The Cheezy Blog

A really nice list of colour swatches, good for site colour schemes and things like that. All based on pictures from the rather spectacular scenery and places of Peru.

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XiTi Monitor has released its latest report (FR) on web browsers utilization in Europe and the rest of the world according to a survey during the first week of July. All European countries saw an increase in Firefox participation with Hungary showing the most dramatic increase from 27.2%, in the latest March 2007 survey, to 39.7%.

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KingDaveRa has highlighted a neat little Firefox extension called Chromatabs.

The extension colours your tabs based on domain name, so if you have 3 tabs open for one site and a few other tabs, it’s easy to see which tabs are related to which. It could possibly do with a few configuration options, but it works pretty well anyway. You can always edit the extension yourself if you would like more features.

All in all though, it’s a nice addition to the browser.

It appears that Google has finally opened its Gmail service up for general sign-ups. This comes after several years of it being an invite only system similar to their earlier Orkut social networking site, which has also moved to an open sign-up system after a long time as an invite only site.

While the invite system works well for social networking, I can’t understand why they applied it to an email system in the first place, especially not once they were giving out 100 invites a day per user anyway. With that volume of invites going out, it certainly wasn’t acting as a mechanism to limit the amount of users on the system during the early stages.

Bram Cohen, the dude behind the BitTorrent protocol has teamed up with CacheLogic to develop a Cache Discovery Protocol that will let a BitTorrent client that supports it find local copies of the file you’re trying to download hosted by a provider such as your ISP. The idea behind it is that, instead of throttling BitTorrent because of all the bandwidth accross the ISPs border, the ISP can host legal / commercial torrents locally, thus saving on bandwidth usage and giving faster speeds for the downloader.

Of course Illegal downloads won’t ever be cached, so they can end up throttled to hell and back still.

Read the article on Torrent Freak.

Connected Internet have a rather good guide to using newsgroups for downloading “content for which you have copyright permission to download.” It explains the basics of newsgroups, as well as a good guide to finding the content you might want.

Go read the article.