Dan Smith

Chances are you don't know the ins and outs of every single connector or piece of computer hardware you'll come across (even if you do have experience), and while we're sure the poster could cover even more territory (if we're being picky), it's a pretty great visual reference. - Dan Smith

""Waze hopes to become a sort of Wikipedia of mapping by creating a community where drivers can edit roads and insert details like street names and construction projects," says John Canali, an analyst at Strategic Analytics. Drivers can report accidents by pressing a button on their mobile-Waze records the location. Users also edit maps online, alerting Waze to deadspots like tunnels and assigning names to previously unmapped streets. Contributors move up in rank and earn map-editing privileges and the right to manage, say, your neighborhood. In Israel, nearly 100,000 people have downloaded the app since January. It speaks to the fact that people will contribute if in return they get free navigation and real-time traffic info. "The genie's out of the bottle. How do you compete with free?" implores Canali. Bardin promises it'll never push ads to their users." - Dan Smith

"North Korea's latest launch is not missiles, but a TV advertising campaign for a locally-brewed beer." - Dan Smith

Facebook's privacy overhaul suggests it's looking nervously over its shoulder at the rise of Twitter... Facebook has just announced that it’s trialling a raft of potential changes to its current privacy settings, including allowing users to make their status updates and other contributions visible to all and sundry, rather than just people in their particular network. And if you think this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s basically allowing users to do exactly what Twitter users do – i.e. post an update on what sandwich they’re eating for lunch for the benefit of anyone with a functional search engine and an appetite for mundane trivia. So it’s clearly worrying about the threat from the latest Big New Thing – although the fact that it’s trying to reinvent itself suggests it’s trying to avoid the mistakes made by MySpace… - Dan Smith

"Japan is considering the introduction of noise-making devices for near-silent hybrid cars following safety fears from vision-impaired pedestrians." - Dan Smith

When every character counts, the right URL compacting service can mean the difference between saying what you want and desperately trying to fit a coherent thought into a few insufficient words. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite URL shrinking tools, and now we're back with the five most popular answers. Read on for a closer look at the five best URL shrinkers and to vote for the site you like best. - Dan Smith

There is only one choice now, bit.ly. :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Thanks, Dan. - Kol Tregaskes

The search for a great beer garden in the capital can be as frustrating and unpredictable as the British summer. So we've rounded up 20 bucolic beer gardens with an idyllic outdoor atmosphere, a wide, well-kept range of beers, foliage in the finest of fettle and, if you’re lucky, the odd water feature - Dan Smith

"Microsoft has set the UK retail pricing for Windows 7, which is due to launch worldwide on 22 October. Prices range from £49.99 for pre-ordered Home Premium to £229.99 for Ultimate." - Dan Smith

"Facebook today announces the relaunch of its Publisher tool; the photo, video and status updating field available to you above your news stream and profile pages. Up until now, you have only been able to share content amongst your Facebook friends. Today, that changes with the release of an option called “who do you want to tell?”. The option makes it possible to share your posts with everyone – not just your friends – but even more interesting however is that you can share items or updates with a specific friend list too. For example, you may want to share geek stuff with your geek friends but your personal thoughts with just your closest friends and family – that is now possible." - Dan Smith

"Social network friendships are a complicated thing; it's hard to turn down an acquaintance's friend request, but after you've approved 50 of them, the signal-to-noise ratio of your homepage drops significantly. Here's how to fix it without un-friending (or offending) anyone." - Dan Smith

Useful, there are lots of services like this. - Kol Tregaskes

I liked the simple functionnality of displaying your followers on a map. Funny I never thought about mashing that up before!... - Zackatoustra

"The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale. Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections. Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts." - Dan Smith

I started looking for ways to say my 140 bytes worth in an uncomplicatedly fast way sans frills from the browsers I use often and almost live in. With the popularity of Twitter, it wasn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack. - Dan Smith

I use Hellotxt/Ping.fm to post entries to my micro-blogging services. Wish there was an addon for either. - Kol Tregaskes

Ooh man, it's been there for years... - Amit Morson

I didn't either. FriendFeed is in a couple of very interesting catagories according to The Google - Mitch

Animals > Pets; Adult > Softcore > Erotic Art & Photography - Mitch

"These days, tech pundits and futurists can’t go a week without pontificating on the future of computing, wondering (and arguing) whether the computer will be merely a tool to access “the cloud” or as an application set.  Even the most inconsequential software release (or failure) sparks this argument - the most recent example is the release of the Opera browser’s repackaging of a personal webserver. Companies and individuals alike have been heralding the death of the computer as we know if for years, claiming all applications, data, and other innovations will live in a decentralized fashion across distributed networks -  Google’s office suite offerings are an example of this.  Everything from instant messaging clients to word processors, video editors to photograph storage, and email to computer programming tools can be found as browser-based applications.  But just because they exist doesn’t mean they should, as not everything needs to be achieved inside the browser." - Dan Smith

"We tend to apply ergonomics as it relates to our waking activities. But utilizing the right sleep posture is just as important as having the right PC posture, especially if you want to enjoy a pain-free morning and day." - Dan Smith