Tumblr, the most beautiful blogging platform, just got a little more powerful.
You can now upload videos files as large as 100 MB directly to your Tumblr account. The cool thing is that, unlike Youtube where you to wait for the system to finish transcoding, videos uploaded to Tumblr will instantly show up in your blog.
While the service is often seen as a quick-blogging platform for sharing snippets and web clippings, the company is working hard to become a full-feature blogging service. They’ve recently added support for Pages and their new Community feature looking like a good option for blogs who accept guest bloggers.
Coming back to video uploads, while can can embed a fairly large video file to your Tumblr blog, you are limited to five minutes of video per day. That looks like a small limit for sure but Tumblr fans still have another reason to cheer for. And there’s absolutely no waiting time.
The contributors at Wikipedia use a few thousand words to describe Google. The simple edition of Wikipedia too has a page on Google that is slightly shorter but still runs into a few hundred words.
Now meet Ten Word Wiki, a Twitter style version of Wikipedia that only describes stuff in under ten words but they also add a pinch of humor to all their definitions. For instance, the definition of Google, in ten words, reads something like this:
The Centre of the Internet. They can find you anything.
Simple, funny and relevant! The Ten Words Wiki site is obviously not as vast as Wikipedia but it still has plenty of pages to keep you entertained for hours.
Here are some more tech related “ten word” definitions that I found extremely interesting. Thanks @leelefever for the tip.
» Mobile Phone – Once for calls and texts. Now music spewing spirit level.
» TV – Box with buttons and screen that blanks the mind.
» Internet – A series of tubes filled with porn and kitten pictures.
» Email – Electronic messaging medium for sending funny pictures of cats worldwide.
» Yahoo! – 1990’s website we used for search before we discovered Google.
» Wikipedia – A wiki project like Ten Word Wiki, but more verbose.
» Facebook – Website where children give out personal details, a paedophiles dream.
» Computer – Productivity tool used for anything but. Downloads porn from internet.
Let’s say you are using Amazon S3 to host images and other media files. Anyone can view these images on your website and you’ve also allowed other sites to use these images as long as they credit the source, that is, your site.
Now consider a different scenario. Someone like a picture on your site and posts a direct link of that picture to social sites like Digg, Twitter, etc. The image goes viral and within minutes, it gets seen by thousands of other people as in this example.
Hotlinking Images Means a Higher Bill
When people link directly to an image instead of the web page that is containing that image, others will see the image but without ever coming to your website and you’ll still have to pay Amazon for all the bandwidth that is consumed in serving that image.
If you are hosting files on a web server (say Apache), you can setup server side rules to prevent hotlinking but such a thing in not possible in Amazon S3. They do provide some kind of referral logs so can you figure out which other sites are hotlinking images but there’s no mechanism in Amazon S3 (and CloudFront) to deny requests based on the referral information.
How to Prevent Hot-Linking in Amazon S3
There’s a workaround that you may use to block hotlinking of selective images and files that you think are putting a major strain in your Amazon S3 budget.
When you upload a file to your Amazon S3 account, the service assigns a certain Content-Type to every file based on its extension. For instance, a .jpg file will have the Content-Type set as image/jpg while a .html file will have the Content-Type as text/html. A hidden feature in Amazon S3 is that you can manually assign any Content-Type to any file, irrespective of the file’s extension, and this is what you can use to prevent hotlinking.
Let’s say you have a page on your website called helloWorld.html that contains an image helloWorld.jpg hosted directly on Amazon S3.
If people are directly linking to the helloWorld.jpg image and you need a mechanism to redirect all that traffic to reach your original helloWorld.html web page, here’s what you should do:
Step 1. Create a new HTML text file on your desktop like the one below. You may change the URL in the code depending on where you want the visitor to go after he or she clicks on that hot linked image URL.
Step 2. Save this HTML file as, say abc.html, and upload it to the same S3 bucket that already contains the helloWorld.jpg file.
Now on the S3 side, first rename the old image file (to say helloWorld.jpg.bak) and then rename the recently uploaded HTML file (abc.html) so that it has the same name and extension as your original image (helloWorld.jpg).
That’s it! If people directly link to your S3 file, they’ll automatically land on your website – see example. Here’s a quick video illustration as well.
The logic is easy. When you uploaded the HTML file to Amazon S3, the content type was automatically set as HTML. When your renamed that HTML file on S3 to JPG, the content type remained unchanged and hence the file was served as a web page even though it had an image extension.
Since we are using the rel=canonical tag here, these ‘hotlinked’ image URLs will also bring to some Google juice to your website. You may use any of these free web based clients or the desktop clients to manage your Amazon S3 files without any coding.
You have cleared your IE history but some previously visited sites still show up in the address-bar of your browser. If you’ve got a similar problem, here’s a solution.
Clear the history of visited websites in IE
The more recent versions of Internet Explorer (IE7 and IE8) feature a pretty “smart” address bar. You type some word in the address bar and it will immediately show a list of matching web addresses that are in your browser’s history cache.
The auto-suggest feature in the address bar is a huge time-saver but a a privacy risk as well especially when you share the same computer with other family members.
Since you don’t want mom to know what searches you are performing on Google or what websites you are visiting, Microsoft added a handy “Delete Browsing History” option in Internet Explorer that will completely erase all your tracks with a click.
Why IE won’t delete my browser history
The only problem (see video) is that even if you clear the IE history and your Temporary Internet files folder, some of the previously visited website URLs may still show up in the address bar drop-down.
I have tried almost every possible method and that includes resetting the IE browser to factory defaults, removing the registry entries, running CCleaner to delete the stubborn index.dat, clearing the Temp folders manually, disabling add-ons (IE in Safe Mode) but, unfortunately, none of them worked.
Some previously visited websites continued to show up in the address bar and I was not the only one struggling with this strange problem. The Microsoft forums are filled with similar complaints from IE users. See some related threads:
In one of the threads, a Microsoft support engineer suggested running Windows after a “clean boot” that will load Windows with a minimal set of drivers and startup programs so that you can know if another background program is preventing IE from deleting the browser’s history and cache.
Luckily, the fix is simple and has actually nothing to do with IE’s web history.
The address bar in Internet Explorer is integrated with Windows Desktop search by default so even if you clear the IE history, the web entries that are stored in Windows search index will still show-up in the address bar. These entries appear in the same “History” group and hence users (myself included) confuse it with IE’s history.
To prevent web history items Windows Search from completely showing up in the IE address bar, go to Tools –> Internet Options –> Content –> AutoComplete and delete the option that says “Use Windows Search for better results.”
The upcoming Office 2010 software will be available as a free upgrade to all users who have purchased a copy of Office 2007 on or after March 5, 2010.
However, if you are feeling a bit unlucky because you got yourself a copy of Office 2007 just days before the upgrade offer was announced and are therefore ineligible for the free upgrade, here’s something that you should try.
The Microsoft web store has a refund policy of 30 calendar days for all downloadable software. If you have bought the software in a box, it is also eligible for return within 30 days of the purchase date as long as you have the original packaging, including installer media and the product key.
So here’s the deal. Return the copy of Microsoft Office 2007 to the store and buy it again from the same store. This time however you’ll automatically become eligible for a free upgrade to Office 2010 when it comes out in June.
All software retailers have different return policies but ff you have bought Office 2007 from Amazon in the last few days, you are covered too as they also have a 30 day return policy for software – the condition is that you should return the box “in its original condition.”
This should work not just for Office 2007 but all the other Office programs including Visio, Microsoft Project, etc.
Oops! This link appears to be broken in Google Chrome
You are trying to open a web page in Chrome and all it gives you is this error message – “DNS Error – cannot find server.”
You hit F5 to refresh a page but the error persists. You then open an alternate browser, like Firefox or IE, and the website loads up without any problem. So its a Chrome specific issue and has nothing to do with DNS Servers or your Internet connection.
The support page on the Chrome website suggests that you clear your browser cache, delete the cookies and scan your computer for malicious software to fix the issue.
Well, that may not fix your problem because the issue is not “malware” but a built-in Chrome setting that’s possibly preventing certain websites from opening up in Chrome.
When you visit a webpage (like a search results page), Google Chrome will pre-fetch the IP addresses of all websites that are listed on that page. Since the browser has the IP addresses of all the links in advance, DNS pre-fetching ensures that any links that may you click on that webpage will load faster. However, when pre-fetching fails, something that’s not very uncommon, you may get the “link broken” error.
You are more likely to see such an error when you are trying to open a website that you have never visited before.
The fix is simple – go to Tools > Options (or Preferences on a Mac) > Under the Hood and uncheck the setting that says “Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance.” This might increase the loading time of certain pages by a few microseconds but you won’t at least see that misleading error message.
It is always inspiring to read stories of people who may never have had an Internet connection but are still using the power of Internet to find clients from across the globe.
Meet Samson – he drives an auto-rickshaw in the Souther Indian city of Chennai and has a proper website where his prospective clients can read more about his services and where they find him.
Samson checks his email every week and says the best way to reach him is text:
I can usually be found outside of the Taj Comorandel Hotel, please just walk down the ramp to the street and ask for Samson! I can also be contacted by phone or text message at any time. If you would like to arrange a time for me to meet you before you travel to Chennai then why not send me a text?
Maybe a web-savvy friend is maintaining Samson’s site but now meet Devesh Mishra, a taxi driver from the North Indian city of Varanasi who gets hundreds of emails every week just because of a video that he uploaded on to YouTube.
The story of Devesh is quite interesting. He wanted to advertise his taxi service on the Internet but didn’t have the funds and know-how. One of his clients from Switzerland recorded a video of him and uploaded it on to YouTube.
The video has received more than 25k views and, because of Universal search, it also appears on the first page of Google for queries like “Indian Taxi Driver.”
There are probably more such inspirational stories. Sean Blagsvedt, who was earlier part of the Microsoft India Research group, started an online jobs portal -- BabaJob.com – for drivers, maids, cooks and other low-income jobs in India.
Of the 66,000+ people who are currently registered as job-seekers at BabaJobs.com, lot of them may have never touched a computer in their life or they may not even know how to read and write but they will still find work through the Internet. Amazing!
Have been trying to watch the IPL telecast on YouTube for some time and all I get is this “blue screen” saying they are “experiencing technical difficulties.”
The video stream does appear intermittently but its extremely slow and flaky. The audio from the telecast has a very low volume and feels completely out-of-sync with video. The video quality of the live webcast isn’t any great either.
On the plus side, the YouTube video player for the live-stream is beautiful – you can switch camera angles on-demand and there’s PIP (picture in picture) so you can watch two videos from different cameras simultaneously.
That said, there’s little reason to cheer about IPL’s live telecast on YouTube.
If you don’t have cable in your home, watching IPL on YouTube probably makes sense – because you’ve no other option – but everyone else may please turn on their television sets. You may of course come later for watching the match highlights on YouTube.
This time-lapse video captures how the Google Docs team turned an online spreadsheet into sort of a painting canvas by filling individual cells of the sheet with different colors simultaneously.
It might have take them several days to plan and draw the whole thing but luckily, you get to enjoy the process in under 60 seconds.
How to Paint in an Excel Spreadsheet?
If you want to create your own spreadsheet art but don’t have the time (or patience) to carefully paint every single square cell manually, here’s a nice shortcut.
Go to boydevlin.com and download their free Excel Art program. It’s a standalone utility that will convert any bitmap image into a spreadsheet that you then open in Microsoft Excel or even Google Docs. You don’t need Excel to use Excel art.
Excel as a Pixel Drawing Tool
For instance, here’re pixel portraits of painter Vincent van Gogh (Google Docs) and Mona Lisa all created with Excel Art. The conversion might appear a little pixelated from close but its beautiful nonetheless.
在维基百科上贡献者用
几千字
来形容谷歌。维基百科简单的版本也有关于谷歌是稍短页，但仍成为一个
几百字
运行。
2010年即将推出的办公软件将作为
免费升级
所有谁购买日或之后2010年3月5日版Office 2007副本的用户提供。
它始终是鼓舞人心的人读谁可能永远不会有一个互联网连接，但仍在使用的因特网的力量找到来自世界各地客户的故事。
