Helpful users face virus danger

Users are being warned to watch out for a Windows virus posing as a complaint about misdirected e-mail.

Wimax to plug rural broadband gap

Intel foresees a bright future for Wimax in rural areas, developing countries and as a successor to wi-fi.

Project to open internet to blind

A three-year project to improve blind access to the internet has started at Queen's University in Belfast.

GMail just got bigger and better

I'm a big fan of all things Google. They can do no wrong in my eyes. So when I was offered a GMail account by a friend months back I said YES PLEASE! I always like to have a personal email account for non business related stuff and I'm just plain nosy. Tired of logging in to hotmail and finding that because the account had been in-active for more than 30 days, having to go through the laborious task of registering again I grabbed my GMail account and embraced it.

Is it any good?

Well yes, it's a Google product. It's Free and works very well.

Bigger and Better

Yesterday I was using 3mb of my allocated storage space. Today I log in and notice that they've more than doubled the storage space available.

You are currently using 4 MB (0%) of your 2098 MB.

They've also added rich text formatting to allow for pretty emails.

Free GMail Accounts.

I've got 50 invites and because it's still in beta that's the only way to get and account. I'm willing to give accounts to the first 50 people to email me at roy.wilding @gmail.com (without the space) with a subject line of "I've read your blog and this is the proof".

Friday Work

Yesterday I worked and continued the progress on heaven SPA and Simon went out and got free lunch at the best restaurant in Manchester.

Where's the justice in that?

Heaven SPA is a hair and beauty salon based in Didsury Manchester.

Happy Birthday to me

Today this blog is 1 month old so I thought I'd update you on the traffic. It currently stands at 128 unique visitors.

Not great I know and the traffic all comes from other bloggers at the moment. There is no evidence to date of the blog supplying traffic to other sites as yet but as we know these things take time. Google certainly has it indexed and it's on loads of blog directories so I'll report back in another month if I remember and let you know the score.

Bogus blogs snare fresh victims

Cyber criminals are starting to use fake blogs to snare new victims.

Net security bug prompts warnings

Microsoft has issued patches for five critical bugs in its software.

Looks like it's time to get the patches out again!

Free UK ISP Update

I've updated Free UK ISP today. Ditched the logo and tweaked a few bits and boobs to improve search engine ranking.

Last night I updated one of our other Free ISP's with a page about Pay as you go mobile phones in a bid to get some mobile phone sales for Phones 4 U.

Making sure your Wireless Network is secure

Sheilds up will test your network to ensure that it is safe.

Better to be safe than sorry!

iCapture - See through the eyes of a Mac browser

I stumbled across this yesterday during a ramble through the World Wide Web. For any web designers that work on a PC and don't have a Mac to hand then this site will screen grab your web page as it's displayed on a Mac running the Safari browser.

iCapture requires you to have a Free account which is little to ask for considering the handy service it offers. Results are not immediate but they're quicker than other tools I've tried.

Apple bloggers get press support

Eight US newspapers and the Associated Press agency have thrown their support behind three bloggers sued by Apple.

IStockphoto

In my early days of web design I used images that I found on other sites. I felt bad about doing it but there was no affordable alternative. That was until I discovered IStockphoto. IStockphoto is a very affordable Royalty Free Stock photography community where users can purchase credit which they use to download images.

The credit packages are as follows:

• 10 download credits = $10.00
• 28 download credits = $25.00
• 60 download credits = $50.00
• 125 download credits = $100.00

The number of credits per image is as follows:

• Low Res. = 1 credit
• Med Res. = 2 credits
• High Res. = 3 credits

It also has the additional benefit of allowing you to upload your own digital images to make available for download. By using this method you are able to earn credit which you can use to download other images.

Thumbs up from me.

Warning over fake Windows update

Users are being warned to watch out for a fake Microsoft security update.

Man gets nine years for spamming

A US man gets nine years in jail for sending millions of junk emails selling pornography and sham products.

Open Source Photo Gallery

OK, here's another Free resource which I've used many times on client sites.

Coppermine Photo Gallery

"Coppermine is a multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick lib with a MySQL backend."

Rather good it is too. It's Free, it's easy to install and it covers just about any requirement you might have for an image gallery. You can even skin the gallery with changes to the CSS and templates.

Marvelous!

Google Desktop Update

Well it's installed and I've used it....................well I haven't yet really. Not out of need to actually find anything on my computer. You see, I know where stuff on my computer is. Maybe in the very early days when I wasn't so computer savvy I'd lose a few things but now I think generally I have things in a logical order which makes things easy to find. Of course that doesn't mean that I won't find it useful in the future so I'll keep it installed for now.

One thing I will say is that rather than having to go into the preferences and deselect or select areas I want it to search I'd rather have a pull down list. Then I could type what I was looking for and use the list to select for example emails and do the search.

It's good for searching MP3s though.

	Number of items
Total searchable items	170,978
Emails	12,355
Chats	0
Web history	1,554
Files	157,069

US still leads global spam list

More than a third of all spam e-mails originate in the US, according to a survey by security firm Sophos.

Creative Resources

Over the next few days I'm going to post about some of the sites that I find particularly useful from a creative point of view. There are thousands of sites out there packed with all the information and resources a creative might need. Most have active communities that contribute toward content and resources and a healthy amount of selfless idea sharing, which is what the Internet in my mind is all about.

Zen Garden
The Beauty of CSS Design

When I took my first steps towards leaving table based web design behind, as with most young CSS disciples I stumbled into the Zen Garden. Confused, angered and lost by the new method of CSS design I was about to turn my back on CSS and return to the table based dark path. What I saw at Zen Garden however opened my eyes. For the first time I could see.

Zen Garden is more a creative inspiration than a resource. It's a teaching that web design can be beautiful as well as functional and that CSS allows us to break out of the box that table based design imprisoned us.

It was over a year ago now that I first wondered into the garden and I still strive to accomplish the level of polished design I see there. My CSS has improved considerably thanks to other resources I'll mention in later posts and I'm hoping that this year I will have my own CSS flower in the garden.

Google Desktop

I've just downloaded and installed Google desktop. I know I'm a bit behind but I never try new stuff out until it's been about a bit and proven itself.

Nothing to report so far it's just been downloaded and installed.

It's now got to index my files which will take a while.

One-time index update in progress.
1% complete with about 0.1 idle hours left.
8 items indexed so far.

Indexing is performed when your computer is idle.
Thunderbird email is indexed only when the application is open.

I'll report back later when I can test it out a bit.

Britain hits broadband milestone

This week BT is expected to connect its five millionth broadband customer.

My Top 5 Essential Free Internet Software

One of the first things that amazed me when I started to use the Internet was the amount of free software utilities and services available. I'm not talking about Warez or software hacks etc, I'm talking about genuine Free software that I've found essential over the years.

1. Firefox - There's no better browser in my opinion. It's way more advanced than IE, it's faster, easier to use and it's free.
2. Thunderbird - It's the Mozilla/Firefox email client that yet again is the best in the field in my opinion and yes it's also free!
   
3. AVG Anti Virus - I remember back to when XP first hit the market. There was an explosion of new viruses and I was working for an ISP at the time. None of the paid for Anti Virus software worked on XP for quite a while so ALL of us resorted to the Free version of Grisofts marvelous Anti Virus Software and I believe a lot of us are still using it. YOU NEED THIS!
4. Winamp - Well it really kicks the Lamas Ass. Still the best Free media player in my opinion.
   
5. Ad Aware - Finds and removes all those nasty bits of Spyware that infect your PC. Nuff said!
   

I'm not going to do a big sell on any of these but more fool you if you haven't got these free bits of software installed.

The Worlds Largets Digital Photograph

For anyone who hasn't seen this yet, it's well worth a look. I was very impressed with my Kodak DX4530 5 mega pixel (5 million pixels) camera until I saw this beast of a 2.5 gigapixel that's a huge 2.5 billion pixels.

Give it time when you zoom in to focus the picture properly.

http://triton.tpd.tno.nl/gigazoom/Delft2.htm

Anti-spam laws bite spammer hard

The net's self-declared spam king is seeking bankruptcy protection.