Posted 11/05/09 at 05:00:00 PM by Florence Ion

Start pages aren’t always everyone’s forte when it comes to reading their favorite daily sites all on one page. Thankfully, there’s a web app for that. Feedweaver allows you to simply choose the most relevant RSS feed links, mash it in with 19 others you’re passionate about, and view them all on one glorious page as if they’re all one entity.

Read on to find out more! 

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Posted 10/29/09 at 05:45:02 PM by Florence Ion

Perhaps one of the most frustrating points of owning a printer comes down to what is actually getting printed. Driving directions always end up with a few extra pages barely containing even a sentence worth of ink, rendering the single sheet of paper practically useless. Fortunately, The Printliminator helps eradicate these exasperating situations by converting any webpage into an economical, simple to print document.

The Printliminator is a bookmarkable link that makes any webpage to print. Once you click the link, this simple tool shows up in the top right corner in your browser window with options to remove any extraneous elements from the page and irrelevant graphics for economical printing. You can select “Remove all Graphics” to quickly zap out any video previews and high-resolution color images.

 Read on for more details!

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Posted 10/28/09 at 08:39:08 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Google already knows more about you than you probably care to think about. In the not too distant future, they might also know about your power usage patterns. Google’s PowerMeter utility monitoring service has finally found its first partners. First Utility in the UK, and Yello Strom, a German utility, have both signed up to deliver customer usage data to Google (provided the customer agrees).

PowerMeter will collect electricity data every half hour and gas data once a day. Customers can view the aggregated data on the PowerMeter website where it will have been used to generate some nifty graphs and tables. Participating customers will receive the service at no charge.

The hope is that PoweMeter users will be more conscious of their energy use. Yello Strom executive director, Martin Vesper, said of the service, “When people know exactly what is going on with their energy usage, they can use energy efficiently without sacrificing convenience.” Google indicated that PowerMeter is a project from Google.org, Google’s philanthropic foundation. So, would you sign up if you could?

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Posted 10/27/09 at 02:24:21 PM by Bart Salisbury

Word has filtered out of the Google Wave Google Technology User Group’s London meeting that Google Wave will be opening an app store. The move, according to Zee over at The Next Web, signals Google’s commitment to this new technology, and provides encouragement for developers to expand Google Wave’s potential.

Google Wave is a real-time collaborative tool that permits groups to interactively ‘converse’ on a project, using richly formatted text, photos, videos and maps. Real-time here is taken to the extreme, with key-stokes shared among participants as they occur--no waiting for the press of a return key to send your thoughts along. The use of what Google calls “concurrency control technology” allows all participants in a wave to edit rich media at the same time.

Third-party developers have already come up with apps for teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and multiplayer gaming. The creation of an app store, similar to what Apple has done for iPhone apps, would provide additional incentive to developers to produce new, innovative add-ons for the Wave environment.

Other news from the London meeting includes Google’s plans to have an extension gallery up and running in a few months; ‘hooks’ which invoke actions, such as opening a new wave or launching a shortcut; merging waves; and deployment on networks and intranets for internal use by businesses. Google Mail, however, doesn’t appear headed for integration.

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Posted 10/02/09 at 11:45:07 AM by Norman Chan

Web applications are quickly gaining popularity over desktop programs for day-to-day tasks like email and calendar management, but you have to run a web browser and be tethered to an Internet connection to take advantage of these services. Luckily for you, both Google Chrome and Firefox actually offer the ability to turn these web apps into desktop applications.

Hit the jump to find out how!

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Posted 09/10/09 at 08:00:42 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Facebook announced today that they were open-sourcing the real-time technology from the recently acquired FriendFeed.  The Python based code is now collectively known as Tornado. "Tornado is... designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services," said David Recordon of Facebook. The hope is that developers will quickly begin work on new services that take advantage of the Tornado real-time technology.

Tornado was originally developed by FriendFeed after finding existing Python frameworks did not perform adequately. Tornado is known as a “nonblocking” framework, as it is capable of many concurrent connections. FriendFeed co-founder, Bret Taylor, said that building their own framework resulted in throughput more than "four times higher than the other frameworks."

What about FriendFeed itself, you ask? Fear not, avid FriendFeed users, the service isn’t going anywhere. Facebook’s press release stated that, "Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed's real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain."

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Posted 02/24/09 at 11:00:00 AM by Justin Kerr

A few weeks ago we looked at moving to the clouds, and clearly, this is a concept that isn’t going away. Of course, we would be the first to admit there are some limitations, but the promise of freeing ourselves from the shackles of a single machine is clearly within our grasp. For the most part, we are sold on the idea of cloud-based email clients, and even photo and music sharing, But what about bulk storage for our files and sensitive documents? For many users, this is a line that simply cannot be crossed. The sheer thought of sending private information halfway across the world via the World Wide Web is simply too much to handle.

Unlike many cloud services however, online storage provides a solution to a very unique need that is difficult to satisfy, offsite backups. In today’s age of 2 TB hard drives, keeping all your information, even backed up on multiple drives does you little good if they are all in the same location. A fire or a break-in could leave you with nothing but a decade of lost files, and a handful of regret. So rather than updating a USB hard drive and shipping it to your buddy's house every few months, wouldn't it be great if you could archive your files online, securely and inexpensively? Good news, you can! Plenty of free and paid options exist, but how are you to know which services will best suit your needs? In this article we will look at the most popular solutions available, and help you navigate the chaotic seas of web 2.0 solutions.

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Posted 02/03/09 at 12:30:00 PM by Alex Castle

Cloud computing has become quite the buzzword over the last year or so. It seems like every major company wants a piece of the “cloud,” from IBM to AMD to Microsoft. Definitions for the phrase vary, but the most common aspect of any cloud computing service is the notion that you can use the internet to run applications on remote computers, making you less dependent on any one physical machine.

And while the idea of software as a service is hardly new, the number of online “cloud” apps has reached a sort of critical mass lately, making it possible to do the vast majority of your computing online. In this article we’ll show you some of our favorite cloud applications, and explain how they can help make the move to cloud city. 

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