Blogging tips, browsing tricks, and computing hacks

I was having a Skype chat with fellow sci-tech blogger Wayne Smallman [yes, he's 6'5" and heard all the jokes], he was just about to post an item on sustainable housing and why there is no need to build when you can grow your own. The post is about designer trees and how they might be converted into homes for Hobbits, tree huggers, or the environmentally conscious. Trouble is, he …

Now that Google is ten years old (depends on where you measure from, of course), the search engine really is old enough to be keeping its room nice and tidy, especially if it expects to keep getting pocket money on a regular basis. So, Google started to do a spring clean and found an old index from 2001, buried beneath a Klingon-English dictionary and some of Brin’s old Razzles.

Apparently, …

It’s almost a month since Google released its new tabbed browser, Chrome, complete with privacy tab and lack of addons and plugins and for which a password cracker has recently been published.

So, how many people are actually using it? I took a look at the GetClicky stats for the Sciencebase.com site, for September just to get some idea of who is using Google Chrome. Sciencebase gets more traffic than Sciencetext, …

Nowadays, it is apparently all about branding. Get your (brand) username known on the social media and social networking sites and you’ve got it made. Well, that’s the theory. And, certainly there is an element of truth in it. Indeed, I’ve created a whole lot of accounts with my Sciencebase username on Twitter, Plurk, Youtube, Facebook, Digg, Flickr etc etc (see selection in sidebar, to the right of this …

Be warned if you are relying on Google’s password-protected password storage to protect your passwords. The hackers have come up with tool to “retrieve” Google Chrome passwords. Of course, for that word “retrieve” read “crack”. The application allows anyone with access to your machine to hack into your Chrome password store and then access any and all sites to which you’ve set and stored passwords.

According to MyDigitalLife, “ChromePass v1.0.0 is …