MSN is going to shut down their free unsupervised chat services. Users got confronted with “nefarious elements”. Odd how this is mentioned specifically for “Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and much of Latin America” and not the US, but ah well. The solution to the ongoing problems of spam and porn? A paid service of course. [Read More!]

Oops. I'm having some trouble making a back up of everything. In this case, the ranking of most viewed posts got messed up. Just when it started to become a true ranking.

Well, I didn't exactly start this blog only for myself and the few people who know me. It is much more interesting to have an “audience” and know (well, “think” is more appropriate) that perhaps sometimes I can point people to something new.

Ofcourse, it's not like people just come and read. No case of “if you built it, they will come”. Although, maybe they'll come for a first visit, because they catch my blog in the “what's new” section. I'm adding it wherever I can, that should go without saying.

I added Feedster to my search engine list. This one searches for blogs and blog entries. And it works.

Personally, I find browsing online stores or shopping directories rather tedious. In the time it takes me to load ten book titles and glance at the images and/or skim their cover text, I could've checked out ten yards of books in a regular store. So to me, the addition of categories in a shopping search engine is not necessary. Still, it is to be expected from Yahoo when it starts something, given its portal history.

Yahoo! Shopping looks vaguely familiar to those who know Froogle. [Read More!]

Yet at the same time, it adds fun in different ways. How does it take away the fun? By making some things easier. In particular, it makes it easier to find stuff. As a librarian, I should probably be happy about that. However, it also makes it easier for me to find things that used to be special. [Read More!]

Fagan Finder offers a wealth of online tools for finding information. Ranging from links to general web search engines, to specialized search engines. It also includes the very helpful translation wizard, which will query relevant translation tools. So in Swedish this site should be called "bläckfläck av meddela". Hm, I like the English title better.

Very helpful when looking for some fancy stuff to add to your pages, without needing to program anything in JavaScript yourself. A search engine that allows you to search for freely available JavaScripts. Also very good for the those of us (like me) who know diddly about JavaScript, but who still want to add some small funky effects to their pages.

I used to go to Spychecker before downloading any programs, for some added security. It must have been a while since I checked anything, because I don't remember the look of the site as it is now. Instead of a fairly empty page and a search box, now it contains links to all kinds of helpful software. [Read More!]

Depending on your level of geekness, you either easily read the title of this blot, or you figured I was typing while drunk. Traditionally, Rot 13 is a simple way to encrypt text. Simply move letters 13 positions up or down the alphabet to (de)code.

Most mail/newsreaders offer Rot13 decoding functionality. ROT 13 on Stefan Huber's page is a simple online script that will take care of the (de)coding for you, for those times when you are caught without a program to do so, and when you're not interested in doing all the decoding by hand.

Peer-to-peer networking, or P2P. For years it was something that didn't get too much attention. Then Napster came along, and it's hard not to know how things went since then. The music and movie industries worldwide are complaining about all the copying. P2P software is blamed. Sure, it makes sharing (illegal) files easier. I think the main technical reason for the popularity of file sharing is not so much P2P software, but the increasing availability of broadband. I don't hear the industries complain about that though. They are the ones creating bandwidth-hungry preview sites, so any enjoyment of dial-up users is gone. [Read More!]