More tech talk from David Bradley

• Free WiFi should use "free" password to protect users – Companies offering free public wireless access should give their users a password to login so that they're inherently protected from snoopers and the likes of Firesheep
• Backup your WordPress blog to Dropbox – Amit highlights a new plugin that automates the WordPress backup process and lets you use your Dropbox cloud storage space as the repository. Nice.
• Twitter counter – You can waste many a happy hour playing with website metrics, social media charts, and followers graphs. Twitter counter is just such a time drain that lets you see your twitter count history and predicts milestones as your following increases. At the time of writing, I've just passed the 8100 mark and the site says I will have 8600 followers within 30 days at the current growth rate. But, it couldn't show me when I'd reach 9000, so I pasted the figures into Excel and did my own extrapolation…sad as I am. I will have reached 9000 followers by Xmas Day. I'll have reached 10000 some time on 25th February next year and by that day in 2023 I should have 80000 followers. So still way behind even the most minor of celebs and I'll have hopefully retired by then and found something a lot better to do with my time than graphing stats.
• Google Chrome Beta update brings PDF viewer, App sync – Google Chrome the most excellent of web browsers (fast, slick, although doesn't have all the bells nor whistles I liked in Firefox) now has a built-in PDF viewer, which saves a lot of right-clicking when you're reading academic journal sites.