8th November 2008

November 8, 2008 | Comment

Stories that caught my eye this week – 8th November 2008:

… Read the rest

1st November 2008

November 3, 2008 | Comment

Stories that caught my eye this week – 1st November 2008:

You can see the rest of my reading list here.… Read the rest

Box vs. Dropbox

October 28, 2008 | 2 comments

A while back I wrote about Microsoft’s Skydrive service which provides some storage in the cloud that allows you to access your files from anywhere. There are plenty of others (Lifehacker has a good overview of some of the main players) but I was taken by both Box and Dropbox as they provide access from the iPhone.

At their heart both services provide online storage (1gb and 5gb, respectively, for free with other paid options) which you can upload files to from a web browser. Once up on the cloud you can then access these files anywhere. Additionally Dropbox also … Read the rest

Google Mail as Communications Hub

October 15, 2008 | Comment

When I am away from the office or home I still want to be able to communicate from anywhere and these days that means from a browser. A while ago I moved both my home and work emails over to Google Mail which has allowed me to get my email from anywhere but, until recently, I hadn’t managed the same for IM.

Google Mail has had a Chat gadget on the right hand side of the workspace for as long as I can remember but as I am not a Google Talk user it was of no use to me … Read the rest

12th October 2008

October 13, 2008 | Comment

Stories that caught my eye this week – 12th October 2008:

You can see the rest of my reading list here. … Read the rest

4th October 2008

October 4, 2008 | Comment

Stories that caught my eye this week – 4th October 2008:

You can see the rest of my reading list … Read the rest

Network Hard Drives

October 2, 2008 | Comment

A while ago I bought this hard drive enclosure from Maplin. What I wanted was some storage that I could access across the network rather than locally via a USB cable and this seemed to fit the bill at £35. I slotted in a spare 80gb hard drive and plugged it into the router. Within a couple of minutes I had connected to it from across the network and was able to transfer files back and forwards.

The management software for the device is pretty simplistic allowing you to setup folders and privileges and not much else. However, it does … Read the rest

What Time is it?

August 22, 2008 | Comment

AppSwing have been using an online project management system FogBugz for a few months now and it’s very good. However, what makes it stand head-and-shoulders above the competition is not the functionality (which is superb and well executed) but the attitude towards support. I have emailed their help desk a few times and have always had a quick and helpful response but what got me this week was an email stating that the service would be down for maintenance. Nothing unusual in that but what WAS unusual was that they had noticed that I was in the UK and provided … Read the rest

Wordle

August 15, 2008 | 1 comment

Here’s a neat way of representing information in a very graphical way: Wordle. Using this service you can either choose to enter some text, perhaps a presentation or speech or direct it at the RSS feed of a website. That’s what the picture below shows – the feed for this site. Weight is given to the words that are used more frequently. So from this graphic you can see my obsessions coming to the fore: Google, Mobile, Interesting, Friend and Small!

Whether you use it as a business tool or just for a bit of fun it is slickly … Read the rest

Cuil Search

July 28, 2008 | Comment

A new search engine (do we need another one?) has opened for business today. Cuil (pronounced Cool) is brought to us by a couple of ex-Googleites. I thought that I would give it a spin. Cuil reckons that it indexes three times the pages of Google and ten times that of Windows Live Search so my hopes were high to find some new pages.

First impressions were good – it looked slick and had a nice clean interface – though not as clean as Google. The acid test though is on search ability. Initially I searched for “Neil Thompson… Read the rest