Category: Utilities

Utils

Apple iBook. First impressions.

Apple iBook 12" It has been a couple of days since I collected my iBook from the store. Mind you, it is my first personally owned Mac. And it has been fun exploring a new OS and fiddling with all the options on the machine. In fact it still is fun. 🙂

Everything I’ve thrown at it so far worked nicely, differently, but nicely. It’s just a matter of getting used to. And I’m already so used to it, that this morning I automatically went for Command+W to close a window on my Windows machine. 😉 (I find Mac OS X more keyboard centric, despite its GUI, than Windows)

But what struck me most was the reactions of family, friends and co-workers. Just a few quotes: “Apple? You weren’t into Mac before…”, “Cool! I want one too!”, “Aaaaaaahhh a Mac!?!?!?! Are you nuts?” and “Yay! He’s one of us now.” I don’t know why, but mentioning you’ve bought a Mac leads to some frowns in a Windows world. Not in a bad sense though. 😉

Anyway, let me clarify things. NO I DID NOT SWITCH!!! I have NOT left the M$ Windows world. Give me one good reason why I should?

Continue reading “Apple iBook. First impressions.”

Pingoat – The stable of all pings

Pingoat is a new ping-service, since the 21st of July. Or as they put it:

What in the world is Pingoat! ?
Pingoat is a service that pings or notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog’s popularity.

I’m giving it a try because Pingomatic is down to often. So, as much as this is news, it’s a test. Let’s see how this one fares. 🙂
I’ve replaced the ping-option in WordPress with ‘http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2’. See the Pingoat RPC help.

Google Sitemap creator

But wait, there’s more fun. For those who use blog software that can’t generate sitemaps they offer a Google Sitemap creator. Just enter your URL and Pingoat will create a sitemap. It even has the option of uploading the sitemap to your domain using FTP and pinging Google in the process. What more do you want?

Update: Well, I see the usual bots drop by and some I haven’t seen before. So the ping must have worked. 🙂

Exploring the earth from your couch

I must admit I have somewhat of an addiction to Google Earth. Especially with all the user input from around the globe. There are literally thousands of eyes scouring the earth for interesting spots or as they are called, placemarks. Resulting in hours of hopping from placemark to placemark. And discovering some of your own (and bothering your friends with them). 🙂

It’s easy to forget that Google Earth wasn’t the first. There are other free tools around. Let’s see:

NASA World Wind

World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.

Or if you’re fed up with earth:

Celestia

The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

If you live in The Netherlands you may want to take a look at:

TerraExplorer

De TerraExplorer is een innovatieve uitbreiding van de Internetbrowser die uw PC verandert in een krachtig visualisatiemiddel. Internetbezoekers kunnen zo volledig interactief door fotorealistische, driedimensionale landschappen navigeren, de zogenaamde ‘digitale maquettes’. Met deze gebruikersvriendelijke, gratis ‘plug-in’ TerraExplorer heeft u toegang tot adembenemende visualisaties.

Talk Digger – Blogpost Metasearch

Talk Digger is a (beta) service that let’s you search for your blogposts instantaneously in the likes of Bloglines, Technorati, BlogPulse, PubSub, Icerocket, Feedster, BlogDigger, MSN Search and Google. It returns the number of occurrences with details on click and a trend. You can use a bookmarklet, enter a URL or make a direct link.

Try it for yourself or see the result for this post (probably none ;-)).

Small is better

As you may or may not know currently my trusty workhorse is in repair. Unfortunately it doubled as my ‘personal’ laptop. During the day I worked on it for my clients and in the evening I did some personal stuff (mostly browsing). The past week I had to rely on e.g. my girlfriend going to bed early so I could abuse her system. 🙁

This got me thinking. As ‘my’ laptop may return today or tomorrow or whenever. How about a system I could use for some browsing/blogging/etc. from the couch? A secondary up to date laptop with a small form factor. Something like a 12″ Apple iBook. 🙂
Added bonus: As a I develop on wintel I always have to ask Mac-people to check my work for me. Owning a Mac myself would surely help.

Continue reading “Small is better”

Tagzania – Tagging the planet

Someone must have thought: “What’s cool these days? Flickr, del.icio.us, tagging, folksonomy, Google Maps, RSS, KML, … What if I combined these?” Enter Tagzania. Geotagging using the Google Maps API. Or as they put it:

Tagzania Logo

Tagzania is about tags and places. If you register and log in, you can add places, points, to create and document your maps. When you add a point, you may tag it with keywords. That way, Tagzania is not only a place to build and keep your own maps, shared territories are created as well.

For an example see my map (RSS) (KML).

(Thanks Tijs)

Yahoo! Finance & Corporate Egosurfing

Yahoo! Finance now offers Company News via RSS. Great for some Corporate Egosurfing. 🙂

Just go to the Yahoo! – Company News via RSS page, enter your stock symbol or symbols and cut & paste the generated feed in your aggregator of choice.

See also: Corporate Egosurfing, or how to get market info for free.

Firefox webdeveloper survival kit

Today and probably the rest of the week I’ll have to work on a loaner. The trusty laptop has to go into shop for scrutiny and hopefully some repairs. 🙁 In the meanwhile I’m looking at this barren desktop of a semi-fresh Windows XP. I’m wondering, how am I going to cram Photoshop, Dreamweaver and the rest of my stuff on this 10Gigs of HD. Not mentioning the 256Megs they will be fighting for. 😉

Laptop trouble Well, the first thing I installed, you’ve guessed it right, was <blink>Firefox</blink>. 🙂 How else am I gonna survive? It took me a whole 10 minutes to get up and running. Including installing the much needed extensions to complete the survival kit.

So here’s what I define as the ‘webdeveloper survival kit‘:

Continue reading “Firefox webdeveloper survival kit”

Revelations part 1

What a day!

First there will be no Firefox 1.1. Nope. Instead they decided to skip 1.1 and go for 1.5 at once. Well it actually still is 1.1 but the features warrant a 1.5 bump up. Are you following me still? 1.1 = 1.5, 1.5 = 2.0 and 2.0 = 3.0. Anyway, no real update untill september, or so they say…

Then there’s the news of the new name for Longhorn, the next Windows. It will be called, brace yourself…, Windows Vista. Come on! SP1 = Buena Vista, SP2 = Social Club?

The world must be coming to an end…