Weekend picks #018

What is the color of your life?

[1]

Google Earth
Google has added a new feature to Google Earth. If you live in United States you have another layer to add in the 3D view, one that uses data from the weather.com site to present the condition of the weather. Google says that it is as close to real time as it could ever be as it uses Doppler radars to present the clouds. All other users can use Google Earth to access the weather forecast [in 50.000 cities around the world]. Another also new feature in the latest version of Google Earth is that you can also explore the sky and not only the surface of the Earth. You can find it here

[2]

Anonymous?
Browsing the web is not anonymous. You can think that because you use a fake name in a site no one can find you but the truth is that if you have a connected to the Internet computer every web site you visit knows through your IP, your location and your ISP. But with a proxy server or an anonymizer there is an extra layer of security between you and the site you are visiting. The site you are visiting doesn’t know anything about you. All you have to do is ask a proxy server to fetch the data and then send them to you. If the intermediate proxy server is secured you don’t have to worry about anything. The only disadvantage is that because the data travel a longer distance browsing the net through a proxy is usually slower. There are a lot of free web anonymizers in the net but there some like JAP you can install in your own PC which I find easier to use. You can find it here.

[3]

D is for "Dream machine" in DSLR
Olympus invited me among other Greek journalists to Istanbul for the presentation of the new Olympus E-3 DSLR and I had the opportunity to test the camera in real life conditions for a whole day [more than 400 photos :-) ]. First of all I have to say that I was impressed by the city [this was my first time]. I honestly think that after Paris is the most “photo friendly” city in Europe. Everywhere you go from Hagia Sofia to Top Kapi or to the old market there is something to photograph. And then I was impressed by the E-3. You can shoot under any conditions night or day and be sure that your photos are focused, sharp and with the correct colors. It is splash free; one of the demonstrations that we had the opportunity to see was exactly that. A guy purred water from a bottle on the camera, took a towel wiped it and start shooting afterwards. I would like to test the also new A700 of Sony but I am thinking that Olympus has a winner here. You can find the press release here

Until next time keep on photographing and sharing your photos with your friends.

Weekend picks #015

Internet is not a network of Computers. Internet is a network of people!

[1]

David Allen in YouTube
What is GTD? Well Getting Things Done is not tiring, what it is tiring is not Getting Things Done. Check out this lecture by David Allen in YouTube and you will understand more.

[2]

43 Folders in YouTube
And as long as you are in YouTube you may want to check out also Inbox Zero, a lecture from Merlin Mann, the creator of 43 Folders

[3]

Internet Download Manager
I haven’t used a Download Manager for years. I installed IDM [Internet Download Manager] because I wanted to test my Internet connection. The first thing I did, well, was to download something. I was surprised. The highest download speed I had ever seen was around 425-430kb/sec from a particular ftp server regardless the time of the day. With IDM I was somewhere between 465-480kb/sec from the same server! After some minutes it settled to 470kb/sec. I didn’t believe it. I tested with Firefox again, the result was 425kb/sec. One more test with IDM, the same results, after a while 470kb/sec. IDM is great! It can catch downloads from Internet Explorer or Firefox, Opera and Netscape or you can add your own browser. You can even download videos from YouTube, Google Video, and MySpaceTV and it works like a charm in Windows Vista.

[4]

SmartLinks
SmartLinks is a different kind of Links. You can put them in your website, your blog or where ever you could put a weblink like your favorite social networking site. The Blueorganizer extension drives productivity by building smarts and semantics into the browser.It integrates with many popular sites and services - including Amazon, Flickr, YouTube, iTunes, Odeo and Netflix.

[5]

Layered Desktop
Who said that a successful GTD tool must be a 100MB program? As I was writing this post a friend of mine (Thanks Maria) send me a link for a Flickr Image. What a great idea was my first thought! A nice looking desktop with four areas to help you stay focused in what needs to be done next. It doesn’t work if you have 20 or 30 icons on your desktop but if you have that many desktop icons then you really have another problem ;-)

Until next time... keep on using the net to meet new people.

Fast ADSL without leaks

My latest discovery is a small program that is a really gem.
cFosSpeed, installs some new drivers in your PC giving you the ability to surf smooth even you are downloading in background tons of files ;-)
Using some "special" technics [like Traffic Shaping], cFosSpeed prioritize the data packets with a way that gives you full access to your broadband bandwidth.


cFos Traffic Shaping reduces delays during data transfer and allows you to surf the Internet up to three times faster. So you can use the full bandwidth of your connection!


During TCP/IP transfer, a certain amount of data needs to be confirmed upon reception before more can be sent. Stalling data confirmation results in delays and transfer-rate slowdowns, thus forcing the sender to wait. Especially for DSL and cable, it is possible to slow a download to a crawl by choking the upstream channel (which has the smaller bandwidth anyway) with an upload. This is because in such a scenario there is not enough upstream bandwidth left for data confirmation.


The standard solution so far has been to try and compensate for this by increasing TCP window size, thereby allowing more data to be sent without immediate confirmation. The main problem here is that this also leads to high ping times (latency) and significant delays during Webpage rendering. Latency of up to 2 seconds is not uncommon for TCP windows with a size of 64k. In short, huge window sizes just won´t let you achieve full download speed.


By contrast, cFos Traffic Shaping prioritizes data traffic in such a fashion that important packets zip past regular packets. This way, receipts always arrive in time, and uploads won't ever choke your broadband connection again!


cFos Traffic-Shaping technology recognizes a number of important packet types and prioritizes them not only to keep Internet traffic running smoothly but also to ensure particularly low ping times. This not only accelerates surfing and download speeds significantly, but it is also a decisive advantage for online gaming.


With cFos Traffic Shaping, you will notice measurable improvements and benefits like:
* Full download rate during upload
* Consistently quick response time while surfing the Web or running other applications
* Improved VoIP speech quality


Without Traffic Shaping, ping times can easily reach a horrific 2 seconds, which will make participating in Telnet or SSH sessions a chore – if not outright impossible. But with cFos Traffic Shaping, latency remains normal.


This alone should make for a totally new surfing experience!


It also means that while surfing the Web, you will be hard-pressed to even notice that there are any data transfers running in the background. Again, such drastically reduced latency will come in especially handy for online gaming.


First, cFos Traffic Shaping measures upstream and downstream rates as well as ping delays for each Internet connection. It then uses this information to control the scheduling of all Internet data transfer. In addition, Traffic Shaping does assign the available bandwidth dynamically to each individual connection as needed.


Not only does cFos Traffic Shaping prioritize ACKs, but also other important packets like those used for Telnet and SSH. Thus, with cFos Traffic Shaping, filesharing programs or mail uploads choking your connection will finally be a thing of the past!


Besides prioritizing ACK packets, Traffic Shaping performs or lets you perform the following:
RX Shaping
ensures ping times remain low even during downloads, while keeping one download from choking other simultaneous downloads.
ACK-Filter
optimizes TCP/IP acknowledgements, thus making more bandwidth available in the upstream channel.
Prioritizing individual programs
like games while assigning lower priority to others is especially useful when trying to reserve some extra bandwidth for important applications.
Voice over IP (VoiP) speech quality
is improved by recognition and prioritization of RTP packets.
Prioritizing other protocols through layer-7 analysis,
like HTTP, FTP, POP3, SMTP, ICMP, SSH, Telnet, and DNS can be done using built-in, programmable filtering rules.


Test it on your own!
I'm sure that you will see the benefit from the first second ;-)

Welcome!

Soon... VERY soon in a PC near you :-)