Tuesday, September 16, 2008
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Giftag Simplifies Wishlists
11:30PM Lifehacker US Edition | Giftag is a free, web-based wishlist creation service that supports products all over the web. Unlike Amazon’s Universal Wish List, Giftag is based on an open data format, hProduct. Armed with a Firefox add-on, at any site you visit that uses the hProduct format, you can add the item with all the product details to your wishlist in one click. If the web site doesn’t have hProduct data, you can just as easily lasso the item on the screen, save a screenshot and manually enter the details. A nice feature is multiple wishlist support; when you send an item to Giftag, you can select which list it should go to. Keeping one list for your private purchases, one for gift ideas for friends and family, another for gift ideas for your significant other or kids, etc. is extremely easy. Share your wishlists with people outside of the Giftag service via email, and there is a Facebook application in addition to the Firefox add-on. Giftag [via ReadWriteWeb] More »
Fix
Get Better Genius Recommendations
10:30PM Kevin Purdy | Wired’s How-To Wiki offers tips on getting better Genius recommendations in iTunes 8 for those readers who don’t think the app’s all that smart. Included tips: Don’t customise your genres, de-select poor matches picked by Genius, and label your imported mulit-CDs with “Disc 1,” “Disc 2,” etc. Have you wrangled your own Genius into better picks? Tell us how in the comments. More »
Fix
Moo0 RightClicker Adds Key Features to Windows’ Right-Click Menu
10:00PM Kevin Purdy | Windows only: Free right-click enhancer Moo0 RightClicker adds contextual images and a host of useful features to your standard right-click menu in Windows. Copying and moving files and folders to bookmarked or standard system folders is made easy with quick-collapsing menus. Perma-deleting items (as opposed to merely “recycling” them) is added to your options, and intelligent copying—the name, path, or contents of an actual file—is a nice touch. Best of all, Moo0 doesn’t eliminate any customisations you’ve already made, and lets you customise what you see on right-clicking, so it works nicely with any other utilities you may have installed. Moo0 RightClicker is a free download for Windows systems only. Moo0 RightClicker [via gHacks] More »
Work
Battle of the Beta Browser Built-In Features
9:00PM Gina Trapani | With betas and alphas of every flavor of web browser dropping like snowflakes during a cold winter these days, a whole host of advanced features are showing up built into the default browser of the future. From Firefox to Opera to Internet Explorer to Chrome, a new feature set is emerging, which will put things like a smart address bar, porn (private) browsing mode, tab-specific crashing, and drag and drop tabbing in front of mainstream users who would never think to install an extension manually. But which of these features do you think are necessary, and which ones do you think are just there to justify a new release and “keep up with the Joneses”? Let’s take a look at this new crop of features showing up across the new generation of web browsers and then tell us which ones you like the most. More »
Communicate
5:59PM Angus Kidman | Telstra likes to boast about the coverage of its Next G broadband network, but it’s hard to come up with a practical, real-life way to test just how well that coverage works. Last week I travelled on a train from Brisbane to Townsville armed with a Next G USB modem, a notebook PC and (fortunately on a 24-hour trip) a power outlet in my sleeper cabin. Read on to find out how well the network stood up to the challenge.
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The Next G Townsville train torture test: how it worked in practice
5:59PM Angus Kidman | Telstra likes to boast about the coverage of its Next G broadband network, but it’s hard to come up with a practical, real-life way to test just how well that coverage works. Last week I travelled on a train from Brisbane to Townsville armed with a Next G USB modem, a notebook PC and (fortunately on a 24-hour trip) a power outlet in my sleeper cabin. Read on to find out how well the network stood up to the challenge.
More »
Work
2:03PM Angus Kidman | On-demand video is now pretty standard on most international carriers, so airlines need to look for new ways to keep passengers amused. Fran Foo at Australian IT reports that one of the options Qantas will be offering on its new A380 services will be free business school content from Melbourne Business School, Harvard and Stanford, including full-length lectures and bite-sized interviews with business leaders. Does that seem to you like a good use of all that in-air time, or would you prefer to advance your business skills in a less crowded and noisy environment? Educate us in the comments. Photo from Qantas
Business school in all A380 classes [Australian IT]
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Would on-plane training appeal to you?
2:03PM Angus Kidman | On-demand video is now pretty standard on most international carriers, so airlines need to look for new ways to keep passengers amused. Fran Foo at Australian IT reports that one of the options Qantas will be offering on its new A380 services will be free business school content from Melbourne Business School, Harvard and Stanford, including full-length lectures and bite-sized interviews with business leaders. Does that seem to you like a good use of all that in-air time, or would you prefer to advance your business skills in a less crowded and noisy environment? Educate us in the comments. Photo from Qantas
Business school in all A380 classes [Australian IT]
More »
Fix
Gmail Labs Adds Forgotten Attachment Detector
12:46PM Gina Trapani | The developers on the Gmail team add a new feature to Gmail Labs: a forgotten attachment detector. With the experimental feature enabled, if you mention an attachment in your email and hit send without actually attaching a file, you’ll get a pop-up message asking if you meant to send without the file. This new feature supplants the Attachment Reminder script in Better Gmail, though the words the reminder used as triggers were configurable, and these are not. (In fact, I haven’t tested the Gmail Labs version in languages other than English.) My initial test show that it works sometimes—an attachment-free message that read “File’s attached!” didn’t trigger a confirmation dialog, but the words “See attached file” did. More »
Work
CrossOver Chromium Ports Chrome to Mac and Linux
11:37AM Gina Trapani | Linux and Mac OS X only: Enterprising open source developers have beaten Google to the punch and released a Mac and Linux port of Google Chrome’s open source code base, Chromium. CrossOver Chromium offers a native install for Mac and Linux users, but don’t get too excited—the developers don’t recommend that you use CrossOver as your main browser, and in fact, they call the release “proof of concept” more than anything else. Indeed, my brief testing with Crossover on the Mac was disappointing—it doesn’t have the smooth look and feel (or all the features, if I understand correctly) of the official, Google-released Windows version. Still, for Mac and Linux users dying to give Chrome a test drive, it’s a fine place to start. CrossOver Chromium is a free download for Intel Macs and Linux. CrossOver Chromium [CodeWeavers] More »
Communicate
How slow is your iPhone’s download speed?
10:43AM Angus Kidman | While the recent iPhone 2.1 firmware update has improved matters for some users, the biggest factor in determining the download speeds you’ll get on an iPhone (or any other 3G data device) is the performance of the underlying 3G network. Over at APC, I’ve written up the Australian results from a study conducted by Wired.com which asked users to submit their own speed test results. The average Australian download speed was a fairly unimpressive 759Kbps, and many users experienced much worse results. Have you been happy with the 3G network performance on your iPhone? Let us know in the comments. Congrats, Optus: you’re the world’s worst for 3G [APC] au, communicate, 3g, iphone More »
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