Sleipnir is a web browser that's popular in Japan and pretty much unheard of in the rest of the world. The Windows-only browser lets users choose between the rendering engines used by market leaders Internet Explorer and Firefox. But Sleipnir is more than just a pretty front end for either browser. It's a standalone tool that provides users with a huge number of customization options.
Fenrir, the company behind the free browser, has been making an English language version for a while now, but Computer World reports that the company is stepping up its efforts to promote the browser outside of Japan.
Here are a few of the things that make Sleipnir worth checking out:
If you install the optional Gecko plugin, you can switch between the Firefox and Internet Explorer rendering engines with the click of a button. You can do something similar with the IETab add-on for Firefox, but Sleipnir includes this functionality out of the box.
When you select text, a box shows up on screen letting you search for that text on the web or translate the text from English to Japanese and vice versa. You can even plot a highlighted address on a map.
Widgets are cool, especially when they do something useful - and even cooler when they look quasi-military.
Xirrus Wifi Monitor is available as a Yahoo Widget (for Mac, too) and a Vista Sidebar Gadget. It sits at the side of your screen scanning at your specified interval and updating its tiny radar screen with new hits. In our testing, it did a very good job at plotting the physical location of nearby APs. To our dismay the widget doesn't actually animate sweeps - too bad, because that would be pretty sweet.
Don't think it's just eye-candy. Wifi Monitor also provides you a ton of statistcal data about your access point's capabilities, your wireless connection, even a glossary of wireless terms. The details screen also allows you to disable your wireless adapter and to connect/disconnect (forwards you to your OS's wireless connection manager).
Well worth the download - if not for functionality, at least for its good looks!
Ever wonder which site provides a higher ratio of internal to external links, Engadget or Download Squad? Want to know if there's a hidden message in the headers of a web page? URl-info can help.
Here's how it works. Visit the site, enter a URL, and hit go. Pretty simple, eh? What you get is some basic information about the web page, including the server operating system, what kind of web analytics the site uses (although the only one we managed to detect was Google Analytics on a handful of sites), and a list of images and internal and external links on a site.
If you click the Images tab, you can scroll your mouse over the URLs of images to see thumbnail versions. The links tab provides a list of links and a nifty graphic showing the ratio of internal to external links. In other words, you can find a whole bunch of information you never really needed. But if you have nothing better to do with your day than try to dig up some stats about your favorite web sites, this is the tool for you.
Adobe just added new video content to its AIR-based Media Player, but it all pretty much sucks in one form or another. The Adobe Media Player is a slick media browser that can play and subscribe to videos from the web, and it also provides somewhat high-resolution content from Adobe's media partners such as MTVN and Comedy Central.
Despite the fact that the player is very visually appealing and easy to navigate, it's just not that useful. It's possible to use any regular, free browser such as Firefox to watch online video content, allowing web-travelers to avoid the installation of an extra app. As a result, the main reason for installing the app (unless you really, really like the subscription feature) is to watch the 25,000+ videos provided by Adobe.
And that's exactly what's wrong here. Adobe's video library is still weak, and most good of the good TV shows aren't full episodes but rather short clips. Furthermore, the full videos Adobe is adding aren't current TV hits like Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Instead, Adobe partnered with CBS and Sony to add tons of clips and a few movies/episodes from old stuff like Men in Black, Jerry Maguire, The Love Boat, Beverly Hilly 90210, Family Ties, and even The Price is Right. They might as well call the app something to the tune of Adobe Senior TV On Demand.
Sure, Adobe has the money to keep it up and running, but why bother if the company isn't bringing its best to the table? Why not partner with Hulu and create an official, fully functional Hulu AIR app instead?
Orca Browser is a web browser based on Firefox 3 which offers a bunch of features that you'd only get in Firefox by adding plugins and tweaking your browser settings. Orca is made by the same folks who develop the Avant Browser, which is based on Internet Explorer.
So what does Orca offer that you won't find in the standard version of Firefox 3? First up, it's fast. Like ridiculously fast. Like, if you thought Firefox 3 rendered web pages more quickly than Firefox 2, you an't seen nothing yet fast. If that's not enough for you, there's also a service that lets you save your passwords, bookmarks, RSS feeds and other configuration settings online. That way you can sync your settings between Orca browsers installed on multiple machines.
Orca is also extremely customizable. You can adjust the toolbars and other elements of the browser with just a few clicks. And Orca comes with about 20 skins preloaded, making it easy to change the color scheme. The only major problems we see is that Orca des not support Firefox 3 add-ons, and that the browser is Windows only.
At some point you've probably used evite, either by receiving or sending an invitation. In the past the online application was great for sending invitations but it was a one shot deal - create and send an evite and when the event is over, the evite is dead.
Last year evite went mobile in an effort to keep up with all of us and on Friday, evite went 2.0. Users can now integrate photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and playlists from Imeem. The changes should make it easier to integrate content you already have on the web into your evite options instead of requiring separate uploads of information.
The redesign also attempts to make evite easier to navigate, introducing more tabs for organizing different sections of the site. Developers have also added some custom options for the way hosts and attendees can interact with each other.
If the thought of downloading a large PDF file makes you (or your computer) shiver, check out PDF Download 2.0. This free Firefox extension gives you several options upon encountering a PDF file. First, you are presented with a warning that you have encountered a PDF file. Then you are given the choice to download it, view it as HTML, skip it or bypass using PDF Download.
Last year we looked at version 1.0. But since then, PDF Download has added at least one major new feature. Not only can you convert PDF to HTML for easier viewing and choose how and when to view your PDFs, you can now also convert a web page to a PDF document, keeping the general look and layout of the page.
PDF Download is useful because whenever you click on a PDF link, instead of just opening the link, you are given a choice on how to proceed. And some of those chices just might save you some time.
Many people may not have noticed this, but it's impossible to do a global search at Craigslist.org. It sort of makes sense, doesn't it? For most of the public, we'd imagine a global search would turn up useless results, but that only makes Craigslist useful for most of us. What about thoe crazy-curious folks that just need to know all about what's being offered, asked for, etc. around the world?
Marty Orgel submitted to Wired a short-tutorial on how-to do a global search of Craigslist through Google, and it's pretty easy. Just do an advanced search, and in the "Find web pages that have... all of these words" box, type in your search terms. Make sure "directory" is entered into the "But don't show pages that have... any of these unwanted words" box, and type "craigslist.org" into the domain box at the bottom.
The method worked for our global search of "time machine", which turned up 12,700 results from several regions including: New York, Austin, Northern Virginia, and San Diego. Most of them really had to do with a time traveling machine, so, yes, there are several crazy people in the world. Don't worry, though, we're pretty sure many of the listings originated from well-humored teenagers... well, we hope that's the case.
That picture of Fluffy is never quite the same once you blow it up on your big, HD monitor. Fluffy looks less cute and much more pixilated than in real life. In fact, a lot of pictures and wallpapers just don't look the same.
The folks over at NerdBusiness have just the solution. They have assembled 218 HD wallpapers for your viewing pleasure. Everything from mint leaves to scenic photos to otherworldly Photoshop environs and Mario Party 8 shots. Our favorite? Digg-er from mandolux.com
Check it out and see what looks good on your big screen.
So, you spend more time surfing the internet than actually working, you met your significant other on the internet and maybe, just maybe you know what a MUD is. Whether you are a geeky boy or the more rare and exotic geeky girl you haven't lost yourself in the rabbit hole of the internet until it becomes time to plan your wedding.
MyWedding is one of the most useful (and free) wedding sites out there. You can create a "wedsite" that will be the envy of your friends even if you don't know a lick of code. The site allows guests to RSVP for the big event, leave comments, sign a guest book and more. The couple can list accommodations, directions, gift registries and even create photo galleries. Once guests have entered an email address on the site you can also easily send out a message to them all if plans change or you update the page.
The design templates vary from the simple to the ornate, cute to couture. No need to have wedding bells plastered everywhere unless that's the look you are going for. Page addresses can be a bit unweildy but that is easy enough to fix by redirecting your own domain name to your MyWedding site.
Moralize.us is a site with an interesting concept: users post hypothetical scenarios, and other users vote on whether a course of action is right or wrong, according to their own personal moral codes. It's a nice theory, that we can crowdsourcing our tricky moral dilemmas. In practice, though, the responses mostly seem to hover around the level of discourse you might find in the comments on a YouTube video.
For example, someone asked "is it right or wrong to push a fat man off a bridge in front of a speeding train to stop it from killing five people?" The responses ranged from "Right: he's fat" to "Wrong: the fat man is Michael Moore." This is not exactly erudite stuff here, friends. Our recommendation: if Moralize.us is going to be more than a place for lame jokes, they should just ditch the ability to leave a justification, and just ask users to vote right or wrong. The data would probably be a lot more meaningful -- because hey, they're at zero now, and it can only get better.
There's no shortage of music recommendation engines. Whether you want to find music from artists that sound like Madonna or Meat Beat Manifesto, all you have to do is hit up Pandora, Last.fm, or a similar site and pop a name in the box. If the web site starts playing a song you like, you give it a thumbs up, while a thumbs down should help the software avoid playing music that makes you want to throw up in the future.
But one thing that Pandora and Last.fm have in common is that most of the music they play comes from major label artists. If you want to find music from independent artists, you might want to check out StumbleAudio. The web service uses a music recommendation image engine much like the other sites. But all of the artists are independent acts, which means they're either unsigned or signed to smaller labels.
If you find an artist you like, you can flip through the tracks on their album and listen to full length audio streams. Or you can click on the links on the side of the page to purchase digital downloads or physical CDs.
StumbleAudio currently features over 120,000 artists and 2 million songs. We found the recommendations were decent, but not exactly spot on. For example, the service claims it was able to find 388 artists that sound like the Allman Brothers. As far as we can tell, it actually found about 5 or 10 southern rock/blues bands, and a few hundred artists that sound nothing at all like the Allman Brothers.
Have you ever looked in a real DIYers toolbox? Or maybe even the toolbox of someone who's pretty handy, but who has a messy streak? So all the hammers might be together, or all the screwdrivers will be together, maybe even with some sort of arrangement as to Phillips or Torx heads... but there is almost inevitably, in some corner compartment of the toolbox, or some drawer (and maybe several of them, even) an area set aside for what amounts to a whole lot of miscellaneous "everything" bits. These pieces might logically be found with hammers, or dry wall tools, or about a million other things... But they aren't quite the same, and they aren't always used in the same manner. So they end up in a big pile, that you hope stays manageable enough you can find them again.
This week's Linux switch, the last of the web development stuff for a bit, is like that compartment. These are all nifty little tools, and great when you need them. But they are mostly small, and have a strange distinction of not always being associated with any one particular type of task.
Some, like FTP programs and plugins, are associated with other programs. But what if you love your editor and hate the uploading functions it has? Image maps can be a nuisance to set up, and we think that's probably part of the reason why you don't see a lot of them. But sometimes, they just fit the project at hand.
And you know how we said we'd go easy on the editors? Seriously, we meant it. However, there's one more editing tool we want to mention that's probably beyond most casual users, but will make Linux users who want to develop SWF9 applications pretty happy. We are not covering it in any great depth, because we are not any sort of whizzes with Flash development -- but we have to point it out. It's been a long time coming!
So welcome to our odds and ends compartment of web tools!
Everybody knows the big names in the battle against malware - Adaware, Spybot, HijackThis. Today we're going indie, focusing on lesser known ways to avoid and remove all that bothersome software that your "friend" crapped up your rig with!
First things first. Try not to get infected in the first place.
It's common sense that if you can keep malware from getting its nasty little claws on your OS you won't have to bother with fancy removal tools anyway. But how to do it? Sure, real-time scanning will catch a lot of garbage, but why not give your PC a little extra help? Here are two really simple methods.
Outfox malicious sites using a hosts file. By making use of the lmhosts file win Windows, you can trick your computer into never seeing sites where a lot of malware originates. Our favorite is MVPS.org's; it's one of the most complete, frequently updated files you'll find on the net. All the nefarious domains are redirected to 127.0.0.1 - good ol' localhost - so any links to their evil apps just won't work because chances are pretty good that your PC isn't serving up WinSuperSpyRemover 2008. Gold.
Due to many complaints from users of LiveJournal the company announced it will again offer basic accounts. Unlike most other free blogging platforms, LJ's basic account has limited capabilities but the bonus of no advertising.
The option of signing up for a basic account was removed in March. Makes sense considering a free account with no advertising generates no money for LJ and in fact, probably costs the company money in storage space at the very least.
Apparently, LJ bloggers have grown accustomed to blogging without the distraction of ads. When the basic accounts were removed as a new user choice, many current users decided to hold a one day protest, refusing to blog or comment. In a news post LJ announced that basic accounts will return by the end of the summer for those in the Northern Hemisphere. The LJ team has also started a new blog specifically to discuss options and ideas for the future of basic accounts.
The LJ team admits it was probably a bad decision in the first place to remove the basic accounts but it looks like the developers plan to work with users on ideas to make things work to everyone's satisfaction.
At some point you've probably used 
If the thought of downloading a large PDF file makes you (or your computer) shiver, check out 
That picture of Fluffy is never quite the same once you blow it up on your big, HD monitor. Fluffy looks less cute and much more pixilated than in real life. In fact, a lot of pictures and wallpapers just don't look the same. 
So, you spend more time surfing the internet than actually working, you met your significant other on the internet and maybe, just maybe you know what a MUD is. Whether you are a geeky boy or the more rare and exotic geeky girl you haven't lost yourself in the rabbit hole of the internet until it becomes time to plan your wedding. 
Moralize.us
Have you ever looked in a real DIYers toolbox? Or maybe even the toolbox of someone who's pretty handy, but who has a messy streak? So all the hammers might be together, or all the screwdrivers will be together, maybe even with some sort of arrangement as to Phillips or Torx heads... but there is almost inevitably, in some corner compartment of the toolbox, or some drawer (and maybe several of them, even) an area set aside for what amounts to a whole lot of miscellaneous "everything" bits. These pieces might logically be found with hammers, or dry wall tools, or about a million other things... But they aren't quite the same, and they aren't always used in the same manner. So they end up in a big pile, that you hope stays manageable enough you can find them again.
Due to many complaints from users of LiveJournal the company announced it will again offer basic accounts. Unlike most other free blogging platforms, LJ's basic account has limited capabilities but the bonus of no advertising. 
