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Oct 04

And the YouTube Video of the Year Award Goes to…

This article was written on March 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Could this be the new big event of the year? Probably not, but YouTube is extending a virtual red carpet out to a list of people who submitted their videos to YouTube over the course of 2006, and deserve to be recognized. Starting today, you can vote for your favorite videos that you’d like to see win a YouTube Video Award – trophy included.

To make it easy, they’ve divided the awards into 7 different categories: most creative, most inspirational, best comedy, musician of the year, best commentary, and ‘most adorable video ever.” Users will have five days to vote, and the videos with the most votes in each category will win.

Mashable is reporting that the list of nominees will be here sometime today, but as of now while I’m writing this, that list is not yet available. I’m sure Lonelygirl15 will be on that list somewhere, and maybe even one of my favorites, Evolution of Dance.

There are lots of YouTube fans lurking around here, so which video if any do you think will be triumphant in any of the categories? I’m sure there are plenty of deserving recipients, but I’m only left to wonder, what will these acceptance speeches be like?

Oct 03

CyberNotes: Price Drop Notifications

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on November 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

There are many stores out there that offer a 30 day price guarantee which means if the price goes down after you’ve bought it, they’ll refund you the difference. The problem with this is that you have to know that the price dropped in the first place before you can get a refund. But who has time to check prices everyday for products they’ve bought in the last 30 days? Luckily, there are several sites out there that are all about helping you save money and letting you know when the price has dropped. Today we’ll be covering services offered by PriceProtectr and PriceGrabber, two sites that cover multiple retail stores. We’ll also be covering RefundPlease which focuses solely on Amazon, as well as Kayak which will notify you if the price of an airline ticket has gone down so that you know when to buy it.

PriceProtectr

PriceProtectr will check a stores’ website for price reductions for 30 days after you’ve purchased the product if they offer a 30 day price guarantee. It’s a fairly new service and they’re always adding new stores to their list.

priceprotectr

Stores or services: In all,there are 58 supported sites. Some of them include (in alphabetical order):

Abercrombie & Fitch, Altrec.com, Amazon, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, American Eagle Outfitters, American Musical Supply, Ann Taylor, The Apple Store, Backcountry.com, Banana Republic, Barnes and Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy, Best Buy Canada, Bike Nashbar, BJ’s Wholesale Club, bloomingdale’s, Circuit City, Comp USA, Cooking.com, Costco, Costco Canada, Crutchfield, Fry’s Electronics, Future Shop, Gap, J&R Computer World, Jenson USA, J. Crew, KB Toys, Kohls, Lacks Home Furnishings, Lamps Plus, Linens ‘N Things, London Drugs, Lowes, Music123, Musicians’ Friend, Nordstrom, Office Depot, Office Max, Old Navy, Petco, Radio Shack, Rooms To Go, Sears, The Sharper Image, 6th Avenue Electronics, Staples, Staples Canada, Swim Outlet, Target, Tiffany Lamps, White House – Black Market, Zappos.com, zZounds

Type of Notifications: Email (they promise not to spam you!)

Good/Bad: They offer a wide variety of stores that they can watch for dropping prices, unfortunately they don’t have an RSS feature so that you can be notified by a method other than email. It’s simple and easy to use, and can save you quite a bit of money.

RefundPlease.com

Much like PriceProtectr, RefundPlease.com is all about saving you money by notifying you when something you’ve purchased has gone down in price within 30 days of purchase. All you’ll need is the ISBN (of it’s a book) or the ASIN# for non-books, and they’ll be able to track the price of the item for you.

refundplease

Stores or services: Amazon only

Type of Notifications: email

Good/Bad:The fact that they only offer this service for Amazon is disappointing, however the good news is that they plan to expand this service to include other online shopping retailers. Another great thing about this site is that they show you what the top five price changes were from the day prior.

PriceGrabber.com

PriceGrabber is better known as a comparison shopping tool and a place to get merchant reviews, or get notified of rebates or find coupons, but it too has a great feature that can be used for Price Drop Notifications. You’ll have to have an account, but once you do, you can use the ‘set price alert’ feature. To use it as a price drop notification service, just find the product you bought, select to filter by merchant, and then set the target price to what you paid for it. Once it drops below the price you paid for it, you’ll get an alert.

Stores or services: Many, many stores in categories like:

Applicances, Auto parts, Barbies & Kids, Books & Magazines, Cameras, Cell Phones, Plans, & Accessories, Clothing, Computers, Consumer Electronics, Flowers & Gourmet, Furniture, Health & Beauty, Indoor Living, Jewelry & Watches, Movies (DVD & VHS), Music, Musical Instruments, Office Products, Outdoor Living, Software, Sporting Goods, Toys, Video Games

Type of Notifications:Email

Good/Bad: The good and bad happens to be their selection of merchants. The list of supported merchants is HUGE, yet they’re lacking some of the major ones.

Kayak

Kayak is best known as a travel search engine, but they offer so much more than just a search engine. One of their features called Fare “Buzz” is especially helpful because you can set a Maximmum Price for an airline ticket, and once it drops below that price, you’ll be notified so that you can go buy the tickets while they’re being sold at a great price.

Stores or services: Airline Tickets

Type of Notifications:Email

Good/Bad:You select how often you want an email – either weekly, daily (or never) for the fare alert feature, which is nice. It would be great to see them add a “buzz” feature (or a notification service) for some of the other travel options like a hotel, a cruise, a rental car, etc.

Oct 02

Create Ransom Notes Using Flickr

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on October 22, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNet Flickr Images

So you just stole your friends pocket protector and there is only one thing left to do…write a ransom note! You could sit there flipping through pages upon pages of magazine articles looking for letters to use or you could utilize the power of Flickr to do the dirty work!

Using “Spell with Flickr” you’ll see just how easy it is to make those ransom notes. It even gives you the necessary HTML code to post the letters on a website and Flickr is the one hosting the images.

This is extremely beneficial for those who are trying to find cool things to do with JavaScript and PHP. That is because the developer posted all of the source code so that you can read it and hopefully learn from it: PHP Source Code, JavaScript Source Code, and RSS Source Code.

News Source: CyberKnowledge

Oct 01

YouTube Launches Active Sharing Service and other Features

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

YouTube has just launched a service called Active Sharing as a way to get even more video views. If you decide to opt-in for the service YouTube will track which videos you have watched in the last 30–minutes and share that with other users. Your username will then appear on each video that you watch, and on your profile page there will be a list of your most recently viewed videos:

Youtube Active Sharing

To enable the Active Sharing feature on your account you’ll need to go here. At anytime you can visit that same site and opt-out the service so that your video browsing activity is no longer tracked.

I think that it is pretty smart of YouTube to start offering such a service because it might make people want to watch even more videos. I’m just glad that they made this optional so that users who wish to maintain their privacy can still do so.

They didn’t stop there either, they also launched a few other features yesterday that are worth noting:

Rearrange the order of your videos and favorites…I think this is pretty cool!
You can setup your own videos to automatically approve comments from your friends, but anyone else still needs approval.
Browse videos on channel pages according to the Most Recent, Most Viewed, and Most Discussed.
Now you can unblock users that you might have “accidentally” blocked.

Source: YouTube Blog

Sep 25

Kevin Mitnick’s Web Sites Get Hacked

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on August 22, 2006 by CyberNet.

Kevin Mitnick Security Hacked Kevin Mitnick is one of the world’s most notorious hackers. When he was caught back in 1995 the FBI seized his laptop which ended up being a money maker for him. He was put in jail for 5-years and in 2002 he sold that laptop with a fresh copy of Windows 95, documentation, and the FBI evidence bag for more than $15,000! I’m sure it did help that the laptop was signed by himself and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who wrote “You’ve got the whole world in your hands. –Woz (Free Kevin!).” Not a bad price for a Toshiba Satellite T1960CS.

He eventually started his own security company cleverly named Mitnick Security and does conferences around the globe. Unfortunately for him the “underground” world still sees Kevin as a hacker and prides themselves on breaking into his sites. It just happened yesterday and the image above is what the hackers used to deface the site.

I am sure the hackers feel proud but Mitnick said “The Web hosting provider that hosts my sites was hacked” which is a very valid point. It’s not like these hackers broke through Mitnick’s own security defenses in order to gain control of the Web site. Not only that but the image looks a little childish.

News Source: zone-h [via CNet]

Sep 25

Digg Site Unavailable

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on June 02, 2006 by CyberNet.

Digg Site Unavailable

I was just informed that the Digg site is unavailable. I didn’t realize it but I do think that it has only been down for a short time. I have some articles in my feed reader that is from their site and they are pretty recent relative to the rest of my articles in my feed reader. Hopefully they didn’t get their servers raided by a bunch of police like the PirateBay.org did!

Sep 23

CyberNotes: File Hippo Makes Finding And Downloading Free Software Simple

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on August 04, 2006 by CyberNet.

Free For All Friday

File Hippo is a website I just came across that makes finding and downloading free software simple and effortless! It is organized into categories like browsers and plugins, anti-spyware, audio and video, and the list goes on an on. Essentially, if you’re looking for any type of software, File Hippo will most certainly have a category for it filled with different options. Best of all, the software is free. After stumbling across this, I think it will become my ‘go to’ site for freeware. Here’s why: One of the first features I noticed was their RSS feeds. RSS feeds have become an essential part of my day to make sorting through information that’s important to me a little bit easier. File Hippo provides feeds for updates, categories, and individual programs. Convenience is something I like, and this is sure a convenience.

File Hippo

Another feature that was attractive is the fact that they keep old versions of programs! Sometimes when I get a new version of a program only to find that the bugs haven’t been worked out, I want to go back to a previous version. At times, this can be hard to come by. No more wasted time trying to track down old versions of a program that aren’t available anymore. Organization of a site and simply the looks of it are always important to me. While File Hippo has a simple user interface, it’s organized well and easy to find what you’re looking for. At the top of the website, they have a ‘latest updates’ as well as a ‘most popular downloads’ section. They claim to focus only on the best software so while quantity isn’t in large abundance, quality is. They also have a filtering feature that will show you only Freeware and/or Non-beta software. Finally, one of the greatest reasons I’ve been intrigued with File Hippo is because downloading is super simple, and there are no popups or spyware. Downloading software these days without popups or spyware is almost unheard of. This is a breath of fresh air when you’re able to download without getting attacked by popups. Here are my top picks in no particular order: Anti-Virus: AVG Free Edition 7.1.394 Audio and Video: Winamp 5.2.5 CD and DVD Tools: DVD Decrypter 3.5.4.0 Messaging and Chat: Google Talk Imaging: Picasa 2.5 Firewalls and Security: Sygate Personal Firewall File Hippo is a great resource in helping you to find quality freeware that you’re interested in and it’s simple and easy to use. Check it out!

Sep 23

Zimbra Desktop Launches with Offline Functionality

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on March 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

Zimbra has launched their Desktop Web 2.0 Application for download, and what’s special about it is that it offers both online and offline functionality which means you can work no matter where you are.

For starters, Zimbra Desktop is available for Windows, Apple, and Linux operating systems, and can be used with Firefox, IE, or Safari web browsers. It provides users offline access to their selection of Ajax applications. Currently their big feature is that you’ll have full email support, as well as access to your contacts both online and offline.

In the near future, they also plan on adding support for calendar, documents, and zimlets as well as the option to choose the folders that you want to synchronize. Zimbra Desktop is in the Alpha stage for people to evaluate it, test it, and report bugs that they come across.

Zimbra

Because you can use their services both online and offline, you can work no matter where you are; on the plane, in the car, wherever you might be. Many online services are going offline recently. It’s becoming the new trend which will help those who use these services to be more productive. There’s a whole list of them, but one you might be familiar with that we’ve mentioned before is called Scrybe. It works similarly, and offers support both online and offline for a Calendar and Task Manager.

While Firefox 3 is still in the works, it is also said to offer offline support for web applications like Google Calendar. This is a big deal because it would give people free offline access to some of their favorite online services.

When these Web 2.0 applications can work just as well offline as online, it’s a good deal for everyone involved. Zimbra says that they haven’t set prices yet for this Desktop application but eventually, there will be a price. The download links are found here (you’ll need at least 256 MB of free memory to run it), and they also have a Quick Start Guide with instructions to help you get started.

Source: TechCrunch

Sep 22

Digg Gets New Features Next Monday

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on July 18, 2006 by CyberNet.

Digg plans to add new ways to monitor real-time activity starting next Monday. One new visualization tool, called the Stack, is pictured above and we heard about it a month ago. Multiple stories are displayed on the screen and are represented by the vertical bars. When a story is Dugg a small block falls from the top and lands on it. This makes it easy to see which stories are quickly making their rise to the top.

Another new tool called the Digg Swarm uses little “bubbles” to represent the articles. The size of the bubble is representative of how many Diggs the story has. I don’t like this visualization tool nearly as much as the Stack from above.

There is already an existing tool that Digg has called the Digg Spy which will let you see Diggs, comments, and more in real-time. Most people don’t even know that the Digg Spy exists which is a little disappointing because it is so cool. I use it all the time because it is fun to see what people are Digging in real-time, it is kinda like people watching 🙂 .

Sep 22

Identify Web Fonts Used on Sites

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on September 09, 2011 by CyberNet.

Font lookup

When you go to a website you may see a font that looks interesting and sparks some curiosity as to what font type was used. There are all kinds of web developer tools that make finding this info pretty easy, but all you really need is the WhatFont bookmarklet. When you run the bookmarklet you’ll be able to click on any of the text on the page you’re viewing to see more details about it.

As you can see in the screenshot above WhatFont tells you the font family and size, line height, color, and an example of the upper/lower case alphabet using that particular font. Plus it is all wrapped up in a beautiful popup window.

If you’re not a fan of bookmarklets there is also a Chrome extension available, but I prefer the bookmarklet since it works in all the major browsers without having to worry about installing yet another extension.

WhatFont Bookmarklet and Chrome Extension

Hasta La Gadget!

And the YouTube Video of the Year Award Goes to…