As apparently the web has more and more hicups leaving thousands of us without connectivity during hours, you can now check if the website you cannot access is down for everyone or only for you.

Check your unaccessible site from “Down for Everyone of Just me ?”

Source: Transnets

One of the stressful thing when traveling is to define what to carry on and what to left behind. In addition constant changes of transport regulations do not help travelers how to pack their stuff.

Some websites help you to reduce the quantity of personal belongings you travel with and provide some tips regarding the way you pack your stuff into your suitcase or bag.

One of the most resourceful site is Doug Dyment‘s OneBag.com which offers exhaustive (some might say exhausting!) detail on the art and science of traveling light.

Examples:

Folding and wrapping all your clothes together:

I found very interesting post on Tom Barrett's "ICT in my Classroom" blog about how Twitter is used as an educational tool.

Tom's post also describes where Twitter is positioned among other communications tools. Twitter is not a synchronous or an asynchronous communication system. It is rather both at once depending how channel's followers use it.

He makes a nice metaphoric comparison between Twitter and a flowing torrent where people can just stand by it and observes the flow. Some prefers to jump into while others simply do not pay much attention to the  stream.

Personally I am amazed to see how many different ways Twitter is used today. There are, indeed, lots of individuals (you and me) but also some politicians (Clinton, Obama, UK Prime Minister), Public Services (LA fire department, AmCross), Airlines, News agencies, etc.. which are increasingly using it, but not necessarily to interact with others but to broadcast content or information.

Is any company using Twitter for internal use only ? 

The WNDW team has released its second edition of the book "Wireless Networking in the Developing World". The 425 page book includes lots of new material, including new chapters on solar power and economic planning, several new case studies.

The book is released for free under a Creative Commons license and is available in several languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, and soon Arabic and Portuguese). and it is free to download, print, update, or redistribute it.

The Wireless Networking in the Developing World book is just one part of the WNDW project. Community forums, training workshops, and additional material are also available on their website, http://wndw.net/.

via : Lunch over IP 

We all know about the most famous Chinese mode of transportation, the bicycle. Indeed with the situation is changing and the bicycle leaves more and more its place to cars & motorbikes. 

I arrived 2 days ago in Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province. The city is growing and its 6 millions inhabitants add 200 cars on the road every single day. However in a city where a liter of petrol costs 0.50 USD and the monthly salary is less than 100 USD I wonder what is the average yearly mileage of this multitude of vehicle.

What surprised me here is that most scooters in town are electric and this idea should inspire Europe. However I have not seen how they recharge them and if the battery can easily be remove and be charged at home. I'll try to have a deeper look in the coming days .

Specifications are the following

Dimension: 1700*555*1170
N weight/ G weight: 115/136KGS
Max speed: <60Km/h
Battery: 48V/38AH Silicone
Motor Power: 1500W
Load capacity: >85Kg
Brake: Disk brak FR, drum brake RR
Mileage for one charge: 80Km
More info here

Who said that in China there are no efforts made to reduce carbon emissions ? 

I haven't review in details all news from the CES 2008 that closed its doors on Thursday but it seems the Global Energy problem contributes to have better ideas regarding the way we can power our IT stuff.

One company, Green Plug, has identified a significant contributor to the high cost of battery-powered consumer electronics products, wasted energy and unnecessary toxic waste. A typical home or office has a dozen or more power transformers that convert between 90V and 254V wall power to device-specific DC power. Every adapter is physically unique and therefore is thrown away every time a device is replaced.

Green Plug comes with a better idea.

Creating a standardize power supply which can be used by all Green Plug^TM compliant devices utilize uniform cables and connectors; so, you never have to worry about finding the right adapter for your laptop, DV camera, cell phone or power tool.

Let's hope they will be able to convinced enough partners to have a real impact on the market and we'll have soon all our electronic devices using a single and unique type of power supply.

I will start to compile some informations about tools that make Flickr even better. This first post is about scripts that add useful tools and improve rendering of Flickr pages.

Next posts related to Flickr will be about photo online editors, Flickr 3rd party applications, etc.. Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on (works also on Flock) which allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at Userscripts.org.

Martin Gommel's listed the 10 most useful scripts for Flickr and published it on the Digital Photography School blog.

1. Flickr Auto Page This is definitely one of the most useful scripts for Flickr. It allows you to scroll though a stream without clicking the “next page” – button. Older images are loaded automatically.
2. Flickr New Contact More Links This script displays more useful information in you Flickr-inbox about the user when they add you as a new contact.
3. Flickr Multi Group Sender This one gives you the ability to post an image to multiple Flickr groups at the one time. Warning : If an image is posted in too many groups you reduce the probability of your image being explored ! I recommend adding images to a maximum of 5 groups.
4. Flickr Move Comment Form Up This makes commenting on images a lot easier. This script always displays the comment box underneath you selected image – regardless of how many other comments have already been written.
5. Flickr Photo Rank Photo Rank will show you a photo’s rank if it is in the top 1000 most interesting images of the day. After installation you can find it under “Additional Information” on the photo’s page.
6. FlickrPM FlickrPM allows you to get important information about another user in a short amount of time by blending in different buttons next to the username on their stream (like icons for mail, profile, favorites, Scout and interestingness). Useful: With FlickrPM you can send the user a Flickrmail without leaving the selected page.
7. Buddy Icon Reply This is another time saver scripts for Flickr. With it you will never have to copy&paste user names you want to reply to on your or other images. With one click you will get a little icon of the user you want to answer in your comment box. Nice !
8. Flickr Background Color This script is all about aesthetics and is an easy to use tool that changes the background color on a photo page. It displays several shades of gray through to black. So if an image has a “dark feeling” the white standard Flickr background won’t disturb it.
9. Flickr Follow Comments This useful script helps you to view images that you have commented on – but only those that interest you. If you are writing lots of comments every day you know how hard it is not to get distracted by the overload of images when you click “Comments You’ve made”. With this userscript you have 4 different options to see only certain types of comments.
10. FlickrMailManager This MailManager is the one of those scripts I will always value, because it makes handling your flickr-inbox much easier. For instance you can “mark all as read”, “delete group invites” and “nuke mailbox”. The processing time depends on the size of your inbox – so I use it very often

What are your preferred GM scripts ?

Source: Digital Photography School

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flickr, tools, script, greasemonkey, photo, sharing,

Free and universal Wi-Fi community builder "FON Movimiento" is spreading fast across Europe. In September an agreement was signed with Cegetel, France 2nd largest ISP to introduce the free "Neuf Wifi FON" service. This service offers Neuf Cegetel's subscribers to share some of their Internet bandwidth through their "Wifi Neuf Box" and to become part of the FON community. Cegetel estimates that by end of 2007, 1 million of "Neuf Box 4" will be ready to support this new service. 

Members of the FON community get free and secured Internet access through any "FON Spots" Wifi Access Point around the globe. 

Earlier this month in United Kingdom, BT also joined forces with FON and offer to 3 million BT's broadband customers to share their Internet access and join the FON community.

Now it is the Geneva city council to sign a convention with FON to consolidate the small existing wireless network available in some key locations of the city. The city council envisages to distribute up to 500 FON routers to its citizens who may wish to share their Internet Access via the FON community (complete story, in French, on TSR telecom blog).

Non-member of the FON community will be able to get access to the Internet through FON Wifi networks using a 3 USD/day fee "FON Access Pass".

Let's hope this solution will be more successful than previous attempts as most of them were sunk by politicians and endless administrative discussions.

" Post Tenebras Lux" ? 

AirTalkr is another multiple IM client application immediately available in its beta version for Windows, Linux , Mac OSX as well as on Web-based version.

IM supported protocols are MSN, ICQ, GTalk, Yahoo and AIM but AirTalkr also connects you to your YouTube and Flickr accounts. In addition, AirTalkr creator Hu Shunjie comes with an interesting concept called "AirCards". AirCards are profiling cards where you can add of your buddies information such their Twitter and blog updates, their photos on Flickr as well as their profiles on MySpace and Friendster.

AirTalkr is a very light application but requires the installation of Abobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) which enables developers to use Flash, Flex, Ajax and HTML to create rich interface applications.

The AirTalkr version is still beta and some bugs have been reported but I personaly like this very smooth application and really looking to see what will come next (Skype, more social networking plateforms supported, etc..)

It definitively worth a try. Did I mention that AirTalkr is free and totally Ads-Free (Thanks Hu!). 

Download AirTalkr here and Abobe AIR here.