Nils’ Geek Blog

Stuff that doesn’t matter

Archive for July, 2006

Web 2.0 and the wonders of online applications

Web 2.0I really like Web 2.0, the AJAX technology and all that comes with it. I adore the idea of making all applications available online. I guess I’m not the only one using several computers every day. When making the applications available online you don’t have to go through the pain of setting up all your computers with the same software. You then also don’t have to reinstall every application every time you reinstall the operating systems. (Read the article)

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Half-Life 2: Portal - applying design into the gameplay

I must say I really like this new trend of applying design and content creation into the gameplay.
I think this trailer for valve’s upcoming game Portal speaks for itself:

I have always liked the ability to manipulate the environment of the game. The gravity gun in Half-Life 2 was genious, and it looks like this gun will be at least as awesome!
Read more about the game at IGN.com.

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Last.fm enhanced!

Last.fm playerYesterday the guys at Last.fm gave their website a huge makeover. Lots of new features have been added and a new Last.fm player. The site is now built with Web 2.0Wikipedia technology in mind from the bottom up. It’s a lot more clean and slick and in general a lot more intuitive. I’ve been using the service for 3 years now, and I love it. For those who haven’t tried it yet, you can use it to explore your taste in music and help you discover new music. (Read the article)

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Flickr is down!

Flickr Down

According to the FlickrBlog the Flickr-site is temporarily down due to a storage glitch. They ensure that all photos and data are safe and that nothing has been lost.  To humor us, they’ve created a competition:

Because this sucks*, we thought you might like to enter an impromptu competition to win a FREE PRO ACCOUNT!

Just print out this page and colour in the dots. When the site’s back up, take a photo of your creation and post it to Flickr, tagged with “flickrcolourcontest”.

If you missed the competition you can print out my screenshot :)

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Skype Protocol has been cracked

New Skype CallLast year Charlie Paglee predicted in his blog that the Skype protocol will be reverse engineered by August 2006 and application code will be offered for license. Now it’s cracked!

(Read the article)

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World of Warcraft dominates

According to this chart it’s no question which mmorpgWikipedia is the dominating one. According to this chart from mmogchart.com World of Warcraft has more than 6,5 million subscribers!Geez! I must sure be hard for the competition to catch up with this game. The math: 6,5 million x 15$ (per month) = 97,5 million per month!

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Bush the Jedi

Watch this hillarious video and have a good laugh :)

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New features for Gmail

is continously improving with new features. ZDNet’s Google Blog is now reporting new features will be added to the gmail accounts. One of the features is that you can now delete all spam with a single click. This is probably not groundbreaking. I however like the second feature, which is the ability to add filters to exisiting emails. Up to now it’s only been possible to add filters to incoming emails. This new features makes it a lot easier to organize your emails.

If you, like me, have multiple email accounts and receive hundreds of emails every month, this is very helpful. Earlier you had to use searching and go through pages of search hits to add labels to lots of emails. Now you can do this is in a filter. :)
I use labels frequently in my gmail accounts. Yes, I have two accounts. One for rss feeds and one regular. Google Operating System has a list of things you can do with this new feature.

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How to promote your blog

Problogger have listed many ways to promote your blog. I’ll list some of them here: (Read the article)

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My burned harddrive :(

My burned harddriveA few days ago my computer crashed. After replacing the motherboardWikipedia and the PSUWikipedia I sadly discovered that two of my harddrivesWikipedia were destroyed. The one in the picture was in fact only a few months old! A brand new Seagate Barracuda. Strangely enough did my Hitachi SATA-drive manage to “stay alive”. Maybe it’s because it was using SATA-power instead of the conventional 4-pin power plug. I dunno…
The saddest part of my story, is that of course I had most of my picture backups stored the burned drive. I’ve actually been discussing backup solutions lately, but haven’t gotten to do anything about it. It’s SO typical!

I will probably register with streamload or amazon’s jungledisc soon.

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