If you’ve ever wondered what hosting provider your favourite website uses, the WhoIsHostingThis web site can help.Simply enter the domain name of the site that you want to know more about, and WhoIsHostingThis will reveal and link to the web host in question. This application could be useful if you need to file a complaint for abuse of your copyrighted photos or blog posts, if you are tasked with researching the competition for work, or maybe you just want to host your personal website at the same place your favourite website does.
WhoIsHostingThisIf you’ve ever been tasked with choosing a random winner from a list of people, there’s an easier way than choosing from a bowl-full of tiny pieces of paper. Take Random Line Picker, for example. The Random Line Picker is a tiny online tool that chooses a random item from a text list. Simply paste your list with each item on a separate line, and then click the Pick 1 Line button to choose a single item from the list. If you are worried about privacy or giving a website your list, the Productivity Portfolio site has a tutorial for selecting random names with Excel using the RANDBETWEEN() function to assign a random number to each record, using the smallest number as the winner. This simple app doesn’t do a lot, but it does exactly what it advertises quickly and easily.
Random Line PickerWindows only: PortableTor is a thumb drive friendly version of the popular anonymous browsing software, Tor. The application is actually a tweaked bundle of the Tor-GUI Vidalia and the proxy-server Privoxy. Once you extract PortableTor and fire it up, it automatically launches the two apps and connects to the Tor network. From there out all you have to do is make sure that your web browser is configured to use 127.0.0.1:8118 as a proxy and all your traffic will be sent on a privacy-producing trip through the many layers of the Tor network. If this is your first introduction to Tor, make sure to check out out how to browse the internet anonymously with Tor. PortableTor is freeware, Windows only. PortableTor [via The Portable Freeware Collection]
If you love the look of Windows 7 but you’re aching to get a little helpful text back on your big taskbar buttons, weblog Tech-Recipes details how to add text to the by default icon-only Windows 7 taskbar. Just right-click the taskbar, select Properties, then change the Taskbar buttons drop-down from “Always combine, hide labels” to “Never combine.” Mission accomplished. You can also select “Combine when taskbar is full” to keep the text there when you’ve got room for it, then collapse to the icon-only view when your taskbar fills up.
Windows only: Freebyte Task Scheduler is a free and portable task-scheduling application. If you’re looking to round out your suite of portable applications or find yourself locked out of accessing Windows Scheduled Tasks on your work machine, Freebyte Task Scheduler gets the job done. It has a simple and familiar interface for adding and modifying tasks. You can set tasks for one shot, daily, or weekly launches. Freebyte Task Scheduler is freeware, Windows only.
Freebyte Task Scheduler [via Life Rocks 2.0]Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension TabCloser adds a tab context menu item that quickly closes all tabs from web sites with the same domain name. Once installed, simply right-click on the tab and choose “Close all hostname.org tabs” to kill all similar tabs. The only irritation is the “Are you sure?” confirmation message that doesn’t appear to have a setting to disable—though it might save you from accidentally closing something important. Readers using the previously mentioned Tab Mix Plus extension already have the equivalent functionality hidden deep within the settings. To enable, open the Tab Mix Plus Options panel, navigate to Menu -> Tab Context Menu and check the box for “Close Similar Tabs” to enable the menu item. This extension could be really useful the next time you get lost 20 tabs deep on Wikipedia doing “research” when you should be actually doing something productive. TabCloser is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.
TabCloserBeing randomly friendly and striking up a talk with someone you don’t know is, as wikiHow puts it, the “social equivalent of skydiving.” And probably not as hard as you might think.
Ext4, the next-generation filesystem for Linux storage, is rolled into the latest (alpha) Ubuntu 9.04 daily builds. Considering it nearly laps its counterparts in benchmark tests by Phoronix, that could mean some nice speed-ups in handling larger files (and maybe boot-ups?) [via; graph by Phoronix]
Just because Apple and Big Music dropped the DRM doesn’t mean they want you trading your iTunes purchases. CNET notes that buyers’ registered email addresses are embedded in every file, and so (somewhat) trace-able. [via Slashdot]
