I have a young step daughter at home and I know that curiosity can get the best of a young teen. I had been looking for an easy solution to deal with content filtering that would allow me to control over various types of content she could see. So I tured to DansGuardian. This filter [...]

Companies reserve the right to produce, ship and distribute their goods globally. Many produce in cheap labor countries like China, ship the goods around the globe to sell it high in countries like the United States or the European Union. It is natural to them because the process saves them lots of money. When customers [...]

Cloud computing is a buzz word. It has been made popular with services like Google Docs which allow users to store their documents on a server on the Internet. While it surely is comfortable to have the documents stored on servers with the ability to work with them and share them with trusted individuals words [...]

You know that I’m a happy Giganews customer. I have been using their Usenet service for the last years and they never let me down. Sure, they are not the cheapest Usenet provider when it comes to comparing the monthly subscription prices but they quality level surpasses anything else on the market. Giganews are running [...]

If you use Firefox you probably have had to enter the address about:plugins to see if the plugin you just installed actually did install. But did you know there is another “about” address you can use to do some serious tweaking in the famous open source web browser? That address: about:config. The about:config address is [...]

Do we need physical access to music if you consider the advent of broadband connections and an always-on mentality fueled by small mobile devices like smartphones, pdas and even netbooks that make it easier than ever to listen to music online. The way music is consumed has changed drastically in the last ten years. We [...]

The Donation Coder website and community is special. Not only because I have a long standing relationship with several of its members but also because it is taking an approach that most other sites on the Internet does not take. Instead of relying on online advertisement to fund their projects they rely on donations from [...]

The video portal Veoh is unlike any other video portal on the Internet. One of the main differences between Veoh and other video portals like Youtube is that Veoh is limiting the playback of some of the larger videos on their site to a five minute preview. Veoh asks its users to download the web [...]

Last year, the German Wikipedia was printed. Now, many Wikipedias worldwide – including the English Wikipedia – has given people the opportunity to compile a book of Wikipedia articles which can then be professionally printed or exported as a PDF or OpenDocument. Wikipedia has enabled the ‘Book’ extension to MediaWiki, the content management system it [...]

With all the social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and the million others out there it becomes very easy to tell the world about yourself. What many users of those social networks do not realize is that their writings can have consequences in the real world. A young women got only recently fired from here [...]

Konolive is a free group collaboration software for the Adobe Air platform. It has many similarities to Instant Messengers at first glance like the IM-like interface or the ability to add and manage contacts in the application. Everything centers around contacts and activities in the Getting Things Done software. Activities are tasks at hand that [...]

Gazup is another online service that provides its users with the means to upload files to multiple file hosts at once. It works like previously mentioned Rapidspread and UploadJockey by providing an interface that supports the selection of multiple file hosts. The file hosts uploader supports file hosts like Rapidshare, Megaupload and seven additional file [...]

FON is a company, which offers wireless access. Unlike many commercial providers, like T-Mobile, it adopts a more social tone. FON allows people to buy a wireless router from them for €30. They then share their WiFi with other Fon users and gain access to other Fon users’ connections. Whilst many FON users are in [...]

Many websites tend to be discontinued after a time. This can be extremely frustrating if that website did contain some valuable information that are not accessible in the same form anywhere on the Internet. Google Cache might be a solution but it usually caches one of the last states of a page which does not [...]

Rapidshare is still offering one of the most popular file hosting services on the Internet despite the recent changes to the core system that have capped the downloads for premium users at 2.66 Gigabytes per day. Rapidstack (via Download Squad) is a realtime Rapidshare Search Engine. What does that mean? Unlike many other Rapidshare search [...]

Did you know that it is possible to go discount hunting on the various Amazon websites? It actually is pretty easy to search for discounts at the Amazon website. All that is needed for that is a basic url that needs to be altered to reflect the category and the discount. Depending on the item [...]

Generally, I geotag my photos using Flickr’s Organizr. Unfortunately, I often find Yahoo! Maps to be much worse than Google Maps and whilst recently tagging some photos of Northern France and Flanders, I simply found it intolerable (being unfamiliar with placenames etc). I began to reminisce about the days when geotagging was somewhat more complex [...]

If you have a US iTunes account you can get all sorts of freebies like new songs or media that is only being made available for US users. We previously mentioned how to get a free US iTunes account but Apple soon after disabled that option. You see, if you want to create a new [...]

Here is a very ingenious method of download music from Myspace. It is actually one of the easiest methods to download the music. All that is needed is a web browser which makes the method universal independently from the operating system. Start by visiting the Myspace website and locate a page with a music player. [...]

For too long, people have hid rickrolls in TinyURLs. A much better service to hide them in is rickroll.it. No one would suspect a thing! The service is just a URL shortening service, but one I love to use because no one dares to click the link. I often post non-RR content in one of [...]

Apparently, Wikipedia, the BBC, gHacks and the White House are malware. Well, there were for about 30 minutes. Google decided to claim that they ‘may harm your computer’, no doubt due to some sort of bug with their system. This may seem quite amusing, but it proved annoying as Google’s links to webpages would not [...]

Spy is a search engine for – as they call it – social media conversations. It is powered by Google’s App Engine and indexes the services Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Yahoo News, Google Reader, Blogs and Blog comments. Just enter any keyword or phrase in the search box and select the amount of results that should [...]

CopyGator monitors a site’s RSS news feed providing detailed information about other blogs and websites who copy, quote or republish posts from the feed. The service is currently monitoring more than 2.2 million RSS feeds who produce more than 500K blog posts per day. CopyGator will then compare all published posts to determine if two [...]

Working on one text document with multiple colleagues can prove to be very complicated. Imagine writing a first draft and sending it out to several colleagues for feedback. You probably will receive several revised versions of that text document in return which contain annotations, comments and other feedback. The difficult part begins to combine and [...]

If you make purchases at an Amazon store you have the option to let Amazon ship the items as soon as they are available or grouped together to save postage and handling fees. Shipping and handling is usually not a problem as Amazon will send some items free of charge. For some items though, but [...]

Cloudo is a web operating system that has been in private beta for a long time. A public beta started just recently which allows interested users to signup and use the web operating system. A web operating system is basically an online desktop that is providing many features that operating systems like Windows or Linux [...]

Some webmasters and tech savvy users seem to live in their RSS reader. They have it open 24/7 to be among the first when a subscribed websites publishes new content. This makes a service like Reminder Feed valuable which is sending out reminders to the user’s RSS reader. Reminder Feed is one of the few [...]

Visual Wikipedia is a visual mashup of Wikipedia information and Youtube videos. The service works much like the regular Wikipedia website with the difference that it adds additional data sources and visual information about each phrase. The entry PHP will for instance display part of the Wikipedia article on the top of the results. A [...]

How do you test if a download accelerator is really working? One way would be to download the same files twice. Once with the download accelerator enabled and once without. While this is surely not the most scientific method of testing it should provide enough data to come to a conclusion. The uTorrent Download Accelerator [...]

animoto is a site which allows video presentations to be made in a minimal amount of time, claiming to be the killer of slideshows (although in reality they are slideshows!). The end result is an extremely slick slideshow. The site makes creating a video presentation easily: to create one, all you must do is simply [...]

The means to search for document types like pdf or doc is not really obvious in most search engines. These options are usually tucked away in the advanced search options and only users who know the parameters can use them efficiently. PDF Database is a web search engine for document formats. It concentrates on pdf [...]

Why buy a calendar for $10 or more if you can get free calendars to print out online? A search for free calendars to print displays lots of websites that offer free printable calendars. Microsoft Office users can download dozens of calendar templates at Microsoft’s Office Online website. All calendars can be downloaded if the [...]

Dreamweaver and Frontpage are no doubt the most popular WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) HTML editors but carry a pretty large pricetag, with Dreamweaver costing about £500! Naturally, neither work under Linux either! KompoZer is a free, open-source and cross-platform WYSIWYG editor which should fill the needs of any home user. Whilst KompoZer has not been updated since [...]

Server2Go is a portable web server that can be run from any storage space in a Windows environment. It can be placed on USB devices, removable devices, CDs, DVDs or the hard drive of the computer. It requires no installation at all and can be run right from the location where it has been placed [...]

Microsoft Vista Answers is a beta web service that copies the functionality of Yahoo Answers and makes it available to the Windows Vista niche. Narrowing down the niche does not necessarily have to be a bad thing but it could surely disappoint Windows users who do not run Windows Vista but another Microsoft product. The [...]

You, like me, will no doubt spend a significant amount of your time on Wikipedia so you might as well make your browsing and editing as easy as it possibly can be. Several userscripts, Firefox extensions and small tricks exist which can help maximise your Wikipedia experience. The most useful tool to improve the browsing [...]

I have been working with LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL, PHP) servers for a long time. But not matter how much experience I have with them one of the first things I, do after the LAMP installation, is to install phpMyAdmin. This tool makes database administration so much easier than the command line. And when your [...]

I’ve been thinking a bit about the history of the internet, and one important point I deduced was how important Google was to this all. Many-many people love Google, which usually means a lot hate it or dislike it too, but everyone should be thankful for what they have done. You’re probably thinking that I’m [...]

Working as a web developer I get a lot of requests regarding SEO and getting to the top of Google as fast as possible. While code-wise a lot can be done, this is nowhere near enough. If you want to get anywhere near good rankings you will need solid content that keeps coming regularly. Once [...]

There are so many possibilities on the Internet to search for and find the music that you are looking for that it is almost impossible not to find it unless you prefer to listen to local bands or rare stuff. Even then the chance is quite good to find what you are looking for online. [...]

WordPress is displaying 20 comments per page in the admin interface. This might not be a problem for users who usually get a handful of comments per day but it forces webmasters with hundreds of comments per day to flip through the pages quite often. The 20 comments per page figure is actually the figure [...]

Webmasters should pay close attention to their websites. Just missing one update of the blogging software, forum script or database engine can be enough to give attackers the means to take over. Websites can be defaced or – which some webmasters consider even more seriously – manipulated in various ways. This includes links to other [...]

I know I’ve been into rants and criticizms more nowadays, and I really sat down to do a proper tech news story today, but I really can’t let this one go. To kill the 5 minutes I had today I read a forum on “What’s so funny about Family Guy” and while going through it, [...]

Google began to include magazines to their book search engine. The search is currently limited to selected magazines with plans to expand it in the future. One could probably assume that only older or outdated magazines have been scanned by the Google Book Search team. This is apparently not the case. Several December 08 issues [...]

The WordPress team has published version 2.7 of WordPress yesterday. The first thing that users will notice is the new administration interface which was completely redone to optimize processes. The development team claims that nearly every task in WordPress 2.7 will take fewer clicks than it took in previous versions of the blogging platform. The [...]

You might have heard the news that several UK Internet Providers are restricting to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia after the Internet Watch Foundation identified the Wikipedia page of the Scorpions album Virgin Killer as a “potentially indecent image of a child”. Listing the page on the watchlist had the effect that several Internet Service Providers [...]

As a blogger and general designer person, I often have the need for some cool pics. I could in theory take photos of stuff, but I don’t have the time or the expertise to come up with something good. My companion throughout my blogging days has been sxc.hu. I was quite surprised about the domain, [...]

Having subscriptions to hundreds of RSS news feeds can sometimes mean news overkill. This is especially true for times when a big new application or service gets announced because these usually get picked up by more than 20% of all the tech sites out there. News Filtering – or keyword filtering – describes the process [...]

Sites like Twitter have scores of competitors and it is possible that for someone to effectively socially network, they will have to use sites other than their preferred one. It is obviously quite a chore to have to update Twitter, Facebook, Pownce etc separately. Commenter reactive pointed out ping.fm, a website which in fact I [...]

Many companies, schools or universities love to block popular websites. A large proportion of computer users however start digging around to find ways to overcome the block instead of concentrating on work. Many make use of web proxies to access blocked websites. Proxies however come and go rapidly and get blocked very fast as well. [...]