Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Web services

YouGetSignal provides a bunch of tools for looking things up. You can find the location of a phone number on a Google Map, find open ports on your internet connection, or perform a visual trace route (which traces the route packets of data make on the internet when traveling from your computer to another destination).

We recently discovered a new YouGetSignal tool: a reverse IP domain check. Just type a URL in the box, and YouGetSignal will attempt to discover other web sites using the same server. This comes in handy if you want to find URLs registered to a certain company, or if you have a shared hosting plan for your own web site and you want to see what other sites are sharing your server space.

For example, I discovered that there are 856 domains hosted on the same server as www.google.com, and 841 hosted on the same server as www.downloadsquad.com.

[via MakeUseOf]

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Browsers

Thinking about switching from Firefox or Internet Explorer to the Opera web browser, but can't imagine life without the StumbleUpon toolbar? StumbleUpon has yet to release an official toolbar or plugin for Opera. And while there is certainly a way to rank web pages and discover new pages without a toolbar, it's rather inelegant.

Opera Stumbler is a third party plugin that gives you all the same features you'd expect from the toolbar, sans the toolbar. There are several different ways to use Opera Stumbler. You can install the menu button, which adds a StumbleUpon menu to Opera.

If you'd rather have toolbar buttons, you can install a series of buttons for common tasks like giving a page a thumbs up or thumbs down. These buttons can be dragged and dropped onto any Opera toolbar. You can also add a Stumble option to your Opera Speed Dial bookmarks.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

While I know there are plenty of good replacements out there for Windows Explorer, I'm not ready to jump ship just yet. I don't really need any really advanced functionality, but there are a few things I'd like to add. Vista-style breadcrumbs and tabbed browsing, for example.

QuizoApps has coded two small extensions that do the job quite well with a minimal impact on resources. Both addons are activated by clicking view -> toolbars in any Explorer window.

The Breadcrumbs addon (QtAddressBar) is extremely responsive and even displays links to subfolders (you can see the arrow off the Adobe folder above).

Brad blogged about using QTTabBar to add an up button in Vista a while back, but it also adds several other tabbed browsing functions. You can create groups to open several tabs at once, clone a tab, merge tabs from another window, undo tab closing, use hotkeys, and it even includes enhanced replacements for Explorer's standard buttons. It even maintains a list of recently closed folders for quick resurrection.

Customization offers tons of enhancements, like grid lines, alternating row colors, minimizing to tray, and a lot more. If you want, QTTabBar will restore your tab previous tab layout on launch - I use it to keep the Control Panel and my Printers close at hand.

These are two great addons for any Windows XP. .NET 2.0 Framework is required.

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Filed under: Utilities, Web services, web 2.0

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Filed under: Internet, E-mail

John McCain has gotten a lot of flack recently for his lack of tech savvy. McCain doesn't use email, the web, or a computer. But it turns out he's not the only high ranking politician who prefers a fax machine to email. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has a cellphone and recently learned to send text messages - but has never sent an email.

The article raises an interesting point - does the guy at the top really need to be CCed on every single email his underlings send around? Some of Rendell's staffers say the answer is not only no, but that this frees the governor up to think about other things. He can make the decisions when it's time to do so, but he doesn't have to get bogged down in all the back and forth emails sent while hammering out the details.

On the other hand, Rendell has probably been responsible for the destruction of a small forest during his time in office, since every single document he needs to read has to be printed out in advance.

What do you think? Is it OK for politicians to be technologically illiterate, or would you like your elected officials to at least know how to look themselves up on Wikipedia even if they still prefer to write out their speeches by hand?

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Filed under: Fun, Games, Mozilla, Browsers

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Filed under: Audio

Pandora may be on the brink of self-destruction, but upstart music download service GrooveShark clearly believes in its style of predictive music programming with the launch of its new service, GrooveShark Autoplay.

GrooveShark originally launched with a radical new model which proposed to commercialize P2P by allowing users to be rewarded for sharing songs that were purchased by other users.

Since the initial launch of GrooveShark the company has also launched a Web based download solution 'GrooveShark Lite' which features a substantial music library to compliment the service's P2P features which also allows for full previews of songs on the site.

The addition of the Autoplay service to GrooveShark Lite turns the site into a Pandora style radio station as it allows consumers to search for tracks, listen in and then click on Autoplay which will build a playlist based on your initial choice. Autoplay can then proceed to build a picture of your listening interests with then subsequent user feedback on the selected tracks which allows the user to give any particular track the thumbs up, thumbs down or add the track to your favorites.

With Pandora threatening to close down, it will be interesting to see if GrooveShark can avoid the royalty woes that have afflicted the Web radio giant and prove that Web radio and music downloads can both be made to pay.

[Via GrooveShark Lite]

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