Thursday, October 18, 2007

6 Cool Tools to Track Your Time

3:34PM Sarah Stokely | We’ve mentioned a few work timers lately, such as the Title Bar Browser Timer, which lets you set how long you’d like to be able to websurf before getting a message telling you to get back to work, or Using a Digital Timer to stay on track and get things done. But what if you want to track your worktime because you bill your clients by the hour, or need to know how long a job takes you? Then a time tracker may be what you need. The Freelance Switch came up with 6 timetracking tools today, including previously mentioned Cashboard. Several of them are freeware or offer free basic versions too. 6 Cool Tools to Track Your Time [Freelance Switch] More »

Five must-have security/privacy extensions for Firefox

3:21PM Sarah Stokely | Internet security blogger Chris Soghoian has written up five Firefox extensions he recommends for safeguarding your personal details and privacy, including one called CustomizeGoogle, which intrigued me. This addon automatically sends your Gmail and Google calendar traffic using the more secure https protocol. It also blocks Google text and banner ads, as well as preventing Firefox from sending your cookie information, or information about the links you’ve clicked, back to the big G. Five must-have security/privacy extensions for Firefox [CNET] More »

HTC Google phone announcement imminent?

3:15PM Sarah Stokely | Via CNET – The rumoured Google phone may be announced as early as next week, according to a report in Fortune magazine. Taiwanese handset maker HTC (who already have a touch screen phone on the market here in Australia) are mooted to be lining up a phone running a Google OS by the end of the year. The catch is? One of the industry analysts quoted in the article says the phones won’t be for sale, but are demos which will be provided to developers as proof of concept. The rumour mill has it that Google will partner with a number of handset manufacturers rather than putting its own device on the market. If the idea of lockin to one phone company, or of Apple’s overzealous policing of third party apps on the iPhone (or hell, the fact that we won’t have the iPhone here until some time next year!) has you looking around for iPhone alternatives, then like me you’ll be keeping an eye on this one. More »

Chinese P2P ‘50 times faster than Bit Torrent’?

2:50PM Sarah Stokely | Yesterday, a Thomas Crampton YouTube interview with Ogilvy China’s Kaiser Kuo on Chinese web development got the blogosphere all atwitter, particularly his claim that Chinese P2P file sharing network Blin.cn achieves speeds up to 50 times faster than Bit Torrent. Tech Crunch’s Duncan Riley blogged about it here, saying: “It’s interesting to consider the broader ramifications of what Kuo is saying. His general argument is that without the artificial market restrictions imposed on P2P networks in the United States by the RIAA and the MPAA, Chinese companies have been free to innovate and are now producing superior web technology in P2P sharing, and a whole range of related industries.” Today, the Torrent Freak blog weighed in and called out the tech behind Kuo’s claims: “First of all, if Kaiser Kuo’s claim is right this would mean that on average, BitTorrent users would use less than 2% of their available bandwidth when downloading. This is an absurd claim, because most people know that it’s fairly easy to max out your connection, even on a private tracker. It gets even more hilarious if we look at the download speed Kaiser Kuo is bragging about. He tells us that it downloads 2.2% of a DVD quality episode of the TV-series “24″ in only 3 minutes. If we assume that he’s talking about the 700Mb DVD quality file, this means that he reached an average download speed of 88kB/s. I have no clue under what stone Kuo has been living, but 15.4Mb in 3 minutes is not going to impress many people.” It’s quite a rant, the upshot seems to be don’t hold your breath for a P2P superhighway anytime soon. 50x Faster Than BitTorrent? Dream On! [Torrent Freak] More »

Use Your Zune as an External Hard Drive

8:00AM Adam Pash | US-centric: We’ve already told you how to use your Zune as a portable hard drive so your Zune can double as an external drive, but if you’ve tried the hack and had some trouble dragging files to your Zune, the video above not only demonstrates the fix, but also takes you on a step-by-step through the registry hacking required to enable the Windows Explorer browsing. It’s our opinion that every portable media device should double as an external hard drive (though the trend with Zunes, iPhones, and the like is to disable disk modes), so if you’re bummed about this deficiency on your Zune, this simple hack should do the trick. [via Hackszine] More »

Are You More Or Less Productive When Your Internet Goes Down?

7:00AM Adam Pash | It’s sometimes hard to believe we’ve come this far, but a good portion of workers now rely on the internet to keep up with their daily grind—which means that when the internet goes down, your work can come to a screeching halt. All of the information you count on pulling from Gmail, all of your quick research lookups on Wikipedia—they’re all out the window. For weblog Web Worker Daily, a downed internet connection means an opportunity to do a tonne of work: More »