If techies were in charge of road signs this is the kind of thing you could expect to see on a regular basis. Mind you someone was lazy here. Where’s the 301 redirect to the clear road on the right?
[via TechEBlog]
I installed the SERPs Finder tool a while ago but I’ve only recently started to use it on a daily basis. The Sitening SERP Tracker has been the main resource I’ve relied on in the past and while it is useful for tracking search rank over a period of time, I’ve found that it can sometimes be inaccurate and the number of results it crawls, currently 100, can be limiting.
SERPs Finder is much more accurate because it does its searching in realtime and it also digs deeper, crawling through the first 1000 results on a query. If it does find a result it loads up your browser and drops you on the page where your URL was found.
SERPs Finder supports all three major search engines - Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live Search.
Link: SERPs Finder
The guys from Common Craft have created yet another great video tutorial, this time explaining social bookmarking.
If you missed them, their previous videos covering RSS and Wikis are worth checking out as well.
Mister Wong is a popular European social bookmarking service that is very similar to del.icio.us. They went into private beta testing for the English version of their service about a month ago and are now open to the public.
If you’ve used del.icio.us before then you will be immediately familiar with Mister Wong. It has all the features you expect from a bookmarking service but the one thing that gets a big thumbs up from me is, unlike del.icio.us who slap a nofollow on all their links, Mister Wong has clean followable links. Hopefully it stays that way.
Adam over at Lifehacker has put together a beginner’s guide to using BitTorrent which is going to save me so much time. I get friends asking about BitTorrent constantly and it can be very time consuming explaining it over and over again.
To make matters worse, it’s not really something you can explain over the phone so I end up having to sit them down to go through it step by step. Now I can just send them to this article and they should be able to work through it by themselves.
If you are the tech goto person amongst your friends and family the best thing you can do to avoid spending hours explaining things to them is to build up a list of resources that you can point them too.
Sony has quietly mentioned that they are looking to release a digital TV tuner for the PS3 to give it DVR functionality.
Sounds great, but the stock hard drive is way too small for video recording. Luckily swapping hard drives is a pretty straight forward procedure.
If you’re familiar with PC hardware you’ll likely be able to figure it out yourself. If you aren’t comfortable prying open such as expensive piece of equipment, Gamepro has put together a guide to upgrading the PS3 hard drive, with plenty of pictures detailing the process.
The New Yorker has a fascinating article on the history of electronic spam. They cover the origins of spam, how it has evolved over the years, as well as the somewhat futile attempts to try and eradicate it.
In the spring of 1978, an energetic marketing man named Gary Thuerk wanted to let people in the technology world know that his company, the Digital Equipment Corporation, was about to introduce a powerful new computer system. DEC operated out of an old wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, and was well known on the East Coast, but Thuerk hoped to reach the technological community in California as well. He decided that the best way to do it was through the network of government and university computers then known as the Arpanet. Only a few thousand people used it regularly, but their names were conveniently printed in a single directory. After selecting six hundred West Coast addresses, Thuerk realized that he would never have time to call each one of them, or even to send out hundreds of individual messages. Then another idea occurred to him: what if he simply used the network to dispatch a single e-mail to all of them? “We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSystem-20 family,’’ the message read. As historic lines go, it didn’t have quite the ring of “One small step for a man,� yet Gary Thuerk’s impact cannot be disputed. When he pushed the send button, he became the father of spam.
The most amusing part of the article comes from yet another classic quote from Bill Gates where he makes a prediction that not only does not eventuate, but looks downright embarrassing in retrospect.
This is what he had to say when addressing the World Economic Forum in 2004: “Two years from now, spam will be solved.”
Not even close Bill, not even close.
I’ve always found it odd that Google Reader has no search functionality. With search being Google’s bread and butter it is beyond me why their feed reader doesn’t have even the most basic search capability.
After looking for a solution, the best I could come up with is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox. It’s options are fairly basic and the results aren’t displayed in the most elegant manner but it works. And right now it’s better than the alternative which is no search at all.
Greasemonkey is a must have extension for Firefox. If you don’t already have it installed you can grab it from here.
Then all you’ll need to do is download the Google Reader Search script, and you’ll be set. The next time you visit the Google Reader page a box will appear at the top of the screen, like in the picture above, and you’ll be able to search through your feeds.
