Look for IT over here » Google

Care when using garchiver

indi — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 16:08:02 +0000

Gmail’s g-archiver seems a great utility for backing up Gmail messages to your computer.

But there appears to be a security flaw.

The backstory:

G-Archiver (notice I’m not linking to it), is a tool that someone wrote to be able to download all your Google Email and archive it locally. Problem is that the coder that wrote the program, decided he’d be slick and put his own username and password in the code.

Whoops.

Yeah, but it wasn’t a ‘coding mistake’. He coded it in there, so when someone used this tool, it uploaded YOUR username and password to HIS email account. (Nice huh?)

OUCH!!!!

Anyway, looks like the good people of Google have removed g-archiver, and are recommending you remove it from your computer. Their official explanantion:

What happened was that a member of our development team had inserted coding used for testing G-Archiver in the debug version and forgot to delete it in the final release version.

Track your exercise with a GPS enabled mobile phone

indi — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 19:05:47 +0000

Track your exercise with a GPS enabled mobile phone

I’ve always wanted to track or log my exercise without too much hassle. Nokia have released a beta version of such a product called SportsTracker.

It uses the GPS fucntion in your mobile phone to map your exercise activities. These can be uploaded to the Nokia sportstracker site and you can view your route in Google Maps – very handy indeed.

There are a large number of phones currently supported. I use it on my Nokia 6110 navigator and have yet to have any problems – even though it is still in a ‘beta’ stage of development.

Kudos to Nokia for such a great piece of software that is available free of charge.

Here are a few screenshots:

For more information, check out the sportstracker wesbite.

Best way to find stuff on the net

indi — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 14:07:16 +0000

Here’s a better way to find what exactly you are after on the net, using Google and a decent social bookmarking site (like digg.com).

Let’s say you are after a backup utility for firefox. Yes I know you could go and look through the Mozilla plugin pages, but you want to find something that is good (ie tested by many others).

in Google, type in site:digg.com “firefox backup”

The first result (especially in this example) is normally the best. And even more so with digg.com because it would of been ‘dugg’ by a lot of users. Try it yourself!

Better search engine than Google?

indi — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 09:55:14 +0000

I have found another search engine that is comparable (and in a lot of ways better) with Google.
It is called Factbites.
The best way to describe it is a search engine crossed with a encyclopedia.

If you try a few searches in Google and then factbites you’ll see the difference. Also some examples of searches in these two search engines
( http://www.factbites.com/factbites_vs_google.php ) will show you what I mean.
As it says in the example of searching for alligator, ” Buying an alligator on eBay, anyone? Google gives you two sites about alligators – as well as irrelevant eBay advertising”.

Having said all that, I still use Google for 99% of all my searches. But it’s handy to have another decent search engine available if you just can’t find what you’re after.