DigitalHobbit

Up till now I’ve never really gotten that much into social networking applications. I joined Tribe.net about 3 years ago but haven’t really checked in for 2 years. I steered clear of MySpace so far…

But yesterday I went on a bit of a social networking spree and decided to sign up for a few services: [...]

Earlier this month, version 1.5 of the OSX Camino browser was released. Camino is based on the same Mozilla rendering engine as Firefox, but unlike Firefox, Camino behaves much more like a native OSX application, without a lot of the overhead (such as the XUL user interface) that Firefox brings with it.

Ever since I started [...]

Today, Google Maps launched the new Street View feature, and I’m very impressed (no, even though I work at Google I had not seen this until now). Street View gives you a 360 degree panoramic view of the chosen location. You can use the mouse to turn around, virtually walk up or down the street, [...]

With relatively little fanfare, Firefox 2.0 was released last week. (Yes, I know, IE 7 was also released recently. Does anybody actually still use IE???)

Firefox 2.0 brings some very nice improvements. My favorite feature is session recovery. Although Firefox is generally pretty stable, it nevertheless suffers the occasional crash. Thanks to session recovery, it [...]

Here’s a cool way of using Google to find MP3s. Essentially, it’s a simple matter of using a query like the following:

intitle:index.of “mp3″ +”Keyword” -htm -html -php -asp “Last Modified”

(replace Keyword with the name of an artist, song, etc.)

There are a whole bunch of similar (and other) Google tricks on this website.

Update: The following two [...]

Ever since Yahoo announced to buy the social bookmarking service del.icio.us about a week ago, it has been plagued with instability. More often than not, I get an error message when I try to access the website. At the time of this writing I am getting the following error: “del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. [...]

Firefox 1.5 has been released. You can grab it here. Some of the new features are improved popup blocking (I am curious about this one, now that some sites have figured out how to circumvent the previous version’s popup blocker), drag & drop tab reordering, noticeably faster navigation using the Back and Forward buttons, and [...]

Google has just released a beta version of their RSS Reader. I gave it a quick whirl, but so far it hasn’t blown me away. In typical Google style, the layout and UI is nice and clean (and very similar to Gmail). Contrary to other aggregators (such as Bloglines), Google Reader only displays a single [...]

It looks like Google has launched another service without much fanfare. Gmail’s “New Features” list modestly advertises the new service as “Personalize the Google homepage”, but it looks pretty much like a full featured portal. You can choose which content to display on the home page. Available choices include Gmail (top N messages), weather, stocks, [...]

Gmail just keeps getting better. I’ve been using it for about half a year now, and I’ve been extremely satisfied with it. But a few days ago, they added another very useful feature: It is now possible to associate your Gmail account with one or more other email addresses (verification required) and specify those in [...]

The name may sound a little dirty, but Greasemonkey is a superb Firefox extension that acts as a decorator and allows you to customize the look and feel as well as the behavior of any website you visit by means of custom Javascript files.

If you know Javascript, you can write your own scripts - or [...]

Ken Adams left a comment for my previous posting about my CafePress store and recommended that I check out Spreadshirt instead. After checking out their website, I am pretty impressed. Spreadshirt operates pretty much the same way as CafePress, which means that you can either create a design for yourself and order your own items, [...]

I’ve been playing a little with CafePress. I have to say it’s a pretty cool concept, and very powerful. My daughter Julianna is drawing the cutest pictures these days, and I thought I’d use that opportunity to put my scanner to good use and upload some of those pictures to CafePress.

Check out my CafePress store.

So [...]

I have not tried it yet, but according to this article, Podcasting is really taking off and supposedly already reaching 6 million adults in the US.

For those of you who are not familiar with this term, here’s the Wikipedia definition for “Podcasting”.

One of the original Podcasting websites, iPodder.org, has a huge list of available Podcasts, [...]

A little over a week ago, I switched to Gmail, and I’d like to report that I’m very happy with it so far. It is very fast and easy to use, and ideal for accessing the same email account from several different computers (such as my workstation at work, as well as my desktop and [...]

After changing my personal emai strategy over the weekend by switching to Gmail, I was motivated to change the way I handle email at work as well. I am currently using Ximian Evolution 1.4 (which has recently become Novell Evolution) on Linux, but I am not quite happy with it. Similar to the way OpenOffice [...]

I’ve been thinking about a better email strategy. About 8 years or so ago, when I was still using my university’s email account, I signed up for a forwarding address from Bigfoot (which at the time was still free and without any limitations). This allowed me to keep using the same email address until now, [...]

A while ago I mentioned GmailFS. I still have not had a chance to try it, but now that I use Linux at work there’s even more reason to give it a shot.

A similar tool now exists for Windows users: GMail Drive. Definitely worth a look.

I wonder how much effort Google will put into disabling [...]

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced plans to establish free Wi-Fi Internet access for everybody in San Francisco. Parts of the city, including Union Square, already offer this service.

(via The Wireless Weblog)

This BoingBoing entry mentions a new product designed to block BitTorrent packets. Apparently the developer (Akonix) is getting companies to buy and deploy this product by spreading lies about the BitTorrent application and protocol, saying that it causes users to inadvertently share sensitive files.

Sounds like a silly product in the first place, as a few [...]