Video on demand services seem to have sneaked up while I wasn’t looking and implanted themselves all over the web. First of all, there’s the disarmingly simple-looking Seesaw, a recent launch from the broadcast services company Arqiva (by “broadcast services”, I mean they own/run transmitters, digital radio multiplexes and so on). Seesaw perhaps doesn’t have the range of programmes that other services do, but it does a clutter-free interface well, along with high-quality compression (the “low quality” 500kb/sec still looks pretty impressive) (more…)

I haven’t looked at Flock for a long time, so I thought it was time I did. If you’ve not heard about Flock before, it’s a social web browser, which means that it’s designed to integrate with all the social networking services such as Facebook, MySpace, bebo, Twitter, Digg and all the in-crowd. But it also supports your webmail (well, Google, AOL and Yahoo, anyway), has an integrated blog editor that will even support self-hosted blogs (like this one), and even adds Facebook Chat into its own status bar. So what’s not to like? (more…)

Web behemoth Google has launched its own URL shortening service – goo.gl.  So far, it’s intended for use for tweeting your blog through Feedburner.  It makes sense from a Google perspective, as it gives them more information for their store, and the likelihood is that they will also provide that information through Analytics, too, at some point (although that’s merely my suspicion).  But the question I’d really like answered is (more…)

My WordPress plugin auto-upgrade stopped working sometime around WordPress 2.7. Being of an indolent persuasion, I stopped bothering trying. Maybe it was the browser – but it didn’t work on either Firefox or Internet Explorer on Windows. And when it didn’t work after the upgrade to WordPress 2.8, I tried it on 64-bit Kubuntu. It didn’t work on Midori, Konqueror, Galeon, rekonq, Epiphany or Dooble either. And then came the upgrade to WordPress 2.9. Which is where it all went panic-inducingly wrong… (more…)

Google have launched a new service, called Google Public DNS. DNS, for those that don’t know, is the system that translates a domain name – such as www.esotechnica.co.uk – into the actual address that the computer connects to its services: such as retrieving a web page like this one, retrieving (or sending) your email, downloading a file, or just checking what time it is.

But before I talk about what Google Public DNS is and does, it’s worth reminding ourself what life was like before DNS… (more…)