Category: O’Malley’s Mashup
O'Malley's Mashup: Synchronise your browsers
As you’re reading a tech blog, I’d say that the chances are that you use more than one computer regularly – perhaps you have a desktop and a laptop. Or if you’re me, a desktop, two laptops and access to yet more computers all over the place.
As you probably know, this can be a frustrating experience – if you bookmark something on one computer and you need it on another, do you really want to spend all of the time Googling for it again, or logging into your e-mails on each machine every time? How about having to update all of your saved passwords when you change them? Well the good news is, as luck would have it, there’s a few solutions to these irritating problems, and that’s what I’m going to be talking about in today’s mash-up: how to make your browsers sickeningly consistent.
O'Malley's Mash-up: Access your home computer from elsewhere
One of the big buzzwords surrounding web 2.0 is that of “the cloud” – the idea that the internet is replacing the hard drive, and we’re storing stuff online rather than on our desktop computers. Things like Google Docs, Flickr and Facebook means that it doesn’t matter what computer we’re sat at, we can always get hold of our spreadsheets, photos and people we haven’t seen since school.
But what if you want to do more heavy duty tasks? What if you need to access things stored on your actual home computer? There are some solutions out there, and that’s what I’m going to be looking at in this week’s mash-up.
O'Malley's Mashup: Location-based services overview
Speculating about the future is always a silly idea – because the futurologist who is speculating is invariably always wrong. You only have to look at the insane ramblings of the fundamentalist Christians in America who predict the “end times” every new year or the deluded announcer who introduces John McCain as “the next President of the United States” to see this. The technology sector isn’t exempt from this either – there’s the famous old quotes of IBM executives saying in the 1960s that they think there’s demand for maybe four computers in the world, or poor old Sir Clive Sinclair, who genuinely thought that the C5 was a good idea, or poor old Sony, who thought that people might actually want a PS3.
So with this in mind, I’m going to set myself up for a gigantic fall, and go ahead and claim that location-based web services are going to be the next big thing. Feel free to e-mail me a link to this column with a wry note in the future when I have been proven wrong.
O'Malley's Mashup: Enhance your Twitter feed
Twitter‘s great. It’s like a secret club where people in the tech sector go to talk about the inanities of their lives… and it’s horrendously addictive. It may surprise you to learn though that Twitter can also be used for some genuinely useful things.
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Okay, that was obviously a lie. But there are many things you can do that will enhance your Twitter feed, and give it the virtual 140-character equivalent of bells and whistles. For this week’s mash-up, I’m going to go through some services that you can hook into Twitter.
