Tech News Journal

Web sites that try to suck you into making them your home page have been around for years and I’ve never found one compelling enough to cause me to even consider their offer. Except for a new one I found over the weekend. It has no ads, offers total customization and, for now, anyway, has […]

I don’t know how many got one of these as a Christmas gift today but it you haven’t yet heard of Slingbox, you will. This is the year it just started to take off. It is one of my devices of the year picks for 2005. It will, I predict, be as big or bigger […]

The scamsters who try to trick you into revealing your eBay password have a new trick: They send you phony e-mails claiming that you sent them an offer to buy or sell something improper and threaten to report you to eBay unless you explain yourself by hitting a respond now button. It comes looking for […]

Think of them as e-mail time capsules. There’s now a bunch of Web Sites That Let Users Send E-Mail to Future. Some like FutureMe.org will go out in a couple of years, reminding recipients what their aspirations were today and how their life was going in 2005. Others like  myLastEmail.com or LastWishes.com promise to send […]

One of the reasona Firefox is such a popular Web browser is because it allows you to add all sorts of extra capabilities through mini programs called extensions. The folks at Techtree have put together a handy guide. Extending Firefox.

This has been a big year for online search. The number of people using search engines on an average day jumped from roughly 38 million in June 2004 to about 59 million in September 2005 – an increase of about 55%, according to a study just released from Dogpile.com - the metasearch engine that searches […]

A Web site called HomePages takes high-resolution aerial photography and applies it to finding homes and businesses. Check our your neighborood by entering your address. If Google’s Earthmap impresses you, wait till you see this. The site is aimed at home buyers but, right now at least, it’s open for a sneak peak. They’ll be […]

I did my column today on Web cams and holiday visiting. Web cams bring loved ones together was the headline but so many people use two-way video conferencing that it’s now a major part of the digital lifestyle. Take this e-mail sent by Gary Gray, one of my group of Technofolk advisors who responded […]

The folks at Enlighten, a very slick Web development and Internet services company have done us all a great service with their interactive Holiday Party Excuse Generator. It’s going to prove very handy this season.

I promised an update when I reinstalled it and tonight, after a week’s worth of renewed experience with SunRocket, one of the cheapest VoIP providers around, I can give it a favorable review. I’ve used it several times a day since reinstalling it and, except for occasional lags in dialing (it sometimes takes 20 seconds […]

The Midwestern cable company Wide Open West which operates in Southeastern Michigan and across parts of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio has, in effect, been sold to Avista Capital Partners, a New York-based private equity company.
The deal will take several months to go through legal review and franchise agreement procedures with the various local governments that […]

I like the folks at Six Apart and when I saw their news release announcing Business Blogging - Yahoo! Small Business web hosting with Movable Type I figured it would be worth a try. But 24 hours later, I’ve given up. I can’t figure the platform out and have - after long, long hours of […]

The Nokia N90 Smartphone is the most technologically advanced wireless device I have yet to get my hands on. I write about it in today’s Detroit Free Press. Below is a video I shot to demonstrate some of it’s capabilities. The video is VHS-quality.  Stills are captured at 2 megapixels, the highest resolution to date […]

It’s been some months since my first and disappointing experiment with VoIP provider SunRocket. But after hearing from several blog readers who reported good experiences with the service over the past few weeks, I hooked my SunRocket gizmo back up and, after a couple of days, am quite pleased by the quality and reliability. Maybe […]

I used to love Wikipedia, the collaorative online user-contributed encylopedia. But because it has been open to anyone to post or add to articles, too many of its entries are questionale or self-serving. Sometimes they’re mean-spitited and intentionally false. Because there are so many warped and twisted people out there who, like hackers, want to […]