If English is not your native language you might have encountered some words that you did not know how to pronounce correctly. How would you pronounce zealously or eligibility for instance if you never heard the words before ? Even in the English language family words are pronounced differently depending on the region of the speaker. A Scott pronounces word different than someone from San Francisco.

If you want to get a impression how a speaker from the United States would pronounce a word you should visit the How J Say website. The site has a list of over 50000 English words and phrases that have been recorded and can be listened to right on the website. You can either type in a word that you want pronounced or browse the complete list of words and phrases available.

continue reading "How to say it"

If you have a website or blog you may have found yourself contemplating a typical dilemma: how to publish your email address for your audience to contact you without having your email address fall prey to the numerous spam bots harvesting websites for emails.

The answer to this question for some blogging platforms might come in the form of a "contact form" plugin, but what if your particular platform does not support one, or the contact form for whatever reason does not work as you intended?. For me, the answer lay in simply re-writing my email in a non-email format (e.g. myname[at]mydomain.com) — until I found Emailcloaker, that is.

continue reading "Cloak your Email with Emailcloaker"

Youtube Sunday it seems. We all know that Youtube likes to cooperate with everyone who looks a bit like authority and takes down videos pretty fast. It does not always have to be copyright infringement, it can also be original works of art that some authorities like the Turkish or Thai government want removed from Youtube pressuring the site with a countrywide ban. (man I love the Turkish interpretation of Democracy and free speech)

It is apparently even easier. A 15 year old Australian boy send a fake takedown notice to Youtube pretending to be a representative of the Australian Broadcast Company. He requested the takedown of hundreds of videos from a popular comedy show. Guess what ? Youtube reacted immediately and removed the videos and even send a message to the users who uploaded the videos threatening them with a ban if they would continue to upload copyrighted videos.

continue reading "Youtube obeys fake takedown request"

Now that is what I call a niche search engine. Youtube is big, sometimes to big to find what you are looking for. Peter created a simple interface to search over 150000 music videos that are currently hosted on Youtube. The videos are embedded in the page as well which makes it probably the fastest method to search for music videos on Youtube. I’m not exactly sure how he managed to get all those videos in this database or if he used a script to do it, lots of work nevertheless.

The interface makes it possible to either play one of the videos that are currently listed on the frontpage, search for a band or song or use the random button to generate a listing of random clips pulled from the database. If you do search for a band or song you should make sure that you use phrases to match the songs. If I wanted to find Fear of the Dark from Iron Maiden I would enter the title and not only fear in the search field.

continue reading "Watch 150000 Youtube Music Videos"

Relakks
encrypts all traffic from your computer to the Internet by using a VPN connection which means that your real IP is not revealed on the Internet at all. The service had serious troubles in the beginning; users were unable to connect to Relakks at all, had slow connections and email support was terrible. Well, they apparently are making a comeback by emailing past users inviting them to freely test Relakks once again for seven days without charges.

I decided to try it out once again and was able to sign up again with their service. You have to configure a new VPN connection in your operating system which is explained in the faq section of their website. Details are provided for Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and Mac OS X. Even beginners should be able to create a VPN connection this way. You can now choose to automatically use Relakks whenever you connect to the Internet or manually activate the service, I decided to use it manually but it does not make a difference as long as the service is running.

continue reading "Relakks makes a comeback"