However here are a few of the tools that I used to help me [...]

Adobe recently released a new set of office applications online to compete with the dominant Google Docs, Zoho and possibly Windows Office Live. It was released alongside Adobe Flash9 and received a small amount of coverage, so I decided to have a quick look at what it offered. Acrobat.com contains 5 services, 3 of which [...]

Glassdoor is a very new service founded by Robert Hohman and Rich Barton. They had worked at a number of large corporations including Microsoft and had previously founded successful companies themselves such as Expedia. Their idea behind Glassdoor was as “…a career and workplace community where anyone can find and anonymously share real-time reviews, ratings [...]

I’m not a big user of social networking sites for a very simple reason: I simply don’t have the time. The little time I spend at home can definitely be better utilized than hanging out on Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, etc. Having said that, I know plenty of people who just can’t do without their social [...]

Do you want to take a bomb and destroy the whole of Flickr? Well, no luck then, but if you want a cool way to navigate through your pics and even download them, Destroy Flickr is a great Adobe Air based application to try. Once you enter and verify your information, you can immediately access [...]

There are two blog searching engines which dominate the market… Google Blog Search and of course, Technorati. The biggest challenge both search engines face is trying to keep their indexes spam-free and provide accurate results. Enter Twingly Spam-free Blog Search. Twingly takes on the blog search market with a home page that is somehwhere in [...]

I had the idea some time ago to create a plugin for WordPress that would take articles from my site, for example of the last month, and turn them into a pdf document that everyone could download from my site. I never managed to produce it but it is still listed in the ideas section [...]

Online services like Flickr and Google’s Picasa are primarily photo-hosting and sharing sites. This means that apart from image files, you can’t really upload any other type of file you choose. Well, all that is about to change. Digital Inspiration has come up with a way to embed or hide an mp3 file within a [...]

I wrote wrote a post last week about online desktops and gave what was in my opinion, the best three of the bunch. Some of you where pretty interested in the topic and there where a few debates in the comments over which was the best, so I’ve decided I’ll share a list of every [...]

In a post last week I talked about the growth of cloud computing and web based applications in relation to online desktops. Today I’ve got some amazing flash powered online tools to show you. Aviary is a suite of web based creative tools. Each of the tools has been named after some kind of bird, [...]

Are you as sick of hearing about Twitter as I am? See the problem is that I never really “got” Twitter… I tried, I really did. I signed up and followed people and Twittered regularly, but it never really did it for me. Eventually I just forgot about it. Enter Plurk. Considering micro-blogging isn’t something [...]

Sometimes, you may urgently need to send a fax across to someone but you do not have access to a fax machine. If this is the case, don’t worry. File-hosting site drop.io has a way to rescue you. Drop.io started off as just another file-hosting site. To stand out from the pack though, the site [...]

With conventional music distribution methods becoming less and less effective with every year and the associated corporations increasingly desperate a growing group of services have been springing up to offer way for people news ways to share music. Some, like LastFM, offer a comprehensive service in which you have a profile and can interact with [...]

I discovered a nice website running a script that can create a CD, and DVD, paper case for you. The most basic version of the CD paper case requires an artist, an title and tracks to be entered before the paper case will be created as an Adobe PDF document that can be printed later [...]

A few years ago the idea of cloud computing seemed vaguely absurd to me. I infinitely preferred using desktop software to any kind of online alternative and I hated the idea of having my data floating off somewhere in the "cloud". I liked it here, at my desk… safe. 2 years later and I still [...]

Blogtastique is a new service by Daniel, one of the resident writers here at Ghacks, which can probably be best described as a service to help beginning and advanced bloggers. The basic concept of Blogtastique is to manage different aspects of being a blog owner for the user. The interesting part is that one of [...]

Microsoft Task Market is a new service by Microsoft that copies established services like Get A Freelancer. Task Market brings Task Posters and Task Solvers together. Task Posters are users who need a task done that can be delivered electronically for a price of $20 – $500. Possible tasks include translations, writings or designs. Task [...]

1000 Kilogram are 1.3 cows, 5.6 female lions or 1 shire horse while 100000 kilogram equal 18 male African elephants and 7.1 Big Bens. The website Sensible Units (via Genbeta) converts boring units like Kilogram, Meters, Miles or Pounds into real world objects. There is obviously no real scientific value behind the calculations but it [...]

I’m a little bit of a font addict. Whenever I see a beautiful font in an image or on a website I have to find out which font it is to play around with it and see if I can use it for any of my projects as well. It’s relatively easy to find out [...]

I’m not kidding, it can sometimes take me 10-20 minutes to figure out what to read. From a book’s title you might not be able to derive anything from the story, and even if you read the back cover you may be left in the dark, you definitely won’t know what quality the writing is. [...]

Rapidshare have implemented a new captcha for some time that asks the user to enter four out of x letters that have a cat (others have a similar looking picture of a dog with a smaller head) in the background. This new captcha is confusing to users and many have decided that it is not [...]