Notes, links and conversation

If you own a domain name with a generic extension (.com, .net. org, .info, .biz), you’ve probably already received letters from Domain Registration of America.  They look like invoices for domain registration renewal, but are in fact requests for domain transfer – if you sign and pay you’re stuck with their higher fees.

A similar controversial business is being run by Trademarkpublisher.info, sending out invoices to trademark owners.  I received an invoice of €795 (for a  Benelux trademark that I no longer own). (more…)

More and more Youtube videos become downloadable as MP4 video (instead of just flash) – and even more already are "behind the scenes" but at at a hidden url.  This makes it easy to subscribe to Youtube podcasts/vodcasts to get the mp4 files to your video player – just follow these steps:

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Found an iPhone under the Christmas tree or in your New-Year’s gift basket?  Here’s my list of iPhone apps that never fail to impress, including non-geek people (such as the people you met at those parties last week). (Please skip this post if you have iPhone-fatigue or if you’re a hardcore Apple fanboy – just sharing my Holiday Season experiences here :-) )  Happy New Year! (more…)

I’ve been a Flickr user since 2004, and apart from the occasional social picture, I’ve (ab)used it mainly to store screenshots and illustrations I found on the web.  One of the useful tools Flickr provided in those first years, was the “Send to Flickr” bookmarklet: if you’re on a web page with an image you want to save for your own usage, click the bookmarklet, select the image and it’ll be stored in your own Flickr account  (more…)

About a month ago Microsoft presented Oomph, a first attempt to integrate microformats in their tools¹. Oomph at this moment consists of an IE8 plugin, a set of css styles and a plugin for the blogging tools Windows Live Writer.  I’ll let this Microsoft video explain:

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1. although several people have argued that the webslices that came with IE8, are in fact a somewhat different implementation of the hAtom microformat [↩]

One of the nice things about Twitter’s social background noise is that you actually can shut it down – like putting on headphones in a bustling office when you want to concentrate on a task. But you might want to avoid anger and irritation when someone actually wants to talk to you and calls your name… and you seem to ignore them. So far, intelligent headphones haven’t been invented yet (as far as I know). On Twitter however, there are a few ways not to miss the occasional personal address (”address” as in “being spoken to” :-) ) that is the “@username” reply. (more…)

One of the reasons for the runaway success of Facebook compared to blogging is imho the (perceived) privacy users enjoy. Detailed profile data is only visible to confirmed friends and members of the same “network”. Facebook networks (schools, companies and regional networks) are supposed to be mere representations of their equivalents in meatspace: the idea is that you can check out the faces you encounter at campus, in the high-school hallway or in the company canteen. (more…)

Automattic is reaping the rewards for years of hard work. Automattic is the company behind comment spam filter Akismet and Wordpress.com, and of course the magnificent open source blogging software started by Matt Mullenweg. But how do they make money from their free blog hosting service?

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You really want to install this Firefox extension but you can’t? Because it’s not compatible with your browser (screen shot)? Or you have upgraded your browser and some of your favourite add-ons got disabled? Happens a lot with more exotic extensions, or if you’re using a minority browser like Seamonkey, (the old) Mozilla, or (the brand new) Flock. However, you do not need to despair: (more…)

There’s little to add to the many great writeups, presentations and screencasts on OpenID, but I thought it would be fun to have a bookmarklet that checks whether a page URL can be used as an OpenID login, so whether that page already has been “claimed”. (more…)

Do you want more control over which mails end up in your inbox? Then every time you give out your email address at a site, use an alias specific for that url. It helps you to track where (and by whom) mail addresses are being used, and lets you filter or block unnecessary mails. Here’s how: (more…)