Here are my favorite 5 websites of the year 2008, in random order:
My favorite software of the year is definitely PlayOn by MediaMall. This tool allows you to stream online videos (from a limited number of websites) from your computer to your TV. We’re using it with our Playstation 3 and it works brilliantly!! We can now watch all the shows and movies from Netflix, Hulu, CBS, YouTube and CNN in full-screen on our TV.
Since we signed up with Netflix we’ve been having some problems with playing Netflix through PlayOn due to the new Silverlight player that Netflix is using. PlayOn is still in beta, so there are some bugs here and there. I’ve been in contact with the support desk of PlayOn, exchanged dozens of emails, and they have been really helpful in working out all the bugs. Netflix has finally been working the last few days, so we now have instant access on our TV to the 900 different TV series on Hulu as well as the 12,000 DVD titles on Netflix.
Talk about fully awesome!
One of my favorite blogs in my Google Reader is The Big Picture from the Boston Globe. Each post features a series of incredible photos from recent news stories. Here are some of my favorite features from the last few months. Click each photo to go to the post for more. More »
A few weeks ago Amazon added the Universal Wish List bookmarklet button as a new feature to their already pretty awesome Wish List. It’s great!
When you have this bookmarklet in your favorites, you can add any item from any website to your Amazon wish list! I tried it with a couple of my favorite online shops and it works like a charm.
When you see a product – on any website! – that you want to add to your Amazon Wish List, click on the bookmarklet to bring up the Wish List pop-up. When I did this on Birdorable, the product name and correct photo default in, and I was able to enter the price and a personal note. Then I clicked on Add to Wish List and – woo hoo! – there it is.
Yesterday we took the cats out for some fresh air. We bought harnesses and leashes for them. They will have to wear the harness during our upcoming flight so we thought to try and get them used to wearing them.
PicLens (www.piclens.com) is one of the coolest browser plug-ins I’ve seen so far. It allows you to watch photos and videos from Google, Yahoo, Flickr, PhotoBucket, SmugMug and DeviantArt in full screen and 3D. It works really fast and it’s a great new way of going through content quickly. What I really like about it is that whenever you start it it shows you the photos or videos from the page that you’re on, so for instance on Flickr you can start it from a photostream, collection, set or search results and the slick PicLens viewer will show only items that are available from that page. It’s available for IE, Firefox and Safari. Check out this cool demo:
ONN reports that the entire Internet has crashed:
Tonight I have been adding travel photos of ourselves to Flickr and ‘geotagging’ them. The result: a great interactive map of the world with dots of where we’ve been. It’s the online equivalent of having a map on the wall with thumbtacks. The Flickr website used to be very slow for us here in the Netherlands, but since last year it has been much faster (maybe because they moved from beta to gamma?). In fact, I can’t believe how fast it is to upload photos with the handy Flickr Uploadr, and I’ve never geotagged photos as easy as I have on Flickr. The maps that Flickr uses are from Yahoo! Maps (Flickr is owned by Yahoo), and that I find a bit of a downside; it’s much slower and the areal photos much less detailed than those of Google Maps. Still, I love this site and I’ll keep putting up our travel photos until you can’t see the map anymore from all the pink dots. More »
Later this year Google will built a huge server farm in Eemshaven, near Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. The new ‘Telehouse’ will have room for 100,000 servers that Google uses for storing its search data. Google is estimated to have some 450,000 servers around the world, in places like Mountain View (California), Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia and Dublin (Ireland). The cluster of computers will require an amount of energy enough to sustain 80,000 households. More »
In the last year I’ve had quite a few problems with Webmasters.com. Luckily I am not using their services anymore for quite a while, but I am still waiting to receive a refund, and they refuse to answer my emails. More »