Matt’s Cuppa

• Ghacks Technology News

  HD Hacker is a portable software compatible with Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista that can be used to backup and restore the Master Boot Record or any other sector the user specifies. It offers the option to select the drive by drive letter or physical drive.

  tags: hacks, backup

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Popularity: 62% [?]

• Webapps: Spreed Teaches You to Speed-Read the News

  Free speed-reading webapp Spreed:News lets you choose from a wide array of news sources and have their articles read to you in small clusters of words.

  tags: speedreading, news

• Featured Firefox Extension: Drag & DropZones Turns Right-Clicks into Gestures

  Drag & DropZones is a clever interface tweak that allows you to perform nearly any action or search by dragging any page element—a link, email address, image, or page itself—onto a transparent grid you set up.

  tags: firefox

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Popularity: 59% [?]

clipped from www.manageyourlifenow.com 15 Ways to Digg your mind for new ideas 1. Exercise your mind by reading 2. Write your ideas down 3. Discuss your new ideas with others 4. Find your creative environment 5. Break the barrier between generations 6. Challenge the rules - innovate 7. Explore your areas of expertise If you need to enter into unknown territory for you, first discuss your ideas with a specialist on that area and allow him to adapt your idea to the needs of this sector. 8. Digg the ideas out of your mind 9. Digg your memory for ideas you had in the past 10. Find your inspiration mousse 11. Utilize your time better 12. Exercise 13. Digg it, Google it, Buzz it 14. Organize your thinking There are 4 ways to organise your new ideas Collection of information Evaluation of data  Estimate the probabilities Implementation of the idea 15. Do not give up It may take some time or it may come to you suddenly when you are not expecting it. be patience and your new idea is on its way!

Popularity: 63% [?]

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk The net shapes up to get physical just as many of us are getting to grips with its second stage, the mobile internet, very few are prepared - perhaps even aware - of the third and potentially most revolutionary phase of all: the internet of things Sometime between now and 2010, the internet is poised to reach beyond virtual space and take root in the physical world. According to many futurist thinkers, almost every object you can see around you carries the possibility of being connected to the internet. This means that your domestic appliances, your clothes, the books on your shelves and your car in the driveway may one day soon be assigned a unique IP address, just as both computers and web pages are assigned them today, to enable them to talk to each other. Whatever it happens to be, we can IP-enable it.” every human on the planet could have a personal network the size of the today’s inter Already in Japan cows wireless RFID chips beneath their skin Farmers can now track their livestock

Popularity: 59% [?]

clipped from muzich.blogspot.com To view the passwords associated with any site, go to the log-in page and right-click anywhere on the page. Select View Page Info, and then the Security tab. Click View Saved Passwords. Another window will pop up showing the usernames associated with that site Click Show Passwords to see the passwords for each username. If you want to view all of your saved usernames and passwords, open Options under the Tools menu and select the Security tab. Click Saved Passwords to open a list of every site you’ve ever saved a password for Again, click View Passwords and the list will display all of your passwords. You can’t print this list, but you can just as easily take screenshots if you want to print out your passwords for safekeeping. Of course…this a security hole password-protect your passwords Options | Security tab, click Use a master password and enter a password. Now this password will have to be entered any time you or anyone else tries to view saved passwords.

Popularity: 56% [?]

clipped from jdamer.com The homepage really serves one purpose: getting people off of the homepage. That’s it. A website is about the content that is inside, not whatever meaningless information you’ve thrown on the homepage. People are looking for content, and that’s what their searches are going to take them to. Unless the majority of your content lives on your homepage, it’s not THAT important. here is no single landing page. Every page is a landing page. Every page that can be found in a search, can be a landing page.

Popularity: 51% [?]

• Clickjacking Details ha.ckers.org web application security lab

  No longer breaking news, but good to know.

  tags: hacking, vulnerability, bugs

Popularity: 55% [?]

clipped from www.engadget.com We can’t put our finger on it, but there’s something vaguely familiar about this new Storm 9500.

Popularity: 54% [?]

I am back from what amounted to a two week vacation from the social web. It wasn’t purposeful. I have a day job which is currently taking more than its fair share of my mental energies right now, so by the time I’m home and ready to connect with people it’s time to go to bed so I can do it all again in the morning. So, trying to add a positive spin, I’ve been saying was on a vacation from Twitter– a Twittercation.

The funny part is that, unless you know me, you wouldn’t have guessed I was gone. Between my information-hoarding habits and the wonders of various API’s, my digital life goes on without my intervention. Whoa! I just did a double-take after writing that! My digital life goes on without my  intervention. What does that mean? What are the implications here?

Before I began writing, I checked my Twitter profile to find the last time I actually sent out a tweet. It had to have been ages ago, right? No, my last tweet at time of writing was about 20 hours ago. Huh? Whenever I save an article to my blog at Posterous my blog fires off a message to Twitter about it. It works so well that I don’t even remember that it happens. The same thing happens when I post to CellSpin, or to Utterli, or to Jott, to name just a few. If I bookmark an interesting article via Diigo, it’s posted to my blog here at Matt’s Cuppa.

What is intriguing, and a bit scary, is how little an effort I have to make to keep the gears moving in my digital persona. How much longer will it be before it no longer needs me? After all, what’s my contribution? All I do is provide the content. If I could somehow plug my digital self into my Google Reader, I could just walk away. If you followed me on Twitter, you’d never know that I was gone…  

Tags: twitter, api, social web

Popularity: 50% [?]

clipped from lifehacker.com Whenever I’ve built a PC I have done my best to *future-proof* my purchase to the extent possible. Find out what the fastest, best processor out there today is. Next find the cheapest processor that uses the same socket. scout reviews for motherboards that support that socket You’re looking for a board that supports the latest processor, the latest video card standard, latest hard drive technology etc. But you’re not looking for the latest model of this board. Buy two steps down fromt he top in terms of hard drive sizes one or two steps down from the top in terms of Video card. What you end up with is a very capable system that costs a lot less than today’s state of the art, but that may have been state of the art a year or so ago. for some applications (photoshop comes to mind) nothing improves performance like a killer fast Hard Drive. Except those are killer expensive. The on-the-cheap solution is to buy VERY FAST but cheap hard drives and set them up for RAID 0 (striping).

Popularity: 46% [?]