Sep 27

Gmail Themes are Available… and They’re Sweet!

Posted in: Gmail, Google, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on November 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

I’ve always thought that Gmail has one of the best interfaces out there in terms of web-based email clients, but not everyone may feel the same way. In true Google fashion they are starting to roll out a feature where users can choose from 30 awesome looking themes that will give your Inbox a fresh new feel.

This new feature isn’t going to be part of Gmail Labs either. Once the themes have been rolled out to your account you should notice a new Themes tab in the settings. Alternatively this link will take you directly to the theme settings provided that it has been activated for your account.

Here’s a quick look at a variety of the themes available (notice the ASCII theme in the bottom-left corner):

gmail themes.jpg

Bravo Google! You’ve really out done yourself this time. Now there’s just one thing that would really put this over the top, and that would be if they create some sort of system so that designers can create and upload their own themes. I’m not going to complain though because the set of themes they currently have available is pretty amazing.

P.S. I have one account that has this feature already, and another that doesn’t. So be patient why this gets rolled out to everyone.

Read more about the new themes over at the Gmail Blog

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Sep 27

Yahoo to Acquire Zimbra for 350 Million

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites, Yahoo

This article was written on September 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

All along I had been wondering why Yahoo hadn’t acquired Zoho (Online Office Suite) yet. In fact, back in July I asked this very question and I suggested that Yahoo seemed like a likely buyer because Microsoft has no need for them, and Google has their own Office Suite. Now I know that Yahoo had no need for Zoho – they were going after Zimbra, an Online Open Source Office Suite. TechCrunch just reported that Yahoo is set to announce their acquisition of Zimbra tonight for $350 million in cash.While Yahoo hasn’t made their official announcement yet, thus it hasn’t been confirmed, Arrington says that they got this information "through a very solid source."

Seeing as Zimbra is Open Source, it’s no surprise how versatile it is.  Users on Windows, Apple, and Linux operating systems using browsers like Firefox, IE, and Safari are able to use their service. And the fact that their Desktop application offers both online and offline functionality makes it that much more appealing. They also make great use of Ajax in their applications which gives you a great experience. Their web client integrates a shared calendar, contacts, email, online document authoring, and more.

Aside from being known as one of the best open source options for messaging, collaboration, and reducing the need for Microsoft Outlook, Zimbra is also pretty well known because of the skins that you can make. Zimbra is very customizable and you can make it look nearly any way you’d want. To prove this, they made (for fun- not for us), a skin that looks like Gmail pictured to the right. Impressive, isn’t it?

zmail

There’s SO much that you can do with Zimbra and it’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo decides to use it.  I also assume Yahoo intends to use Zimbra to directly compete with Google Apps, but we’ll just have to wait and see. When I look at Zimbra, I must say, it makes me wonder why Gmail and other mail services haven’t been able to do what Zimbra has done already by integrating all of their services together.

If you’d like to see what Zimbra is all about, you can try out this demo — no registration is required to do this.

Thanks “S” for the tip!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Sep 26

Coming Soon: DRM-Free Music Brought to You by Amazon

Posted in: amazon, Music, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on May 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

Amazon has just jumped out of the gate leaving DRM behind.  Later this year, we can expect an Amazon music store stocked with millions of songs from 12,000 record labels, all DRM-free!

DRM-free music has been peeking around corner for a few months now.  Amazon has most likely partnered with EMI, an independent music company in London who announced in early April their plans to sell DRM free songs to iTunes customers starting in May. At the time, EMI said that iTunes was given the first opportunity, but it wasn’t an exclusive deal with Apple alone.

Amazon will be the first to offer an entire library of DRM-free songs in MP3 format. I’m eager to find out what their pricing will be. iTunes has set their price at $1.29 per song, and it would be awesome if Amazon could come up with something better like $.99 per song. People love the idea of DRM-free songs, but so far I haven’t seen many too thrilled that they have to pay more for that privilege.

This is definitely another step in the right direction towards giving the consumer freedom with what they purchase. People can purchase the song and use it however they’d like for their own use on multiple devices, which is a good feeling. Hopefully other major labels will join in, and the selection of DRM-free music will continue to grow.

Source: Ars Technica

 

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Sep 26

Did You Miss Digg’s Temporary Upgrade Screen Today?

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on June 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

Did You Miss Digg's Temporary Upgrade Screen Today?
 

There were many people anxiously awaiting Digg version 3 that was just released today. This morning they had to take the site down in order to prepare the new version to go live. While the site was down they placed a temporary page that showed some of the sites that the Digg team finds enjoyable. That is nothing new, but the unusual thing was the music that they had playing to help build excitement for the release.

Go ahead and view a copy of the page, complete with music, that someone has put together.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Sep 26

Pandora Arrives on the Desktop

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on June 04, 2008 by CyberNet.

arrow Windows Win; Mac Mac arrow
Pandora has done a great job of making a name for themselves as the ‘go-to’ music recommendation and Internet radio service on the web. Most people who use the service regularly have nothing but praise for it, but have often requested some type of desktop application to compliment it. Now Pandora is about to satisfy those users who had requested the feature by announcing that a beta version of Pandora Desktop has launched.

This new Pandora Desktop (beta) was built to use the Adobe AIR platform. One of the unfavorable aspects of it is that the advertisements they use stick out like a sore thumb. Of course we can’t blame Pandora for using advertisements because we too rely on them to pay the bills, but those who have used Pandora Desktop already have commented that the advertisements as they are currently set-up do take away the beauty of having a desktop version. Pandora addresses this issue on their blog saying,

It’s important to understand that at Pandora we have big licensing and streaming bills to pay and from the beginning we’ve been working hard to figure out that piece of the puzzle. That means that advertising is an integral part of the Pandora experience and in an effort to keep the advertising as unobtrusive as possible we’ve focused on graphical ads rather than audio ads. The one downside to that is that we need lots of pixels to run the ads, so one thing you’ll find with the desktop app is it’s not some tiny little widget. As nice as that would be, it would make it basically impossible for us to cover our costs with advertising. So, at least for now, the main window of Pandora Desktop (which you can minimize) looks pretty much exactly like the Pandora.com home page.

Here’s what Pandora Desktop offers users:

  • The option to easily see what’s playing with one click
  • Conveniently pause, play and change stations
  • Quick start to begin listening to Pandora

It’s worth noting that Pandora Desktop works for both Mac and Windows users which is nice. I installed it and it looks pretty much just like their website, and allows you to type in the name of an artist, song or composer and then it tries to find music you’d like based upon that.

pandora desktop.png

It’s a great start for Pandora and while there’s some work that can be done to make it better, there are lots of people happy that a desktop version of Pandora has arrived.

Download Here

Source: TechCrunch
Thanks for the tip Omar!

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Sep 25

Add Tabbed Feeds To Your Google Homepage

Posted in: Google, Today's Chili, Web Sites

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

Google Tabbed Feeds Adding feeds to your Google Personalized Homepage is easy to do but it isn’t nearly as efficient as what Netvibes has to offer. If you like the Google Homepage better then you might find this to be useful though.

The Feeds in Tabs module will let you add up to four feeds and it will place them in tabs so that you can easily view the news from multiple sites in just a few clicks. This is a great solution because it doesn’t clutter up the screen and it gives you the option to not show a summary, show a short summary, or show a long summary of the article.

If you have a ton of feeds you are trying to track then you should consider using the Google Reader module. It lets you see your recent unread feeds and also lets you filter them by labels. However, when using this module you cannot sort the articles by the source, which is why I like the Feeds in Tabs module a little better.

If you’re looking for the most powerful feed reader that you can get on a personalized homepage then you should look into Netvibes. You can view the full feed from a website using their intuitive RSS modules that they provide. In my opinion no homepage has come close to what they have to offer.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Sep 25

Soundflavor: Free iTunes DJ

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

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

I have thousands of songs on both my computer and my iPod. Most of the time, I find myself listening to the same songs, the ones I’ve put into a “favorites” playlist.   The other songs that didn’t happen to make it into my favorite list just sit there. Up until now, I hadn’t thought about how nice it would be to have all of the songs placed into playlists for me! I’m sure you’ve found yourself saying “Wow, I didn’t even know I had this song.” One solution to this problem is Soundflavor, the free iTunes DJ that will place your songs into playlists based upon the “flavor” of the sound.  As of now, it’s available for Windows only, but it’s worth checking out (they’re working on a mac version as well).

Soundflavor works by “flavorizing” the music in your library by matching a type of music that you’re listening to with another song with similar qualities. There are five different “flavorizer” settings that will determine how the playlists are formed. The “full flavor” setting creates a well balanced list. Some of the newer songs won’t be recognized like older songs because songs that Soundflavor recognizes have been analyzed by one of their 45 analysts.  They’ve gone through over 350,000 songs to place the euphonic makeup of the songs into a database.  Playlists are determined by era, genre, songs previously listened to, and/or the track’s aural qualities.

While there may be a few glitches that need to be worked out, it is a free plug-in worth experimenting with.  You may not end up with perfect playlists, but you’ll probably end up with some new tunes to listen to that you didn’t even realize you had!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Sep 25

Newegg.com Making It’s Way To Europe

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on June 09, 2006 by CyberNet.

Newegg.com Making It's Way To Europe

Most people will purchase something from Newegg.com at some point in their geeky lives, but have you ever thought of how big they really are? Well, if you haven’t thought about it before then this will put it into perspective:

Newegg.com anticipates its worldwide sales will grow 30% to US$1.7 billion in 2006, up from an estimate of NT$1.3 billion in 2005. Every day, the online retailer generates US$5-7 million in sales, with about 550,000 visitors to its website on average every day.

I would say that Newegg.com has quite a business going on. They are also planning on making their way into Europe so that they can capitalize on markets all around the world. Now if only they had retail stores that had their online prices, then I would finally be able to say goodbye to Best Buy.

News Source: DigiTimes

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Sep 25

The Pirate Bay Mocks Hollywood

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on June 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

The Pirate Bay Mocks Hollywood

The Pirate Bay is back online and they are more alive than ever. They are laughing at Hollywood because The Pirate Bay is now decentralized. This means that they have copies of their servers in other locations, and even better is that they are in different countries.

If The Pirate Bay is going to go down again then it will take a lot more. Looks like Hollywood isn’t going to get the last laugh this time.

Also, make sure you check out this info that The Pirate Bay released about their downtimes. You’ll get a good laugh.

News Source: Slyck File Sharing

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Sep 24

How Websites Can Track You With Cookies Even If You’ve Disabled Them

Posted in: Firefox Extensions, flash, privacy, security, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on December 30, 2009 by CyberNet.

Ever since consumers started gaining access to the internet, cookies have been controversial. They have a lot of legitimate uses, such as helping websites remember that you’re logged in. On the other hand, privacy campaigners have often voiced concerns about ad networks using cookies to gain information about your surfing habits. Although browsers will let you disable regular cookies completely if you want, this doesn’t keep sites from storing a more sophisticated type of cookies on your computer…

How is it possible that sites can still track you even if you’ve disabled cookies? The answer lies within a browser plugin that is installed on approximately 99.0% of Internet-enabled computers worldwide: Flash. In version 6 of the popular plugin, something called Local Shared Objects was introduced. This allows websites to store a small amount of data on your computer. But hey, wait a minute… that sounds an awful lot like the concept of cookies.

There are three major reasons why we should be cautious with Flash cookies:

  • By default, every website is allowed to use up to 100kB of storage on your computer. Regular cookies are limited to 4kB. That may not sound like a lot of space these days, but that’s huge in cookie terms.
  • Flash cookies never expire, unlike regular cookies.
  • Even when you opt out of cookies entirely in your browser’s preferences, Flash cookies can still be set unless you disable Flash entirely.

Calm down
Don’t panic. Flash cookies don’t will not send your social security number to criminals or anything like that, but it is important that you understand what they could be used for to make an informed decision about them.

Let’s have a closer look at a common “evil” use of cookies in general: marketing. Sites A, B and C display ads from ad network X on their site. If you go to site A for example, the ad network can place a cookie on your computer that contains the URL you just visited. As you go from site to site, perhaps including site B and C, the network can collect the URLs that display their advertising to generate an anonymous profile about you, containing such information as your interests, political orientation, beliefs, age and the region where you live.

So basically Flash cookies do what regular cookies do too, except that Flash cookies can contain more data and never expire. If that doesn’t sound bad to you, Flash cookies are nothing to worry about.

Finding your Flash cookies
betterprivacy.jpgTo help us find and delete Flash cookies, we’re gonna need a Firefox add-on called BetterPrivacy. After installing it, you can start it by going to Tools > BetterPrivacy. If you take a look at the screenshot, you can see that I’ve been playing a Flash game called Level Up and that I have been using Gmail’s web interface. All entries that begin with a hash are harmless because they’re related to Flash’s preferences.

There are two entries that caught my eye: cnettv.cnet.com and vizu.com. CNET TV appears to have stored data in a file called OVPMetricsProvider.sol, which leads me to believe this cookie is used solely to do detailed site analytics. I didn’t remember going to Vizu.com, so I looked it up. A quick search revealed that it is an analytics company, therefore people who are concerned about their privacy probably don’t want this cookie around.

Deleting Flash cookies
Unfortunately, BetterPrivacy can’t block Flash cookies as of yet. You can however let it delete your Flash cookies on demand with a hotkey or automatically every couple of hours. I’m not too paranoid about my privacy, so I went with the less radical solution of having BetterPrivacy delete my Flash cookies when quitting Firefox. All these options can be accessed on the second tab of the add-on’s preferences window.

betterprivacy options.jpg

Much like regular cookies, Flash cookies also have legitimate uses you don’t want to block. After all, you don’t want to lose your progress in that Flash game you’ve nearly finished. Luckily you can whitelist certain Flash LSOs so that BetterPrivacy won’t delete them. This can be done by going to the first tab of the settings window, selecting an entry and clicking the ‘Prevent automatic LSO deletion’ button.

The tips in this article only cover Firefox. If you have Opera/Chrome/IE/Safari tips that fit in with the article, please do share them with us in the comments.

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