I’m not sure i like it, seemingly there is a growing backlash already of folks not liking the colour. Interestingly my theme in Gmail has a better looking bar, which I think has been up there for ages:

This style is wayyyyy better than the horrible google black bar of blackness. I like the idea in principle of being able to get to all your google stuff real quick but I think a style change is in order pretty quick.

http://pixlr.com

Basically a free online graphics editing site. It has a really good photo editor that at the least is great for giving folks a way to resize/crop photos pretty quickly.

Along with a couple of other tools it also has the pixlr-o-matic which is pretty cool rapid photo effects tool with a darkroom like interface.

e.g. you can do stuff like this in seconds:

Its fairly geeky but how awesome is that!? I’m a huge fan of nostalia I think a lot of people are and this project was well thought out from the start. Back in 1996 the web was not the blog laden facebook frenzy beast it is today, it was still very young. Sure ‘The Internet’ had been around for a lot longer but actual websites and what we know as the world wide web only really came to life in 1994 – 1995, so to envision that ‘this interwebs shit is gonna be serious bisness’ and set about archiving it for future generations was and is an amazing idea.

The BBC Website 1997

I think this site means quite a lot to me especially as i’v been hooked on The Internet since I started using it way back in 1997. Back then it was so different to what it is now, like take facebook for example, back then you’d struggle to find anyone online in your own county nevermind town! now everyone is on facebook. If i’d of said back in 1997 to the vast majority of people who use facebook today that they’d spend hours on The Internet each day and it’d become part of their daily lives they’d of laughed in my face, but The Internet archivers knew it would take off and they knew it needed archiving.

Apple’s Website 1997

By the nature of its self The Internet is in a constant state of flux, changing and growing, sites going up sites vanishing never to seen again all this stuff presenting a current view of the world and leaving the old as not even a memory if you think about that for a second its really exciting but at the same time a bit sad.  Fear not though as you can take a trip into the past by paying a visit to the internet time machine

Basically a news feed (commonly referred to as RSS)  is a means by which a website or blog can let you know about new content it has published without you having to visit said site or blog every so often to check up on it. This feed takes the form of a normal internet address that you can put into a news reader and from there on you can keep track on what is going on in all your favorite websites.

There are many different readers you can use to do this, I recommend Google Reader as its very simple to use and if you use gmail (if not you should!)  its easy to get to when checking email.

Here is an example of what it looks like once you have it setup and have added in some feeds:

So you can see I have loads of folders setup with feeds from all my favourite websites. Every time I log in I can immediately see what about 30 websites and blogs are up too. All you need to do is copy the link to a website’s feed and add it as a subscription in Google reader and ya on your way. I know a load of folks out there that’d benefit from this, it takes a few minutes it set up and really improves how you use the interwebs.

YouTube tip:

If you want to add in a feed of a specific channel from YouTube you can do it! Just copy the channel address and Google Reader will do the rest, e.g. ‘http://www.youtube.com/user/BBC‘

Right so as some folks know I have just reinstalled my PC with Windows 7. Everything is great but I have noticed something online I was not seeing before on crappy Vista, adverts! lots and lots of flashing banner scummy adverts!

Then I remembered that on Vista I had modified one of my files to block those pesky swines.

Here is a guide on how to do it, If you are not at least 45% technical then maybe don’t bother with doing this as you might mess it up:

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Before and After

So here is a print screen of the radio times website before changing a file (was worse online both the banner ad’s flashed like a fucking fireworks display):

And here is it after, No advets, looks great:

The Tech Bit

The link in the intro basically provides you with a list of domain names which websites use to embed adverts on their pages (kinda like a webpage inside a webpage). You add this list of domains to a file called hosts which is part of Windows. Each line looks something like this:

127.0.0.1  fr.a2dfp.net

Basically what this does is bypass how your computer normally tries to find a website and instead it redirects to 127.0.0.1 which is the address of your own machine! So basically you are tricking your PC to go to it’s self when ever your computer tries to access ‘fr.a2dfp.net’ and therefore the advert does not show! Simple yet genius. There are hundreds of these lines in the guide above which basically account for most of the ad servers on the Internet.

The Moral Bit

Some might argue that it is a bit rude to do this. These sites need adverts to stay running right?, fair enough. The truth is most people will get confused as to how to do this or are simply not Geeky enough to bother. These are the same people that probably click on these adverts in the first place, get infected by viruses and fall pray to email scams from Nigerian morons.

These people are the sheep of the Internet and like sheep they outnumber the badass Wolves. Sheep are simple and get fucked but they don’t cause trouble, Wolves eat sheep and don’t play by the rules but there will always be more sheep. What i’m basically saying is unless a sudden burst of intelligence sweeps the general Internet population these sites will lose no ad revenue, so fuckem.

It is an amazing way to kill time and find interesting stuff on the Internet. It is all user generated so it’s what other people with the same interests like! I have been using it for a few years but never thought to let anyone know about it!

Warning: Before you click and sign up, this is going to enhance your Internet experience a lot and in doing so you may find hours and hours pass without you noticing.

check it out

Here are my topics I have setup:

Action Movies    Alcoholic Drinks    Alternative Rock   Ancient History    Archaeology    Astronomy    Atheist/Agnostic    Beer    Computer Science    Conspiracies    Cult Films    Evolution    Firefox    Guns    Heavy metal    HipHop/Rap    Horror Movies    Medieval History    Movies    Mythology    Nanotech    Online Games    PHP    Paranormal    Personal Sites    Philosophy    Photography    Punk Rock    Robotics    Roleplaying Games    Science Fiction    Space Exploration    Terrorism    UFO’s    UK    Video Games    Web Development