I first published this poem on my personal blog back in December 2004 and was reminded of it again today when reading about Google’s Context-Sensitive Spell Checker.

A more intelligent spell checker is part of a new service to be launched later this year by Google called Wave. This takes a fresh look at communication and builds something brand new. What the creators have done is rather than build on what we already have (email and IM) they started with a clean sheet of paper designing something for the way we communicate today.

This is an interesting approach … Read the rest

Anagram is one of those great little utilities that you just don’t know how you lived without it. It takes what can be quite unstructured text and converts it into either a contact record or calendar entry as appropriate. I had been using the Outlook version of Anagram for a couple of years but when I moved over to Gmail a year ago I lost the ability to use Anagram as it wasn’t supported. So I was delighted to find out recently that Anagram now works with Gmail and Google Calendar.

Anagram works as a Gmail Gadget which means it … Read the rest

I recently wrote of my inability to get the new Carbonite Remote Access facility to work and my frustration with getting anything useful out of their support. Well shortly after I had made the post and put up a tweet about it I got a direct message from Carbonite saying that if I sent them my email address they would contact me and sort it all out. And do you know what? They did! (well sort of).

After a couple of calls from Paul in the States it seems that the reason I wasn’t seeing anything when I went to … Read the rest

I’ve been using Carbonite as my online backup service of choice for about a year now and it works seamlessly in the background sending my important files to the cloud just in case. Until recently that was all it did. A one way upload of files from my machine to the cloud. You could see them but unless you wanted to restore them they were untouchable in a virtual vault somewhere.

That changed just recently when Carbonite Remote Access was launched. Remote Access, as the name suggests, allows you to get access to your archive from just about anywhere via … Read the rest

Occasionally I have the need to create an icon file – usually for use as a favourite icon for a website. Until recently I struggled to find a simple way of achieving this as the graphics programs I use, as good as they are, don’t seem to have support for *.ico files. Then I stumbled upon the Online Icon Maker which, as the name suggests, is a web-based system for creating icon files.

You can choose to either create your icon from scratch or upload an existing file. On screen you see a simple view of the icon on the … Read the rest