Filed under: Fun, Internet

Ever wish you could harness the power of the collective intelligence to help you find that perfect stout or pale ale? RateBeer may well be the link to help you find that ultimate brew. Touting itself the most accurate and most-visited source of beer information, Rate Beer has an impressive index of beers which are all, well, rated.

Beers can be viewed by latest ratings, category (such as style and country of origin), a top 50 list, annual top beer lists, and any beer or brand you want to search for to see how it fares against the rest of the world of beers. There is subscriber style "premium content" on the site, which mostly revolves around additional rankings like "Beer God's Top 50 Beers" and rankings by state. But all the core features of the site are available for free - which is perusing the main rankings and contributing your own ratings of beers you have enjoyed.

The site also has an event calendar that is fairly stocked with beer-related events, a guide to beer in different areas utilizing Google Maps by highlighting the best places to down a brew around town, and forums for those that like talking about beer almost as much as they like imbibing it. The only downside that we perceive is that the layout and interface are somewhat unintuitive, especially for those of us who are sensitive to usability. But, it's no deal breaker, and is far outweighed by the volume of information and ratings available on the site. Happy brew hunting.

[via LifeHacker]

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Filed under: Internet, Photo, Utilities, Video, Macintosh

Gawker lets you do time-lapse photography with your Mac's iSight. You can share and record your streams with other people, and they can record as well.

That's awesome. And very scary. Don't forget to turn it off before you go to bed, or the world wide interwebs will know that you sing Barry Manilow in your sleep. It was just one time, ok?

There's a neat page of examples that you can check out here.

The newest release lets you password protect your streams, schedule a stream to start and end, and some cleaning up of the user interface.

Apparently the folks over at the co-working space IndyHall were using it, and their fearless leader Alex Hillman tweeted about it.

Thanks for the heads up! This is one to watch.

Hey...who left the camera on again?

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Filed under: Fun, Internet, News, Blogging, Social Software, web 2.0

Retaggr takes the concept of paper business cards and transforms them into Harry Potter like interactive cards. Beyond the benefits of not killing trees to leave your contact information, an interactive card is sooo multi dimensional. With your Retaggr card you can:

• Show your recent Twitter messages
• Link to your blogs, web profiles such as Facebook
• Display your online activity on other sites like FriendFeed, Flickr, etc.
• Add any web widget
• Allow others to get in touch with you via Skype, MSN, Gtalk, etc.
  

Whereas paper cards are static, your profile card instantly updates as you update information on your various social networks. Also, when you leave comments on other Retaggr enabled sites, your profile card is left there too. If someone mentions you in a post, they can link to you so your card automagically appears.

A profile card provides more context to what you're about and what you're up to. And that is the other edge of the sword. (Cue scary music). How much information do you want people to have at their fingertips anyway?

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Filed under: Weekend Review

Trying to figure out whether to see Indiana Jones or Sex in the City this weekend? Why not just skip the movies and catch up on some of the week's best software news?

• Windows 7 says hello world, then runs and hides away
  After months of speculation, Microsoft has finally lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding Windows 7. And by lifted the veil, we mean one tiny little corner. We now know that Windows 7 will feature multi-touch capabilities. And that's about it.
• Flipping the Linux Switch: Banshee learns to sing
  While Microsoft is busy keeping secrets, the open source Linux media player Banshee is free for anyone to use. The latest beta version adds a ton of features, allowing you to play MP3s, rip CDs, organize your music collection, burn discs, aggregate podcasts, or even connect to your Last.fm account.
• Mozilla - They're unbeWeavable
  Mozilla launched Weave last year as a way to keep your Firefox settings synchronized across multiple computers. But for some reason Mozilla left out one of the most useful features: password synchronization. Fortunately, this week an updated version of the Mozilla Weave browser plug-in was released, which lets you synchronize your bookmarks, saved form data, cookies, and passwords.
• Bubbles single-site web browser updated, adds extensions
  Before there was Mozilla Prism, there was Bubbles, a tool that lets you launch pretty much any web site in a stripped down web browser. Bubbles has been around for a few years, but the developers recently relesed a new beta version that adds support for user-generated extensions that give you more control over how the browser interacts with web pages. Extensions include a Gmail notifier and a Facebook chat application.
• OpenOffice.org keeps getting slower with each new release
  Free and open source office suite OpenOffice.org has a dirty little secret. It's slow. Like, you have to wait 20+ seconds to open a document sometimes slow. And it keeps getting slower. It turns out that OpenOffice.org 2.4 opens documents slower than version 1.1.5. And OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta is even slower still. But you can't beat the price.
• Adocu: Nanoblogging gets even nano-er
  Twitter took the world by storm by launching a blogging platform that limits your posts to just 140 characters. So it stands to reason that the only way to beat Twitter is to launch an even more limiting service, right? Adocu lets users post just a single word.

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Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows Mobile, Google, BlackBerry

The cult favorite Opera Browser has added support for Google Gears to its desktop and mobile browsers.

Google Gears is the product that allows you to seamlessly (hopefully) integrate your web experience and your desktop experience by storing information on your computer so that you don't have to wait for your slow funky dial up to grind its own gears. Basically, it's bringing the web data to you.

Now they're going mobile with it.

Opera Mini, the mobile browser, has gained way more traction than their desktop version. Global reach and being on as many devices as possible has always been a goal of theirs. Although they don't have a huge market share with Desktop users, the people who use it are loyal beyond belief.

The loyalty comes from the fact that Opera is extremely focused on web standards, something that Microsoft has not cared about until recently with Internet Explorer. In fact, Opera sued them over it.

You'll be able to give Google Gears for mobile a shot when Opera Mini 9.5 comes out later this year.

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Filed under: Blogging, Web services, Beta, web 2.0

When it comes to dealing with blog spam, there is no shortage of tools. Blogger comes with a built-in Google crafted tool, WordPress has Akismet (and Akismet is also available for Movable Type, Drupal, Expression Engine and tons of others), Defensio and others, Drupal has Mollom, and so on. Now Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, has released their own open source anti-spam tool for bloggers.

TypePad AntiSpam is the product of the antispam technology Six Apart has been using in their TypePad hosted blogs since May 2007. Now the service, which is in beta, is available to anyone, open source, and free -- regardless of how large your site is or how many comments you receive. Akismet, the service this is most akin to, is free for personal use but starts at $5 a month for anyone making more than $500 a month off their blog.

TypePad AntiSpam is available as a plugin for WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 and Movable Type 3.3 and up. Six Apart says they plan to support other platforms with plugins soon, but the API is available for anyone who wants to roll their own.

We just installed TypePad AntiSpam on one of our WordPress blogs (which was running Akismet) and we'll post our thoughts in comparing the services in the weeks to come.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: Linux, Open Source

The developers behind the open source KDE desktop environment made some major changes when they launched KDE 4.0. While KDE 3.5 had long been described as one of the best Linux desktop environments for users familiar with Windows, KDE 4.0 introduced a whole new look and feel. The start menu was completely redesigned and the desktop environment made heavy use of widgets. And oh yeah, a number of KDE 3.5 applications were left behind.

Now the KDE has released KDE 4.1 beta, which introduces or brings back the following features:

• The KDE PIM manager, Kontact is back
• Dolphin, the file manager gets tabbed views
• KDE CD Player is back
• Konqueror now supports web browsing sessions, an undo mode, and smooth scrolling
• Gwenview image viewer now supports a full screen interface
• The Plasma interface which covers the launcher menu, panels, and desktop has been refined
• Dragon Player, a new lightweight media player has been added

The final release of KDE 4.1 is schedueld for July 29. In the meantime, you can download a virtual machine image to test it out, or grab an image that will run in Virtualbox.

[via Tombuntu]

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Filed under: Video, Productivity, VoIP, web 2.0

Musion Systems and Cisco Networks may be bringing our dreams to life.

Ever not want to attend a meeting in person? Ok, dumb question. But you've never had an option, unless you lied and said you got stung by 100 bees, or were contaminated in some way. But even at that, you'd have to eventually provide SOME proof.

Well, the future of laziness may be closer than we think.

This HAS to be too good to be true.

Maybe, but maybe not. With some fancy cameras and IP networks, you can have people on stage at an event or meeting that are not even there! Zuck could have done his SXSW keynote from Ecuador! And he would have been able to see the audience just like he was there!

These two companies have teamed up to create the Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Experience using technologies from each.

The possibilities are ENDLESS. Don't want to visit mom? No problem, hologram yourself to the Church group brunch. Have a long distance relationship? Feel closer than iChat with someone.

We're not sure when this is going to happen but we hope to get a Beta invite.

Check out this awesomesauce demo video.

[via lux.et.umbra]

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Filed under: Developer, Internet, Web services, Google, Googleholic, web 2.0

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google! In this edition:

• Google I/O round-up
• Use Google to reference your JavaScript libraries
• Google Web Toolkit 1.5 RC
• Other random Google bits

Continue reading Googleholic for May 30, 2008

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Filed under: Internet, OS Updates, Web services, web 2.0

Glide has launched an updated version of its web-based "operating system." Like its predecessors, Glide OS 3.0 provides users with a desktop-like space within a browser window. You can use Glide's web-based applications to create Word documents, spreadsheets, or presentations. You can also play music, manage photos and videos, and send and receive email. In other words, you can do many of the same things you'd do with a desktop operating system, but in a web browser.

What sets Glide apart from many of its competitors is that Glide offers a suite of tools that let you synchronize your files with a Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris machine. There's also Glide Sync software for a number of mobile phone models. Free account holders get up to 5GB of web space, and if you need more, you can shell out a few bucks a month for additional storage.

One of the new features in Glide OS 3 is a Glide Group tool that adds social networking features. You can communicate with other Glide users by sending messages or sharing media files.

[via WebWare]

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