If you've ever had a touch of the voyeur in you, Blogger has released a small web app which shows you photos being uploaded to Blogger in real time.

Entitled Blogger Play, you can pause at a particular photo or go back to a previous one. You can also click on the photo to be taken to the blog where the picture appears.

Caution though : you may find yourself looking at the photos for ages as Blogger Play is strangely addictive.

I was reading a very interesting post today about Google Talk and a previously unknown (at least to me) feature that allows you to set up group chats with multiple users. This has got me thinking about Google Talk in general.

I really like the Google Talk application but I only have three contacts on it. Not due to having no friends (!) but simply because I only know three people that use Google Talk for their instant messaging purposes. I think part of the problem is that Google does not really make much of an effort to publicise its chat program. I mean, it's there and it's freely available but Google's sparse main page ensures that there is no banner advertising urging people to use Google Talk. You can use it on Google Docs to collaborate on projects but do you see Google screaming from the rooftops about it?

Whereas in contrast, MSN and Yahoo both openly advertise their chat programs on their main pages and they have a much bigger user-base. They spend more time and energy promoting and pushing their chat programs and as a result, they have got further ahead in the instant messaging market.

I think it was a master-stroke by Google to integrate Google Talk into Gmail and to have Google Talk conversations stored in Gmail accounts as searchable messages. Notice how fast Yah00 copied this feature for Yahoo mail owners. But I prefer to use the standalone Talk application which has a nifty file-transfer capability, new mail notification (for Gmail accounts) and thumbnail photos of Gmail users who are on your contact list (assuming they have put a photo of themselves on their Gmail accounts). I also like the simple and sparse design (a famous Google trademark). Hell, they don't even have emoticons!

One thing has really irritated me though - I tried putting Google Talk onto Pidgin and it worked OK. But the problem was that everytime I emailed someone, their name would instantly appear on my Google Talk contact list (even if it was a newsletter that I had emailed to subscribe to)! So in the end, I had to uninstall GT from Pidgin and run GT separately. If you run the standalone GT program, you can choose to hide people who are not approved to be on your contact list. But if you attach GT to a Jabber chat client, then you will get everyone that you ever email popping up on your contact list. Rather annoying.

I have 3 remaining invitations to give away for Pownce. This is a site where you can build a network of your friends and securely send them links, files, messages and much more!

If you'd like one of the three invitations, please contact me with a valid email address. When the three invitations are gone, I will post an update to this post so you can all stop emailing! ;-)

If your computer is your second home, like mine is, you might, from time to time, have a power-nap at the computer while you're waiting for that defrag job to finish. I recently found an online alarm clock that can wake you up in either 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes or 60 minutes.

Amusingly called "The Naked Alarm Clock", it is a simple clock which shows the time on your computer and allows you to set an alarm to wake you up again. You can choose from four different alarm types and is easy to use.

I have been a huge fan of Ad-Aware for years, ever since Spybot Search & Destroy really DID search out and destroy by nuking my Windows OS. Ad-Aware, on the other hand, has never caused me any problems and I have become a huge fan of the product - I like products that work like they say they do, without any hidden surprises. But after installing Ad-Aware 2007, I may have to revise that opinion quite a bit.

The first problem was that when installing the 2007 version, it didn't automatically over-write the previous version. So I ended up with two Ad-Aware programs on the computer. So I had to uninstall both programs and delete any relevant remaining files on the hard-drive including registry entries. I then re-installed 2007 on its own and it seemed to work - for a while. But to date, I have been unable to get the program to complete a full spyware scan.

When I ask it to do a full scan, it starts off promisingly enough but 15-20 minutes into the scan, it says it has encountered an "unexpected error" and it shuts the scan down, effectively forgetting what spyware it has found and going back to square one. This has been going on every day for ten days now and I am about to search out and destroy Lavasoft (the company that makes Ad-Aware).

I am seriously considering re-installing the older version. I normally don't like to do this but hey it worked for years without a hitch! Plus the 2007 version keeps bugging me to upgrade to a paid version which is seriously pissing me off. In my dictionary, "free" means "free of any charge". It DOESN'T mean, "free but only on the condition that we bug you every day until you upgrade".

Is anyone else having problems with Ad-Aware 2007? Please tell me I am not the only one going through this crap.

I recently blogged about Google Browser Sync not installing on my Portable Firefox on my USB stick. Well if it was only GBS not working then I would have just stopped using it and forgotten all about it. But ALL my Firefox extensions were not working on my Portable Firefox and that obviously needed to be fixed. Firefox is not the same without my extensions. I spend a lot of time customising my Firefox browser so I would like to be able to take it on the move with me.

At first I thought that it was the fault of the USB stick not reading the information properly. But then I was looking at the development website of John Haller (the man who developed the Portable Firefox application, as well as a whole host of other portable apps). It turns out that each portable app has its own FAQ and forum board and it was on the forum board that I found out the fix for getting my Firefox extensions to work on my USB stick.

All you need to do is go into your profile folder in your Portable Firefox and delete "extensions.rdf" and any cache files and any "ini" files. Delete them from the trash bin and then re-start Portable Firefox.

Bingo! My extensions started working and Google Browser Sync is good to go!

I love it when problems finally solve themselves and things start working again. You just can't beat that feeling.

Despite the fact that it has a nasty habit of slowing down my PC to the point that the CPU is at 100%, I am nevertheless starting to become a fan of Google Desktop's sidebar feature. This comes as a big relief to me as I was looking for some kind of desktop widget and I had finally run out of patience with Yahoo Widgets which was malfunctioning on a regular basis.

There are two apps which I have on my desktop sidebar which are rapidly proving invaluable to me in my quest to be more productive with my time. One is a notepad which I am using to jot down random tasks / thoughts. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was using Todoist and that worked well enough. It even had a Gmail integration and an iGoogle module. But the reason I ultimately gave it up was the fact that I had to open an internet browser to use it. Sometimes if I am running another program, I first shut down all non-essential programs, including internet browsers. So if an idea comes to me that needs to be noted down, I want to be able to note it immediately. Not wait until the current task is finished and hope that I then remember to open Firefox then Gmail then write whatever I was thinking up to a hour before. So having a notepad on the desktop is extremely useful.

The other app that is rapidly proving its weight in gold is the ability to access my Google Calendar also without having to open my Firefox browser. I can add appointments via the Google Desktop "Quick Add" function and view my appointments on any day I choose, with the aid of a very cool looking pop-out window. The only downside to this feature is that I can't delete appointments from my Google Calendar using Google Desktop. For that, I have to open the browser and do it directly on the calendar website. I hope that Google offers a delete function in the future for users of the calendar app on Desktop.

Now what would be really good would be a Gmail module where you can send emails from the desktop without opening a browser. You can already view your emails on Google Desktop but the whole module is in a real mess. Old emails come first with new emails at the bottom (when ideally it should be the other way around) and emails that I normally have sent straight to archive appear in the desktop module with no apparent way to make them disappear. Can somebody please make a much better Gmail module for Google Desktop? I promise I'll be your pal forever!

Anyone that knows me well enough knows that I am a paranoid sort of fellow when it comes to personal security and protecting myself from identity theft. I'm the guy that doesn't throw away old bank statements in the bin intact - I'm the kind of guy that shreds them, shreds the shredded pieces, shreds them again - then sets light to them before flushing the ashes down the sink. You can't be too careful these days.

So I have always been on the lookout for a good secure deletion tool for the computer. As anyone with PC knowledge knows, when you delete a file, it's not really deleted. The computer tells you it's deleted by freeing up the hard-drive space so you can download more photos of Halle Berry in a bikini. But anyone with the right knowledge can easily undo the delete function and restore your files. This can be anyone from law-enforcement to the guy who bought your old hard-drive on eBay. So if something sensitive or embarrassing needs to be deleted, you need to be sure that it stays deleted forever and that it can't be restored later.

I think I may have found a good secure deletion tool with a very simple name - Eraser. When you download this, a system reboot is required and when you reboot, you'll see that Eraser has attached itself to your Windows Explorer right-click menu. So if you want to securely delete a file, right-click on it, choose "Erase" and then it will be gone forever - poof! It will bypass the trash bin and be deleted by Eraser in a matter of seconds, being re-written over and over again until it is totally unrecoverable.

To make sure it really was gone, I then used a deleted file recovery program called Restoration which you can use to easily restore those deleted files you thought were long gone. I typed in the name of a file that I had just deleted (using Eraser) and Restoration told me there was no trace of it on the system. So it looks like Eraser is a very efficient tool at making files permanently disappear!

I then tried using Restoration on a file that I deleted normally via the Trash bin and it instantly recovered the Word document and a PDF file. However, when I tried to restore a MP3 file and an "avi" file, I was only able to get a partial file back. It seems that Windows starts to over-write audio and video files first.

One of the good things about Restoration is that it requires no installation on your computer. It runs as a stand-alone "exe" program. So you can put it on your flash USB stick and carry it around with you.

So it seems that if you want something to be gone from your computer forever, use Eraser. Otherwise a tool like Restoration can easily bring it back. Only use the Windows trash bin for stuff you don't mind people trying to restore later.

Listen to this post by podcast! Download original mp3 file

On my trip to Scotland in April, I wanted to take Skype along with me so I could check voicemail & chat messages while surfing the net on my dad's laptop. Since there is no official portable USB version of Skype, anyone wishing to carry "Skype On A Stick" needs to make a few tweaks here and there. The good news is that it is easier than you might think to achieve this. In fact, it's child's play which is really good news for a techno doof like me.

First, go into the Skype folder on your computer and look for skype.exe. Normally it is in the "phone" folder. Now right-click on that skype.exe file and copy it to a folder on your USB stick (you can create a directory folder called "SkypeUSB" or something similar). Note, I said "copy" and not "move"! You have to keep the original "skype.exe" file in its usual place for Skype to work normally on your computer.

Now within the SkypeUSB folder on your USB stick (next to your copied skype.exe), create another directory folder called "data" (without the speech marks). Next, using Microsoft Notepad, open a new text file and name it "skype.bat" (again, without the speech marks). Inside this text file, write the following line and then save the document : skype.exe /datapath:"Data" /removable . Once saved, place this text file inside the "data" folder you just created. And then you're done.

Clicking on skype.exe on your USB flash-drive will now run Skype portably without the need to properly install it on the computer you are using. You can log on, make phone calls, start chats, etc just as you would with any regular Skype installation. Even if the computer you're using already has Skype installed and running under another username, you can still run your USB version without the two programs conflicting with one another.

This portable method of Skype works perfectly for me. I plugged the USB stick into an internet cafe computer (despite the cafe owner looking at me worriedly) and Skype instantly booted up.

Just remember to pack your Skype phone or headset and you can make calls at will!

I just have to give a honourable mention to Unlocker, a freeware software program that really is indispensable. Many is the time when I was ready to smash the computer in frustration but then Unlocker the Cavalry came riding to the rescue in the nick of time.

Basically when you open a file, whether it be an image, a document, whatever, many computer processes will be used to open that file, run it, and do whatever you need to do to it. When you close that file, those computer processes may still be running and so you will be unable to delete, move or rename the file until those processes have been shut down. This is where Unlocker comes to the rescue because by this point your blood pressure is starting to rise and you're giving serious thought to starting a new career as a serial killer.

If you get the above error message, then just right-click on the file and choose the "Unlocker" option. You will then get a pop-up window giving you details of the processes holding the file in place and an option to kill those processes. If you decide to kill the processes, you can do so at the click of a button and the file will instantly be free so you can delete, rename or move it. What a lifesaver!

Someone passed along to me a link to a new Digg tool called "Diggwatcher". It enables you to monitor a particular story and the page refreshes itself every 60 seconds to show the current number of diggs for that story as well as the number of comments people have left. It's a web-based tool so there's no need to download anything.

It was the comments that really put me off Digg. I've tried to get into the "Digg atmosphere" and be part of the Web 2.0 group but I very quickly realised that the people who rate and comment on Digg are immature idiots who are ready to flame anyone whom they deem to be not worthy of being there. Some of them are also rather cruel - someone once posted a story on the site about a dead body being found in an apartment and all the commenters on Digg could do was make very distasteful and unsensitive remarks. When I angrily told them that they were being rather tactless, I was hounded off the site.

I still occasionally check the site to see if I can find any good weblinks but on the whole I tend to avoid the place. Nevertheless, Digg Watcher is a neat looking tool and worth a mention.

Another tool which I have been playing around with over the weekend is WinPatrol. This is a nifty little robust program which basically monitors your Windows operating system and you'll soon realise that it is totally invaluable.

When you install a software program on your computer, more often than not, it gets added to your start-up menu. This means that when you boot up your computer in the future, that new program is going to load as well and so the more programs you've got in your start-up menu, the longer it's going to take for your computer to boot up properly. So it pays to keep your start-up programs to a minimum. So one of WinPatrol's biggest assets is that it gives you a complete list of what programs start up when you boot up your computer and it gives you the option to easily disable that program by clicking on them. This right away made my day because Apple Quicktime was constantly starting up even though I had constantly disabled it through "msconfig". But it only took one click on WinPatrol to disable that Quicktime icon from constantly popping up. I also disabled about half a dozen other useless system processes which were totally unnecessary and which were slowing the computer down. End result? When I booted up the computer this morning, it started up so fast I thought it was on steroids.

WinPatrol also acts as a kind of firewall, letting you know in a pop-up window when websites and software are trying to covertly install software on your PC, when a program is covertly trying to get into your start-up menu and it gives you the option of either granting or denying access to that program.

WinPatrol has so many features that I haven't even scratched the surface of yet. One of them is the ability to view and delete individual cookies on your computer. Another shows you the list of currently running programs and processes on your PC so you can disable or delete if you so wish. Anothet tells you what program is associated with a particular file type (so "doc" will be opened by Microsoft Word, "mp3" will be opened by Winamp, that sort of thing). You can even see files which are supposed to remain hidden on your system (mostly Microsoft files which help to run Windows).

In a nutshell, WinPatrol is ideal for cleaning all the crap which naturally accumulates in a computer over time and as a result, your computer will work faster and more efficiently.

The program even has a little Scotty dog icon which "woofs" at you when you open it. What more could you ask for?!

For the past few days, I have been playing around with a piece of encryption software. I have been looking for a reliable encryption tool for quite some time (as I am completely paranoid about hackers and other shady characters!) but I was always concerned that if I chose the wrong tool, then it would irretrievably ruin my hard-drive with an unbreakable, unmovable encrypted file. I mean, once you start messing around with encrypted partitions attached to one of your drives then you could be letting yourself in for a whole host of problems if you set it up the wrong way or if the software malfunctions or even something as basic as forgetting the password. Not to mention the mess of losing the files which are being held inside - some of which may be irreplaceable. So I have been procrastinating about this for a while.

The computer program I found a couple of days ago was TrueCrypt and so far, it seems to be working well. It was recommended by PC Magazine and I have always trusted their recommendations. I was particularly struck with how simple it was to set up. You get a PDF user manual in the software download and if you follow the manual's instructions to the letter then setting up your encrypted folders is mere childs play.

How it works basically boils down to this - you create a folder on your "C" drive, just a normal regular folder. You give it a name - let's just say for the purposes of this discussion that it's called FORT KNOX. This folder is where the encrypted files will be stored. You then assign a drive number to your folder and it in this drive that the TrueCrypt software will be installed and ultimately live in your computer. You then move the FORT KNOX to the TrueCrypt drive which is protected by a master password. Using the password, you can then "decrypt" your files and access them. When you don't need the files, just remove the FORT KNOX folder from TrueCrypt. The folder is then instantly encrypted again and totally unbreakable (or so the company claims). I would be interested to see how TrueCrypt's algorithims hold up against a determined brute-force attack.

But if you're just looking for basic no-frills security and a way to deter people from casually snooping on your files then TrueCrypt seems to be able to do the job properly. I can't begin to list all the possible uses for such a program. At the very least, you should have an encrypted drive on your PC for personal information such as bank statements, receipts, invoices, passwords, tax paperwork, address books, calendars.....sometimes it pays to be paranoid. Sometimes they really are out to get you.

My Google Reader woes continue after I installed a new feature yesterday called Google Gears. It was the worst decision I made in ages.

As I said before, I fully understand the nature of "beta" products and I know they can be buggy at times. But with Google Gears, "buggy" just doesn't cut it. We're talking about a major malfunctioning tool which has been judged to be ready to be released to the public for testing.

Installing it wasn't a problem. It was after the installing that the fun and games began. Basically the Reader app started developing "connection issues". The page refused to load and instead asked me if i wanted to download 2000 feed items offline (even though there was never anything wrong with my internet connection to begin with - plus I don't even have 2000 feed items in the first place!!).

For every 5 times I refreshed and re-loaded the Reader page, it successfully loaded perhaps once in those 5 times.

And you know what? As soon as I uninstalled the Gears feature, Google Reader started working again really well! Coincidence? I think not!

My advice would be to avoid installing Google Gears until it has been more fully developed and less buggy. Plus I would advise Google to stop rushing out new tools and features when they are more than likely going to crash the page it is instead meant to complement. Take more time to develop things - that way you'll avoid pissing off so many people.

Anyone else having these issues with Gears? Or is Satan solely crapping on me?