Thursday, December 07, 2006
AOL Launches AIM Share Social Bookmarking
It's an interesting combination of IM and social bookmarking since new finds are shared in real-time, giving AIM Share more of a collaborative feel than, say, del.icio.us.

Labels: Technology
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007
For the most part, the new formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 are just elaborations of current ones plus one extra letter. They are the following:
Microsoft Office Word 2007
• Word 2007 document (*.docx)
• Word 2007 macro-enabled document (*.docm)
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• PowerPoint 2007 presentation (*.pptx)
• PowerPoint 2007 macro-enabled presentation (*.pptm)
• PowerPoint 2007 template (*.potx)
• PowerPoint 2007 macro-enabled template (*.potm)
• PowerPoint 2007 show (*.ppsx)
• PowerPoint 2007 macro-enabled show (*.ppsm)
Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Excel 2007 binary workbook (*.xlsb)
• Excel 2007 workbook (*.xlsx)
• Excel 2007 macro-enabled workbook (*.xlsm)
• Excel 2007 template (*.xltx)
• Excel 2007 macro-enabled template (*.xltm)
• Excel 2007 add-in (*.xlam)
Labels: Technology
Building a Search Bot for Kids


Labels: Technology
Make Me Move: Sell Your Home with Zillow
In the area of consumer empowerment, being able to quickly list your house online for free is nice. It certainly makes the allure of hiring a real estate agent lessen.

Zillow is innovating nicely and might even be able to eventually cut out the middle-person (real estate agent).
Labels: Technology
Experience Earth with Geojoey


Labels: Technology
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Reveal Passwords Hidden Under Asterisks
Download Asterisk Key

Labels: Technology
Running Firefox with 200 Extensions

Labels: Technology
24 Season 6 Prequel on YouTube
Labels: Technology
Sxipper Helps You Manage Your Online Identity

One thing I am concerned about is the size of the extension: it weighs in a 2.1 MB, which is huge for a Firefox extension. Given that Firefox has a built-in password manager, and there are alternative form fillers, you might want to pass this up if space and speed are concerns. If not, Sxipper looks like a nicely designed tool for more efficiently managing your online identity.
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Labels: Technology
Remove Internet Explorer 7 Search Bar

Microsoft never put an option in the settings for IE 7 to disable or remove it, but you can set a registry key to make it go away.Or, to do it the easy way, download their hide search bar utility.
If you open this key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Infodelivery\Restrictions
And create a dword value named "NoSearchBox" and set it to 1. The search box will be gone. Set it back to 0 and it will be back again.
Labels: Technology
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Online Version of MS Paint

Labels: Technology
Online Maps May Have Led Kim Family Astray
Terri Stone, an innkeeper at the Tu Tu Tun Lodge in Gold Beach, where the Kims were to have stayed the night of Nov. 25, said the Bear Camp Road is shown on some Internet road-direction sites as the best way to get to the coast from Grants Pass, but she advises against it.Many readers have probably discovered that online mapping sites like Google Maps are not 100% reliable. Typically, the shortest route is the one that's recommended, but this just goes to show that taking the shortest route isn't always optimal. Hopefully, some human judgment gets incorporated into the driving directions that are displayed.
Labels: Technology
Second Life Contributes to Global Warming?
So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark.Where does global warming fit in? Dave Douglas ran the figures and found that
...More narrowly still, the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.
looking at CO2 production, 1,752 kWH/year per avatar is about 1.17 tons of CO2. That's the equivalent of driving an SUV around 2,300 miles (or a Prius around 4,000)While there's nothing particularly new about the fact that data centers use exorbitant amounts of electricity, putting it in the context of Second Life does give it an interesting twist.
Labels: Technology
Restore Crashed Sessions in Internet Explorer with IERescuer
Going to the rescue, IERescuer extends Internet Explorer's functionality by incorporating Firefox 2-like session restoring capabilities. You can restore crashed sessions as well as save your current session for later retrieval. It'll be free for the next 9 hours from Giveaway of the Day. Note that you have to install and activate it today.
IERescuer

Labels: Technology
Pandora's Jar Saves MP3s from Pandora

The setup instructions are a little complicated, but you can set up a batch file to do it for you. It's also possible to integrate Last.fm so you can see artist bios, album art, and other track information.
Like similar MP3 downloading services, there's a quasi-legal justification for using Pandora's Jar: it's simply a timeshifting tool like a VCR.
[via Lifehacker]
Labels: Technology
Facebook Releases Firefox Toolbar

Now, Facebook is looking to take up part of your screen real estate with a Firefox toolbar that lets you search Facebook profiles, get notified about pokes, friend requests, and new messages, interact with your friends' profiles in a sidebar, and share links and media. One annoying "feature" is that notifications appear as pop-ups, but thankfully they can be turned off.
The toolbar is a simple way to increase the stickiness of their offerings by making sure that wherever users surf to, they'll be able to access and interact with their Facebook friends. I'm a little surprised that MySpace hasn't gotten around to the releasing a toolbar, but then again Facebook's toolbar came out of left field. It's also a sign that MySpace and Facebook are headed on different trajectories and might not be such direct competitors as originally thought. MySpace is trying to avoid doing anything that might interfere with their monumental success while Facebook is busy experimenting in order to catch up.
Labels: Technology
Monday, December 04, 2006
How'd You Say That with Howjsay

Labels: Technology
More Free MP3s with Online Music Recorder

Actually playing the files is trickier. Files are encrypted using an OMRKey so you'll need a piece of software called OMRDecoder to decrypt them. You'll also need to enter your account name and password to verify it's actually you. The process is a little long, but the end result is an MP3 file encoded at 128kbps.
[via P2P Blog]
Labels: Technology
AskCity Is Local Search with Snapshots, Drawing Tools, and More


Overall, AskCity is a nice addition to the array of local search options now available. It's easy to use and has loads of features that make it easy to find what you're looking for and share what you've found.
Labels: Technology
Microsoft Releases UniveRSS 3D RSS Reader

It leverages the Windows Presentation Foundation and provides a stunning way of visualizing RSS feeds and their content. It introduces a full-screen 3D universe where galaxies represent the folders of your RSS feed directory, and the stars are represented by the spinning cubes that hold the feed information. Size and position of the feed cubes indicate how many unread items they contain.While the visualization is cool, I'm not too sure how practical it would be to actually use UniveRSS on a day-to-day basis. Yes, it would be useful to visualize just how much stuff you haven't read in your RSS feed collection, but the approach seems too cumbersome when you actually want to read an item. The 3D approach is good for seeing the forest, but not the trees.
Three dimensional visualization has been seen before in Microsoft's impressive Photosynth project, which allows 3D reconstruction of a photo collection.
Labels: Technology
Anshe Chung is First Virtual Real Estate Millionaire in Second Life

The fortune Anshe Chung commands in Second Life includes virtual real estate that is equivalent to 36 square kilometers of land – this property is supported by 550 servers or land "simulators". In addition to her virtual real estate holdings, Anshe has "cash" holdings of several million Linden Dollars, several virtual shopping malls, virtual store chains, and she has established several virtual brands in Second Life. She also has significant virtual stock market investments in Second Life companies.Now, how soon do you think the German tax authorities come after Mrs. Graef's virtual assets?
Anshe Chung's achievement is all the more remarkable because the fortune was developed over a period of two and a half years from an initial investment of $9.95 for a Second Life account by Anshe's creator, Ailin Graef. Anshe/Ailin achieved her fortune by beginning with small scale purchases of virtual real estate which she then subdivided and developed with landscaping and themed architectural builds for rental and resale. Her operations have since grown to include the development and sale of properties for large scale real world corporations, and have led to a real life "spin off" corporation called Anshe Chung Studios, which develops immersive 3D environments for applications ranging from education to business conferencing and product prototyping.
Labels: Technology
Ripping Blu-ray Movies with Your PlayStation 3
Now that the PS3 can run full-blown Linux OS distributions like Yellow Dog Linux, Fedora Core (video), and others, users have found that ripping an exact copy of a Blu-ray movie (as well as PS3 games) is as easy as typing in the following command in the Terminal to create an ISO image: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/blu-raymovie.iso. Of course, once you've created the file, you can then burn a Blu-ray disc with the ISO image if you have an external Blu-ray burner handy or – most likely the case – just play the movie back from its hard drive or attached storage
Labels: Technology
Video Sharing Gets Scientific with JoVE

A sample video showing nuclear transfer in mouse oocytes is below:
Labels: Technology
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Convert Any File with Media Convert

Some interesting conversion suggestions I saw on the site include converting a PDF to a SWF Flash file for easy viewing on a webpage, capturing a website as an image (essentially screen-capturing it), and converting text to morse code.
Labels: Technology
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Million Dollar Homepage Creator Gets Into Lottery Business

What's interesting is that an arbitrage opportunity exists for smart advertisers who do decide to place an ad on the site. Since users have to click on every ad at least once to have a chance of winning, you're guaranteed a massive amount of traffic assuming Pixelotto takes off, which it has every chance to since $1 million is at stake, and a fair number of bloggers are writing about it. If even only a small percentage of visitors click on ads on your site, you can easily make back your original ad investment. Every user can only submit 10 entries a day, apparently, so depending on the length of the lottery, it might not be possible for a user to get through the entire ad inventory.
Tew has published this email letter about Pixelotto:
HiI have some very exciting news I’d like to share with you.
Next week, on 5th December, I am launching a new venture called ‘Pixelotto’.
It’s similar to The Million Dollar Homepage only this time I will be giving
away $1,000,000!It’s all based around pixel advertising and generating big traffic for
advertisers. Visitors play for free - all they have to do is click on the
ads for chances to win the jackpot. The more they click, the more chances
they have - and the more traffic you receive.As a valued customer of The Million Dollar Homepage, I’d like to give you an
exclusive opportunity to purchase advertising space on Pixelotto before the
site goes public. The world will be watching next week and this is your
chance to get on-board before everyone else.The following link will give you exclusive access to Pixelotto, where you
can buy ad space right now:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXx
If you have any questions don’t hesitate to e-mail me and my team at
info@pixelotto.comI look forward to welcoming you on-board for this new pixel adventure!
Cheers,
Alex Tew
Pixelotto
PixelottoPixelotto Limited is registered in England & Wales. Company no. 05972757
Labels: Technology
Free Physics, Computer Science, Engineering, and Biology Lecture Videos
Labels: Technology
Friday, December 01, 2006
Firefox Crop Circle Seen from Space

Planned in under two weeks and completed in under 24 hours, the crop circle had a final diameter of 220 feet. We constructed the circle in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky. Our team consisted of 12 people, mainly OSU students, and we carefully stomped down oats from 3:30pm Friday afternoon until 2:30am, putting on the finishing touches between 7:30am and 11:00am Saturday, August 12.More on the step-by-step creation of the crop circle.
To see it in more detail in Google Earth, you'll need the coordinates, (45.123785,-123.113962). An overlay for Google Earth is available here.
Labels: Technology
Report Spam to Google with Firefox Extension

Now, SpamReport fills in most of the fields for you, simplifying the process. However, I foresee this tool being used maliciously by webmasters looking to take out the competition. Adding a CAPTCHA to the form would be the easiest way to cut down on false reports.
Labels: Technology
Line Rider Gets Updated with New Features
You can see the new features in action below:
Labels: Technology
Download Free Movies From AOL Tomorrow
[via TechCrunch]
Labels: Technology
Create PDFs From Any Program with PDFCreator

Some other features:
- Security: Encrypt PDFs and protect them from being opened, printed etc.
- Send generated files via eMail
- Create more than just PDFs: PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, PS, EPS
- AutoSave files to folders and filenames based on Tags like Username, Computername, Date, Time etc.
- Merge multiple files into one PDF
Labels: Technology