April 2009Monthly Archives

I’m obviously not the first person to write a list of WordPress plugins. However, I use some pretty interesting plugins (specifically a couple that I have not really noticed on other lists), so I thought it would be fun to take a little time to talk about fifteen of the best WordPress plugins I use. Hopefully, you will find a couple that you haven’t checked out before!

Google last week touted the benefits and ease of switching to IPv6, the next generation internet protocol, while the IT world in general remains resolutely indifferent about the technology.

the massive shift towards the iPhone and its application store is such a powerful movement, we can’t deny the power of what this combination can bring to people who rely on being mobile while working.

Personally, iPhone applications have changed the way I live each day – from fun to productivity. This is true for many of us that work on the web. So, look at this both as a list of possible tools for current iPhone users, as well as a reference for other phone users to consider if they aren’t happy with the phone – and more importantly, the productivity system – they already have.

today, Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra confirmed the company is moving all of its web-based business apps to HTML 5, so that, in part, these apps are suited to devices with intermittent internet access. Gundotra was speaking at tech-book publisher Tim 2.O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, California.

Timetoast, an attractive tool for creating interactive timelines to commemorate anything from the big events in your child’s life to the history of NASA. Not only does Timetoast help people create timelines, but it also allows people to add details, photos, and links to help flesh out the timeline. It’s simply an effective way to record and share memories and events.

There's certainly no shortage of means to customize your Android experience, but there's few tweaks as innovative as this new Eyes-Free shell developed by Charles Chen and T.V. Raman., which makes the handset more accessible to the blind, or anyone simply looking to make a call without having to divert their attention.

Gives you the ability to add a short video to your actual Twitter profile in a matter of seconds. You video can be up to 30 seconds & will play in a floating bubble video player that pops & vanishes once the video is over. Once creating a BubbleTweet message, you will be provided with a unique BubbleTweet URL that you can send to your followers. Your video can only be seen by those who visit your unique link.

Astrophotographer Tyler Allred took this amazing new image of the Andromeda Galaxy, which just appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune. Today's new space porn also includes Jupiter's shrinking spot, digitally-restored moon pics, and an exoplanet.

The following article is a list of AJAX Cheat Sheets & Quick Reference Guides for AJAX Web Designers, Web Programmers, Coders & for Web developers for Quick coding with AJAX. These are very helpful for those of us who haven’t memorized all of the AJAX functions, classes, properties, etc.

WA switched over last weekend, but now it’s the turn of the other daylight saving states, with clocks going back an hour at 3am on Sunday. No more curtain fading! –>

I received an email today from someone who has recently immigrated to Australia from the UK and is renting a house in the Adelaide hills. They would like to grow some food and wonder how on earth they get started, when, in his own words, Neil says he has never grown anything in his life. Having myself recently spent some time in France, with an Englishman, trying to grow vegetables, I feel I can perhaps understand how daunting it must be to attempt to grow anything in such a different climate, without some help. So, Neil and family, here is something to help you make a start.

When it comes to cheap mobile broadband access, nobody beats 3. But the problem is that their coverage map isn't exactly extensive, and as soon as you roam off onto Telstra's 2G network, you start paying through the nose (and every other orifice you have). We knew that they had cut a deal with Telstra to improve that figure (and their effective network coverage) last year, but Whirlpool has just gotten its hands on some leaked pricing and while it's an improvement, it still doesn't quite fit the "affordable" ethos we've come to expect from 3.

While its merger process with Vodafone rumbles along, 3 is still pushing ahead with plans to allow roaming onto Telstra’s Next G network. If a leaked price list is to be believed, that change will also make its data services somewhat more affordable.

DiggBar, which launched today, is a fantastic Digg utility that travels with you when you click external links from Digg. Additionally, when you’re browsing the Web, you can just type in “digg.com/” in front of any page URL and it will reload with a short Digg URL and show the feature-rich DiggBar.

With all the different ways to present a news story online, many often ask how they should select the multimedia tool that is best for a particular story. There is never any concrete answer, but with the multimedia picker embedded below, you can at least have an idea of which technology will work best to showcase a story or idea.

One of the main reasons to use Gmail (Gmail reviews) over competitive webmail products or a client like Outlook is because of its lightning fast search capabilities. Today, those capabilities are getting a bit of an upgrade, in the form of auto-complete when searching, plus easier options for finding emails with specific attributes like file attachments.

When we first reviewed Glue, the browser plugin that connects people looking at similar Web content, I wrote that “even moreso than many other services, to be really useful, Glue is going to need to have a big-time user base.”

That’s because in order for Glue to be useful, you need multiple people in your Glue network to have stumbled upon or reviewed similar content online, like a book or movie.

Today, Glue is taking a big step in addressing this problem, allowing users to import their Twitter and Facebook contacts

Everything about Jupiter is super-sized, including its colorful, turbulent atmosphere. But there's fresh evidence that one of the planet's most recognizable features, the Great Red Spot, is shrinking.

With more and more social sites popping up on the Web, your preferred username is becoming directly entangled with your social identify. The reality is that it’s becoming a priority to claim your username everywhere.

So how do you know if your username is available on most social sites? You could try each site individually, or you could check 76 of them all at the same site with namechk

They're back; Google has restored the tethering applications pulled from the Android Market earlier this week. What, can't you see them? That's because you live in the US.

Open Culture has a comprehensive list of totally free resources for anyone looking to learn a language though audio files. Whether you’re brushing up your Yiddish or delving into Dutch, you’ll find a free feed here.

I'm of two minds about K-9, Doctor Who's robot dog: on the one hand, I love him. On the other, his advent signaled Who's massive decline. Both sides of me hate this K-9 spinoff trailer.

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has begun distancing himself from his controversial internet censorship policy in what one internet industry engineer has dubbed "the great walkback of 2009".

If you’re like me – a tinkerer and tweaker – you might be interested in ways to fine-tune your profile for maximum affect. So here are five tips to optimize your activities on Facebook, including the right way to create profile and thumbnail graphics, how to show different content to Fans and non-Fans, creating DIY vanity urls, and how managing what and when you post can lead to greater success.

Linux, Mac, or Windows with Cygwin: If you’ve ever needed to display your public IP address, or wanted to add it to your customised desktop with Geektool, a simple command has you covered.

If you already have a fence or railing available, there is a simple and cheap way to turn them into extra growing spaces in your garden.

Web site Ping.fm creates a single entry point for updating all of your social networks in one fell swoop, from Twitter and Facebook to AIM and GTalk.

I find it indispensible!

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox launched its Personas theming extension nearly a year ago, but now there’s a big, search-able repository that instantly applies themes for previewing.

I’ve been so taken with HiRISE lately that I haven’t written much about the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. They’ve been traversing Mars for almost six years now, taking tons of images and great in situ data. And now I feel remiss, because Spirit has stumbled on something very cool.

These images were taken on Sol 1858, just a few days ago (a Sol is a day on Mars, about a half hour longer than an Earth day). Spirit has been tooling around a high plateau called Home Plate, because it’s shaped like, well, a home plate in baseball. There’s evidence that water flowed in this area a long time ago, and as I looked over the images it was pretty obvious. Check out this first one:

This month's Red Dwarf revival may only be the start, according to one of the show's stars. But the start of what, exactly, he's not quite sure…

Dropbox is a very popular online storage service which provides 2GB of free space to store all your files, and selectively share them with the public. What is really nice about Dropbox is that it provides tools which integrates with Windows, Linux and Mac OSX and makes uploading and downloading files to and from your Dropbox, and act as a conduit for backing up all your important files – a seamless affair.

Okay, we knew the fly-headed guy couldn't possibly be the true threat in the Doctor Who special, "Planet Of The Dead," airing April 11. He's in this new trailer, but so are the awful Swarm…

Looks like Joe the Plumber’s campaigning against the Employee Free Choice Act in Pennsylvania didn’t go so well.

One, two, three…AWWWWW, diddums. Warhol called mate, your 15 minutes is long overdue to be up.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has advocated open-source and industry standards as a way to prevent vendor lock-in in the nebulous cloud computing market.

yay!

With Myebook users can create their own e-book from scratch or PDF, incorporate a myriad of file types into their books, drag-and-drop assets, browse and effortlessly flip through other e-books, and connect with other members.

Today 6 men will be locked in a small space capsule together for three months to test the psychological effects of a prolonged space flight. Because a trip to Mars might take a year and a half to three years, this test just scrapes the surface of the potentially harrowing experience of living in a tiny space with five relative strangers for years.

To enhance the realism of the test, the test subjects – including Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Sergei Ryazansky, along with two Europeans and two other Russians – will have all the food and supplies they need packed in with them. They can bring personal effects like books, DVDs, and laptops, but all communications with the outside world will be time-delayed by 20 minutes, just as they would be if their ship were in Martian orbit.

Since the dawn of time, geeks have been playing harmless pranks on their beloved (but unsuspecting) associates, and it’s up to all of us to carry the torch forward. On the eve of April Fools’ Day, when you’ve got local network access to your coworkers’ and family systems, cubicles just crying out to be filled with packing peanuts, and webapps that can do all sorts of things automatically, there’s no better time to baffle, confuse, perplex, and just plain mess with your loved ones and associates. Hit the jump for our top 10 favourite harmless geek pranks.

Firefox only: Gmail’s powerful filters and labels make it great for organizing, but when you have multiple labels assigned to a message the subject barely fits on the screen—unless you auto-hide them with a script.

The Conficker worm has infected millions of Windows computers—and one variant is set to be unleashed on April 1st, 2009. Here’s what you need to know to keep yourself safe.

Looks like According to several readers and our very own Lifehacker Gmail account, Google has finally started a wide rollout of themes in Google Apps Gmail—so now all of the very cool Gmail themes are now an option for Google Apps users.

NASA gave visitors to the National Mall in Washington a peek at a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft designed to carry U.S. astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars one day.

It's time for an OpenOffice.org benchmark rematch. Go-oo has been proudly boasting it is "Better, Faster, Freer," but last time when we tested OpenOffice.org 2.4, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Since then Go-oo developers addressed some problems, and now we're checking a new version 3.0 and adding benchmarks on Windows.

Turn a boring old spreadsheet into an interactive web-based map, timeline, or table with some simple HTML using the free, open source Exhibit project. Exhibit takes data sets up to about 500 rows, plots locations on a Google Map, dates on an interactive timeline, and displays images and links in a tabular or thumbnail view. The viewer can sort, search, and filter data in any Exhibit view without reloading the page. You can make Exhibit do all this with a single HTML file and a spreadsheet–no hardcore programming required.

HP, Lenovo, and Dell haven't fared too badly in some of Greenpeace's previous e-waste reports, but it looks like three companies have fallen well short of the organization's expectations this time around, with each getting called out for failing to live up to their promises.

"Electronic Arts has posted a SecuROM de-authorization management tool. Once downloaded, the tool will search your drives for EA games infested with the draconian online DRM system, and help you download their respective individual de-activation tools. This isn't a perfect solution, since it's still possible to run out of activations in the event of hardware failure or other source of data loss, but since the announcement that this particular DRM system will be dropped for The Sims 3 , it would seem that EA has had a minor epiphany about DRM."

Today the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) published documents online showing that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) killed 95 percent of the adoptable pets in its care during 2008. Despite years of public outrage over its euthanasia program, the animal rights group kills an average of 5.8 pets every day at its Norfolk, VA headquarters.

Apple has helpfully created a knowledge base article describing the process for creating an App Store account sans credit card.

Even if you are really familiar with Photoshop, you’ll always find ways to master and evolve your skills further. I’ve compiled a ton of Photoshop articles which will give you different tips on how to use and improve your Photoshop skills, as well as teach you some new techniques that you may not know.

As a web designer, achieving efficiency in your workflow will have a significant impact on your success. Fortunately, there are a number of great resources that have been created with the intent of making your life easier and your work quicker and more effective.

Here are a few of the SQL Server scripts that we use quite regularly with our projects. They are mainly for administration and maintenance purposes with a nice "Distance Between Points" function thrown in. If you can think of any more great scripts feel free to suggest them in the comments

When designing a website stock photography can sometimes play a big roll. With all the commercial stock photo sites out there, it’s sometimes hard to find the ones that offer quality images free

Wonderful solutions:)