I wonder why more people don't have an interest in obscure Operating Systems? I would have thought that the average computer head would have delved deeper into OS's than mainstream Windows, Mac and Linux? But apparently not, because if it were a burning topic, I would get more than 2 visitors to this site looking for my priceless insights.

And if it were a hot topic, the fact that I rank no 2 in Google searches for that term would mean something beyond, "I rank number two in Google for something."

I know you are chomping at the bit now, so, discover everything you ever wanted to know about Play Station and OS/2 in my incredible summary!

There is a whole raft of society giving thanks for a product called Chem draw.

Untold numbers of users wonder where they would be without it, such is its power and usefulness. On the other hand, millions of others have no idea where they would be if they had it, because they don't even know what it is.

Some would say that ignorance is bliss, however, I, as a spoil sport, think it is time to reveal all. Chem Draw is:

the industry’s leading application for chemical structure drawing. Sequence Tool, 13C and 1H NMR prediction with peak splitting and highlighting, a TLC plate drawing tool,

Don't waste a moment, just go and order it right now. It could change your life. Then again, it could leave you scratching your head, or as we scientists like to say, rearranging the follicle molecules on your cranium.

I mentioned recently how my mailbox was clogging up with poker related spam. I hold my hand up, it was all my lazy ass fault. My junk situation was a classic case of np-gigo aka no protection from garbage in, garbage out.

I had no filters set and guess what, not even Apple's email software can recognise spam, unless you teach it. Doh. So much for intuitive! But now, it is under control and my trash is filling at the rate of 50 gambling mails a day.



The trouble is, it took longer to complete the filters than just delete stuff as it comes in!



I am OK for now, but you know they are going to be attacking later with modified spellings - piker, cassino, hold em - and my junk filter is going to be longer than the arm of the federal law designed to stop spam.

Stopping spam

The trouble with laws is they are easily circumvented. Spammers in Thailand certainly don't care about laws outside their country.

I think the best way to end spam is to call it something else, or embrace it as correspondence from people who need companionship - problem solved.

Who says Windows is the only way to go? A scan through the details of visitors to this site revealed some interesting insights into obscure operating systems still (or already) in use today. Boffins, man your stations. Non geeks, prepare to glaze over - or maybe not.

Portable Playstation

They aren't just for playing killing and maiming games. You can do constructive things, like surf the internet for Naked Zwinky info provided by the biggest name in that important field of endeavor.



I wonder if they have used their PSPs on the Net Disaster site, the place where you can destroy other web sites in a variety of creative ways?

OS/2

I said what? I remember my brother was looking into the IBM OS/2 wonder Operating System back in the 90's. He decided not to go that route, due to built-in obsolescence - a kind way of saying, Great idea, but this is going nowhere! Judging by the death of the business version, Warp 2, he was, of course, spot on with his assessment.

IBM has announced... Effective December 23, 2005, the products are withdrawn from marketing and the product CDs will no longer be available.

End of Standard Support for both products is December 31, 2006

Support beyond December 31, 2006, will be available for a fee

My theory on the OS/2 lurker.

1 - The person accessing the Pisstakers via OS/2 is so deeply invested in it, they can't afford to migrate to something more current. Therefore, they come to this site in the forlorn hope of reading about other people who got caught up in something from which there is no escape.

2 - They love OS/2 so much they don't see anything wrong with being in a minority of 12 world-wide users. In fact, they always feel more comfortable being part of a small group, and probably visit here on a Saturday - the quietest day of the week.

3 - They are one of the support guys who thought they could make a fortune by supporting OS/2 fanatics. However, the market is so small that they have oceans of time on their hands to read The Pisstakers day after day.

If you are truly a pernickety, get-all-the-facts-straight kind of person, get the full OS/2 story from Toasty tech. I'm just a pisstaker after all.

Symbian and Sun Solaris

I think I will leave these for another day. I don't want anything to steal the thunder of PSP and OS/2 just yet.

Sync 2 Folders

For the Mac heads with more computers than friends, rejoice at the launch of freebie software, Sync 2 Folders. It lets you easily sync the latest version of your Broken Relationships folder with the same out-of-date folder on the rest of your computers.

Clickety-click SYNC. Now you can be doubly, trebly, quadruply synced in sadness, and all for free too.

Remember, this software is of minimal use to people with one computer or no Broken Relationships folders.

GolfCard

At last, a reason to give up on life and take up golf.

GolfCard allows you to store all of your golf scores, save the details for your favourite courses and save scores for future analysis.

But hang on, a score card that requires a computer? I remember my reaction to seeing a dweeb in a supermarket with his MacBook cradled in one arm while he picked the ingredients for some whacky recipe with the other. I was so embarrassed for him.

So, no, I can't lose all my golfing street cred in one go. I will pass on this particular option and wait for someone else to be labeled the first jerk swinging around 18 holes with a laptop in his golf bag. Next.

Ensemble ultimate RSS reader

This Ensemble RSS reader is on steroids. With so many options, you spend more time tweaking the layout than you do reading your feeds. I jest, of course, but it is a cool way to keep up with RSS stuff without being totally transmog-googlified.

Just to reiterate, these are Mac apps, so splash out a few grand and join the Mac freeware party.

Mr Tides

This sounds like an excellent and well conceived app to tell surfers, fishermen and paddlers the time of the tides and the details of currents all around the world. Linked to a central database, the times are supposed to be highly accurate. The only problem I can foresee with this software is a tsunami. I think Mr Tides would be somewhat out of its depth when the big one hit shorelines.

Sleepless HD

Technically speaking SleeplessHD is an application which recurrently triggers a selected harddisk to keep it spinning and prevents the internal sleep mechanism of some harddisks from taking effect.

Before you glaze over, pay attention to the icon from Braintrigger. Smoking!!!!!

Shrook

Shrook is to RSS readers what Shrek is to ugliness, it rocks. It is a Mac app, but one of its killer features is synchronisation. With a shrook.com account and synchronization, you can log in from any web browser, and all of your channels will be there. It has up-to-date information on what you've read, and when you get back to Shrook itself, it'll know what you looked at when you were away.

We already waste 3 -5 hours a week reading blogs at work. With Shrook, when you get home, you can keep adding feeds so that you can then spend 4 to 6 hours or more reading even more blogs in the workplace. Perhaps this app is not suitable for work!

Freeware is a wonderful thing - in the right hands.

I came across Highslide photo gallery, clicked on a thumbnail photo and thought, "Where is the obligatory blacked out background you get with Lightbox and the other javascript photo galleries?"

Seems like you don't need to go that route to get overlaid photos on your screen. And with the options for commenting, sizing and styling, plus dragging images, it looks like Highslide has all that a discerning blogger could ever need for a high class and user-friendly photo gallery.

Just need to get some decent pictures and you could be in business!

If you have spent more than 2 minutes on a PC, you will no doubt have been faced with a computer glitch that doesn't sort itself out in an obvious way. After a couple of frantic clicks and curses, most of us re-start our computer, a move that solves 90% of all computer issues. However, in terms of trouble-shooting, it is like starting at Z and working back to A in one giant step, not the ideal way to interact with a binary 0's and 1's-driven machine. Even when you do the right thing, you can still fail. I know, twice, from recent experience.

Troubleshoot junk mail

Occasionally, I feel moved to properly sort out a problem like funky junk mail issues, and as a restart won't do it, there is no option but to troubleshoot in a logical way. Oh, the pain. The aim is to start from the top and work back, or more accurately, start from the top with dialog boxes, and drill down. So, in the worst case scenario, if all else fails, you should end up in an obscure library file, the exposed heart of your PC pulsing as you work, ready to delete the ultimate file and solve the problem.

It sounds scary getting under the hood of your PC, but deleting some code in a darkened locale should be a logical step after a trip through a long list of logical moves that solved nothing to that point - so what's the worry?

It is another thing to end up at an obscuro file by accident, or as a friend of mine is wont to do, dive deliberately into the nether regions, high on ignorance and hope, ready to delete something he doesn't understand. That is scary!

After a proper troubleshoot, my mail still ended up in the junk instead of in the correct boxes, but at least I had tried and failed correctly!

Vanilla troubleshoot

Yesterday I was trying out a forum package, Vanilla. It is a lightweight app which you can style and then spice up with a series of extensions, like Firefox. Not your average forum layout!



Vanilla has an option where a commenter can type in a link to a Youtube video and the software automatically embeds the video in the comment. Sounded nifty, but I couldn't get it to work. How I wish I had gone into a red misty fit from the start and gone straight to Z to solve it!

Like a logical troubleshooter I followed the relevant thread on the Vanilla support forum, working from post 1 on toward post 98. With each pertinent tip I tweaked and uninstalled and ticked boxes, and made a little progress, but the progress was not in the direction of embedded videos.

Good job I have a sense of humor. 2 hours later I got to post 78 and it suddenly dawned on me that the tone of the helpful posts was changing. The helpful guys weren't quite so bullish, the keen troubleshooters were getting resigned to failure. The final nail in the coffin was post 96 - the fricking new version officially doesn't work! Cheers.

In conconclusion

You can learn a lot from troubleshooting correctly, it is like an investment in the tools you are using.

And ferretting around in a program can help you put issues into perspective. There you are ticking boxes and copying and pasting and cursing, but imagine how much work has gone into actually "inventing" the software you are trying to troubleshoot. That is quite a humbling thought, and has saved my computer from a flight out the window a few times.

Not to say it isn't a ball acher when troubleshooting ends in failure, but the silver lining is an app like Vanilla, a very interesting forum option that does most things except embed Youtube videos.

If you took any notice of the following article when it came out last week, you missed out on a few more dollars of profit. Sorry! A couple of weeks ago, the reality roadshow from VMware hit the highways, (emphasis on high) and the virtualisation company's stock, originally priced at $24 became an unreal $29 prior to their debut on Wall Street today. With a couple of flicks of a real life trading button, the stock then hit nearly $56 and a new era in hard drive storage, hard drive storage millionaires and hard stomached speculators has been born.

The biggest news is that the company with software that can turn your single hard drive into a series of data stores (aka virtualization) will have a competitor next year.

The hot demand for virtualization software also has attracted the attention of Microsoft Corp., which has indicated that it plans to enter the market.

Ah, Redmond's photocopiers are hot in pursuit already.

An analyst said that VMware have the market pretty well locked up through 2008, which is what Sony thought about the threat of the XBox and then the Nintendo Wii, so what do analysts and conglomerates know!

In this day and age of equality, it should come as no surprise that a lady heads VMware, and her husband is an employee of hers. This would have been virtually unheard of a few years ago, when women's knowledge of computers was limited to a Casio calculator and the job of cleaning the keyboard of their husband and son's PC. Three cheers for emancipation and virtualization.

I look forward to installing VMware and storing The Pisstakers data in quadruplet on my new hard drive, just in case. (Just in case of what? 4 tsunamis or 4 last minute hurricanes? Sounds like a lot of hype all of a sudden. Quick, sell, sell sell.

Based on an article from serious minds at yahoo finance.

Remember Brownies, or the good old days of traditional 38mm photography where you had to think before you clicked? You better have a good memory, because that era of taking your time and being selective about what you snapped, due to the cost of printing, is a fast disappearing memory.

Now it is digital clickety click anything that moves. Thanks to the likes of iPhoto, Flickr, DoodlePad et al, your family and friends WILL sit through 3000 poorly constructed shots of your granny's tea party just seconds after the last guest leaves. Progress is great, innit!

I would go as far as to say that there is something wrong with you if you don't own a digital camera these days. You have probably either dropped out of society altogether, or you are in the process of making the break from the mainstream and have already thrown out your cell phone, PC and refrigerator. Oh yeah, and you don't wear shoes any more. Either that or you were beaten so badly over the head by an old Brownie camera as a child that you vowed never to get involved with fuzzy megapixels ever again.

Whatever your story, digital camera-less saddoes are in the minority and the rest of us are on the look out for slick ways to sort through the quagmire of unbelievably bad pixelated photos clogging up our camera's flash drives hard drives and online storage spaces.

iPhoto 08

5 years ago, Apple released iPhoto which was a good idea badly executed. As usual the faithful raved about the plug 'n play magic of linking any camera (except the one I had) and seeing their pictures auto-sucked into a slick brushed metal photo manager. It was just a poor relation of iTunes.

The moaners moaned at not being able to find their photos outside of iPhoto, the pros moaned because they couldn't do Photoshop craziness without having to use Photoshop, hmmmm... but now, for their troubles, the Mac community has a rather spiffing iPhoto 08 that should satisfy the sorting, internet and printing needs of any normal camera-head, and then some.

Coming from a background where I took 36 photos a year, and I could tell you about every picture in and out of focus, I found it quite scary to hear the demo guy laying bare the psychology of digital photography. "You take photos based on events. On average you take 50 photos per event. If you have 5000 photos you can now access and easily search them via 100 thumbnails representing each event." I was waiting for the line about, "It is 4.09, time to take your medication, Ed." but not even Apple can research human behavior that precisely.

Flickr

Flickr took the photo game on-line and set standards that I don't believe anyone else has yet bettered. From their warm and friendly welcome, to the gazillion ways to resize, store and share out-of-focus photos, it seems to be everything to all men women and crap photographers world-wide, The Pisstakers included.



Mrs Ed hated it at first because you have to think a little bit before you jump in, but even she now talks in terms of I am going to put this picture on Flickr and link to it from my fave forum. Praise indeed.

Doodlepad

This is neat on-line software from India. You can upload as many photos as you dare, for free, and you can even download them again! (That is quite an important feature, believe it or not, because some freebie photo hosts only let you download degraded versions of the original!) The software then takes photos beyond the album and CD stage and moves more into CafePress territory.

Just like iPhoto and the rest, you can make slideshows and whatever else rocks your boat. But then you can go into Doodlepad and get creative with tees, mugs and all that good merchandising stuff. So now, as well as filling the world with hazy shots of a dog's back leg, you can bless your family with clothing they will never wear and drinking vessels that only get used when 43 other used cups are in the dishwasher and you ran out of soap.

In the right hands, of course Doodlepad is cool. Any right hands in India, that is.

Conconclusion

The photo software and hardware available to us all is obviously wonderful compared to even 5 years ago, but, am I the only one who has issues with a photographic rush to mediocrity? Maybe I am just damaged from having seen my ugly mug in and out of focus 43 times on a Kodak gallery. Maybe everyone else's family is blessed with natural photographers without itchy fingers? Maybe it is good for the tech economy and instead of Shopping for America, the new motto should be more precise - Snap for America. What do you think?

Despite what an obnoxious individual on Digg posted about me, I don't consider myself particularly nit-picky, but this next observation should make me guilty as charged. When I am scrolling down a page, it really irritates me how Google ads stop the cursor dead in its tracks.

Look, no wheels. Look, no action

This is my elitist Mac trackpad, and to scroll, I run my superior finger up and down the right edge of the trackpad. It seems very reliable, but perhaps the software is 1% faulty, or were the developers sponsored by Google? Or do Adsense blocks affect the behavior of all scrolling wheels to the detriment of the user experience? Or am I in a minority of one and no one cares except me?

Seeing as Google are the epitome of Content is King, they should understand that if the ad block is that interesting, I would stop scrolling of my own accord. So, please, leave my scroller alone.

Care to share any other niggles that waste milli-seconds of your time? (And please, out of respect for the PC apologist from Digg, I don't want to hear about any references to arcane Dell- and Windows-related woes that waste hours of your time. That is just obnoxious and sooo old.)

It is best to do as you are damn well told by this tech support guy.

At least the client spoke to a tech with spirit and life in him. Can't say the same for the average Joe, I mean Brad, on the end of Indian Dell phone support.



What surprised me most about the featured complaint was that it ocurred in 2004. I don't recall outsourcing being a contentious issue back then. Times and jobs must be a-changing. Ironically, as more "Americans" of mexican origin work in the fields, so more Indians leave the land and go work in service centers in the city. A sign of the future world order perhaps?

Menwhile, Brad from Delhi, pull your finger out and be thankful that you have some support of your own out there. Was this article sponsored by Dell?

I recently studied the rescued contents of my Applications folder, and I was reminded of the importance of naming software with care. Some titles are self evident, most require some inside info before you knoiw what the hell they do.

Say what you do, do what you say... This cliché contains sound advice when it comes to naming a product, especially at purchase time. For some reason, geeky developers often forget that the people they want to encourage to buy the software have not been living and breathing the product for months. Therefore the customer needs help differentiating one amongst thousands of other titles vying for their attention.

If you hear that Microsoft have a new version of Word, only a dummy would ask, What does Word do?

Has it always been so clear cut? If I had had my way, the original release, Word would have been called Worried - the result of a great word processor running on an OS called Windows, a combination which is either very good or very bad depending on the weather. Now, after so much money spent on marketing, it is safe to assure people are not worried by anything other than the price of Word. How bloody much?

Even if you know nothing about Macs, iCal must be a calendar? Yay! Address book is an address book. Entourage? Ah, that is Microsoft, and yes, it isn't too obvious what Entourage does just from the name - but throw in a few more million in marketing and branding and it becomes crystal clear!

For several reasons, it makes sense to have descriptive software titles from the offset, but why do most software titles seem to fall through the hole of naming logic?

Dodgy Mac software titles

Pando - Now let me think, that is a?... file-sending application! Psychics may have guessed that Pando shoots files all over the internet, but the rest of us non-cosmic folk would surely never associate the name with its function in a million years of guessing.

Chirp - now that could be a name for a chat app, right? Wrong. Bird song analyser? Not even close. Try, software to handle Group task & project management & communications Claro!

Floola - iPod manager Of course, how silly of me not to know that Floola is indispensable for organising your music and videos on your iPod. (I bet it doesn't stop you getting zapped by lightening or run over on a crossing.) Floola isn't the first word I expected to see in the web search result, but it is up there! Another bit of proof that marketing can sell anything.

Dress assistant - At last, a term that is close to what I expect. This one actually says what it does on the tin. But on reflection, why would I need a personal dress assistant?

Thanks to Versiontracker for the inspiration on intuitive applications with obtuse names. Got any good examples of puzzling names?

It doesn't get more fun than this.

Edit

Preview

Published

If reading or writing online snippets of under 140 characters is your thing, you will love the inanane chitter chatter micro-blogging diary-gone-mad phenomenon of Twittering.

Twitter, our savior

Like we couldn't live without another Web 2.0-ism! Thank you Twitter for bridging the gap between manic text messaging on cell phones, (an unbearable and inordinately complex and wasteful pastime), and blogging.

But I jest, of course. Twitter is a new online communication paradigm suitable for instant messaging on phones and PC's and any other device you hold dear. Embrace!

Nowadays, to chuckle at your sister's private smitten kitten ramblings about boys, all mixed in with I hate my nosey brother comments, and every step of her trip for coffee, just find her Twitter name and track the conversation.

Hi all my best friends I saw an hour ago, I am going to the toilet now and then I am off to Starbucks. Aren't you pleased I am sharing that with you in real-time? What else do you need to know? Twitter / Jaiku me, ciao. XOXOX.

Anyone else at Starbucks? Jinx.

If that boy with the earring and weeping blue mole is still serving mocha at Starbucks, who wants me to say hi to him? Be quick, I just opened the door.

Oooh, it is cold in here. I asked them to turn down the a/c. They said, no. What should I reply? Quick.

I borrowed a coat. Mocha tastes like mocha. Is that how it is supposed to taste. Help.

Likewise, there is no need to even wait till tomorrow for words from your favorite blogger. Twitter and micro-blogging enable us to access and read blow-by-blow accounts of the life of any blogging Twit (Or not, in this case of Leo laporte jumping ship to Jaiku! ) It is sooooo cool - also not!

Chris Bailey is equally unimpressed, or is it bamboozled by the whole idea, likening Twitter to stalking! (Unfortunately it is almost impossible to get arrested for stalking, so I doubt Twittering will ever be outlawed.)

The good in twitter

I am cynical and ignorant. However, if internet gurus like Paul Boag or the guys behind MyBlogLog are behind Twitter, there must be a reason they talk it up?

In Mr Boag's case, I heard he doesn't really understand why it is so popular in his world.

My theory is, he met the founder of twitter who probably sounded credible enough to convince him that there must be something unique (and currently intangible) in this micro blogging idea.

One day, oh Web 2.0 warrior, Twitter 11.7 will be of use to the mainstream. One day it will save your life, so why not give it a go.

The satire in twitter

After doing a 180, and looking past Twitter's non-ruby related growing pains, I think the good may well outweigh the bad and bewildering aspects. For instance, how cool that you can pretend to be someone else, like this Condoleeza Rice imposter twittering as if (s)he were at the White House. Thanks to Open for that touch of twitter satire.

Or you can relive historical moments like the Hindenburg disaster!

Sign me up for that sort of creative misuse of a new technology. Rather like back in the 60's, using a trendy typewriter for a doorstop, so wrong, but if needs must...

In conconclusion

Micro-blogging is currently a fairly elitist tech pastime, but one day, it will evolve into the consciousness of every grandmother and aging uncle on earth, somehow, some day. Meanwhile check out another Twitter clone mentioned here, plus Jaiku and Tumblr.

Live a bit - under the microscope.

In MacSimum I was reading about an app called Yep, the ultimate PDF organiser. It does seem pretty cool and has all the bells and whistles to find anything, anytime. It occurred to me, though, that millions of us already have a pretty good PDF filer on our desktop, and didn't even know it.

iTunes is quite a well-known program for organising and playing music. It has morphed into a video and TV show player too. But did you know you can store all your PDF documents on it too and use the powerful iTunes search tool to keep track of them? Well, you can.

How to sort and search PDFs on iTunes

All you do is make a new folder in iTunes and drag the PDFs from your hard drive into this new folder.

To find the title of a PDF at a later date, just apply a search in itunes toolbar and iTunes will turn it up for you.

Double click on a PDF title and it will open in your default Preview or Adobe app.

Precise search

Searching for PDFs by keyword in iTunes isn't perfect, and where $35 Yep excels, but iTunes has a powerful search tool and if you go beyond a barebones title for your PDF's you will improve your chances of good results.

Keeping it simple, I would use the Get Info command and just write a descriptive entry for the Name of the file! Activities for teaching adults how to be funny I would then expand the name with some more keywords to further describe the content covered. eg Activities for teaching adults how to be funny - jokes, mimic


Create a smart playlist and then you can right click and Edit it to search for specific PDFs eg In the search fields write

name CONTAINS teaching
name CONTAINS jokes

This will show results for all Pdfs containing teaching and jokes in the name field.

If that tip just saved you $35 and / or a lot of time - send half the money to Yep to invest in a decent iTunes killer and the rest to a charity of your choice.

Traditionally everybody uses IE7, followed by a few renegade Firefox users, followed even further behind by the smart-set Safari brigade. However there has been quite an interesting stat showing amongst the browsers used to access The Pisstakers. Opera, probably the classiest of all browser software is up from 0.4% to sneak into 3rd place with a stunning 6.4% share!

Who are Opera?

Opera are the cross-platform browser guys who seem to set the surfing standards which others follow. But in commercial terms all-singing, all-dancing Opera is one of those perennial underdogs even lower down the ladder of deserved success than mega underdogs Apple. However, their users appear to be surfing the satirical world with glee and who knows, extrapolating like an idiotic fanboy, who's to say Opera won't evolve from a blip on IE7's radar, to the tidal wave!!

Opera's bid for marketshare - going mobile?

It is clear that quality means nothing in the war to grab MS share, and to go head to head and beat the big desktop boys is way too costly. So Opera do what all good innovators do, they find a niche and go for it. The niche was Mobile Web, and while everyone else was slapping their successful desktop backs, and probably snorting at the idea of browsers on phones, Opera perfected a browser to fit on a tiny mobile / cell phone screen.

The Opera halo effect

The halo effect worked for Apple with the iPod and Opera could grow their desktop by a similar default too. If enough of the billion phone users like the fab Mini browser, (Opera Mini is a pure piece of browser brilliance that takes a web page and compresses it onto a phone screen, without spoiling the overall effect) who's to say they wouldn't like the desktop version with more features than ever.

If our browser stats for Opera are showing principally Opera Mini users, then the browser boys could already be onto something, and are growing overall browser market share without even needing to sniff in the direction of desktop based Internet Explorer. Talk about going through the side door!

Is your website mobile ready?

The Pisstakers have a style sheet specifically aimed at cell phones, and there is a perpetual button in the side bar of the blog promoting the Opera mini version of the website. Could our surprising browser usage stat be related to this piece of foresight on the part of Ed and designer, Bonsai Studio? Are commuters guffawing at the Pisstakers in glorious Opera technicolor? It would be cool if they were. I just apologise for the current expense of the bandwidth if this is the case.

How do the browser share stats compare to your stats? Is your blog optimised for Opera mini or the upcoming iPhone and future iPhone killers? Do you think mobile surfing is the way ahead? Questions questions!!

Safari has arrived in Windows land. Wince IE7 and move over Firefox, the fastest slickest browser on earth from Apple is ready to take over the number 2 spot. Slap me upside the head that claim smells like Steve Jobs bovine fecal matter. But he has every motivation to aim high, because the FREE browser will earn his company loads of money!

Nothing in life is free, at least nothing from a big corporation. There is always some angle going on that brings in revenue without the end user immediately realising it. So how does freebie Safari, for instance, generate lucre? Easy. It has Google search built into the browser bar. That free feature generates, according to some research by this fellow, $25m a year for Apple (to use to pay the developers, presumably working for mercenarily big bucks in Cupertino.)

Free Firefox generates $50m annually for Mozilla to offset their code monkey pay roll.

In layman's terms, every time someone searches, Google make a note of it and pay Apple/ Mozilla et al a few cents. Simple economics and a win win and significant income if you can get a lot of folks using your browser.

Netting millions of new Safari users

The trojan horse is iTunes, another free software that has plenty of features to make music management a joy. It is also a free money-making ride into a billion dollar store.

Apple will be able to lump free Safari for Windows onto the 1 million daily downloads of free iTunes, and grow the user base by a couple or three. Sounds like a plan to capture a few percentile points of market share.

Blogs are free and easy to earn money from!

Related to browsers and free, I suppose a blog is another free-to-use money-maker, assuming the blog is set up to generate revenue. Adsense is free to use, but makes money for Google and bloggers. It is a good business model.

And the free funny quotes widget from The Pisstakers: quotes link to various monetized blogs, so the zero cost code being installed around the internet by bloggers should generate real money via subtle pay per click or affiliate leads. Sadly, any widget-generated visitors to my site go to a blog that has nothing to sell!

Old Safari for Mac is sooo old

Meanwhile, in typical fashion, I find myself going against the grain and saying that my old version of Apple Safari for Mac is in fact crap. I have dumped it for the nippy Camino browser, poor relation to Firefox. As Mozilla need the money more than Steve Jobs, I support my favorite free browser by using integrated search, as should you!

And thanks to John Gruber for the inspiration for this post

How cool is it to select a piece of text in a browser and email it, or skype it off - in one move! Or have the computer read some text to you, or summarize it or....

Well, Mac OS X Services is able to do just that - take any piece of text from one application and put it straight to work in any another application. Unfortunately, it is an under developed aspect of Mac OS X, and needs some work.

I read an article in Daring Fireball and recalled an affair in the past with Services. This isn't a particularly amusing post, but I really need to share my contribution to solving an issue that would make Services rule the world!

Services is a fantastic option with a long-winded shortcut

As you see from the screen shot, once you have selected some text to perform some magic with Services, activating Services is a bit Windowsesque. Apple haven't got over the traditional menu item structure.



It isn't exactly a stone age solution, far from it, but launching Services in its current format, it is barely faster than drag 'n drop or copy and paste.

Drag 'n drop flop

Services is an even niftier way to get work done than drag 'n drop, which in itself is a very flexible alternative to copy and paste. Currently on a Mac, neither Services nor Drag 'n Drop are super sharp. For instance, drag is universal, but drop isn't!

You can drag text from Word, or in this case, a notepad, and drop it onto a new email window - as long as both applications are open on the desktop.



You can drag a photo onto the photoshop icon and it opens Photoshop

You can't drag text onto the Mail icon and open a new email. Der. The solution is to drag the text onto the the desktop. It will be saved as a file which you then drag onto the Mail icon. Mail opens and you drop the file straight into a new email. That part of the operation is kind of cool, but overall drag 'n drop is inconsistent. Try the same procedure with Skype - you can't - which is annoying.

Anyway, that kind of drag and drop is soo 2002.

Exposé for drag 'n drop

There is a 2005 alternative to conventional drag 'n drop! Press F9 and you see every window open on your desktop. Far from eye candy, the Exposé ´féa´túré is a clever way to move info from application to application.

As an example, to move any text from one open app to another, all you do is select the text from the notepad (or Word or Firefox), drag it an inch or two, and then hold.

Press F9. Spot the the Mail thumbnail on the screen, for instance, and continue dragging the text you have in limbo, until you have it hovering over the mail window. Hold it steady... When the Mail window opens, you drop the text into the email window.



This is a pretty cool way to transfer text from one app to another, but again, only works if the destination app, Mail in this case, is already open.

Services stomps all over drag 'n drop

Services can not only take the text and open an application with it, but it will launch the function you want to perform too - in one single action. So you can copy text from Firefox, launch Services and in one move, Services will open Mail, create a new email and paste the text straight into it. You can use the same text and Services to open Skype and create a Skype message.

This is totally awesome, but as I showed above, it is a bit more klutzy to activate right now than it need be.

Ed's way to sexify services

In my opinion, this graphic shows the next generation way to make Services a killer easy option! Make Services options an extension of what is already available in OS X dock.

Basically you drag the text from your notepad or Word or whatever and hold it over the Skype icon in the dock. (The top 4 options are current Services options that I borrowed from the Services menu!) Drop the text onto one of the Services options and ... Mwahaha, how totally efficient is that!

Apple, kings of simple, currently have a long way to go to make the Services function as user-friendly as it needs to be, so it can become mainstream and must-have. What do you think to this solution? Is it technically possible? Or more to the point, is it a slicker solution than tear-off menus, or contextual menus like Icecoffee?

Normal service will now be resumed!

After reading an article from eJabs, I can see the appeal of Linux, the great new slap in the face of Microsoft, but it makes me smile when people say it is totally customizable. When you see the dog's breakfast that most people make of a web site design, what can possibly be cool about a whole OS along similar lines?

Call me conformist, but Vista and OS X and even Linux designers have way better ideas than 99.9% of the rest of us, and I think most users are better off with a few options rather than carte blanche. Also, it makes more sense to vent at Steve Jobs or Bill Gates for a crap implementation rather than take the blame yourself for an arcane set up that works badly for literally one person on the planet.

I may be wrong, but I doubt we will see too many screenshots from users owning up to diabolical Linux GUI tweaks that make Jackson Pollack's sense of order look positively trigonometric.

Just a quickie to convey my immense and over-stimulated nerdy excitement at the new version of Rapidweaver. To me, the advances in this super cool desktop blogging tool represent a huge sigh of relief. Rapidweaver and The Pisstakers are rocking in the right direction.


All I need to do is wait a bit for Bonsai Studio to update some itzy code and we will be in business as follows:.

Rapidweaver is good for Ed

In practical terms, Rapidweaver 3.6 means I can have even better times putting this blog together faster. I know Macs are only toys but what a fun toy! And instead of facing the prospect of transferring hundreds of posts across to Wordpress, the so-called daddy of blogging software. I can spend all that wasted time now being funny!!

A helvetica font walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The barman says, We don't serve your type!

Rapidweaver is good for Google

To Google it will mean search-friendly titles for all my articles. When you search Hunter chimps evolve into Hell's Kitchen chefs, that is what should appear in Google rather than some arcane meaningless reference to The Pisstakers.

Most important, Rapidweaver is good for you

What it means to you, my readers, is better tagging, more categories, maybe even a tag cloud, so you can zip around in style. There may also be more multimedia than ever. Woah, now you are talking.

For The Pisstakers as a whole, and that includes you, Rapidweaver means rosy times ahead.

So, the burning question today on the Web Tech section of the Pisstakers blog is: Windows users, do you still use Photoshop to capture colors?

The correct answer is AdesClrPickr

This is a loaded question that comes from Ades, a mega rich tech and money-making blogger from the Kyrgyz Republic, (that's right, THAT Kyrgyz Republic the favorite holiday destination of the rich and famous).

He knows that the answer for a resounding number of folks tweaking colors on websites is going to be "YES, I am a photoshop junky." But the correct answer should be, "No, I am cool and productive and use a color picker from Ades called AdesClrPicker."

What is AdesClrPicker?

In contrast to his other cool app, the Ades Nose Pickr, a web 2.0 Identikit droplet, the color picker is very easy to use. With a single click of the mouse you will be told the exact hue and tint of a pixel on a screen in either HTML, RGB, C++, VB and Delphi color codes.

You would expect Ades to play up the benefits of such a tiny app, making it out to be better than it actually is, but the color picker has plenty of mini features, proving that good things do come in small packages, all 1MB and change of it.

Color Library

If, like me, you have a terrible memory for 6 digit hexadecimal numbers and you are forever tweaking your site (especially when styling widgets), the Color Library is a useful feature, acting as a store, enabling quick reference to the color codes you use on a regular basis. The Color Library feature also allows you to change your colors and convert from one color to another. See, it isn't just a one-click pony.

A couple of drawbacks

Although I have to concur that this color picker really is a time-saving godsend for site owners and designers, it can't cater for a couple of mini segments of society. For instance:

Not all widgets need styling. MyBlogLog's visitor widget, for instance, is a bit of a fiddle to style, but some designers are so far ahead of the game (did I say Bonsai Studio?) that they code their widgets (did I say Funny Quotes widget?) to auto adapt to any theme, thus making AdesclrPicker obsolete. However, as most of us are left to figure stuff out for ourselves, make sure you have Adesclrpickr to hand for general use.



Windows only. Pah, Ades droplet only caters for 98% of the world. How elitist is that!! But if you have a Mac, don't despair, you have your equivalent StevesMacOSXColorPicker built into the Operating System.



Discloure: I am writing this so that Ades has a link about his product to a PR5 website, I mean, so I get a link back from his PR7 site, I mean, I wrote this to help you guys out.

If you had any shares in (AMZN) you will be smiling from ear to ear after last week's meteoric rise. And to confound the experts who instantly downgraded Amazon shares and also propound the idea of sell in May and stay away, the stock is holding. Amazing Amazon.

Not that I am suggesting you buy in now, (ask Wallstreet Fighter for those sort of tips) but Amazon the shopping giant has to be a good bet for future growth. They are ploughing a mighty impressive furrow with their S3 services software and ensuring the future continues to hold great promise for them in the shoposphere.

What is S3?

It is not a variant of car from Audi, but it has a hot engine to power all sorts of database search - Amazon's database, of course. Working on a simple theory, that the more searches made, the more sales will follow, Amazon are encouraging developers to tap into lots of juicy shopping info and present it in imaginative ways off the back of the S3 framework.

TicTap and Amazon

This is a periodic feature on The Pisstakers. Simple random search based on keywords, plus simple presentation with lots of pop-up info. Ideal for shoppers and/or bloggers short of material!

Penny book store

On Amazon there are 239,000 books that cost a penny plus shipping. Relax, now they are brought to you in an easy-to-search site built using Amazon software.
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Auto parts review

All this info on auto parts is dragged out of the Amazon database and presented for car part nuts to review. Simple, effective, smart use of existng info.

Fancy writing about a muffler, or a Xantrex 852...power back-up unit, now's your chance!

Conclusion about S3 services

The upside of all this is that Amazon S3 enables developers to make sense of a website that many find unusable. I am talking amazon.com, not The Pisstakers btw.

This is one of my favorite spoofs for software packaging. Universal to the end with this one, Microsoft have managed to appeal to every sector of society, every creed and race. Good choice of model, MS boyzzz.

The story behind the picture is: the crack developers took a break from bug testing in 2002 and posed for the MS cameras. Their bitches held on to their bling while the shooting was in porogress, then when it was over, they all denied even being there. The sorry bunch are still admiring themselves in the reflection of their CDs and are coping well with the insinuations that they are responsible for the delays in the release of Windows Vista XP, as well as the death of rap.

Integrated East Asian languages

The integrated languages in Word include Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Maybe the instructions are more complicated than the actual action, but on Windows it looks well difficult to switch language. Even if it isn't rocket science, I think that any user will be happy with the way you go from English to simplified Chinese on a Mac. It is such a doddle- even in a simple text editor! 往日听一四面偏离偏吃呢色。The written word is so powerful, as long as you don't want it written in Chinese, in a hurry, in Word for Windows.

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This isn't about the cost of broken relationships from over-work, ulcers from worry and liver problems resulting from the celebrations of the first big sales contract. This is a link to some amazing transparency from the developers of DropSend, Freshbooks, Maya's mom, Mobissimo and Wesabe. The cost of production, so to speak.

Perhaps when you next think of using an app and not paying for it, spare a thought for the guys who invested some fairly serious money (and time) in offering you the wonderful user experience.

In the spirit of the exercise illustrated by Ryan Carson it has cost $860 to get The Pisstakers to its current state - and on the plus side of the equation, there is zero income but a Technorati-based net worth of about $20,000. Cuckoo, cuckoo.

Plug-ins can add massive amounts of entertainment value to a web site - visitor numbers, latest comments, "Bad music I admit to listening to", the time on Mars... but sometimes the flashy features can slow your site to a crawl, destroy the formatting, or add nothing positive to your site, whatsoever.

A poll plug-in that went horribly wrong

Polls are a good way to get visitors to interact. What is the saying? An opinion is like an asshole, everyone has one. Well, I would like to talk to the asshole who wrote the poll plug-in that wrecked our web pages in Firefox.

Unique plug-ins are few and far between

You have to have something special if you want to attract visitors. So that cuts out the ubiquitous "Press the fart" button, or a drag and drop Zwinky (get a life) avatar tool bar. Everyone has one of those, right! I came up with the idea of an "I'll guess your weight" plug-in, but I am yet to find a way for visitors to sit on my face.

Worst ideas for a plug-in.

Name and shame the Worst Commentator
Erroneous Statistics to make you feel good about 3 visitors a day
Back up and destroy to delete your worst posts and keep them out the public domain.

Got any more Worst plug-ins ideas? What is the hands up best ever plug in?

The official line:

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