I wish you a happy 2008! Not a lengthy post but tomorrow (or maybe Wednesday…) I’ll be posting a fairly lengthy review of the 3 Skypephone. Be prepared for posting to resume once again!

Disclosure: Webby’s World is getting paid to write this review. I will try not to let this alter my opinion.

Ever had a fantastic idea for a website but couldn’t think of a catchy name? I know that I definitely have! PickyDomains are a company who will find you a catchy domain name which meets a specification which you set. Large corporations will pay consultancy firms thousands of pounds for such a service, but PickyDomains offers it for $50.

I bet you’re thinking ‘what’s so outstanding about a consulting firm?’. Well, PickyDomains lets anyone consult and pays them if their suggestions are enacted upon. Basically, a company will post the specification on PickyDomains website and users of PickyDomains will suggest possible domain names. If one of their suggestions are chosen, they’ll receive 50% of the fee ($25). If no-ones suggestions are used, the company will get their money back! Contributors are paid monthly through PayPal.

Companies can specify whether dashes, numbers or slang can be used in the domain name and they also specify acceptable domain length and domain suffixes.

PickyDomains uses Drupal, a FOSS CMS system, as we can see through the fact they haven’t changed their favicon!

Tags: domains, pickydomains, drupal, web 2.0, web2, web 2, make money

Thanks for reading Webby’s World

It’s time for a quick post with some links which I have discovered this week which interested me and will probably also interest you! Many of these links will be for OS X considering my conversion.

1. Scribbles is a seriously cool drawing application for OS X. It’s extremely simple and is by no means a replacement for software like The GIMP or Photoshop but is rather just a nice doodling application to waste your time with. It has an extremely simple, yet feature packed and attractive, 3D interface. Scribbles has nice textured, natural-looking brushes, support for layers (with transparency) and is shareware costing only $20. If you don’t pay $20, it just becomes nagware asking you to buy it for 10 seconds each time you launch it and adds a non-obtrusive watermark to any images you export.
2. MacHeist have a Mac Giving Tree open until sometime tomorrow. Per person you refer to the Giving Tree, you get one free piece of software on Christmas morning!
3. Some Mac developers are providing Christmas reductions.
4. JDarkRoom is a free, multi-platform piece of software which is a good alternative to WriteRoom.
5. CrypTool is a piece of Windows FOSS with many simple and advanced features. The aim of the software is to educate people regarding cryptography and it is very good (it can do things such as automatically solve many Vigenere ciphers!).
6. On a non-tech note, Tony Blair’s converted to Roman Catholicism. I wonder if it will impact in anyway on the Middle Eastern peace process.
7. A youth failed his driving test. (I didn’t say chav!).
8. Azhar pointed me to these funny quotes on insurance claims.
9. Have a Merry Christmas!

I’ve used Google Groups for some time to make an occasional USENET post but I recently decided that I might use it for binaries because P2P was too slow (I don’t condone piracy; only use USENET to download copyleft media/software.).

I looked online and there are literally dozens of providers who provide access to USENET binaries. The below factors are important to consider:

1. Retention: binaries are often big; how long does your provider hold files?
2. Completion: how complete are articles/files
3. Price: well duh.
4. Speed: if you’re in Europe, look for a European server. Make sure your binary provider are fast
5. Trial: check it isn’t rubbish!

Based on the above, I chose to go with Giganews. Whilst they are more expensive than many (unlimited plans start at $25/month. 25GB plans at $13) and lack features Easynews boasts like a web interface to USENET and free SSL encryption (it costs $5 more for Giganews), I think the retention rate of 200 days for binaries (increases for text articles to about 1200!) makes up for this because there’s a bigger choice of files you can download. A 3-day trial is offered!

Giganews Support are great, replying to my query in less than 10 minutes! They also give you unlimited upload bandwidth and are very fast several gigabit having backbone connections to the Internet in Europe and North America!

Of course, you need a client to access USENET. You can use Thunderbird etc, but these aren’t designed for binaries! I use Unison for OS X (costing $25) or NewsBin for Windows (Giganews reduce the price of this to $25 for their customers). To search USENET, don’t pay to use Newzbin but use the free binsearch.info.

So, if you want to start with binaries I suggest Giganews. If you do plan to sign up use my links, so I get a commission!

Tags: usenet, giganews