Connecting the Offline world

Shotcode technology promises to revolutionize the mobile internet:

"Today, businesses cannot get people to use their mobile phones to browse the internet. This is because typing in domain names on a phone is a time-consuming and frustrating process. ShotCodes change all of this, radically.

ShotCodes are offline web links. When captured by a mobile camera, ShotCodes instantly and effortlessly take users to any desired location on the internet.

ShotCodes are easy to make and can be tied to any web address. Businesses can make their own ShotCodes and add them to existing print media or turn them into brand new tools for sales and customer interaction. "

Pretty neat stuff! To get started use the download link or jump directly to the developers page and start creating your own shotcodes today!

Mozy On-line Backup (2Gb)

Nowadays we store our entire lives on the personal computer. Everything from music, entertainment, business data and online banking is stored in digital format on our PC. We vigorously make backups every week to an external disk drive to protect us from device failure but what most of us do not realise is that this backup method does not protect against fire and other natural disasters like tornadoes, earthquakes and flooding. Even though we all make backups; a fire would destroy both our data and backup drive. And this is where Mozy comes to the rescue.

Mozy is free, correction, absolutely free, off-site backup for up to 2GB. If you don't have many important files or pictures, 2GB may be plenty and will store most of your important data like passwords, e-mail (archive), passport copy, office documents, etc.

Scheduling a backup with Mozy is very easy and even novice users will be comfortable using it. Mozy can automatically backup your data in the background whenever you are connected to the internet. This way, your data is automatically backed-up while you are working on your computer! Mozy is set-and-forget backup software for your PC!

Your data is encrypted on Mozy's servers using either Mozy's own private key or your own passphrase. I highly recommend selecting your own passphrase so that only you have access to the data stored on Mozy's servers. Do not forget your password since Mozy will not be able to help you in case of password loss.

Conclusion: The free 2 Gigabyte of backup storage is a must have for your most important data. The program is intuuitive to use and even novice users will have less problems using mozy than say XDrive or Window's built-in backup program. Because of the limitations of current broadband internet connections the upload speed is rather slow so long files like video files will really take quite some time to transfer. On the other hand, this all happens in the background while you work so if you just leave it running, you'll be fine.

Get your free Mozy Backup here...

Google Earth Tracks Flights

Google Earth can give you the precise location of just about any commercial flight, almost in realtime. To get the flight information on just about any flight's progress, download Google Earth, then go to Aeroseek or FBOWeb to enter the carrier and flight number you're interested in. Once you've got it, click the Google Earth link to open that flight in Google Earth and see its exact location updated every few seconds.

Source (Wired Magazine)

Google Desktop Search

The Google Desktop Search package has been out for quite some time now and considering its high-profile parent company, (Google) I find it downright astonishing that some people still have never installed or in some cases not even heard of the Google Desktop search engine.

In short, Google Desktop makes an index of all the files on your drive, HTML, email, documents and in combination with (mostly free) third party plug-ins, Google Desktop indexes practically every file type imaginable. It is like having a personal assistant watching over your shoulder the entire time.

Looking-up information with Google Desktop is a breeze. Just type whatever you are looking for and the results will pop-up in internet explorer split seconds later. When you use Google on the web it will also show you a link to the desktop search results on your PC, an extremely handy and powerful feature although it confuses some people into thinking all their documents have been transmitted to Google.com. Of course, this is not the case.

The product does not send back your indexed information over the internet but instead uses IE (Internet explorer) to offer its search service exclusively to the local users of the Laptop or Personal Computer. Technically speaking Google is running a web server on your PC that only allows local access. This is also where our problem with Google lies.

Google’s desktop search product has had some serious security issues while in Beta and received a lot of media hype because of this. Using a carefully crafted URL it was possible to get information from a Google Desktop engine whilst being connected from another computer through the internet! Even though the potential hackers would not be able to access the documents directly they could potentially “query their way through” the document using the Google engine that normally should only be accessible to local users. This was a serious security hole and we suspect this might very well happen again in the future.

To block this and a lot of other types of internet attacks we suggest using a personal firewall. Windows XP Service Pack 2 (WinXP SP2) users will have their WinXP firewall enabled by default. Even if there would be a serious vulnerability in Google Desktop search, using a personal firewall makes it impossible for hackers to contact your local Google engine. We highly recommend users of Google Desktop search to install a personal firewall before installing Google desktop.

Be careful with installing Google Desktop search on multi-user PCs as well. Because Google indexes everything you do it can cause some embarrassing moments if one is not careful. You have been warned!

Conclusion: Google Desktop is a very powerful product and works exactly as advertised. Because of the nature of search engines we do not recommend using this product on public-terminals and shared PCs. If you are the only user on a PC and have installed a personal firewall you should be fine security-wise and you’ll find Google Desktop Search an invaluable tool in everyday computing.

Google Picasa 2

Picasa 2, Google's image organizer that does not take .gif image files...

‘What kind of useless image organizer is this?’ is the first thing that popped my mind when I read the specifications. No .gif support for an image catalog program is like selling a car without wheels. Because of Picasa’s everyday low pricing (free) I decided to give it a go anyway and tested Picasa 2 in combination with Hello Picture sharing and the Picasa Blogger plug-in.

The Hello and Blogger plug-ins are free components designed for use in combination with Picasa 2. The quality of these so called plug-ins is not very good as they do not keep track of images posted on a site. Before I knew it I was out of web space because of left-over Hello Zombies. The solution: To use another program to clear up the mess Hello left on my web space. Hello!

For transferring pictures from your camera and organizing them on your PC, Picasa 2 does an excellent job. For most people this is all that they need. In that case, you'll love Picasa's timeline feature that basically is a chronological list of all the pictures in your folders. There’s red-eye reduction as well as some other basic photo editing tricks. Very handy, great fun too, but nothing new.

Overall I think Picasa is a nice program but...... It's lack of .gif image file support I find unforgivable for an image catalog program and if people want to use Picasa to share pictures with friends, look for other tools as Picasa's Hello and Blogger tools just don't cut it.

Skype VOIP telephony

Just when you thought internet telephony was gone forever, Skype entered the voice over IP arena.

In short: Skype lets you talk over the internet for free to other Skype users. For a very small fee you can call non-Skype users on their regular telephone and for another low fee Skype gives you voicemail and a telephone number in a growing number of cities around the world.

Skype-out call rates to old-style telephones are extremely cheap at about 1/10th the price of the traditional telephone operators. In combination with a supported VOIP phone, you get the same call experience as a regular phone call at a fraction of the cost. If you want to try Skype first, a regular headset will do just fine but you will miss the telephone-like experience and miss out on ease use.

For a free program, Skype has a feature set is pretty impressive considering it contains no spyware or other forms of ad-serving rubbish. Sound quality of Skype telephone calls is one of the best on the market and often beats the quality of the regular phone network. Besides, conference calls are thrown in at no extra cost and the software is very good at finding a way out through corporate firewalls and other potential network nasties that could ruin your call experience.

Conclusion: An absolute must have product for international travelers and long distance callers alike. Get a proper USB style Skype phone for the most natural calling experience and get some Skype-Out credit to get you started. The USB-phone and Skype credit will pay itself back in no-time because of increased savings on long distance calls.