For some time Firefox extensions have allowed users to redesign GMail but now Google has released some official themes that allow you to jazz up the interface. There are 30-odd themes available that can be access through Settings.
At the moment, the themes are being rolled out so you may not be able to see the option yet. More at the Official Gmail Blog.......
Google have partnered with LIFE magazine to host millions of their images ranging from the 1750s to the present day, many of which have never been published before....
An Oregon woman who was duped by a Nigerian scam is $400,000 out of pocket.
Janella Spears says she became curious when she received an e-mail promising her $20.5 million if she would only help out a long-lost relative identified as J.B. Spears with a little money up front.
The fact that the scammers had identified a relative by name was enough to persuade her to first send $100 and then thousands more over a period of 2 years.......
A San Francisco artist, who lost an eye in a 2005 car accident, wants to replace her missing eye with a Web cam, and experts think it could be possible.
"There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I'm sort of a sci-fi geek," said [Tanya] Vlach, 35. "With the advancement of technology, I thought, 'Why not?'"......
Jason Kottke has a great tutorial on how to link, embed and save YouTube in high......
Google Earth has teamed up with the University of Virginia to produce a 3D rendition of Rome in the year 320AD featuring 250 "highly detailed" and 6000+ other buildings.
The modelling is based on a physical model of the city called the “Plastico di Roma Antica” created between 1933 and 1974. As well as exteriors, the virtual city displays 11 buildings with viewable interiors, including the Colosseum and the temple of Vesta.
Download Google Earth here.......
UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key.
The software has been tested a photo of keys taken from almost 200 feet away and with a photo taken by a mobile phone.
Professor Stefan Savage, a computer science professor who led the student-run "Sneakey" project, noted:-
“If you go onto a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, you will find many photos of people’s keys that can be used to easily make duplicates. While people generally blur out the numbers on their credit cards and driver's licenses before putting those photos on-line, they don’t realize that they should take the same precautions with their keys.”
You can read more about the...
A new study, by a team of seven computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD, has shown that spam gets 1 response per 12,500,000 emails. They reached this figure by infiltrating a spam network (the Storm botnet) and controlling 75,869 machines. "After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales......
A demonstration of Tennis for Two - the world's first graphical videogame. The game was created by Dr. William Higinbotham in 1958.......
uSend.io is a very simple way to send files up to 100MB. No signup and an ultra-easy interface.And if you need to send large files. VIPeers allows you to upload files up to 5GB in size and then share it in a variety of ways (direct link, bit torrent). If you want an account to the invite-only service, use lifehacker20 when signing up (before Monday).......
This and these photos are not new, but it's the first time I've seen them. I'm sure the bus is nothing more than a publicity......
The Aero Peek feature is pretty neat.......
The Firefox add-on China Channel offers internet users outside of China the ability to surf the web as if they were inside mainland China. Not something that you'd want to use all the time but interesting to see how restrictive Internet access in China is.......
Swiss researchers have developed 4 different attacks that are capable of reproducing what someone has typed on a keyboard without using any additional hardware or software.
Every keyboard tested was vulnerable to at least one of the four
attacks the researchers used. One attack was shown to work over a
distance of 20 metres.
In their work the researchers used a radio antenna to "fully or
partially recover keystrokes" by spotting the electromagnetic radiation
emitted when keys were pressed.
In a web posting they added: "no doubt that our attacks can be
significantly improved, since we used relatively unexpensive equipments
[sic]."
Link......
I'm looking to transfer some of my DVDs to my iPod Touch, does anyone know any free Windows software that makes the whole process of transferring to MP4 format as quick and easy as......
It's my dream......
Taken from the Life Without Walls website. [via]...
What would present-day computer game boxes would look like if they had been draw by an Atari 2600-era artist? Here are a few examples.......
In what may be a way of reporting a news story first, the Rocky Mountain News has Twittered the funeral of a 3-year-old boy. The feed is still active and includes posts such as "coffin lowered into ground" and "family members shovel earth into grave". The child in question was the victim of a car accident. [via]...
StopForwarding.us is an anonymous way of telling people you know to stop forwarding chain letters and pointless emails....
FileSavr.com is giving away 250GB of storage to those that sign up before September 15th (a saving of $10/month). The account is paid for until 2038. The service looks very basic and could go out of business at anytime so it's not wise to store crucial files there. [via]...
Some people have got way too much time on their hands. [via]...
Multicolr has extracted the colours from 10 million of the most “interesting” Creative Commons images on Flickr and using visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour....
People who have bought Spore have been giving the game scathing reviews on Amazon due to the crippling DRM that comes with it.
Reading through the reviews (Amazon.com currently has 1,145 1 star reviews and Amazon.co.uk only has one 1 star review but apparently Amazon removed a lot more) it seems that when you install Spore, it also installs SecuROM which installs itself so deep into your system that the only way to get rid of it is to format your system. And in a bid to prevent piracy, you can only install the game 3 times. Subsequent installs require that you call EA in the US regardless of where you live in the world.
As you would expect, these anti-piracy measures affect only legitimate users and pirates having been playing the DRM version of the game since before it's official...
Have you tried Google Chrome, the new browser from Google? That thing is fast! Check out these JavaScript tests from CNet to see just how fast the browser is.
The browser not only boot quickly but also loads sites very quickly. The browser does seem basic in comparison to IE/Firefox but that could be a good thing as there are a lot of web users that don't require extensions and social networking tools.
Testing out Google's own applications and they load quickly. Maps seems to work slightly different to how it does in Firefox. In Firefox when you view Maps in satellite view and scroll quickly you get to see a blurry satellite image until it loads but in Chrome it renders streets (like in Map mode) before rendering the satellite image. This makes it easy to quickly scroll around a map...
Forbes has reported that a video ad on the front page of YouTube costs $175,000 plus the advertiser must agree to spend a further $50,000 on ads on Google or YouTube. If you want a custom-branded channel it will set you back $200,000. [via]...
Take a tour of the YouTube offices. It doesn't look like much work gets done there....
The Register has an in-depth article about a malware scam that you're bound to have come across or may have been infected with....
A very unscientific test that proves that the more drunk you get, the better you play Mario Kart. At least up to .08% BAC. [via]...
Andy Brice over at SuccessfulSoftware recently received an email from Microsoft Adcenter to inform him of low cost keywords that he could advertise on, categorised by sector, to “unlock new customers”. Here are some of them.
According to Microsoft:-
These keywords are actual terms recently used by your customers on Live and MSN Search Engines and are available at a low cost while very few other advertisers are bidding on them.
[via]...
