Automate Your Home

For the DIY home automator, the most popular solution is the X10 network protocol. X10 is communications protocol and network address system not unlike the TCP/IP protocol that powers the internet.

Using X10 and some Open-source software.

Link:
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/...

Rentomatic

What it does:

• Gain control and visibility of your properties anytime, anywhere. Advertise, manage finances, real-time data tools, and more.


• Connect with your tenants: communicate, track maintenance, and receive payments – we invoice for you.


• Automate rents: the only service to process both checks and online payments. We take care of billing, collection, deposit, and accounting updates.

Link:
http://www.rentomatic.com/

Google’s latest Android prototype

Google’s latest Android prototype is miles improved over the versions we last saw. Back at CES the GUI was clunky and the whole thing looked relatively primative; Google themselves asked us to keep an open mind and instead concentrate on the OS’ potential. Now, they’ve brought out a device that you could, frankly, mistake for production hardware.

Link:
http://androidcommunity.com/...

Is this Windows 7

Posted over at Crunchgear with many more:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/27/...

Web 2.0 Awards

After scouring the web for Web 2.0 sites both new and old, we developed a "short list" of over three-hundred sites in forty-one categories. From there, we had some of the web's best bloggers, entrepreneurs and business people vote on winners, narrowing the field to 174 place-getters and Honorable Mentions.

Link:
http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0

Understand how visitors view your website with Eyetrack

How much do we really know about how people read news websites? We can track their behavior clicking through a site visit. We can collect personal information. We can ask them questions. But that presents a small part of the full picture. To get the rest, we need to climb inside their heads and look through their eyes as they view online news sites -- to peer into their minds and see patterns that even they don't consciously see.

Might be old but interesting none-the-less

Link:
http://www.poynterextra.org/...

The PC Repair Toolkit in your Pocket

One tool that I have found to be valuable beyond compare is the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD). This compilation of software has just about everything you need to diagnose hard to find low level problems, and also some other tools that every PC technician should have available.

UBCD on a USB thumbdrive.

Link:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/...

Tower of Defense roundup

Two great roundups of the popular Tower of Defense online Flash games.

Defend The Towers: A nice summary of 28 tower of defense games each with a screenshot and short statement about the game.

Tower Defense games collection: An actively updated collection of every tower of defense game that the author feels is worth checking out. Larger screenshots makes this forum post a handy little guide to the tower of defense game genre.

Create a one-time popup using jQuery

Thought I would go through the steps of creating a one-time popup for a webpage using jQuery. The goal is to create a styled popup that is shown to visitors a single time when they visit a webpage, but not shown on future visits to that pages.

What we will need:

• jQuery: Provides the JavaScript framework for the code and does a lot of the heavy lifting
• jQuery Thickbox: Provides the actual popup and gives us an amazing amount of control on whats shown
• jQuery Cookie: Provides the mechanism to track users coming back to the page to prevent them seeing the popup more than once

Getting a webpage ready:
With only few lines of code added the head of a page we can make it ready to handle our popup.

Add into the Head area (between the HEAD tags):

<script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/jquery.cookie.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/thickbox/thickbox.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="scripts/thickbox/thickbox.css">

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
 if ($.cookie('20080521') != '1') {
  tb_show("<strong>We're Moving!</strong>",
              "#TB_inline?height=190&width=275&inlineId=mypopup","");
  $.cookie('20080521', '1', { expires: 20 });
 }
});
</script>

What the above does is first make reference to all the components we require to get the One-time popup to work.

The script section:

1. Checks if the document (page) has fully loaded
2. When its loaded it looks for the cookie that is set when the user has viewed the popup. What I did was date code the cookie so you can easily force a popup just by changing the cookie's name
3. If the cookie has not be set then a popup is displayed to the user and the cookie gets set with a 20 day expiration
4. Each subsequent visit to the page will not trigger the popup because the cookie has been set

Adding the popup:

<div id="mypopup" style="display:none">
<p id="msg">
         This is a sample popup.
</p>
</div>

This is the hidden content which will be displayed to the visitor as a popup. This can be any HTML code and can contain tables, forms or any styling you want and its location can be anywhere in a page between the BODY tags.

Wrap up:
You can see this is a very trivial task when you know the right components to use. With jQuery it couldn't be easier.

Google Earth Gets Layer for News

Google Earth has a new layer: Google News. Writing on the Google LatLong blog, Brandon Badger, Product Manager said, "By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide."

Link:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080521-090559

Weather Watcher Live

Weather Watcher Live is your personal, real-time Windows desktop weather station. View real-time weather conditions in your neighborhood from WeatherBug weather stations, or as reported by NWS.

Link:
http://www.singerscreations.com/...

Samsung demos 82” 2160p HDTV

The prototype display has a massive 82” size and features a resolution of 3820x2160 pixels, which results in a total screen resolution of 8.3 megapixels. Current 1080p TVs run at 1920x1080 pixels or 2.1 megapixels. According to the manufacturer, the TV integrates a red/green/blue LED backlight, which raises the color saturation to 150%. The image refresh rate is 120 Hz.

Now thats a TV.

Link:
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/...

5 websites to save you money on your next purchase

Below is a compiled a list of the top 5 websites to help you save money on your next purchase. When making a purchase online it really never makes sense to leave the coupon or promotion code box empty. These websites help you locate a valid coupon code to save you money whether its online or offline.


GottaDeal.com:Not only do they provide coupons codes but they also actively search for deals for products in both online and offline stores. This is a great place to check if you just want a deal and have some money to burn.


Hot Coupon Word: What makes this place bookmarkable is that they provide actual, old school, printable coupons for many brick and mortar stores. You can wade through scans of retailer flyers to locate coupons and deals. This is one of the few places that provide you scans of the actual flyers.


Brads Deals: Another great site for coupons (in-store) and coupon codes (online retailers). When visiting this site make sure to check out the Top Coupon bar on the right.


DealTaker.com: One of my favorite places to get coupon codes. I often check here first and have saved lots of money on GoDaddy products through the years because of DealTaker.com. Be sure to check out their Filler Items tool which locates products for various retailers for a certain price to allow you to take advantage of free shipping (usually).


Retail Me Not: From the people who brought you BugMetNot comes RetailMeNot. What I like about this website is the design of the website is professional and easy on the eyes. Its simple to use and each coupon can have a user rating and some feedback - this lets you know ahead of time how likely it will be that the coupon code will work.

Digg It

Set Up a Pirate Radio Station

Having a general concept for the content you're going to broadcast is not only important for sanity's sake. Knowing whether you'll be broadcasting voice or music can have a bearing on how you develop your studio. Want to run a music-heavy show? You're probably going to want to broadcast in stereo and on the FM band.

Link:
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/...

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1

Service Pack Update for Virtual PC 2007 qualifying Windows Server 2008, Vista SP1 and XP SP3.

Notice it says for XP SP3 only. This appears in the main section of the download but if you read further down it says supported on XP SP2.

Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...

Windows XP Service Pack 3 Deployment Tools

The Windows XP System Preparation tool enables administrators to prepare Windows XP system images as part of an automated deployment. You can use the System Preparation tool to perform the following tasks in a manner that is supported by Microsoft

Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...

Google Doctype

Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

Link:
http://code.google.com/doctype/

WorldWide Telescope

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

Link:
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org

How important is #1 in Google?

Pretty telling isn't it?

Read all about it:
http://www.seoresearcher.com/...

Sand, Sound and Science

New Blackberry To Be Called "Bold"

Link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/...

Distance Check now has active city lookup

Distance Check gives you the approximate driving time between two zip codes. A new active city lookup feature now makes the tool even easier to use. What it will do is give you a drop-down of zip codes matching any town or city as you type in the zip code field. So now you can either type the city code or start typing a town or city and Distance Check will find the zip code for you.

Tell me what you think.

Link:
http://distancecheck.com/

Bug and task management with Trac

Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission is to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team's established development process and policies.

Link:
http://trac.edgewall.org/

The Celebration Of Pixel Art

See the above and many more.

Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/...

MachForm is only getting better

MachForm is a form building application that you can run on your own servers, totally under your control. What is does is take all the work out of creating, styling, processing and collecting forms and form results. After reviewing many like services, I must say MachForm is above them all and with the release of version 2 its only getting better.

Whats new:

• Email Autoresponder
• Better, Prettier Email Design
• Fully Customizable Email
• Revamped Entry Manager
• Columns Display Preference
• Entry Viewer
• Printer Friendly
• Forward an Entry
• Submission Review
• Full PHP Embed Code
• New CAPTCHA option
• SSL Support

(read more)

Another thing that I use to judge an application is developer interaction. The developer for MachForm is a super nice guy that is highly responsive to his users and their issues and ideas.

Link:
http://www.appnitro.com/

Also, check out the demo's:
http://www.appnitro.com/demo/

Microsoft Photo Info 1.0

Microsoft Photo Info allows photographers to add, change and delete common "metadata" properties for digital photographs from inside Windows Explorer.

When installed, a new "Photo Info" item appears on the context menu for files selected in Windows Explorer. To use, simply select one or more image files, right-click and choose "Photo Info" to open the Photo Info properties editor. You can edit metadata for files individually, or all together as a batch. Photo Info reads and writes metadata in IPTC and XMP formats (depending on file type). It also provides enhanced "hover tips" and additional sort properties for digital photographs in Windows Explorer.

Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...

Get the health of the internet

Link:
http://www.internetpulse.net/