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As you might have guessed I tend to go through a lot of websites each day. Most of what I find I just post here, but every now and again I find something totally random to share with just one or two people. On occasion that random item is about halfway down a page and part of the second paragraph. It turns into a bit of a pain in the ass in trying to direct people to the sentence I thought they might appreciate, a treasure hunt of sorts to fnd an amusing line.
Well, now there is The Awesome Highlighter. You enter the web address of the page you want to highlight, go crazy with the highlighter and they provide you a link that you can share with people. Here’s an example. Once some one goes to the highlighted page they can jump from one highlight to the next.
I have noticed a few “issues” with the application though. For one, I can’t seem to un-highlight items. a second is that there is a limit of 2000* characters per highlight, though you can work around that. Also some of what I highlighted didn’t show (though I would say about 98% did). Looks like they need a little tweaking, but this could be a great tool, especially for groups working together on a project.
*Thanks for clarifying Luke we corrected itÂ
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| Image from Pirated Movie. |
The Motion Picture Association of America hit a bit of a snag this week. In their continued efforts to attack movie piracy and cut down on P2P (That’s Person to Person) sharing on college networks they developed a “University Toolkit” asking universities and colleges around the country to download the software they were supplying to curtail the peer sharing of movies over networks.
What happened wa that back in October the MPAA sent a letter to 25 universities that have been “identified as top locations for downloading of pirated movies” and asked them to install the software. From there an internal report would be generated and sent to the Chief Information Officer at the university. Read more »
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Every now and then criminals do things that just baffle me. Like posting details about their crimes on the internet.
Associated Press has an article today about Lt. Charles Cohen who goes around talking with police officers and detectives about the internet, specifically sites like MySpace, Facebook and Second Life.
Basically what Lt. Cohen is lecturing about is how folks, specifically criminals, don’t quite get that the internet is not their private diary, and that things posted on the web are visible are available to the public and can be tracked back to them. He is also working on breaking the police department mindset that the internet is another realm, not worth monitoring. Read more »
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By now you must be familiar with services like iTunes or one of its many competitors trying to suck you dry of your hard earned cash.
Well, now there is a new player in the game: Spiral Frog. Similar in some aspects to iTunes it allows you to download music and videos over the internet from singers and groups you have actually heard of. A bit smaller then the iTunes library with only 800,000 songs available (meaning you won’t be able to find everything you are looking for) there still remains a nice selection, even of new music, such as Amy Winehouse.
So, we’ve covered the similarities to iTunes, now some differences- first (and this is the big one) it is absolutely and totally free! Yup, no credit card needed, no money asked for, kind of nice. Oh, also you don’t need any special software to start downloading, it is not exclusive to any software (though you do need an internet plug-in to make sure it all works). All kind of nice, there is, however, a catch: This service (like too many other services available on the internet today) is only for folks with PCs. Got a Mac? Well, you’re out of luck. In fact Spiral Frog strikes out against Apple- Won’t work on a Mac, can’t use the music in iTunes and, last, but not least, the songs won’t play on an iPod. Read more »
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Ok, well that title just doesn’t seem right, especially when the website in question is Blackle.
Blackle is the first website designed keeping a green ideology in mind. Based on the Google model (and even using the Google search engine) but with slightly less functionality (no image search, maps, etc.) Blackle is a search engine with a black background instead of a white one.
The concept is that folks who are using CRT monitors (standard tube based monitors) need to power each pixel on their screen that shows a color, including white. On the other hand, black is not a color that is powered, on monitors at least, black is the absence of color. Keeping this theory in mind Blackle uses an all black back ground with gray lettering (which is easier to read against black then white is, instead of there being massive amounts of white space (like on Google) that needs to be powered there is a lot of black space which allows the pixels to ‘rest,’ and the monitor to use less power. Theoretically this will also prolong the life of the monitors.
If you are using an LCD screen however, which is pretty standard these days, well, then it makes no difference, there are no individually powered pixels and the whole screen is powered at once. But, you know what they say: Every little bit helps.
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