Good old Rarst posted another interesting article today about 10 things that make tech blogs unreadable. He has become quite the little ranter over at his Rarst stronghold but I have to admit that he has a point. His post got me thinking about aspects of tech blogs that I dislike and I came up [...]

Helvetireader is a minimal Google Reader interface theme supplied as a userscript that turns Google Reader into an optimized feed reader that is displaying only the essentials. It was especially designed to view feeds in the expanded view using keyboard shortcuts. A userscript compatible browser is needed for the new interface theme to work. Long [...]

Ghacks author Daniel Pataki is pretty busy these days with all the new Internet websites and services that he is creating. His latest service is called Shrinkomatic. It is an url shortening service with one interesting unique feature. But first things first. To shorten an url one would simply head over to the Shrinkomatic website [...]

The WordPress development team has released version 2.6.5 of the blogging plattform for download. The release fixes one security update and three bugs and can be downloaded from the official WordPress website. Alternatively only the files wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php can be copied from the new release over the old files to update the blog. The [...]

VeriSign send me a free PayPal Security Key after I mentioned that an unauthorized payment was done from my PayPal account. The security key acts as a new layer of defense. It has to be entered during login to complete the login. The key is an electronic device that generates a six digit key every [...]

Online services that tell you things you already know seem to be becoming increasingly popular. Some analyze your browsing history to tell you if you are male or female while others analyze websites and tell you what kind of person you are. The author’s at Ghacks are Duty Fullfillers according to the analysis of Typealizer. [...]

If you want new wallpapers for your Blackberry cell phone you could try and find sites that are offering them, you could try and create them yourself locally with an image editor or you could use the online service BBsnap which turns Flickr images into BlackBerry wallpapers. BBsnap can be used without registration which is [...]

A deal between Life and Google makes more than 10 million photographic images available on the Internet. The collection spans from the 1750s to today. Google provides a special search engine for the collection that makes use of the Google Image Search engine. The collection centers around five areas called People (Kennedy, Picasso), Places (Times [...]

Feedrinse is a basic RSS feed filter that can be used to filter one or multiple feeds so that only selected articles will be included in the mashup. This could remind a few users of Yahoo Pipes. The service provided by Feedrinse is however basic in comparison to that of Yahoo Pipes. A user of [...]

Now that the US elections are over and the results are out, it’s worthwhile looking at how the winners fare with technology. Everyone knows that Barack Obama actively used the Internet while campaigning but what are his views on other things technology related? Most notably, how do the new guys plan to tackle issues like [...]

Only a minority of cell phone owners have access to a data flatrate. Most have to cope with utterly insane pricing schemes and pay per Megabyte transferred. If you are old enough to remember; That’s how the first Internet Service Providers handled business when the Internet became popular in the Nineties. Some cell phone owners [...]

Have we come this far already? Desperate times require desperate measures it seems. To impress, one has to be witty. This is especially hard on social networks with millions of other users who want to impress as well. According to the developers of Generatus their product is ideal for the imaginatively challenged. Generatus is a [...]

George send me the tip via email. Checkpoint, the developers of Zonealarm Pro, will hand out the software program for free tomorrow. To be precise, it will be free starting at 6 AM PDT on Tuesday 18 and remain so for the next 24 hours. The url with the free offer will go live at [...]

Sometimes I find a free resource wich is just so much higher quality than most paid sources it’s astounding. I mean if someone can design 9 free fonts that look this good, how does his commercial work look like? Judging from the webpage and the fonts, this person truly loves typography, and the free fonts [...]

Alexa announced a new service a few days ago. Their What’s Hot on the Web service aggregates data from all Alexa toolbar users to provide a list of the hottest, i.e. the most visited, links of users who have the toolbar installed. One could say that it is similar to Digg but with a lesser [...]

Google Multi-Column View is a Greasemonkey script that can display Google search results in two or three different columns instead of the default display. Doing that can be extremely useful for users with widescreen monitors who want to use all of the screen estate when working with Google. A test on a 1920×1200 LCD monitor [...]

If you visit Youtube you might have noticed the “watch in high quality” link beneath some videos on the video portal. The high quality link leads to a video with a better resolution and quality that is more enjoyable to watch than the low quality versions. High quality videos on the other hand demand a [...]

Martin wrote an article in May about IconLook, a website where you can search for icons. I recently found another one, simply called Iconfinder, and as you would expect it enables you to find icons as well. During my testing I found that Iconfinder has more large icons in the 128×128 range. It also seems [...]

We have shown you yesterday how you can forward RSS news to Email. Today it is the other way round by reviewing the service MailOnFeed which creates RSS news feeds out of Email accounts. The basic principle of the service is straightforward. The user adds one or multiple email accounts that support IMAP to his [...]

Converting RSS news to Email can be useful for users who prefer to receive information about updates of their favorite sites in their inbox. It also comes in handy when using mobile devices because it is usually easier to read the news in an email client instead of having to read them in a web [...]

The Internet can provide music fans with lots of information about their favorite artists including tour dates or upcoming albums. The website Muspy can help you with the latter by tracking the album releases of selected artists and sending out information whenever a new album release is announced. The service requires registration which is a [...]

Video Crawler is AT&T’s multimedia search engine. The service is currently in Beta and provides access to videos and other multimedia files of more than 1600 different websites including the popular ones like Youtube, MySpace or Dailymotion. The search engine is indexing the contents of those websites and providing a search engine so that users [...]

Have you ever wondered how long it would take for a typical computer bought in 2008 to brute force your passwords? Now you can find out with the Brute Force Calculator. While it does not provide scientific results it could be interesting to see how long it could take to brute force your passwords to [...]

Automatic RSS news feed translation is a feature that might come in handy for numerous users of Google Reader. It is not uncommon to stumble upon a really great website in another language that you might understand a bit or even not all at all. It is still possible to understand what is being said [...]

There is only one possibility to access content that is restricted to select countries on the Internet: Virtual Private Networks. They basically route your traffic through their web server so that the destination only communicates directly with the server and not the user computer. If those servers are located in the country you want to [...]

Wikipedia are currently having their annual fundraising drive and consequently a large ‘encouragement’ to donate appears on every single encyclopedia article, which is an annoyance. Whilst it is possible to ‘collapse’ the advertisement to a much smaller one, having to do so is about as big an annoyance as the original advertisement. A popular Wikimedia-themed [...]

The idea of Faroo is simple. Faroo uses P2P technology to crawl the World Wide Web instead of using an infrastructure with thousands of servers and worldwide datacenters. If you think about it, users are already visiting websites all the time and the basic idea is to utilize those information to build and maintain an [...]

We are always told how important it is to back-up our blog, in case it is hacked, which does actually happen. My personal blog, Webby’s World, I am ashamed to admit, has been hacked a few times. Backing up seems somewhat of a chore and whilst a cron job can be set up, a WordPress [...]

We have covered the online service Rasterbator in the past that converted an image into a rasterized wall poster. Block Posters is a similar service with the difference that the images are not rasterized which makes the results even more impressive. A large wall poster is created in three steps. An image is uploaded to [...]

Joe Anderson who recently began writing articles for Ghacks send me a message two days ago asking what I thought about Twitterfeed and I had to admit that I never heard of that service before. He let me know that webmasters could use Twitterfeed to publish RSS News Feeds on Twitter. What it does is [...]

You find two Rapidshare Search sites on the Internet. The first is using a custom Google search engine effectively making use of what Google has already indexed which also means that many links will be outdated and not working because of the time difference between indexation and the user search. The second type of websites [...]

When creating a presentation, a web design, a leaflet or a brochure, it is important to find suitable images to use. Whilst one option is to pay for stock photos to use under a restrictive licence, another option is to find free (gratis and libre) photos. Wikimedia Commons is the repository which Wikipedias and other [...]

Pixolu is an academic reasearch project on semantic image search. It does increase the quality of the search results by asking the user to refine the first batch of results and using the selected pictures to discover images that are closely related to them. The process is made up of three steps. The user enters [...]

What is good customer service? Customers would usually state that good customer service means fast and effective solutions for difficulties with a product of a company. What about a company that actively monitors forums and initiates the contact with the customer? That is apparently what has happened to Nicole Gorski (via Softpedia, thanks Dante) who [...]

Using an online desktop recorder like ScreenToaster eliminates the problem of having to install software on a computer system first before being able to record the computer screen. ScreenToaster is a free online service build with Java that can record the full desktop or just part of it by drawing a rectangular shape around the [...]

The democratic west, with all its ideals of free speech, free religion and believes, is on the forefront of demolishing those ideals for the greater good as politicians like to call it. The greater good can be terrorism, child pornography, pornography, different believes, different political views, violent video games or anything else that politicians might [...]

Youtube sits tightly on its spot as the number one video portal in the world. It’s extremely hard to compete Youtube, comparable to the problems that search engines have to compete with Google. One way of dealing with this challenge is to provide a specialized video service. 5Min is one of those specialized video portals. [...]

We have featured some articles in the past that explained how to reduce the bandwidth usage while surfing the Internet which is important for users who have to cope with a monthly bandwidth limit and those who are stuck with slow Internet connections. (Reduce Opera Bandwidth Usage and Use The Opera Mini Browser On A [...]

The IP address. Your gateway to the internet. That little set of numbers that guarantees you can log on and check mail, watch videos, etc. This is something I only used to bother about when my internet connection stopped working and I needed to check if there was a problem from my end. All this [...]

Many tech savvy Internet users love RSS news feeds to keep up to date with the latest articles and news of their favorite websites. Unlike bookmarks however RSS news feeds cannot be checked for dead sites that do not get updated. Rarst posted a process on his own website that makes it possible to check [...]

My Internet Provider decided to capture data that I entered in a browser’s address bar that could not be resolved to an Internet address and provide me with their own search interface instead of the default one that I enabled in the browsers. This is one of those sneaky moves that makes me want to [...]

The voice over IP client Skype never got off the radar of privacy activists. There were always rumors about backdoors in the voice communication software and that several organizations were able to record calls made by Skype users although Skype claimed otherwise. Skype messages were in the focus of privacy groups since first news about [...]

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 [...]

If anyone is not already convinced that DRM is bad for the customer after seeing major companies like Google, Yahoo or MSN pull the plug on their DRM servers then Walmart’s decision to do the same might convince you finally. Walmart started selling music back in August 2007. The music was protected by DRM for [...]

Using the Internet to send print jobs to another computer that has a printer connected to it is usually more comfortable than trying to install the printer as a network device in a network. Share Printer software makes it as easy as possible to send a print job to another computer and connected printer. It [...]

Saving network bandwidth is important for those users who are subscribed to a data plan that gives them a certain amount of Gigabytes per month that they can transfer freely. If they reach the limit they either have to pay for additional data transfers or live with reduced connection speeds which are both unpleasant side [...]

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 [...]