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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
Here's an interesting idea: advertising on your computer that doesn't cost you anything, but still contributes income to four different charities.
A new site called Donate Your Desktop asks you if you'll allow advertising on your desktop - instead of the usual wallpaper you'll have there. Currently the system is only available for New Zealand users.
Having the advertising there costs you nothing, (and you don't need to give them credit card details or the like) but it assumes that every so often you'll up and take notice of something that's advertised and follow through on it. Your desktop is safe from anyone hacking into it via the program, and in general it seems to me to be a reasonable idea.
The four charities which make some small amount each time an ad is presented are WWF NZ, Starship Hospital, Oxfam, and the NZ Breast Cancer Foundation.
I've been using the system since its inception a few days ago, and, if nothing else, it gives some variety to the wallpaper! Each ad fills the screen, and the logo/statement 'Donate your desktop' occurs somewhere on the screen each day. The advertisers vary from well-known ones to the one that turned up this morning for a site called GatherandHunt.co.nz.
It seems that you can't actually link to anything directly on the wallpaper, so you have to actually make the effort to investigate a site if you're interested. This is probably a good idea: it means you're not going to accidentally go tripping off somewhere you didn't intend.
[This post has been substantially rewritten since it first appeared, since the original information wasn't quite accurate, and I've now had experience of how the system works.]
A few years ago I was in Auckland, and spent some time at the Auckland Art Gallery, which has a most intriguing collection - very eclectic: at least what I saw on show was.
Now to my delight I've just heard that the Gallery is online in the Google Art Project.
I've visited the Google Art Project before,but not spent a lot of time with it. Having access to Auckland's gallery inspired me to check it out more carefully, and I've already started a 'collection' of the paintings that I enjoy from Auckland.
You can do the same with paintings from around the world, as well as doing a collection based on theme or colour or whatever.
It took me a little working out to get the feel of the site, and it probably help if your screen area isn't cluttered up with bars across the bottom or top. There are around a hundred galleries worldwide to choose from, and within each gallery there are hundreds of paintings to sift through and highlight and go looking into the detail.
It's a very time-consuming process....!
Raspberry Pi has developed a computer that costs - in New Zealand - a mere $48. Yup, no misprint there. The aim of this charity organisation is to enable children everywhere to get into programming and learning how to use computers, without the huge initial cost of most machines.
It's not an attractive item, being pared down to its basic essentials (it's about the size of a credit card), but it runs in tandem with other hardware through two USB ports, and an ethernet port for internet access.
It can run word processing, games and even high-definition video. And of course it accesses the internet with ease.
The photo shows the Raspberry Pi in its basic form - I'm assuming it comes with something in the way of a box to protect its component parts!
But I may be wrong about this. Every photo I've seen of it has it in its naked state, which for me suggests it would be easy for it to be damaged. So I guess the makers have put it together in such a way that that's less likely than you'd think.
Here's the site of the New Zealand seller.
When it comes to service we tend to remember the times we've had cause to complain about something far more than the times we've been well-treated. So by way of amending that approach, I want to tell you about ClippingsConverter.com and Jim, who's the man behind it (he's a Brit working in the US). I'm not entirely sure of Jim's role, but I suspect he may be Clippings Converter.
Anyway, those of you who use Amazon Kindles will know that you can make notes as you're reading, or highlight passages, or do various other things. The 'My Clippings' file includes some other things which I don't use much, so I can't remember what they are offhand. I don't tend to use the features when I'm reading a novel, although occasionally a phrase or word will catch my eye, but when I'm reading non-fiction, I use the clippings feature a lot. It's the equivalent of scribbling in the margins or underlining in a 'real' book
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Apple has plans to change the way textbooks are sold - forever. Like everything else Apple has done, however, it's all going to be done Apple's way, and stuff everyone else. And of course, you'll only be able to use Apple products to access these textbooks....didn't that kind of monopoly annoy everyone in the past in relation to Microsoft? How come it's taken this long for people to start complaining about Apple's monopolistic approach to everything digital?
There have been a lot of comments about the textbook issue - for example, from Audrey Watters
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We've just been overseas for the first time in some years. We wanted to put a couple of documents on our Kindle, so that we had a backup of these while we were away.
This wasn't too difficult, though we had to remember what our specific Kindle email address was in order to do it; once we'd attached the document to the email, Amazon sorted its format out and sent it back to our Kindle
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A new report from the New Zealand Commerce Commission says that fixed-line and mobile phone service pricing is higher in New Zealand compared with the rest of the OECD, although we are on target for broadband.
What it doesn't mention is that broadband costs are still high as well, and that there are plenty of places in the country - particularly rural areas - that can't get broadband still. The Government is planning on increasing the level of broadband access, but it's talking in terms of schools being the first recipients of it, not households. Great to teach kids how to use broadband at school when they can't access it at home
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One thing about Google, if a product doesn't work, they get rid of it and try something else. In the digital world this is easy as, of course, and the only cost is the time and labour it took to set up the product in the first place.
So, this week, Google has given notice that a number of non-starters are biting the dust: Google Wave, for one, that seemingly exciting concept that just never excited anyone. Also going is the Friend Connect service that predated Google . My suspicion is that Google will eventually go as well; even though it's got a number of users, it's just come too late into the scene to compete with Facebook, however much people complain about the latter
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A concern everyone who has any amount of data on a computer is how best to back it up. The old hardware models are fine, but have some issues. For instance, we have two back-up drives, one of which will automatically pick up any changes you've made when it's plugged in. The drive recommends that you keep it plugged in at all times, but that seems somewhat counterproductive to me. I don't know whether it would be affected if the computer had a meltdown, but I'm not keen to discover that.
Consequently I have to plug it in every so often and catch up. The second back-up drive doesn't do anything automatically, so you have to go through your computer's files and figure out what might need updating. It's a bit of a job, but at least there's plenty of room on the thing
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Recently Google eliminated the operator from its search tools. Well, that wasn't exactly an operator I'd ever used, I must say, but that's just me. I find that either a straight Google search or one encased in quotation marks suffices for anything I want.
Anyway, they've replaced it with something called 'Verbatim'. Verbatim isn't easy to find, I must say. You have to have a search results page open already, and then, looking down the left side, you'll find at the bottom of the first list, the word 'More.' Click on More and another list will come up, including 'More search tools.' Finally, if you click on that, Verbatim will appear. Seems very long-winded, and to me, if Verbatim was actually that important, it would higher on the list
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333 Posts dating from January 2007
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