Daniel Pallett

BitMeter 2 is an excellent little bandwidth monitoring program written by a guy who goes under the name of Codebox Software.

I run it all the time on my PC and have it start up automatically with Windows. It places an icon in the system tray which keeps you informed of the current upload/download speeds and can also display a compact box with a graph of recent usage. The great thing about this box is that it can be transparent (the percentage is fully adjustable) and has a feature called click-through which means it doesn’t register any clicks, but passes them on to what’s below. The colour schemes and most of the program’s many features are fully customisable.

I thoroughly recommend you head over to the website and have a better look, or click here for the direct download (1MB).

You often have many contacts on an instant messaging network, whether it be MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, Google Talk, Skype or whatever. Well it’s a basic fact that us humans tend to have certain friends who we’d rather talk to than others. There is a hierarchy if you like. Your closest family and friends - who you’d always talk to. Then people who you are happy to talk to most of the time. Then other people who you rarely talk to, etc.

I’ve found it is often the case that you block a fair number of contacts or change your presence to away, busy or even invisible. And all this to avoid the chance that someone who’s online, that you really can’t be bothered to talk to, IMs you. Quite possibly doing this whilst chatting as normal to other contacts.

It struck me that it’s quite a bit of hassle blocking/unblocking and changing your status. So I had a thought. Have levels of visibility. You assign a contact a certain level number. Then you set your current level. You will be visible to people at or above the set level, but contacts below that level will not see you online. For example, level 1 is the highest level. If your level is set to 2 then contacts in levels 1 and 2 will see you online, but contacts in lower levels will not see you.

You may not feel it would be more convenient or user-friendly, but it is a different angle of looking at the online presence model. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

Freenigma is a really neat little extension for Firefox which allows the average Joe to encrypt their emails (and of course, the recipient to decrypt it!). Well cryptography has been around for a while and the technology is nothing new, however, Freenigma is clear and simple, taking care of all the public and private keys, which the user never sees. Therefore it is a great tool that allows everyone who wishes, to use cryptography.

It works with the major web-based email systems, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, however it currently doesn’t work with the newer betas such as Yahoo! Mail Beta and Windows Live Mail. If you’re concerned about privacy or you’re just curious I recommend you check it out.

I have just signed up to the free web-based word-processor Writely, which was bought by Google in March earlier this year. It does what you’d expect and works very nicely. One feature which I’m trying out for this post is the function to post to your blog. I’m not sure that I’ll use it over MS Word yet, but do I see myself using it if I need to collaborate on a document with someone else.
Edit - Writely didn’t put a title on my post.