Too good to forget!
One of the interesting things about tech is how easily it can be adapted to different needs. You want a navigation system? Here’s GPS. You need an orchestra? Here’s a synthesizer and sequencer. Now this inexorable march is starting to move towards automating the entertainment industry.
Hunting around for stuff online can be pretty hard work, especially when you’re trying trawl through classified ads for jobs, tools or any other thing you need. The major sites like Craigslist offer comprehensive coverage, but the interface is not exactly great, while other services like eBay again make it tricky to browse through large numbers of ads in your area.
It doesn’t matter what you do for a living, at some point you’re going to need to convert a file from one format to another. It might be Word to PDF, WAV to MP3 or any other of a large number of permutations, but you will have a need. Really. And while there are a selection of services which can offer this service, it’s always useful to have other options available.
I have to confess to being in two minds about short URLs. On the one hand they’re awesome for delivering compact web addresses in email messages and suchlike, but on the other they basically break the web. For one thing if the company or domain goes away, so does a big chunk of the web’s links, and for another they can be used to shield some pretty nasty sites and malware delivery mechanisms.
Digital photos is awesome, amiright? We’ve got thousands of them stored on disks across the universe, but only a few are actually worth showing to anyone else. But how cool would it be if you could upload a shot and ask someone to tweak, fix, enhance and otherwise improve the shot to make you look like a total awesome photographer? And for free?
If you’ve ever tried closing an online account you own, you’ll know just how much fun it can be trying to locate the actual delete page. I’ve spent many a happy hour trying to shut down some services, especially with companies who not only bury them 10 menus deep, but won’t even give clues as to where to start looking. Well now there’s an easier way, and it’s a must-have bookmark.
The Humble Bundle game deals are legendary, and we’ve featured a few before. For those who don’t know what we’re talking about, the H.B. model is to offer a selection of great games to purchase and download at any price you can afford, even as low as $1.00 for the whole collection. What’s more, you get to choose how much of your payment goes to charity and how much to the game developers and publishers. Awesome.
What is it about Internet communities that is so appealing? Is it the sense of belonging or the chance to feel empowered in a world which increasingly makes us feel less in control of things? From the earliest days of The Well, through iterations such as AOL, MySpace and Digg to today’s monsters like Reddit and Facebook, we’re clearly fascinated by the idea of large groups of people interacting online.
Have you ever wished you could share the viewing of something on YouTube even though you were unable to do so in the same room? Maybe you’re away on business and need to catch up on something important or you’re trying to watch a video clip together with a friend or relative and they live the other side of the country?
Remember Geocities? That brash, vulgar, messy glorious website building community that defied all the odds to become one of the biggest web services of its time? We loved it. In 1999 Yahoo! bought it, and in typical fashion shut it down in 2009. At the shutdown there were 38 million user pages on Geocities. Go figure.
There’s been a bit of a stir recently over the launch of the new Firefox mobile phone platform, which uses a completely new open source operating system developed by Mozilla and based around the Firefox web browser technology. The first handset, called the Keon, has already gone on sale at just €69, so this is definitely not a vaporware project and could definitely change the whole mobile landscape.
![Try out the cool new Firefox OS phone platform for free in your browser [Freeware]](https://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/firefoxos4.jpg)
Wordprocessors have been around since the dawn of civilization, well OK since the early computing days, but they’ve always come with a specific format. A blank page and a range of editing tools. Even modern WP engines like Google Docs’ Writer follow the convention.
Google is at it again. This time it appears to be testing out some form of flight search feature. We’ve seen this sort of thing from the company before of course, most recently with the launch and eventual retirement of the Google Real Estate listings which integrated properties for sale and rent on top of Google Maps.
Regular readers of the Ferret will remember when we first stumbled upon MyBlogLog, a fabulous web publisher service which provided real time and historical stats on visitors and their activities on your web site. We loved the simplicity and the effortless way you could see exactly what was happening to your site second by second through the days and weeks. Unfortunately the company sold out to Yahoo! which then killed it, as big companies tend to do. Sigh.
If you’re one of those people who likes to…y’know…get things done, you’ll appreciate any tool that makes it easier to multi-task. The optimum way to do this of course is to provide your brain with even more inputs than normal, usually by mixing audio and visual together in some unholy alliance.
![Panopreter – why read, when you can listen instead? [Freeware]](https://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/panopreter.jpg)
