The search-by-voice iPhone app we heard about lasgt week may not have shown up as planned, but it is now available from the iTunes App Store. The iTunes page itself doesn’t show the app as updated, but download and sync it anyway, and you’ll notice a shiny new Google Mobile on your iPhone complete with voice-recognition. I’ve just started playing with it, but my initial one-word review: Amazing!
Internode today rolls out its Ultra plans, which combine its existing Naked DSL broadband and VOIP plan with a regular phone connection — meaning you can dump your current landline plan, still have the security of a standard line if the Net connection dies, and even migrate your existing phone number. The service is available from today in metropolitan areas, according to Internode (and existing customers can migrate across from another plan if they wish). Prices start at $69.95 with 5GB of downloads — not bad when you consider there’s no line rental involved and Internode hasn’t yet joined the upload-counting crowd. Internode Ultra
With three real-world but anonymous examples of people who wanted identifiable and possibly perceived as negative information about themselves removed from web sites, ComputerWorld consulted experts but came up largely emptyhanded. In only one of the cases were the efforts successful, and the steps involved were complicated and time consuming. In the case of a journalist who shared a name with a reviewer on film review site Rotten Tomatoes who didn’t want their name associated with the word “Rotten,” more online activity and not less was recommended: Apparently, the journalist’s best course of action would be to do what reputation mavens recommended in the first place: Create enough positive, search-engine-friendly content to push the “rotten + journalist’s name” search result to Google’s second page of results.
Check out our guide to using web tools to manage your online reputation. Have you ever tried to chase down a negative personal reference online, and how did it work out? Photo by Joe Goldberg Deleting your digital past — for good [Computerworld]
The YouTube development team has released a geolocation webapp that integrates Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Gears’ geolocation features to show you YouTube videos uploaded by users near you. The idea is great in theory, but unfortunately Google Gears came no where close to finding my actual location (especially compared to Geode’s accuracy)—which meant I had to pretend I live in 70 miles to the west (and near Grammy-nominated singer Eric Benet). [via]
Windows only: The popular Windows firewall application ZoneAlarm Free has a big brother called ZoneAlarm Pro, which boasts a handful of features not available in the free version—including integrated antivirus. Normally $US40, ZoneAlarm Pro will be available tomorrow (November 19 Australian) for the low, low price of free. ZoneAlarm Free was voted one of the five best Windows firewalls by Lifehacker readers, so if you like what you’ve seen from that, a free upgrade to the Pro version sounds like a winner. The promotion link below will likely offer an active link to the deal starting at 1AM on November 19 AEST.
ZoneAlarrm Promotion [via gHacks]Windows only: exTray is a free system tray utility that monitors your iTunes playback and displays album art and other track information on your desktop. exTray can also control volume and playback through keyboard shortcuts and—strangely enough—even includes export functions to help you move metadata like track ratings and playcounts to another machine. exTray is far from the only app of its kind, has its own flair, is very customisable, and boasts a light footprint worth checking out. exTray is a free download, Windows only.
exTray [via FreewareGenius]Mozilla Links reports that the latest development release of Firefox 3.1 includes a new feature called tab tearing. As you can see from the video above, tab tearing allows you to pull any tab out of your Firefox window into a completely new window or pull any tab into another window. This functionality will look familiar to any Google Chrome users, but when Firefox 3.1 drops, Firefox users will be enjoying the same handy feature. Firefox 3.1 gets tab tearing [Mozilla Links]
Free URL-shortening and password-protecting service HideLinks is a simple, useful service that’s perfect for links you want to hold onto, but don’t want anyone to necessarily see. Go ahead and joke about the most typical uses, but with the holidays approaching, many of us are doing our best to hide gift ideas and Amazon bookmarks from those who share browsers or provide tech support. Like TinyURL and its brethren, HideLinks also cuts gigantic search bookmarks into shortened links, and the service presents only a minimal few ads when prompting for a password. HideLinks is a free service; signing up allows you to review links you’ve posted through the site. HideLinks [via MakeUseOf.com]
Google released this morning its seventh edition of SketchUp for Windows and Mac systems, the free 3D modelling tool that topped our list of Top 10 Google products you forgot all about. New to this edition are tools for collaborating and sharing models and objects through the 3D Warehouse, automatic tools for beginners, and lots of other tweaks. What do you use SketchUp for? Tell us in the comments. [via Official Google Blog]
Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Darik’s Boot and Nuke does what it sounds like, so it’s not a tool you want to mess around with unless you really want everything securely wiped off your system. If you’re donating or otherwise handing off your hard drive, however, it’s a serious tool for erasing data so it’s really, really hard to ever find again. You load Darik’s tool onto a CD, DVD, USB flash drive or even a floppy disk, and after it boots, you can either choose which mounted hard drives it should wipe clean and in which fashion (with varying numbers of over-writing to meet the standards of, say, the US Department of Defence or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), or use the “autonuke” option to wipe everything gone for good. It worked flawlessly on some non-partitioned hard drives I wanted to donate to a local charity. Darik’s Boot and Nuke is a free download; owners of dual-core processors should head for the 2.0 beta. Darin’s Boot and Nuke [via ReadWriteWeb]
