languor.us

With the advent of the Opera 10 Beta, I highly recommend that users check it out or upgrade to it. The biggest news is that one of my primary gripes, i.e., the lack of inline spell-checking, has been solved.

Besides P2P, the rise of sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload and the like have provided another avenue for pirates (and other legitimate users of course ...) to peddle their wares. Unlike P2P, there is no upload and related politics involved and matters are attended to with straightforward HTTP downloads (which are usually quite speedy). Most of these sites have a premium option as well as a hamstrung free option.

If you're a firefox user (and usually, also a programmer), you've very likely come across situations where you are confronted with an error page while accessing an https address, because the certificate is self-signed. Getting around it involves adding an exception, which requires a multitude of steps ...

I just found out yesterday that Konqueror natively supports sFTP and another protocol which I wasn't aware of named FiSH. To use either, just enter sftp://foo@example.com or fish://foo@example.com as necessary in the Konqueror URL bar to create a connection. My fledgling experience with FiSH seems to indicate that it's considerably faster than sFTP.

The latest fad going around is the host of MP3 search sites that are cropping up all over the place. Most of these are built off Google searches and can be hit-or-miss. But they're pretty useful for finding that rare track you always wanted, but couldn't find ...

I came across Google's image labeller just now and quite enjoyed myself playing the internet version of charades with some other anonymous chap halfway across the world.

I wonder if the chap behind it got the idea from the ReCAPTCHA project. Neat stuff.

Anyone else notice the rising popularity of live video / TV sites and applications all over the place? In the last year or so, what was just a niche service / application has exploded into the mainstream and I won't be surprised if established sites such as YouTube also manoeuvre to get a piece of this pie.

Presently available offerings can be segregated into two categories:

The following are a list of some really cool Text-to-speech (TTS) engines available (for testing) on the web:

I came across a neat service named Cryocopy earlier today. What it essentially does is mimic the service provided by archive.org except for the fact that Cryocopy does it on demand instantaneously and saves a screenshot to boot.

To quote:

CryoCopy is a web archiving service that allows manual caching of Internet pages, fully saving them both in HTML and in bitmap (PNG) format. This is done almost instantly upon request, not days or weeks apart, like with other services.