Web Talk

Last month I reviewed the upcoming HP UMPC 2133 giving you very little specs to play with. The truth is that there wasn’t a lot to say since there were very little infos scattered on the Internet. Since then, weeks have gone by, and now I can give you a full review of this nice new HP ultraportable. To start with, I want to say that the most recent rumor says that it will be released on April 7th. But let’s see its most important features:

• For 600 bucks you will be able to get: 1.2GHz C7-M, a 120GB drive, 1GB of RAM and Vista Home Basic.
• For 749 bucks you will be able to get: 1.6GHz, 2GB of RAM, bluetooth, a big battery and 1GB of RAM.
• Bonus! For 549 bucks you will be able to get: a HP UMPC 2133 with the same specs as the $600 model but it will run SuSE Enterprise.

Source: Engadget

You understood it right. The new e-book reader promises you to get rid of your dusty, bulky books in a while, thanks to its new stunning technology. But let’s see in detail its features:

• Bright screen.
• 5-inch grayscale screen.
• Pre-loaded translating dictionaries.
• Multi-language support.
• MP3 reader.
• Supports .txt, .pdf and .jpg file formats.
• Bookmarks and auto page turn functionality.
• Portrait & landscape mode.
• SD card slot.

If you are doubtful about buying it or not, maybe its price will convince you. In fact it costs just $349.95! If you ask me I think it is much better than its Amazon Kindle counterpart as it is well designed, richer of features and with a nice color full of personality! If you want to buy one or if you want to know more click here.

Got bored with your Nokia N810 theme? Wish you were able to make one by yourself for free, but you do not know anything about programming? Well, with Theme Maker by Urho Konttori now you can customize your Nokia device’s skin to no end! This nice application lets you customize the background and the general feel and look of your N-device in a few easy steps. All you need is a program like Gimp or Photoshop and a little patience. Reading from Urho Konttori’s blog: “Basically, it’s all about editing one single image file”…”and then setting the theme details in Theme Maker”…”And Clicking build in theme maker. It will produce a nice installable .deb file of your theme. Just copy that to your device (or publish it … whynot) and install it as normal.”. With Theme Maker won’t be impossible to give your N810 your personal touch anymore! If you want to download it or know more about it click here.

YouTubeRobot.com today announces YouTube Robot 2.0, a tool that enables you to download video from YouTube.com onto your PC, convert it to various formats to watch it when you are on the road on mobile devices like mobile phone, iPod, iPhone, Pocket PC, PSP, or Zune.

YouTube Robot allows you to search for videos using keywords or browse video by category, author, channel, language, tags, etc. When you find something noteworthy, you can preview the video right in YouTube Robot and then download it onto the hard disk drive. The speed, at which you will be downloading, is very high: up to 5 times faster than other software when you download a single file and up to 4 times faster when you download multiple files at a time.

Manual download is not the only option with YouTube Robot. You may as well schedule the download and conversion tasks to be executed automatically, even when you are not around. Downloading is followed by conversion to the format of your choice and uploading videos to a mobile device (if needed). For example, you can plug in iPod, select the video, go to bed, and when you wake up next morning, your iPod will be ready to play new YouTube videos.

Product page: www.youtuberobot.com
Direct download link: www.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe

steveking

Web Talk: Thank Steveking for letting us know about your nice piece of software. Very interesting indeed!

So, this is the news of the day. The much awaited Wordpress 2.5 is finally out. This new version can be considered a real milestone, bringing the end-users lots of new features above all in the back-end side. If you want to know more about this new version, you can read this page. For a brief list of its features read this page. Keep in mind that Wordpress also adds new interesting features as far as Wordpress themes are concerned. If you want to know if your theme can support the new Wordpress, or if you just want to know what to add in your code theme in order to take advantage of its new features, visit this page. Anyway, for your peace of mind, the only thing you will have to do, as far as your theme is concerned, is to add this code in the comment loop:

<?php if(function_exists('get_avatar')){ echo get_avatar($comment, '50'); } ?>

This piece of code will enable your theme to show avatars next to each comment. If you want to know more about new features related to Wordpress themes, read this article. To check if your theme is conformed to the norms or standards defined by various organizations, read this article.
For a complete list of those plugins working with Wordpress 2.5 visit this page. If you want to run some preliminary checks in order to see if your blog is ready to be upgraded, you can use this plugin. As a general rule, before upgrading back up your blog and its database. As far as I am concerned, I think I will wait some more time before upgrading my blog. In fact this new version is far from being perfect (this works for all new releases of course) and I want to be sure everything is really ok. So, I will just upgrade when the 2.5 Sp1 version will come out. One of the flaw which is constantly reported by users during these hours, is a problem with the Media Section. Whenever you upload an image or look at the gallery, none of the image previews is shown. Plus, one of the plugins this blog uses namely Simple Tags, is reported to work funny sometimes. Read this page to know more about Simple tags’ bugs. Anyway the general Wordpress 2.5 feel and look is nice, smooth and more effective. I really like this new version of Wordpress. It provides the blogger with a lot of new tools and features to tune, organize and manage its blog. Once again, well done Wordpress!

This nice website is 1 year old but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know about it at all. But what is Yahoo! Pipes? Basically it is a place where you can set your fantasy free and try to create nice widgets for your blog (TypePad, Blogger, WordPress, iGoogle). To start using it you need a Yahoo! account. The thing you don’t need to start playing with it, its the hard-to-get-without-studying-hard programmer’s knowledge. As a matter of fact, you can start creating nice widgets from scratch in a few steps, and without knowing any piece of code. The way it works is rather simple. Once you are in, click on “create a pipe” and a white page will appear. On its left there are lots of buttons describing what they do or the functions they represent (most of them are related to feeds. The application itself is based on a fetch-feeds system). Drag them on the screen, link them to each other, debug the widget created and you are done! The widgets you create are available in one of these three combinations: the widgets show you a list of infos such as news, the widgets show you results on a map, the widgets show you pictures. Is it too easy to be good? Watch the video and get an idea about what I am talking about.

I know that this topic maybe of no or very little interest, above all to people who know very little about blogging, SEO and Google pagerank. I also think that bloggers may find this tool useless or boring since there are tons of them promising you to predict your pagerank. Anyway the reason why I posted it here is because I have been looking for a tool like that for a lot of weeks. Since I successfully found it, I decided to share this little discovery with you. What makes this pagerank predictor different in comparison to the many available on the Internet is that…it works! True, there are many tools like, but the majority of them don’t work or are smart trap to spam your blog. This one promises you to predict your pagerank accurately giving you, at the same time, the number of backlinks and the accuracy percentage. Enjoy!

	PLEASE NOTE: This tool will provide an estimation of the future PageRank and should not be considered precise. Your Domain (URL): Utility from www.iwebtool.com

Since I am always looking for something original and nice to add to my website, namely widgets and small services to give my readers something new to play with, today I want to speak of some widgets I found on the nice, but rather simple website called whos.among.us. These widgets are not really widgets to tell you the truth. In fact they are just pieces of codes to copy and past wherever you want on your blog (no installation is required). Anyway the results and the effects they give you are the ones belonging to widgets for real! You have to know that I have been looking for a widget giving me the exact location of my online readers and the exact number of them for a long time. I have to confess you that I am really piky when it comes to choose something to add to my blog, since I don’t want to burden it with too many features which sometimes can slow it down. A few days ago I stumbled upon whos.among.us and I was really amazed at what it offered me. Let’s see together these widgets in detail:

• Whos: This little widget gives you and your readers the chance to know how many people are online in your blog. You can choose among different kinds of stickers. You can choose the colors and the shape of the widget itself to adapt it to your blog’s feel and look.
• Maps: With it, you can add your blog a map showing where you readers comes from. The map itself is highly customisable. In fact you can choose its colors and dimensions. I decided to choose a small map for my blog because I wanted to put it in the frontpage for everybody to see. If you want to you can click on it to see the map bigger and see where the readers come from in a more effective way.
• Graphs: This is not a real widgets. It is rather an extra service coming from the other two widgets. It is a graphic showing you statistics of the people visiting your blog. You can choose the lapse of time to see: 24 hours, 31 days, 12 months, 5 years. The graph also shows you the minimum, the maximum and the average of your readers in a due period.

I like these widgets. They are simple, effective and no special knowledge is required. All widgets should be like that. Just copy the code provided and you are done! I recommend it to everyone!