Recently Twitter has redesigned its Micro Blogging Platform site. Along with that, the guy at the Next Web has created TwitterKeys. It is a browser bookmarklet that pulls up expressive characters for easy copy & paste of all those crazy Unicode symbols that people love to include in their emails and blog posts. The TwitterKeys are divided into 3 Pages. See the link below to add TwitterKeys to you Twitter.

TwitterKeys | Part 1

TwitterKeys | Part 2

TwitterKeys | Part 3

Company hopes that Apple's customers will voice their frustrations and demand Flash

Adobe's Flash supports a large portion of the internet's rich content. And it will soon be coming to almost all smart phones, opening a world of internet possibilities. All the smart phones, that is, except one of the most popular smart phones on the market -- Apple's iPhone.

Apple remains cold and aloof about the topic of Flash. While the iPhone could easily support hardware-accelerated Flash, CEO Steve Jobs has stated in interviews that Flash is irrelevant and not something that iPhone customers have demanded. He insists the iPhone is the perfect internet phone -- even if it can't run Flash.

Adobe seems to be hoping to push Apple's customers to demand the feature with a new humorously passive aggressive browser failure message.

On the iPhone customers trying to use Flash now get a message stating:

Apple restricts the use of technologies required by products like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Before the message merely read:

To view this content upgrade your browser and flash plug-in.

Will the new message inspire users to complain to Apple, or will it merely annoy iPhone users, making Adobe look bad? It should be interesting to see how Apple's customers react to the new, more pointed error message.

Just few days after Google Chrome was released, Paul Douglas from TechRader has provided 30 Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts for Google Chrome.

1. Create desktop and Start menu shortcuts to web apps such as Gmail – go to Gmail.com and then select Create application shortcuts… from the Page Control menu (in the top-right corner of your browser – it looks like a page with the corner folded over). Now choose where you want to place your shortcut. This works for other Google apps such as Calendar and Documents, and other services such as Windows Live Hotmail.

2. Control + Shift + N open an ‘incognito’ window – sites you view in this window won’t appear in your history and cookies served by sites in this window will be deleted when the window is closed.

3. You can open a link in an incognito window by right-clicking the link and selecting Open link in incognito window.

4. Alt + Home loads your Google Chrome home page, with thumbnails of your most visited sites shown in the active tabbed window.

5. Control + T opens a new tab. You can drag tabs around to change their order or drag a tab out of the window into its own window.

6. Control + Shift + T opens your most recently closed tab. Press the key combination again to open the tab closed before that one. Google Chrome remembers the last 10 tabs you’ve closed.

7. Jump to different open tabs using Control + 1, Control + 2, Control + 3, etc. Control + 9 takes you to the last tab.

8. Control + Tab lets you cycle through your open tabs in order.

9. Control + Shift + Tab cycles through your tabs in the opposite order.

10. As with Firefox 3, you can drag a link onto a tab to open it in that tab, or drop it between two tabs to open a new tab in that position.

11. To bookmark a site click the star on the left of the address bar and then select a folder to add it to.

12. Control +B hides the Google Chrome bookmarks bar. Press Control + B to bring it back again.

13. Right-click or hold down the back button and you’ll get a drop-down list of sites to go back through. Show Full History, at the bottom of the list, opens a new tab with your full browser history.

14. Control + H is a faster way to bring up the History page.

15. You can delete history for chosen days by scrolling to the day you want to delete and clicking Delete history for this day on the right-hand side of the window.

16. Control + J brings up your Downloads page.

17. To clear an item from your Downloads page, right-click an entry and select Remove.

18. Press Control + K or Control + E to search from the address bar. Once pressed, you’ll see a ? Symbol appear in the address bar and you can simply enter your search query and hit Return.

19. Right-click the top of the browser window and select Task manager to see how much memory different tabs and plug-ins are using. Highlight one and click End process to stop it running.

20. Shift + Escape is a quicker way to bring up the Google Chrome Task manager.

21. To see what plug-ins are installed, type about:plugins into the address window.

22. You can also type the following commands into the Google Chrome address window: about:stats, about:network, about:histograms, about:memory, about:cache, about:dns.

23. Type about:crash to see what a crashed tab looks like.

24. A three-second diversion: type about:internets. (Only works in Windows XP.)

25. Edit any web page – right-click a page and select Inspect element. Now edit the HTML source code and hit Return to view the changes.

26. To make Google Chrome your default browser, click the Tools button (in the right-hand corner of the browser window – a spanner icon). Select Options, click the Basics tab and then click the Make Google Chrome my default browser button.

27. To delete cookies, go to Tools > Options > Under the Hood. Scroll down to the Security section, and click Show cookies. Now you can click Remove all or remove individual cookies.

28. To clear more data such as the Google Chrome browsing history and cache, click the Tools icon and select Clear browsing data…

29. To clear the most visited web sites that appear on your Google Chrome start page, you must clear your browsing history using the method above.

30. Clearing your Google Chrome browser history will also stop matches from previously browsed sites appearing as suggestions in your address bar.

Worm is first known iPhone worm, originated in Australia, may be spreading overseas

Rick Astley, an English singer-songwriter and musician, first became famous for his 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up". The music industry in the 1990s gave up on Astley, but Astley didn't give up on it. He managed to recapture attention in 2007 thanks to one of the most infamous viral video crazes. Links popped up all around the internet to Astley's hit and the term "rickrolling", originally referring to tricking people into watching the video, became a common colloquialism.

Now an internet worm is achieving what Apple has been unable to do -- punish those with jailbroken iPhones (phones freed of Apple's app restrictions). Sophos, a leading security firm, appears to be the first to have investigated the amusing virus. The virus, which "rickrolls" users, changing their wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley. It appears to do little else other than spreading to other jailbroken iPhones in the user's contact list.

The worm can infect any jailbroken iPhone with SSH installed and an unchanged default password. The password on jailbroken iPhones defaults to "alpine". Users can change this by installing the MobileTerminal app, available from the Cydia undergound app store, and typing the command passwd.

Apple's hardware team can't seem to keep their close platform closed

Apple has a big headache. That headache is iPhone unlockers and jailbreakers. With iPhone jailbreaking, the powerful handsets are no longer constrained to only run the apps that Apple allows. And with unlocking, users can jump onto other networks, leaving Apple's partner AT&T and its patchy 3G network behind.

Apple has long and unsuccessfully waged war with the unlockers. It has tried to brick their iPhones. It has tried to release new firmware versions to try to lock them out. But ultimately, time and time again, Apple's best hardware and software engineers are finding themselves outwitted and befuddled by the persistent hackers.

Leading the crew is George Hotz, a 20-year-old New Jersey native who goes by the aliases geohot, million75, or mil online. When he was just a teen, he became the first to develop a procedure to jailbreak the iPhone allowing its use on other networks. The move netted him a hot car, extra iPhones, money, and fame. Now slightly older and a month out of his teenage years, Hotz continues to be among the most prolific iPhone unlockers, consistently outsmarting Apple.

Now Hotz has released his latest masterpiece, blacksn0w, a free unlocking utility that works with the latest iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS hardware (the latest 05.11.07 baseband, which locked out previous hacks). The unlock works with a new version of Hotz's popular purplera1n jailbreak hack, dubbed blackra1n. Together the hacks can both free the phone from the AT&T network and Apple's app restrictions.

If you are running your blog from your own hosted website, most likely you will be using WordPress Platform. WordPress is great by itself, the majority of WordPress’ usefulness comes from its plugins and themes. Some of the best and most creative features come from plugins, and because plugins are so easy to create and install, there are literally thousands of WordPress plugins.

If you’re new to WordPress Platform, you will have difficulties in finding the appropriate plugin . Sometimes there are ten plugins doing the same thing, which makes it difficult to find the plugin which works the best. Or, you just simply don’t know that a plugin exists. That’s why I’m here to help. Here is the list of Top 10 Popular Wordpress Plugins for your site.

• All in One SEO Pack – Automatically optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
• cformsII – contact form – cforms II is the most customizable, flexible & powerful ajax supporting contact form plugin (& comment form).
• WordPress.com Stats – You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.
• Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
• WP Super Cache – A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.
• Wordpress Automatic upgrade – Wordpress automatic upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation to the latest one.
• WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog.
• WP Ajax Edit Comments – Allows users and admin’s to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admin’s can edit all comments.
• WP-PostRatings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

t is probably a safe bet to assume anyone with a car and an iPhone has said, “man, I wish this thing could start my car.” Maybe you’ve been walking to your car on a frigid night or a scorching day, but you’ve wondered about it, haven’t you? Maybe you remember this early post from your favorite remote control blog. Viper, a leader in car security and remote starters, must have been paying attention — because they just turned that spoof into reality with Viper SmartStart for the iPhone.

SmartStart is a free iPhone app that allows you to start your car from basically anywhere via your wireless service. Now hold your horses (or Vipers) — it’s not just going to magically start your car. There is the $300 Viper SmartStart Module that you are going to have to have professionally installed in your car, as well as an annual $30 subscription to get that gear on the cell network. The first year of the service is free, so I suppose that helps. Kind of reminds me of OnStar.

Pricing aside, the SmartStart system seems pretty cool. It’s certainly the most impressive remote start system I’ve seen. First, the app can be used to start any of your cars that have the module installed — which has to be pretty helpful for car collectors and large families. You can also unlock any of your cars — from anywhere — which would definitely come in handy if you were to, say, locking yourself out of the car when you are away from home.

Apple said Thursday that it will let iPhone application developers offer their users the option to buy additional content or features within a free app on its App Store.

App developers said they received an email notice from Apple informing them that the in-app purchase feature was now available for free apps and that it would “simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses in App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app.” A spokeswoman for Apple confirmed the news.

The in-app purchase feature, which was first introduced in March, allows developers to offer fresh content for purchase within an app such as new levels in a game, additional books in an e-book app, or expanded capability in productivity apps. The caveat, however, was that the feature was only available for paid apps, which meant that developers had to charge at least 99 cents.

Developers say that the latest announcement helps in two ways. First, it makes it much easier for them to make a business out of free apps. Until now, developers sold ads within their free apps or tried to convert users to a paid version with more content.

After rejections, one Apple executive is trying hard to win customers -- and developers -- back

Apple's app store practices have bordered on schizophrenia, with it frequently accepting applications only to later reject them and rejecting others only to later accept them. Worse yet, frequently rejections seem to follow no consistent pattern, with some apps being rejected for containing some sort of forbidden content, while others with that same content get accepted.

These inconsistencies have led to customers growing dissatisfied with the iPhone -- or in some cases even leaving it. They have also led to a growing discontent among developers, some of whom have also jumped ship. And it has even brought down a government investigation concerning Apple's role in rejecting the Google Voice app.

However, there is one man who hopes to fix the system. Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller is trying to right the iPhone App Store and is personally taking a hand in trying to win back customers, developers, and placate government investigators.

Mozilla Firefox works great on its own browser, but it’s the thousands of extensions that make it shine. I have pulled together about 10 add-ons which provide a quick access to handy blogging tools.

• Wordpress.com Sidebar – Adds a quick access sidebar to get to your WordPress.com account.
  
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• Firefox Universal Uploader – Universal program for uploading to sites such as Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, and Facebook.
• FireFTP – It is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.
• Adsense Notifier – Displays your current earnings from Google Adsense in the status bar.
• ShrinkThisLink Link Shrinker – Use the ShrinkThisLink service without leaving the page.
• StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more.
• ScribeFire Blog Editor – ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.
• SEOpen – Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization. Including google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more.
• PayPerPost Opps Hider – Doesn’t it annoy you that PayPerPost opportunities can’t be hidden? There are tons that you can’t post or don’t want to take. With this extension you can easily hide PayPerPost opportunities by clicking a small checkbox.
• coComment – This extension allows you to activate coComment! from the right-click context menu and reduces your onscreen movement time so that you don’t have to move all the way from the comment text box to the Bookmarks and then back to the Submit

Jailbroken iPhone users with SSH and a default password are the target

The iPhone is one of the most popular smartphones on the market. By most accounts, the iPhone is the most likely of all smartphones to be used on the internet to access files on the go. There are also a growing number of iPhone users who are jailbreaking the devices to use unauthorized Apple software or to use the devices on other carrier networks.

Over the last few weeks, a worm targeted specifically at iPhones which are jailbroken and have SSH installed with the default password was found. The original worm was nothing more than an irritation and would change the background image of the iPhone to a picture of washed up pop star Rick Astley. Embarrassing for sure, but hardly what most would consider malicious.

A similar worm targeting jailbroken iPhones with SSH and the default password -- alpine -- is making its rounds in the Netherlands. The new worm is different from the first in that the latest is clearly malicious and has a financial motive behind it for the worm maker. BBC News reports that security firm F-Secure discovered the worm and that it targets users of Dutch online bank ING. The worm infects the iPhone and redirects the user to a fake login page.

Mikko Hypponen from F-Secure told BBC News, "It's the second iPhone worm ever and the first that's clearly malicious - there's a clear financial motive behind it."

A hard disk drive (HDD), commonly referred to as a hard drive or hard disk, is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Strictly speaking, “drive” refers to a device distinct from its medium, such as a tape drive and its tape, or a floppy disk drive and its floppy disk. Early HDDs had removable media; however, an HDD today is typically a sealed unit with fixed media…

The famous Micro Blogging Platform has finally transformed to a brand new design. It looks more in line with current web applications and retains its characteristic simplicity it does not include new features, but if it significantly improves the aesthetics and a little accessibility.

According to the official blog, a lot of these changes are with a view of the future gttt ttwhere if you can add new features. Perhaps the section for more changes has been to design, where you can customize the background and the color of the subject in a more insightful.

I think the change you feel good service, because by now it seemed that it was not working to improve it or to a very slow. Now we have to wait for new features.

From the Google Docs email newsletter:

If you have an iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile device, now you can point your phone’s browser to http://docs.google.com/m to view read-only, mobile-optimized versions of your docs and spreadsheets. (Your presentations, too, if you have an iPhone; we’ll be making this feature available for other devices shortly.) You might have to squint a little, but now your information will always be right there, in your pocket, wherever you go.

The interface only allows viewing. You cannot edit your documents, spreadsheets or presentations, but just being able to access all my Google Docs is enough for me. I don’t need to edit my documents through my mobile phone - I have a laptop for that.

The holiday season is near and you want to send personalized email greetings to all your fr iends, family members and customers using the standard Gmail (or Google Apps with Gmail) s ervice.

How to Send Bulk Emails using Gmail

Since the web interface of Gmail doesn’t support personalized emails, you should connect your Gmail account with Microsoft Outlook (via POP3 or IMAP) and also import the Gmail address book into your Outlook Contacts.

Now you can use the mail merge feature of Outlook to send personalized messages to every single Gmail contact from the desktop.

This may sound like an easy plan but there’re strict sending limits and, if you aren’t careful, Google may even block your Gmail account temporarily for up to 24 hours and you’ll neither be able to send nor receive any emails during that lock-out period.

Email Sending Limits in Google Apps

If you are using Gmail with Google Apps, you cannot send messages to more than 500 unique email addresses per day.

For instance, if you send one email to Person A and another one is addressed to Person B and C, you have already exhausted three slots (out of 500) even though only two messages left your Inbox.

Email Sending Limits for Gmail users

If you want to send bulk mails using a regular Gmail account, the rules are similar.

You can only send out emails to a maximum of 500 recipients during a 24 hour* period but if you are using a desktop client (like Outlook), that limit is reduced to 100 messages in a day.

[*] The Gmail help site mentions this limit as 500 recipients per message but a Google employee on the Gmail support site has confirmed that this cap is not just per message but per day.

Workarounds for sending mass emails
With all these limitations in place, Gmail is obviously not the best option for reaching out to a very large customer base. However, if you have no other option, it may be a good idea to plan well in advance.

For Gmail: Distribute the mail merge process over 2-3 days so that you never exceed that 100 messages per day quota.

For Google Apps: You can either upgrade to a Premier edition or create multiple accounts in Google Apps as each will have its own 500-recipients limit.

What’s the first thing that you do when you are back from a vacation or from a family wedding? You probably connect the digital camera to your computer and transfer the photographs (a better word would be "memories") from the camera to your hard-drive.

You’ve following this routine for quite some time and, as a result, a few hundred thousand photographs reside on your computer now neatly tagged and arranged in folders. But wait, do you have a backup plan for these "priceless" digital photos?

How to Backup your Digital Photos

There are basically four ways by which you can backup your photos at home:

1. Backup your photos on CDs and DVDs – This is a cheap and easy option but please remember that disks have a finite shelf life so pictures that you burn today on to a DVD disk may not be accessible after few years.

2. Use an external hard drive – You can get a portable 500 GB drive for less than $100, they connect to your computer via USB (or Firewire) ports but again, you can’t expect an external hard drive to last forever.

3. Use Network Storage – If you have pictures across multiple computers, you can use a network attached storage (NAS) device like HP’s MediaSmart Home Server* or Apple’s Time Capsule to automatically backup all your digital content in one place.

The HP device can transfer files to Amazon S3 so you have an added layer of protection.

4. Use an online backup services – You can use photo-sharing websites (like Flickr) or an online backup service (like Mozy) to put your photos on to the "cloud" and access them from any other computer.

For most users, the best option for preserving digital photographs is often "online backup" because it doesn’t require you to burn DVDs (which are unreliable anyway), you don’t have to invest in any new hardware and your photos are likely to last forever as long as you pay the yearly bills.

Online Backup for your Digital Photos

There are again four different routes for online backup:

# 1. Online backup services like Mozy that offer unlimited storage and allow not just photographs but files of all types.

# 2. Photo-sharing services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums that allow you to store both photographs and video clips online.

# 3. File-synchronization services like Dropbox, SugarSync or Windows Live Mesh.

# 4. Online storage services like Amazon S3 or Windows Live SkyDrive.

What should you use?

Well, photo-sharing sites allow you to visually browse pictures in the web browser itself while a backup service like Mozy will first require you to download the photos on to the computer before you can show them to your visiting grand-parents.

File-synchronization services like Live Mesh not only provide online backup but they also save a copy of your digital files (pictures in this case) on to your other computers so even if your main hard-drive suffers a crash, you can quickly retrieve files from the other computers.

The Cost of Online Storage for Digital Photos

If you only have a few hundred photos on your computer that occupy anywhere between 1-2 GB of storage space, you can enjoy any of above backup services for free but if your storage requirements are slightly more, you probably need to for a paid version.

Now here’s a visual graph that compares the storage cost of various online backup services where you can safely store your priceless photos.

Flickr Pro costs around $25 an year and you can store unlimited number of pictures here though the maximum size of individual pictures should not exceed 20 MB (bad for professional photographs who shoot in RAW – see comments).
Picasa Web Albums on the other hand lets you purchase storage on-demand so you only pay $5 per year for 20 GB of online storage but end-up paying $100 for 400 GB of storage. Like Flickr, images uploaded to Picasa Web Albums can be no larger than 20MB and are restricted to 50 megapixels or less.
Live Skydrive is the best online storage service – it offers 25 GB of free space (50 MB limit for individual files) and that should be enough for most home users. You can upload picture libraries from your desktop to Windows Live SkyDrive using the free Windows Live Photo Gallery client though it’s only available for Windows.
Online backup services like Mozy cost around $60 per year respectively but here you get unlimited storage, your files are automatically backed up (in the background) and there are no restrictions on file-size.
SmugMug, another popular photo-sharing site, offers a service called SmugVault that uses Amazon S3 to backup your photos, videos and all other file-types that you can imagine. They have a relaxed 600 MB per file limit and you pay the normal Amazon S3 rent for files that are not photos.
Amazon S3, where you pay only for what you use, is very reliable (their SLA promises 99.9% uptime) turns out to be very expensive if your yearly storage requirement exceeds 10 GB.

Here’s another representation of the same graph – Yearly costs (in $) vs. storage offered (in GB).
Windows Live SkyDrive offers 25 GB of online storage space for your pictures for free though there’s no option to purchase extra storage. In paid services, Google’s Picasa offers the best value for money if your photo collection can fit in 20 GB else a Flickr Pro account probably makes more sense.

Picasa desktop software makes it easy for you to upload and download photos from Picasa Web Albums. Flickr provides an uploading utility but you need to rely on a third-party hacks to download the original (full-resolution) albums from Flickr.