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 [...]

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 [...]

Rapidshare is still one of the most popular file hosting solutions on the Internet although their latest changes to the system have angered many long time users of the service. The reduction of the daily download quota for Rapidshare premium users and the speed decrease for free users are the two main points that have [...]

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 [...]

Precious bandwidth. Many providers try everything in their power to make their customers who are on an unlimited plan or flatrate to reduce their monthly bandwidth usage which is quite the irony. The webhosting world is marching to the same tune for a very long time. One company seems to be at the center of [...]

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 following article explains why it is a good idea to research potential web hosting companies before making business with them. This is a real story. You might have noticed that the Grand Effect toolbar spilled out 404 errors. I removed the toolbar from top after checking with the main website to find out that [...]

Website Caching is a technique to reduce the server load by sending visitors of the website static pages instead of dynamic ones. A normal request would query the database of the website and run all the commands references in the php files. That’s usually not a huge problem unless your website gets hit by a [...]

Josh is a freelance blogger and trying to start his own over at extendably.com – check it out! Like most people, my first experience with blogs was on Blogger.com. Within about a day it peed me off and I decided to check out this ‘WordPress’ thing everyone was going on about. After trying WordPress.com I [...]

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 [...]

RIP – Remove It Permanently – is a Firefox add-on that adds options to remove elements on websites permanently. Elements can be pretty much anything from headers, images, advertisement, forms to flash content. Want Google without the Google logo? Digg without advertisement and user comments? RIP can do that for you and much more. Two [...]

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 [...]

NetTools is another server monitoring software that shows promise. The main advantage of NetTools is at the same time its biggest disadvantage. The software program runs on a Windows computer which means that it’s virtually impossible to let it monitor servers 24/7 unless the computer is always on. The Server Monitoring Software however is offering [...]

Yahoo Pipes is a very sophisticated online tool which might look intimidating at first glance but which provides a great interface that requires minimal input to create astonishing results. One major use of Yahoo Pipes is the customization of RSS News Feeds. It does not really matter if one RSS News Feed or multiple should [...]

Each webmasters has fears that his websites are getting hacked or that the server goes down. Happening usually in a moment when the webmaster is unaware of the problem (sleeping time). Server Monitoring can ease the mind of webmasters quite a bit. I have already covered the server monitoring service that I’m using to monitor [...]

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 [...]

Is it just me, or are internet memes trying to hard these days? An internet meme refers to some kind of “catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person”. A few which I can think of off the top of my head are rickrolling, the ‘Fail Whale’ and references to ‘bitchmemes’. Many good [...]

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 [...]

Yes that is no type there in the title of this article. The website FaceSaerch offers a face search interface and search engine that displays pictures of people that it found while looking for the phrase that the user has entered. It is a bit surprising that the search box accepts not only names but [...]

If you visit private websites, those that are not related to your work, at your workplace you have to be careful. Most companies will react on private web surfing which could lead to a kick in the butt and the search for a new job. It’s not only the supervisors that have to be taken [...]

With all the new fangled torrent search engines available out there, it’s easy for new users to BitTorrent to get confused. After all, learning how the software works can be hard enough and then having to learn about its different search engines can be even more cumbersome. Welcome to Speckly. The torrent search engine for [...]

While I do have Twitter, Facebook and several other accounts I barely use them and cannot see a real gain for using them extensively. Quite the opposite. Still, I was invited by Joe from Webby’s World to Kwippy which from first looks seems to be some sort of Twitter clone. It is currently in private [...]

Coccinella is an interesting chat client that brings new features and lots of customization to the table. If you want to compete in the Instant Messenger market you either need backing of a major player or provide users with features that they cannot find elsewhere. The client Coccinella takes the second path by adding new [...]

If you are experiencing a bad sound quality in the voice over IP software skype you might want to try the following. This can be a quite complex problem but one thing that can really do the trick is to delete the file shared.xml which contains host cache information which is basically a list of [...]

A new attack, dubbed Gifar by their creators named after the two file types that they mixed to create the attack (Gif and Jar), was mentioned in a Black Hat Sneak Preview article over at ZDnet. While not everything was revealed in that preview article it mentioned that the developers were able to combine two [...]

Humans are not good with numbers. At least not many are. That’s why the DNS, the Domain Name System, is in place. It translates the addresses that we enter in the browser to IP addresses that the computer understands. A DNS lookup of google.com would result in the IP 72.14.207.99 (among others) and you can [...]

Blogger Backup provides users who have a Blogger account and website with an option to backup their Blogger blog. If you run a blog at blogspot you probably wondered how you can backup the articles that you have written. That could be useful for several reasons, one possible scenario would be to move the blog [...]

The Download Squad is one of my favorite technology blogs along with Lifehacker, Cybernet News and a few others. Recently though activities came almost to a halt. Brad Linder (also Liliputting a mobile computing blog), one of the major writers for the Download Squad and the rest of the team seemed to have stopped writing [...]

Favtape has received some news coverage lately and basically everything that can be said has been said about this website where users can share their favorited and bookmarked songs of their Last.fm and Pandora accounts. Well the service got updated a while ago and is now displaying the top songs of every year from 1901 [...]

I just send a letter to your ISP telling them that you are sharing files. I did not have to prove my claims because I’m in high standing. Your Internet Service Provider is now sending a DCMA takedown notice / a warning letter / a three-strikes-and-you-are-out letter to the owner of the IP that has [...]

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 NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, partnered up with the well respected Internet Archive to provide access to a huge collection of pictures and videos of a total of 21 different collections. The non profit organization will administrate the collection which is expected to go live in the coming week. Lo and Behold the [...]

The well respected German website Heise Online has fueled speculations about a backdoor that is implemented in the Voice over IP software Skype. According to Heise the Austrian interior minister revealed at a conference with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services that they were able to listen [...]

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 [...]

Amazon Watcher is a handy application to monitor availability and changes of items at the six Amazon stores. Users can feed Amazon Watcher with full urls to Amazon items, their ASIN or ISBN-10. The product will then be loaded into the application with a preview image if available and the user can configure Amazon Watcher [...]

After a $500 million “Wow Starts Now” campaign completely bombed Microsoft went awfully quiet and let the public, the tech community and Apple noisily tear Vista to pieces. Understandably of course, there where a lot of serious issues with Vista’s release, nothing we hadn’t seen before, but issues nonetheless. It’s safe to say that 2 [...]

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 [...]

If you are administrating your own dedicated server you should monitor it 24/7 to make sure that it is running smoothly and be able to react immediately when something unforeseen happens. The motherboard of one of my rootservers died just a few days ago and several of my websites where not accessible for a few [...]

Phone Providers are making lots of cash from SMS, the Short Messaging Service. It’s interesting in my opinion that they charge that much for such a small data transfer. A new trend that they probably do not like that much is the addition of new technologies that create free or low cost connections to the [...]

The WordPress developers have released version 2.6 of their blogging plattform almost one month ahead of schedule and while some users might be excited to update their blogs and test the new features I’m always a bit taken back by those updates because it means that I have to spend a few hours updating my [...]

Google Alerts are a great way of keeping in touch with certain changes in the Google index. This can be used to track keywords, news, a favorite device or celebrity and anything else that is indexed by Google. The user can define a few parameters including the interval in which the alerts are send out [...]

As I read my feeds each day I see a whole lot of great little tech tips coming through, and often I want to share them, but that would mean either stretching a whole post out for just one little tip and that’s pretty lame. So I decided something along the lines of what Martin [...]

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 [...]

Every operating system comes with a calculator that provides access to basic arithmetic functions and probably some additional ones like base conversions and some functions of a scientific calculator. They usually do lack some features like a history function in combination with an option to use results from history for new calculations. The Online Calculator [...]

The best Usenet provider Giganews has announced that they will be starting to raise the Binary retention from 200 days to 240 days which equals 8 months by year’s end. This once again puts them ahead of the pack of Usenet (Newsgroup) providers. The Binary part of the Usenet are mainly those groups in the [...]