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In Depth: Complete guide to Google Analytics

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 08:30:00 GMT

Things change so quickly on the web. When I started working at software firm Urchin in 1996, web analytics was a niche product, important to (and understood by) perhaps a handful of people at an organisation.

When Google bought Urchin in June 2005 and launched Google Analytics later that autumn, the industry was moving away from expensive, complex tools in favour of free, easy-to-use ones, and these are quickly becoming more capable than those of the previous generation.

Analytics has also expanded to encompass a larger tool set and conversion process. It includes offline data sources and multivariate testing solutions. Perhaps the largest shift is that virtually everyone is now aware of and able to afford a quality web analytics and multivariate testing platform.

Getting started

You can sign up for Google Analytics at google.com/analytics. From there, you can create a new, free account. If you advertise on Google's AdWords system, you can also sign up for Analytics from within your AdWords account. Google Analytics has been closely integrated into your AdWords account under the new Analytics tab: click the tab and follow the instructions to start tracking AdWords campaign data and ROI information.

The Tracking Instructions page that appears contains the tracking code that you'll need to paste into each page of your site. Before doing so, you might want to complete a couple more steps to make sure Google Analytics collects the most relevant data for your site. You can configure your profile by clicking Edit in the Website Profile table.

Set the default (or index) page of your site. This will allow Google Analytics to reconcile log entries for www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html, for instance. These are in fact the same page, but are reported as two distinct pages until the Default Page setting has been configured.

Does your site use dynamic session or user identifiers? You can tell Google Analytics to ignore these variables and not count them as unique pages. Enter any query parameters you wish to be excluded, separated with commas.

To enable ecommerce reporting and the Ecommerce Analysis report set, select Yes. If your website is designed to drive visitors to a particular page, such as a purchase or email sign-up page, you can track the number of successful conversions using 'goals' and 'funnels' in Google Analytics. A goal is a website page a visitor reaches once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action, such as a registration or download. A funnel represents the path that you expect visitors to take in order to reach their goal.

Defining these pages enables you to see how frequently visitors abandon goals (and where they go instead) and the value of the goal. Each profile can have up to four goals, with a defined funnel for each. You can begin defining goals and funnels by selecting a profile and clicking Edit from the Analytics Settings page.

Hearts and minds

Google Analytics is not only a way to learn about customer behaviour, it can reveal something that's even more important: customer intent. Analytics data provides a peek into the hearts and minds of your customers and their needs and wants.

How did your visitors arrive at your site? For those who came through a search-engine query, a list of search terms will tell you what they were seeking. For example, shoe shoppers may be looking for Nikes but not Uggs; Clarks but not Donna Karan. You may therefore discover that part of your site is on target for visitors' needs, while the other half isn't. Similarly, Google Analytics can give you a list of 'referring URLs', websites that send you traffic. You can infer, for instance, that visitors coming from happycoupons.co.uk will have a different goal (making savings) than those coming from a manufacturer's retail link page (finding out about product features).

What are visitors looking for? Your checkout page tells you only where you've succeeded – not where you've missed an opportunity. Consider Best Buy's experience stocking a portable refrigerator to chill beer in the US. At first, they stocked it only during the Super Bowl. But search keywords reports revealed that shoppers still looked for the product code well into the baseball season – yet they couldn't find anything on the site.

Other key data that goes beyond conversions is the 'cart abandonment' rate: the percentage of customers who put items in the cart but leave your site before checking out. This crucial metric of your site's ability to close sales may indicate that something's amiss with your checkout process.

Where are your visitors landing, bouncing, and viewing? It's often assumed user experience begins on the homepage, and this misconception drives many an ecommerce site to waste hours of design work in the wrong place. Search engines dig deeper into ecommerce sites, bringing visitors to not just 'electronics', but also televisions, MP3 players or sat navs. Analytics data will tell you where your real 'homepages' reside, so you can focus your design work there. Curious? Just take a look at the 'Top Landing Pages' or 'Top Entry Pages' report in your Web Analytics tool.

Conversely, analytics will tell you which landing pages have the highest bounce rate – ie on which did people land, look around and quickly leave? This data tells you which of your pages are letting your customers down, and can also help with your redesign, since you can infer intent through the list of keywords and referring sites.

Web analytics can also show you the top viewed pages: information that's often overlooked. While you may consider yourself in the business of selling products, most of your hits could represent people reading customer reviews. Or perhaps you're selling 10 lines of products, but two of them show especially high traffic. Knowing what interests your customers will help you design a site that better meets expectations.

Analytics can help you understand what drives performance up or down. Earning $15,000 in the last 24 hours is good; knowing what drove that surge is even better. Ecommerce tracking shows the number of orders placed, the value of those orders, and more, by hour, day, week and month. By segmenting your data over different time lines, you can see both seasonal trends and more subtle buying habits that could otherwise go unnoticed.

Putting this information into practice takes not just creativity, but also a willingness to experiment. This spirit of adventure comes through on some of the most successful retail sites. Crutchfield (crutchfield.com) has taken the unorthodox approach of putting its checkout cart on the left side of the screen. Is that a good idea? Analytics reports have confirmed that it is – at least for them. Wal-Mart commonly puts products on its website that are unavailable in its stores. When those zebra- patterned bed sheets prove they have a following, the company understands the demographics enough to place them in targeted store locations.

Recent changes

Earlier this year we redesigned the Google Analytics site. The goal was to make it easier to discover information relationships via navigation and visualisations. We created a customisable dashboard and introduced sparklines. We developed new graphing tools and a new type of date slider, which make it easy to see spikes and dips in traffic as you set date ranges. And one of the most popular new features is one of the simplest: the ability to email reports and schedule these emails so that information can be easily shared with key stakeholders in your organisation.

New visualisations have been among the most popular features. You can now view many reports by hour or day and graph data by day, week or month. And we've made it easier to compare visits to conversions. You can also graph two metrics against each other over time so, for example, you can compare the number of visitors and the bounce rate for a certain week, or see if visitors who come to a site through AdWords spend more or less time on your site than visitors overall.

We've also added a new ga.js tracking code. This pagetag allows for more flexibility and customisation. It's just as easy to install as the old code, but enables more seasoned users to track ecommerce transactions in a more readable way and make use of advanced tracking features. We've also added a Google Analytics codesite (code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/) to help you take advantage of documented customisations that have been made to the tracking code.

If you have content behind a security firewall, an intranet or an internal network that prevents you from using Google Analytics, you may also want to consider Urchin software. You can configure it to fit your own requirements and process/reprocess log files as frequently as you wish. Urchin is also great for intranets, since it allows the analysis of firewall-protected content, such as corporate intranets, without any outside internet connection. You can even track your site with Urchin and Google Analytics combined.

One of the coolest things we've recently added is industry benchmarking. Still in beta, it enables you to see how your site's data compares to others'. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike. We don't share individual data with competitors, but bucket data into industry verticals and then anonymise and aggregate it.

Finally, Website Optimizer is a free tool that complements the functionality of Google Analytics to hone your site further. You can create different versions of your web pages, and Google then splits your traffic automatically, so your visitors tell you which version they like best. Things you might consider changing include images (bigger, smaller, colour, black and white, with models, no models); headlines (questions, shorter ones, emphasising different points); calls to action (different button designs and copy) and layouts (three columns, two columns, one long scrolling column).

Test a few big changes, not several small ones. A good rule of thumb is one page variation for every 100 conversions. So if you get 300 conversions per month, test up to three variations, including your current page. Run your test for at least two weeks. Don't jump to conclusions: make sure the data has an opportunity to normalise.

Make testing an ongoing process. Once you find a winner, keep trying to beat it. Remember that not finding a winner can be helpful, too, since you learn what doesn't work and you protect yourself from making changes that could have permanently harmed your site's performance.

First published in .Net Magazine, Issue 181

Now read 101 tips, tricks and hacks to help you search smarter with Google

In Depth: The future of mobile internet devices

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Mobile internet access has come of age. No more squinting at the tiny screen on your smartphone. No more flat batteries on your laptop.

With the mobile internet device (MID), you can enjoy an always-on connection, long battery life and a decent-sized screen, all in a package that will fit in your pocket. However, are the processors currently used in smartphones or the x86 chips that power laptops capable of providing all this, or will the MID require a totally new processor?

Intel, VIA and ARM are already promoting their wares in a new round of processor wars. So if you're in the market for a MID, should you be looking for that 'Intel Inside' sticker – or does the competition have a trick or two up its sleeve?

What is a MID?

What do we mean by the term MID, and how does it differ from the smartphone, the laptop and other in-between devices – such as the UMPC (ultra-mobile PC)? PC Plus magazine asked the main suppliers of MID processors to define the platform.

According to Pankaj Kedia, Intel's Director of Global Ecosystem Programs for MIDs, "Mobile internet devices represent a category of truly mobile consumer devices that enable the best internet experience in your pocket and allow users to communicate, entertain, access information and be productive. The MID category is comprised of mobile devices with a display size no larger than six inches and a simplified user interface. There are expected to be over 100 million units in the range over the next three to five years."

Timothy Brown, International Marketing Manager for VIA Technologies, offered more in the way of technical detail. "For VIA, a MID is a five-inch form factor or less device that runs on an x86 architecture platform providing the capability of a full internet and computing experience to users. That includes the full Windows Vista, XP and Linux operating systems, the massive body of software developed for those operating systems and the ability to connect and interact with the internet anywhere at any time."

However, Bob Morris, ARM's Director of Mobile Computing, had different views – almost to the point of not recognising the MID as a unique platform in its own right. "Intel coined the term MID. ARM would prefer to call it mobile internet (MI) since there is not one device but many." Morris suggested that within the next five years internet connectivity will become an essential element of a wide range of mobile devices including portable media players (PMPs), personal navigation devices (PNDs), and smartphones.

To make the point, he showed us an illustration that explained how each of these types of device had migrated to the mobile internet arena. In the area of PMPs, the Apple iPod was shown migrating to the iPod Touch with the addition of Wi-Fi; with PNDs, the forthcoming Garmin NuviPhone was shown as the Nuvi Navigator (a sat nav device) with the addition of a 3.5G mobile phone and browser; and in the realm of smartphones, the Samsung Instinct has been augmented with EV-DO technology (or 3G broadband).

The Intel Atom

Although other companies may be developing processors that could form the basis of a MID, to date only three companies have nailed their colours to the mast. We asked these three companies – Intel, VIA and ARM – to tell us about the processors they're promoting for the up-and-coming MID platform. As it's the processor that's had the lion's share of the media coverage, we'll start by looking at Intel's offering.

Intel announced the Atom processor family (formerly codenamed Silverthorn) at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai in April, and subsequently rolled out five variants. The Atom processor is Intel's smallest – and, it claims, the world's fastest – chip to consume less than three Watts of power. Ranging from 800MHz to 1.86GHz, the chips are quoted as consuming between 160mW and 220mW on average and from 80mW to 100mW while idling.

The Atom processor is based on the Intel Atom micro-architecture, which was designed to achieve high effi ciency in terms of performanceper- Watt while maintaining full compatibility with the Core 2 Duo instruction set and architectural features such as HyperThreading, Virtualization technology and Intel Digital Media Boost (SSE3). It's currently based on the 45nm high-k process, but it will shrink to 32nm in 2009. Low power consumption is achieved using a range of power management techniques.

Competition from VIA and ARM

According to Brown, VIA's current products aimed at the MID market are based on the C7-M ULV processor. The VIA C7-M ULV provides x86 support via an in-order execution architecture and is offered in clockspeeds of 1.0GHz, 1.2GHz and 1.5GHz. VIA claims that this provides enough processing power to run devices based on full operating systems such as Windows Vista, XP or a mainstream Linux distribution. Like the Intel Atom, high performance-per-Watt is stressed, with power consumption figures ranging from 3.5W to 7.5W.

However, while Intel quotes average power consumption figures (which take into account the fact that the processor will often be idling), figures for the C7-M LV look much higher. This is because they relate to operational power. In reality, the two families are closer together than the figures alone suggest, although comparisons of average power will have to wait for the launch of the MID platform in numbers, when a comparison of performance-per-Watt will be much easier to establish.

Interestingly, there was no mention of a Nano derivative, despite previous indications from a senior VIA spokesperson that it would be used in this context. If and when a sufficiently low-powered version of the processor does become available, it shows every sign of being the first MID processor to feature potentially more efficient out-of-order execution.

Today, it's ARM's V6 architecture devices – such as the ARM11 – that power the Nokia N810, iPod Touch, and smartphones like the iPhone, all of which ARM consider to be MIDs. The architecture will continue to be used in new products of this type. However, for mini-notebooks and platforms closer to what most people think of as MIDs, processors with ARM's next generation V7 architecture, which includes the Cortex-A8, are being promoted.

The main difference between the ARM11 and Cortex-A8 is performance – ARM's figures show the Cortex-A8 achieving about twice the amount of work for the same clockspeed. This has an obvious benefit in terms of the all-important performance-per-Watt. ARM says that the Cortex-A8 range will start showing up in third-party products later this year. ARM claims that the Cortex-A8 has similar clock-for-clock performance as Intel's Atom, and that in addition to Windows Mobile, it can run the full desktop Linux operating system.

It's said to scale in speed from 600MHz to greater than 1GHz and offers a number of architectural features perhaps unfamiliar to those who are more used to looking at Intel data sheets. This includes Neon technology for multimedia and signal processing, Jazelle RCT (Real-time Compilation Target) technology for efficient support of both ahead-of-time and just-in-time compilation of Java and other bytecode languages, and Thumb-2 technology for enhanced code density and performance.

ARM claims that this new processor can meet the performance requirements of mobile devices with a power budget of less than 300mW. As in the case of Intel's figures, this is an estimated in-use average rather than a peak power consumption figure. Where the Cortex A8 differs from both the Atom and VIA's C7-M ULV, however, is its lack of x86 support.

It's important to note that ARM's product is quite different from those offered by Intel or VIA. Whereas these latter two companies are selling chips – that is, pieces of silicon – ARM is licensing processor cores that their silicon partners, which include TI, Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, Freescale, Marvell and Broadcom, integrate into a SoC (System-on-Chip) that is then sold to MID manufacturers.

Mobility requirements

So, what should we be looking for in a processor designed to power a MID? In a sense, it's a bit early to come up with a proper answer, since MIDs have yet to appear in any number and the platform will undoubtedly evolve in the early days as it becomes established in the marketplace. Even so, we took the opportunity to ask the three protagonists what they considered to be the key requirements of a MID processor.

According to Intel, a MID processor needs to be powerful, compatible and frugal in its power consumption. Performance is required to provide the user with an Internet experience in its entirety which, according to Kedia, is "rich, dynamic, immediate, interactive, increasingly user-generated and fast."

To achieve this, the processor must be fully compatible with Internet technologies, including support for the wide range of codecs such as Adobe Flash, plug-ins such as JavaScript, media players and web technologies such as AJAX and XML. Kedia also stressed dramatically low power consumption, a small form factor and a long battery life. Atom processors, it was unsurprisingly suggested, strike a good balance across these three broad requirements.

VIA also saw a need for balance between the processor's power consumption and its ability to provide enough raw performance for a satisfying user experience. For Brown, however, the Internet experience is only the start. VIA also anticipates a requirement for a high standard of media playback and, in the case of business users, the ability to use the standard office applications familiar from the desktop PC environment.

Predictably enough, ARM also cited performance and power consumption as the key features. Performance should enable Internet access, multimedia applications including 3D graphics and HD playback and productivity solutions, while the level of power consumption should permit a full day of use. Ideally, power-use in standby should allow for a battery life measured in days rather than hours.

Laptop meets smartphone

In many ways, a MID could be thought of as occupying the middle ground between a laptop and a smartphone. So it's perhaps not surprising that two of the main suppliers of processors for MIDs have interests in traditional markets at these two extremes. So which approach is likely to be more relevant to the newly-emerging platform – Intel's PC-centric background or ARM's low-power mobile emphasis? We asked each manufacturer to say why they believed their traditional market is better suited to providing successful MID processors.

Intel addressed the question by reiterating the view that performance and compatibility are essential. "We believe that shrinking the x86 processor to reduce power and size while maintaining high performance and software compatibility is the optimal way to bring the Internet to pocketable devices," said Kedia. Intel's design and architecture, 45nm process and pioneering work in power management were all quoted as key strengths in this respect.

Interestingly, Morris didn't altogether agree with our analysis that ARM would consider its own background in low-power portable devices as more suited to addressing the needs of a MID. "ARM thinks companies coming from both markets will be able to define and develop products," he said.

As evidence for this stance, he indicated that ARM is finding that the major OEMs are not so hung-up as they once were over the particular processor in a device, but care more about whether the platform provides a good mobile Internet experience. "An x86 processor is not required for computing tasks," he said. "This is enabling companies to think beyond one or two partners, which bodes well for ARM because our mobile partners can expand their business while new ARM partners from the laptop market are set free to develop cool new products and technology."

VIA's Brown was not convinced that experience from the mobile phone (ARM processor camp) and PC (x86 processor camp) markets alone would necessarily provide the expertise to produce successful MIDs. He characterised the situation as the ARM camp needing to scale up in terms of raw performance and software application development, and the x86 camp needing to scale down in terms of power consumption and an improvement in the software interface for small devices. He was bullish about VIA's chances of squaring this circle and getting the balance right. "At VIA," he said, "we can see very clearly our path to scaling down the power draw, as that has been our expertise and main focus of our x86 processing business over the last eight years."

The x86 compatibility issue

In the realm of PCs, support for the x86 architecture is considered essential. What about MIDs? Will this established processor family remain dominant, or does a new platform demand a new architecture? We asked each of the manufacturers why, if at all, they thought x86 support was imperative. As you can imagine, views were divided.

Intel's Kedia stated quite categorically that "for mobile Internet devices to run the internet as we know and love it today, x86 is essential. Intel Atom processors, which are Core 2 Duo-compatible and fully x86-compliant, deliver the performance and compatibility to run the internet in its entirety." His second argument related to compatibility. "The Internet has been written on the x86 PC for the x86 PC since 1994," he claimed. "Today, over five billion websites are optimised to run in this environment. An x86 PC supports a myriad of codecs, plugins, extensions, media players and latest web technologies. And these technologies and standards continue to evolve as the innovation on the Internet continues."

While there's a great deal of truth in this assertion, it's pertinent to point out that users of non-Windows operating systems such as Linux, Unix variants and Mac OS X – which use both x86 and non-x86 processors – all enjoy good levels of web support, which suggests that there's nothing that makes the x86 architecture particularly suited to web applications. More relevant perhaps is the commercial decision to support a platform. History suggests that software houses will back a platform if it gains a significant foothold in the market, whatever its technological capabilities.

As another supplier of x86 chips, VIA's Timothy Brown was equally predictable in his response, suggesting that raw performance and software compatibility demanded the use of x86 architecture.

Morris had a radically different take on the question. "Support for x86 is essential only if you want to run Windows XP or Vista", he said. "It's clear that the web is not hardware architecture dependent. With Adobe's Open Screen Project and Microsoft's Silverlight (a cross-browser, crossplatform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering media and interactive applications to the web), ARM is well on the way to closing the gap with the PC by mid 2009. The iPhone has shown what a good browsing solution can do for the mobile internet."

MID product releases

Bearing the relevant arguments in mind, where does the industry stand today? Which MID manufacturers have chosen to go with each of the semiconductor manufacturers?

Intel announced its first-generation low-power platform (formerly codenamed Menlow) for mobile Internet devices in April this year. Since then, a few customers have launched devices based on this, and others are expected to do so through the rest of the 2008. Intel have disclosed a long list of signed-up system manufacturers, such as Aigo, Asus, BenQ, Clarion, Digifriends, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, Hanbit, KJS, Lenovo, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Sophia Systems, Tabletkoisk, USI, WiBrain and Yuk Yung.

According to VIA, the most famous MID to use a VIA processor is the OQO e2 – although some people might refer to that as a UMPC rather than a MID. In its various configurations it runs Windows Vista Ultimate or Premium and Windows XP Professional and Tablet Edition. It's said to be a full PC in every way and includes Wi-Fi, 2G and 3G connectivity. Other MID devices are being developed around VIA's ultra mobile processor platforms, but have not yet been announced.

With ARM's somewhat broader definition of the term MID, the company claims the Nokia N810 (especially the WiMax edition that is at present only available in the US) and the Apple iPod Touch as two high volume MIDs using their processor cores. Morris went on to suggest that the Nokia Maemo operating system is the 'father' of Moblin (an Intel-supported project for developing open-source software for MIDs using Linux) because a large percentage of it is based on the same code.

With an eye to the future, we asked each company how MID processors will develop in the short term, what trends are likely to emerge and what, if any, relevant upcoming products have been announced. Intel cited an uncertainty of how the Internet will evolve as a justification for being somewhat vague about plans in this area beyond the next couple of years.

Nevertheless, Kedia committed to continue to deliver high performance and low power while maintaining full software and internet compatibility, whatever that might mean in practice. In the mid-term, though, a second platform, codenamed Moorestown and based on Intel Atom processors, is scheduled for release by 2010. The first Atom processors reduced peak power by a factor of 10 compared to the first UMPC platforms, and Moorestown is expected to reduce idle power by a similar amount.

VIA's Brown stressed low-level features, such as more advanced manufacturing processes, decreased package sizes, lower power consumption and even more features integrated onto smaller platforms. As an example he mentioned the 75mm by 45mm VIA mobile-ITX prototype demonstrated in June 2007, which also includes a mobile phone module. He thought it probable that such developments would result in x86- based MIDs with smartphone features during 2009.

ARM's Morris painted a picture of the future that centred on two areas – processors and graphics. In the realm of processors, Morris indicated that a number of ARM11 products (of which the Cortex-A8 is the first member) will enter the market within the next 12 months. He predicted net performance gains of four to five times the speed of currently available products, resulting from a doubling of the clock and processor efficiencies.

Morris' mention of graphics was somewhat surprising, since our questions had all related to processor technology. However, ARM's vision of the future sees a marriage of the processor and GPU. Indeed, ARM partners are already developing application processors for the MID market with high-performance 3D and video engines for improved response times and HD video. For more information on this, see the 'CPU Meets GPU' box.

Unlike the market for PC processors, which in recent years has been a two-horse race (albeit with one horse a tad lame), the processor wars that are looming in the MID arena show signs of having three healthy players. And with AMD and Nvidia entering the frame with the novel new approach of combing CPU and GPU on the one chip, the battlefield could become even more complicated. Will one architecture dominate? Or, as ARM's Morris suggests, is there room for a number of different approaches? Whatever the result, there are undoubtedly some interesting times ahead.

In Depth: 18 essential free productivity boosting apps

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Credit crunch making your office system look lean? There's no need to fret when there are perfectly good productivity tools available for free.

Here's our pick of the free productivity-boosting programs every Windows user should own.

1.Thunderbird 2

Based on Mozilla code, what Firefox does for web browsing, Thunderbird does for email. Including advanced features like message tagging, saved searches and Gmail integration, you can use it for POP, IMAP and webmail accounts.

2. OpenOffice.org

Not one productivity tool but a whole suite of them. OpenOffice boasts word processing, drawing, spreadsheet, presentation and database apps in one handy package. Microsoft Office compatibility makes it easy to switch.

3. PrimoPDF

Adobe's Portable Document Format is ideal for delivering content across different platforms. PrimoPDF makes it free to create industry standard PDFs from over 300 file types. Installed as a printer driver, you can output from almost any program.

4. Inkscape

A graphics package that's ideal for creating clipart, charts and posters, Inkscape that will cost you nothing. With vector drawing tools on a par with professional programs, it outputs files in the open source SVG format.

5. Sunbird

Most free email tools are missing the calendar and scheduling features of Microsoft Outlook. Sunbird fills that gap, with a robust, open source application that uses a SQL based storage mechanism for security and strength.

6. NotePad++

The Notepad that comes free with Windows has nothing on this word crunching supertool. With it's tabbed interface, saved workspace states, syntax highlighting, auto-completion and text processing features NotePad++ is ideal for everyday use or even coding.

7. GIMPShop

A longtime Linux favourite, The GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) sought to emulate the main features of bitmap editing tool Photoshop for free. This remix makes The GIMP's interface look and behave more like Photoshop too.

8. XnView

Windows built in image viewer balks at some formats, but not XnView. It imports around 400 different file types an exports about 50. If that wasn't enough, you can also make simple edits, like cropping and resizing or create slideshows.

9. TurboLister

eBay listings are made easy with TurboLister. Combining design and database tools, the package connects to your eBay account to give you template based control over the auctions you place online.

10. Diagram Designer

Diagram Designer helps you create flow charts, circuit boards and graphs. In other words, it does a similar job to Microsoft Visio, but for free.

11. Trillian

Replace all your instant messaging clients with Trillian. It connects to Yahoo, Windows Live, ICQ, AIM and Internet Relay chat. There's even built in support for sending SMS messages via a gateway.

12. 7-Zip

Windows XP and Vista can open ZIP files, but can't read RAR, LZH, ARJ or any of the other additional formats 7-Zip is familiar with. You can even browse disk images in ISO format.

13. DeBrief 2.3

If you're the kind of person who scribbles on envelopes, bus tickets and any other scrap then DeBrief is for you. This note-taking application helps you organise your lists, ideas and thoughts.

14. AceMoney Lite

Financial management tools are rarely free, so it's gratifying to find one that's so good at its job. Track your spending, pay bills on time, manage debts and household budgets with AceMoney Lite.

15. Jarte

Built on the same engine as Windows WordPad, Jarte adds features that make it into a useful word processor. Spell checking, word count and support for Microsoft DOC formats make it a must.

16. TimeTo

More than just a calendar application or "to-do" list, TimeTo enables you to manage your commitments hour by hour, day by day.

17. Picasa 3

Google's photo sharing and management tool beats most others feature for feature. Picasa 3 lets you quickly import pics direct from your camera, fix them with the built-in filters and organise them in albums.

18. Ashampoo Burning Studio Free 6

Available only at download.com, this is an earlier edition of a commercial program featuring CD, DVD and Blu-ray burning capabilities. Great for music compilations and data back-ups.

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Weird Tech: In-body eels give electrifying possibilities

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:31:00 GMT

Artificial electric eel cells could be implanted in the human body to generate power for medical implants and other small devices. That's according to new research by American scientists, which suggests it's possible to build artificial cells replicating the electrical behaviour of electric eel cells.

Not only that, the researchers claim, but the artificial cells could deliver a higher performance than the real ones – by more than 40 per cent.

According to NIST engineer David LaVan and Yale University scientist Jian Xu, small, stacked layers of artificial cells could be capable of producing continuous power output of about 300 microwatts – enough to drive small implant devices.

Touch-sensitive tables

In other news, dining went digital in London this week, with restaurant and bar Inamo launching a new interactive service that projects colourful menus onto touch-senstive tabletops. As well as general browsing, patrons can preview the food, order interactively, change the ambience of their individual table – and even book cabs.

Back to the Future

Talking of futuristic, if you're in the market for a new vehicle, beware. A man who was fined in 2003 for selling "'fraudulent unregistered stock'" on the internet was been spotted selling a "flying saucer" on eBay on Tuesday.

If a flying car is, indeed, what you're after, may we point you towards Terrafugia's Transition instead. Set to go on sale next year, the $194,000 vehicle is more "roadable aircraft" than car.

With four wheels, Formula One–style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings (that fold up while it's on land), it's been described as "a single-engine, rear-propeller airplane that just happens to be street-legal".

Gadget therapy

Here's one for everyone at work who went out last night: the iSleep concept. A soft pillow that attaches to your laptop, it fills with warm air when you close the lid, playing soothing music for 10 minutes before sounding a gentle alarm to wake you up. So simple, and yet so effective; catching a few zees under the desk could one day be a thing of the past…

If you do happen to spot a colleague catching said zees (we've all done it…), it might be nice to give them a little nudge with a Mechamo Crab & Halloween Hack. A creepy crab robot with the head of a Cabbage Patch Kid doll, it should do just the trick.

And finally…

Trigger-happy police in Wales have been criticised for tasering a runaway sheep, it was reported earlier this week. Horrified motorists watched in disbelief as a police officer blasted the ram – which was holding up traffic – to clear the dual carriageway.

The sheep was later returned (still alive) to a near-by field. The RSPCA has said it will investigate the incident.

In Depth: Interview: 'This Week in Tech' podcaster Leo Laporte

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:00:00 GMT

No broadcast journalist has embraced new media as much as podcast guru Leo Laporte. Although he's still got one foot in traditional broadcasting (he hosts syndicated show The Tech Guy on US satellite radio), he's managed to build up a small empire of podcasts, or netcasts as he prefers to call them, since the launch of the original TWiT (short for This Week in Tech) in 2005. It's no coincidence that he's often called the hardest working man in podcasting.

Leo laughs at the use of the word 'empire' to describe the 14 hugely popular shows he hosts on the TWiT Netcast Network. "I guess it's an empire," he says, "a very small empire, but I serve at the pleasure of the community. I can never say it's mine. It's not mine, It's ours."

So, when Leo launched his latest project, a live video stream called TWiT Live, the community was already there. The show, which currently goes out five days a week, very quickly reached 3.6 million viewers a month – not bad considering 4.6 million people download the TWiT netcasts every month. Whatever Leo touches online seems to turn to gold. He's got more than 50,000 followers on Twitter – only Kevin Rose and Barack Obama have more.

"It's funny – I've said for a long time that I wouldn't ever do video because audio is easier for people and it's cheaper for us to produce," Leo explains. "You couldn't do live streaming before. Until a couple of years ago, when companies like Stickam came along, it wasn't technically feasible. But there's something about live that's really fun, so when it became technically and economically possible, people kept asking me for it and I finally said I'd do it. I started doing it on the radio show – a cheap, crappy version – but people wanted more and more. There seems to be this demand – I'm actually surprised more people aren't doing live streaming. My eyes have been fully opened here. I think streaming video is the next big thing and I'm very excited about it."

Production values

Initially, TWiT Live will show how Leo produces his podcasts from his cottage in Petaluma, California, but most of the shows won't go to video. The longer term plan is to add content in between.

The live show will include interviews, conference coverage and breaking news stories like the recent 24 Hours of iPhone event, which tracked the launch of the iPhone 3G around the world and attracted 271,733 viewers in total. Eventually, Leo wants to produce 40 hours of really interesting content a week.

"It's always struck me that live is ultimately what the internet should be because what's different from broadcasting television and internet television is that it's interactive, it's fully two-way. You're not really fully interactive unless you're live, so we take live questions in all the podcasts now. We want to do more and more of that live topical coverage. Ultimately, I see this becoming kind of a populist CNN for geeks. So if there's a big breaking tech news story, you immediately turn it on and know that we'll be there talking about it and have experts on. You'll get the story as it develops."

When Leo announced his plan to use Stickam (www.stickam.com), many people were surprised. After all, the most prominent live streamer on the web, Chris Pirillo, is on Ustream (www.ustream.tv). "In the first year I did both Ustream and Stickam informally, without any relationship with either of them," Leo explains.

"I also used Justin.tv, BitGravity and Yahoo Live. I tried all the services and they all did really good jobs with it. They're all doing essentially the same technology, so it really came down to which company was going to give me the things I needed. Stickam is really helpful with programming. They've given me a special 16:9 window and have gone the extra mile. They're giving me a lot of bandwidth – we're able to handle 10,000 people without a problem. I think we're a really good team because Stickam is really interested in figuring out what needs to be done to make this work and develop this platform."

Bandwidth issues – especially for Leo's show, which is sent out on 16:9 high definition resolution – are still critical. Usage is pretty steep and consistent, even when only 2,000 people are watching at the same time. Stickam put TWiT Live on a dedicated server cluster, which ensures it can scale to more viewers without slowdowns.

Once past the technical problems, the main challenge that's left is finding the content. This has never been a problem for Leo, who's got more ideas than time and resources. "The audience is pretty tolerant," he says. "They seem to understand that it's an informal broadcast that's not CNN and they kind of like that, I think. I don't have too much trouble filling the time and they seem to be patient when, for instance, I have to get up and go to the bathroom. We don't have commercial breaks and so they just have to sit and wait while I do that."

In fact, the community is active whether the cameras are on or off. When the show is over and the chatroom is open, thousands of people stay all night long to talk to each other. "The programming is the anchor for the community. As a programmer you're really providing the core, the reason for getting together, but ultimately what makes it work is the people. They become part of a community and so the chatroom is critical to the whole thing. It's very important to have a chatroom attached to the video, so that people who casually wander by know immediately, 'Here's the community and here's how you can be part of it.' It really changes the experience of watching TV when you're watching it with other people in a community."

Although Leo's on the other side of the camera, he still sees himself as part of the community. "I'm staying on air as long as I can every day because ideally I'd like this to be 24 hours, which means I have to get more hosts. It's hard to turn the cameras off because it's so much finished with TWiT at 4.30pm I was still talking to people for another two hours. I'm part of the community too, and just as people find it hard to leave the chatroom, I find it tough to leave the community and get on with my regular life."

Ad sharing

Originally, Leo didn't want to include any advertising on TWiT. He wanted it to be a direct medium supported by the people who listen to it, but that turned out to be too idealistic and few people were donating. It was enough to support the network initially, but to grow it to the size it is today, Leo had to strike ad sharing deals (as happened with Stickam).

Now TWiT is a proper corporation with four employees, including an accountant and a book keeper, and Leo expects to gross a very respectable $1 million this year. However, he says he still makes his living with radio show The Tech Guy and ploughs all the money he'd be making back into TWiT to develop it.

In the future, Leo would like to add a gaming, a mobile phone and an audio book podcast, but right now the resources aren't there. The focus is on beefing up TWiT Live. Only recently, Leo installed a Tricaster Studio (newtek.com/tricaster), which means he can switch between up to six cameras and several computer screens to show the Skype callers. "That's the advantage of being the sole proprietor, the guy in charge," Leo laughs.

"You get to do what you want. Internet broadcasting gives you complete and utter control. I have to say it's very intoxicating, it's very addictive. Once you have control over what you're doing and the audience you reach, you don't ever want to do it any other way. The mistakes you make are all your own, and I made more than my share, but I get to do what I want and that's the fun part of the creative process."

And so, at 51, Leo Laporte doesn't show any signs of slowing down. In fact, it's difficult to imagine the web without him. He is both the voice and the face of internet broadcasting.

Originally published in .Net Magazine, Issue 181

In Depth: The ultimate guide to overclocking

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:45:00 GMT

There are two schools of thought as to why you can, or would even want to, overclock most CPUs and GPUs.

One of them takes the peace, love and understanding route, namely that the manufacturing process is never 100 per cent reliable, so not every chip that rolls off the same production line is born equal. Those with the most lustrous coats and shiniest eyes (bred on Pedigree Chum, presumably) are ready to be high-end components, but those with a bit of a squint and a runny nose may have a funny turn if they exert themselves too much.

Hence, some chips are slapped with a lower official clockspeed and sold for less groats than their beefier brethren. The potential for their intended glory remains, however. Overclocking techniques can unlock at least some of that potential, albeit at the risk of frying the chip completely.

The tinfoil hat/Angry Internet Men theory is based on the same concept but chucks in a pint of paranoia. In this scenario, every same-series processor is born equal, but The Man artificially neuters most of them and slaps different badges on what are fundamentally the same chips. Overclocking, then, is simply a way of taking back what's rightfully yours.

The truth about overclocking

The truth likely lies somewhere between the two. Mass production certainly makes more financial sense than dozens of separate lines, and it's true that a low- end CPU or GPU can be made to punch far above its weight, but their stability isn't as guaranteed as a chip that's officially able to run at a higher speed. No manufacturer wants to deal with a steady trickle of returned parts, after all. But it does mean home overclocking is almost always productive – and seemingly more so with every new hardware generation.

It's also increasingly easy. The earliest overclocking, on the 4 to 10MHz 8088- based CPUs of 1983, involved desoldering a clock crystal from the mobo and replacing it with a third-party one, with only partially successful results. Ouch. Still, the precedent was set: a dedicated bloke-at-home could exceed his chip's official spec. IBM, then very much the top dog of PCland, wasn't entirely happy about this, so follow-up hardware included hard-wired overclock blocks. More soldering, this time of a BIOS chip, managed to get around this.

By 1986 IBM's stranglehold had been broken, resulting in a raft of 'clone' systems – and a wealth of choice. Intel's 286 and 386 processors became the de facto standard chips, and bus speed and voltage controls began to shift from physical switches and jumpers to BIOS options and settings.

The 486

It was the 486 that really changed everything, however. It's telling that this was the chip most prevalent during the era that birthed the first-person shooter as we know it: 1993's Doom very much popularised performance PCs for gaming, driving system upgrades in the same way a Half-Life 2 or Crysis does these days.

At the same time, the 486 introduced two concepts absolutely crucial to overclocking both then and now. Firstly, it popularised split product lines; no longer was it a matter of buying simply a processor, but rather which processor. The 486SX and DX offered some serious performance differential, and notably the SXs were hobbled/ failed DXs, giving rise to the ongoing practice of assigning different speeds and names to what were the same chip.

For a while too, the 25MHz SXes could be overclocked to 33MHz by adjusting a jumper on the motherboard; something less salubrious retailers took full advantage of. Secondly, it introduced the multiplier: performing more clocks per every one mustered by the system's front side bus. The 486's 2x multiplier thus effectively doubled the bus frequency. This was something overclockers would make the best of for successive processor generations – bumping up the multiplier was the simplest and often most effective way of increasing CPU speed. Nowadays (since the Pentium II, in fact), the multiplier is locked to prevent this, save for high-end chips, such as Intel's Extreme Edition series. For a while, there were complicated ways of defeating the multiplier lock: soldering on a PCB for earlier chips, third-party add-ons and the infamous practice of drawing a line onto certain AMD CPUs with a pencil. No CPU manufacturer's likely to make that mistake again.

Around this time, RAM overclocking became more common place, as memory speeds were ratified, and with that came more tweaking of the front-side bus to compensate for the locked multipliers. Overclocking shifted further towards the BIOS and away from jumpers, which in turn led to overclocking software.

The first was 1998's SoftFSB, which enabled bus-tweaking from within Windows for the first time. With the Pentium III era came aftermarket coolers, as processors now chucked out so much heat that a standard cooling block and fan wasn't enough to cope with an overclocked chip. And so it continued, overclocking largely becoming easier and more commonplace with each processor generation.

This leads us to the Core 2 chips of today, and Intel's current terrifyingly unassailable dominance of the CPU market. Generally drawing as little as half the power of the Pentium 4s that preceded them, most of the range offers a vast amount of overclocking headroom, to the point that a low-end Core 2 Duo can almost go toe-to-toe with the top of the line.

How to overclock

So how's it done? Key to processor overclocking is the front side bus (FSB). In the very simplest terms, this is the connection between the CPU and the rest of the PC, and its speed defines the processor's speed to a significant extent. Intel CPUs' final speed is the FSB times the multiplier - so if you've got an FSB of 266MHz and a multipler of 9, your chip will run at approximately 2.4GHz.

While the multiplier is usually locked – though some chips let you at least lower it, to conserve power and reduce heat – the FSB isn't. Bump up the FSB and you bump up the chip. In our example taking the bus to 290MHz gives us a 2.6GHz processor. This is no random example, incidentally, it's what we run the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 in one of our office test systems at, giving it a healthy 200MHz boost that makes a noticeable difference in CPU-intesive games and hi-def video re-encodes.

What stops us from going higher? Not a lot in the case of this particular chip. We're playing it safe for desktop work, cos we're in a particularly sweaty office. When we're farting around with high-end tasks, we can have it running stably at over 3.3GHz (with an FSB of 370 or so) on a decentish, third-party air cooler.

That's more or less trading blows with the best Intel has to offer on a £120 chip. But while going to 280MHz on the FSB took a BIOS tweak, a reboot and Microsoft BOB's your uncle, going much higher does involve more fuss. First up, when our Q6600 is at 3.3GHz, it's also running at nearly 70ºC when under maximum load (and around 50ºC when idling).

It's perfectly stable, but it could damage it in the long run, and on top of that the fan is making enough noise to wake the deaf pensioner in the next street over. Watercooling, a fancier air- cooler or even just a spot of dust- cleaning will bring the heat down, but there can come a point where that stuff becomes more expensive and hassle than simply buying a better processor.

The second hurdle is the motherboard. Pushing up the FSB doesn't affect only the CPU, but also the mobo and, in many cases, the RAM and PCI-e slot to boot. In our case, we're using a motherboard that supports a monstrously high FSB. When shopping for a mobo, its max FSB will usually be referred to as four times the actual speed, due to the way the processor actually fetches data. So when we've got the FSB set to 266MHz, in effect that's 1,066MHz.

When it's up to 372MHz, we need a mobo that's happy at nearly 1,500MHz. That simply isn't a given, especially on cheaper boards, so shop carefully. As well as that, if you've got a board with a stingy BIOS, you may not be able to alter RAM and PCI timings independently of the FSB, which can lead to those falling over.

Ours does, and for our mighty near-Gigahertz Q6600 overclock, we have to lower the RAM's clock speed a little to compensate for the strain put on it by the raised FSB - we have it sitting pretty at 893MHz. It could comfortably go higher, but the real-world benefits (as opposed to the willy-waving benefits, which are a different matter entirely) would be so miniscule that it's simply not worth placing the extra pressure on the RAM.

Similarly, while faster and, most likely, more expensive RAM will cope better at their stock speeds with a massive FSB, the pay-off is often so minor that value RAM, running at a lower clock-speed may well be enough to make your overclocking masterplan hugely successful. Even the best memory will net you something in the region of just a five per cent performance boost - worth having if every little helps, but it's the FSB that makes the big difference. And for that, the motherboard is critical.

Thirdly, there's the matter of voltage. The faster your chip runs, the more power it needs to feed it. As the FSB goes up, you'll find your motherboard's North Bridge and your RAM also get hungrier. Unfortunately, your hardware will automatically report its revised power requirements, so trial and miserable error are required to find the sweet spot. Volt tweaking is a fiddly and danger-fraught business.

Some overclocking-friendly motherboards can automatically adjust voltages for you, but are understandably conservative about it, so for the really big overclocks you'll need to set 'em yourself. This needs to be done by the tiniest increments possible, establishing reboot-by-reboot how many volts your embiggened CPU needs; as low as possible, essentially, as firing too many into it can fry it.

Establish in advance what your chip's out-of-the-box volts are and, through a mix of common sense and googling, decide on a number you're not going to risk going higher than. We pushed our Q6600 from 1.3 to 1.4V, which is a fairly big increase as volt modding goes. It's not just a matter of the so-called vCore either - as you go for the big overclocks, you'll find you're having to play with the arcane likes of CPU PLL and FSB termination voltage. Again, so long as you raise stuff in tiny increments the risk of slagging your chip, RAM or mobo is fairly minimal.

Overclocking AMD processors

It's a different matter with AMD processors, which for a while now have had an onboard memory controller, which allows the chip to communicate more directly with the RAM, which in turn means there isn't an FSB as such.

Instead, you're overclocking something known as the HyperTransport bus, which is achieved in more or less the same way, but can require lowering the HT's own multiplier to retain stability when you bump the speed. If you've gone for one of the recent AMD Phenom Black Editions, you'll find it comes with the multiplier unlocked, which makes overclocking an easier affair.

Overclocking graphics cards

By contrast, overclocking a graphics card is dead simple. As a more self- contained piece of hardware, there's none of this confusing multiplier or FSB business; just overclocking the card itself, finding the right speeds for both the GPU and the card's onboard memory.

Free software – some of it official NVIDIA/ATI driver plug-ins – will do the trick from within Windows, and built-in safety cut-offs and stability tests make it incredibly hard to damage the card, though of course you are going beyond the warranty. It's also grown a little more complicated of late in that you may need to overclock the shader clock as well as the GPU and RAM for the best boosts.

In the case of NVIDIA cards, it used to be that this was twinned to the GPU speed, meaning a raise in one had a synchronous effect on the other, but for a little while now they've been able to be altered independently. So if you hit the speed ceiling on the GPU, it may yet be possible to eke more performance out of the card by pushing the shader clock a little further.

While the present situation is that you can overclock everything and be pretty confident it'll work, the future of the form is harder to call. One thing seems sure: it's not a dirty little nerdy secret anymore, but an increasingly common practice, most especially with Core 2 chips.

There's a vast aftermarket cooler industry to support it, and even cheap mobos can handle a bit of a free boost. If anything overclocking will become easier, with more and better applications to achieve it within Windows, rather than from the BIOS, and possibly more in the way of automatic volt-modding. But much depends on the future of desktop processing.

There's a big war brewing between Intel and NVIDIA as to whether the CPU or the GPU will be the major element in the PC of the near- future. Intel are pushing ray-tracing, using a multi-core CPU to render game graphics, while NVIDIA's CUDA enables its recent GeForce cards to perform parallel processing, such as video encoding and in-game physics, far faster than a CPU could manage. If either of these bed in, overclocking will need to take them into account.

At the same time, the slow move to ever-more cores potentially reduces the need for conventional overclocking, as raw clock speed continues to be a lesser concern to multi-threading and, in the case of 3D cards, the number of stream processors and texture units. That's hardly going to stop anyone from trying it, of course.

Even when its effects are minimal, overclocking's always going to be a sure-fire way of making a system feel like its yours rather than simply a collection of mass-produced parts. Modding the case is one thing, but what makes a PC is its performance. When you've painstakingly tweaked that performance into something that suits your own purposes, and it's become something that feels like you've gone far beyond what you paid for it, the system will feel more unique than all the green neon tubing in the world could ever hope to achieve.

Hot chip

While some overclocking can be done from within Windows (some mobo makers provide an app, while NVIDIA's own nTune's your man if you have an nForce board. Systool, from techpowerup.com/systool, may do the trick if you're still running Windows XP) most likely you'll be doing this from the BIOS.

Lingo varies hugely from BIOS to BIOS, so you'll need to have a scour for the screen dealing with CPUs and FSBs. It could be called 'Advanced' or possibly 'CPU settings'. On our test rig it's described as 'jumper-free configuration'. Mobo makers really don't make this easy. If you're running an unlocked chip such as the Intel Extreme Edition or AMD Phenom Black, you'll be able to alter the option called 'multiplier.' This will raise the clockspeed and nothing else in the system.

You'll see another figure called 'External clock', 'Front side bus' or 'FSB'. The CPU's speed is this multiplied by the, you guessed it, multiplier. More likely, however, you'll be tweaking the FSB. Bump it up by 10MHz increments, rebooting each time until you hit the point where Windows refuses to load. When that happens, you'll need to use the CMOS reset. This is either a small button or a moveable jumper that restores the BIOS to default settings. You'll need to refer to the mobo's manual to locate it.

Next re-overclock the bus to the highest speed you've proved works. To go higher than that, you'll need to tweak the volts, or vCore. This needs to be done by the tiniest amount possible, and you should know what others have established is a safe voltage for your processor. You may also need to lower RAM clockspeed to stop the raised FSB from making your memory fall over.

Render-revving

By contrast to all that farting about with CPUs, 3D card overclocking is incredibly simple. It's all done from within Windows, with no rebooting required, and in Vista you'll even find that the system will recover from an unsuccessful overclock without locking up or bluescreening. For an NVIDIA board, you want an app called nTune. It's an official NVIDIA tool – grab it from nvidia.com/object/sysutility.html.

Then you just need to head over to the NVIDIA Control Panel (there should be an option for it, if you right-click on your desktop) and click on 'adjust GPU settings' under 'Performance'. If you select 'Custom clock frequencies' you can alter the core bus and the memory bus. As always, do it by tiny increments (10MHz or so) to identify the exact speed ceiling. There's an option in the NV control panel called 'system stability', and there you can run a looped render test to check the card can cope with the speed hike.

ATI cards are similarly straightforward. Load up Cataylst Control Center, again by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting its name. When prompted, choose 'Advanced' rather than the 'Basic' mode. From the list of settings on the left, you want the bottom one – ATI Overdrive. The best option whether you're a first or a fourtieth timer at this is to click 'Run automated clock configuration utility.'

This will test the card's GPU and RAM at various different speeds, working out what's safe to run at. It'll take a little while, but once done you should notice that Overdrive's added a few extra MHz. Click 'Apply', then gun up a few games and give them a quick run.

Best of the rest

While the benefits of RAM overclocking are fairly minimal, it can sometimes win you an extra frame or two in game or unclog a bottleneck that's causing occasional system chug. It's vital to know the official speeds for your RAM before you tinker – if you don't know already, use free app CPU-Z (cupid.com).

And now to the BIOS; you're looking for an option to alter the DRAM clock or memory frequency, or whatever random nomenclature your mobo manufacturer has settled on. Try and push it up a notch, eg. 400MHz to 410MHz. Bear in mind that DDR/DDR2 effectively doubles its clockspeed, so your BIOS may report it as, say, 800MHz rather than 400.

The overclock may fail. In which case, you've several options. You could drop the memory's clockspeed and raise the FSB instead. Or you could increase the voltage the RAM draws. Look for something like 'DRAM voltage' or 'VDIMM' and increase it by the tiniest amount at a time. Just remember that's a real risk of frying your memory and possibly entire system if you go too far.

Alternatively, try a latency overclock instead. Look for 'latency or 'CAS' in the BIOS and try decreasing it by 0.5, eg. from 3.0 to 2.5. For a final, comedy overclock, there's your mouse. Yeah, really. While you can't increase your rodent's sensitivity, you can improve the rate at which it reports its actions to Windows.

Grab USB Rate app from tinyurl.com/2cdd88. There's four speeds listed, but aim for the third, 500Hz. If the mouse, or any other USB devices stop working, you'll need to reset the speed. Use a PS/2 keyboard, tab to the speed slider and use cursor keys to select something lower, then tab again until 'Apply' is selected.

Originally published in PC Format, Issue 219

Now read the ultimate guide to graphics cards

Mozilla readies alpha of mobile Firefox

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:07:00 GMT

We knew that Mozilla was working on a mobile version of Firefox but not that the first release would not actually be made for mobile phones.

Instead, the foundation is about to release an alpha version for Nokia's N810 Internet Tablet with a view to having developers test it to the maximum extent before porting the software to actual phones.

Browse by touching

The so-called 'Fennec' release will be announced some time next week, with the first full beta likely to arrive in 2009. It will support Java and AJAX and will use third-party add-ons in the same way that the desktop version of Firefox does.

Mozilla's alpha release will also included the much-anticipated ability to navigate using fingertip gestures on the N810's touchscreen, a feature that's sure to make it to the final release on other mobile platforms.

Sony brings AC charging to PS3 controllers

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 05:00:00 GMT

With the increasing number of PS3 peripherals coming out of Sony these days, we get the nasty feeling that anything they lose in future price cuts on the console itself, they'll claw back in must-have add-ons that no one can resist.

The latest is a solution to the problem of having to leave the PS3 turned on to juice its USB ports for charging wireless Sixaxis or DualShock 3 controllers – a charger on the end of an AC adapter instead.

Simple solution

The ¥2,800 (£17) CECHZA 1J (way to go, Sony) will arrive in Japan first, on 18 December, offering two USB ports on one end of the adapter.

The latter, of course, plugs into the wall, while the USB ports feed your controllers via the mini USB cables they came with. There's no word yet on a release outside Japan, but it can't be long.

Apple shares surge on MacBook hopes

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:23:00 GMT

Looks like we're not the only people excited about Apple's mystery announcement next week (hint – it's a bunch of new laptops): traders have jumped on Apple stock, pushing it up by almost 10 per cent.

The US markets appear to have renewed their liking for Steve Jobs and his products not just on the back of the anticipated new line of MacBooks, but also simply because the stock appears to offer great value for money.

Entry point for investors

According to Reuters, the fact that the stock is now worth less than half of what it was a year ago makes it a bargain for investors looking for a sure thing in troubled times.

One analyst explained, "Given the recent sell-off in technology stocks, Apple's stock offers a valuation entry point not seen in years."

Considering that the company's market value had slipped by 40 per cent over the last month, we'll bet there are a few guys in black polo necks breathing a huge sigh of relief about that point of view.

Smart Coke machine looks out for crime

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:08:00 GMT

Coca Cola has brought us more than its fair share of pleasure over the years, but we're pretty sure that it's never saved anyone's bacon before – something that's about to change in Japan.

The fizzy drinks giant there is currently setting up a high-tech vending machine that is supposed to offer reassurance and keep an eye on the mean streets for criminals and their goings-on.

Watchful eye

Not only does the machine sport a webcam that scans the surroundings and records everything it sees, but it also contains a phone with a hotline to the local cop shop in Toyohashi, western Japan.

The thinking behind it is that the camera acts as a deterrent to casual street crime and the phone as a reassuring quick link to help. If the first trial is a success, more machines are planned for the rest of Japan.

It's all very well, but we can't help thinking that all the camera will see is scenes of bloody murder as perps catch their vics as they mess around with a Coke machine instead of just running away.

Panasonic takes stab at wireless chargers

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 01:54:00 GMT

Over the years, we've probably seen more failed attempts to market wire-free gadget chargers than we've had hot pot noodles, so it's with a cautious eye that we view news of yet another stab at the technology.

This time, however, the electromagnetic induction charger comes from Panasonic Electric Works, so there's at least a slim possibility of it making it to the shops one day.

Light weight

Speaking of slim, the unnamed charging coil is just 1mm thick, so it should be a relatively easy sell to device makers looking to keep the bulk down. Typically, wireless chargers are intended for phones, MP3 players and other portable devices where weight matters.

The Panasonic subsidiary says it hopes to get the device and its accompanying base station that connects to the mains into stores in the first half of next year. We won't hold our breath.

YouTube boldly goes with full TV shows

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:50:00 GMT

We all should have seen this one coming – a few days after introducing a new cinema-style viewing mode, YouTube has introduced full-length TV shows as it aims to find the juicer revenue streams.

The TV shows come from the archives of American network CBS and are available to watch only in the US, so if you're reading this outside the States, you're out of luck.

Monetary motivation

Those able to get hold of the new content will find a small selection of old dramas marked with a special 'full-length' logo, including Star Trek (the original series), Beverly Hills 90210 (ditto) and The Young and the Restless.

The official YouTube blog explained the move: "As we test this new format, we also want to ensure that our partners have more options when it comes to advertising on their full-length TV shows.

"You may see in-stream video ads (including pre-, mid- and post-rolls) embedded in some of these episodes; this advertising format will only appear on premium content where you are most comfortable seeing such ads."

Honesty pays?

Whether or not such mouldy old content will be enough to persuade the TiVo generation to sit through ads remains to be seen, but we're glad to see the YouTube guys at least being upfront about it.

Next-gen OLED screens to have touch built-in

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:15:00 GMT

OLED-display.net is reporting that German scientists have created a new type of OLED display with touch sensitive technology built in.

Researchers from the high tech Fraunhofer IPMS Institute will be unveiling the screen at the fabulously named 4th Global Plastic Electronics conference in Berlin later this month.

This is big news because unlike the current touch screens found on iPhones or sat navs, the new touch OLED doesn't need an additional touch-sensitive layer: the touch controls are built in to the display itself.

A touch exaggerated

OLED screens are already the favourite choice to replace LCD technology, thanks to their faster response time, lack of viewing angle restrictions and not needing a heavy, power-hungry backlight. OLEDs can even be made into flexible, transparent screens.

The new development promises to enable everything from ultra-lightweight laptops to cheap touch-sensitive mobile phones.

Jörg Amelung, head of organic materials and systems at the Fraunhofer IPMS is particularly excited: "The touch function generates a completely new feeling of light. It´s like magic: turning on the light simply by a hand movement."

Er, calm down, Jörg. It's a nice advance but not really the subject for a prime-time, one-hour TV special starring David Blaine. Unless perhaps it features Blaine being force-fed crushed up touch OLEDs until his stomach ruptures. We'd watch that on a fuzzy old CRT.

LG Wirewize untangles home cinema cabling

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:16:00 GMT

Connecting your brand new Blu-ray player to your old projection telly can be a nightmare, especially when many components still don't ship with cables in the box.

Today, LG in the US launched a website to help you untangle your rat's nest of AV cabling with a step-by-step guide to connecting your home cinema system.

Wirewize (www.wirewize.com) lets you choose individual components, then shows what cables you need to hook them up and how to do it - including illustrations of the back panels of each device.

The website is aimed at a US audience so some of the names are unfamiliar, but it does seem to have a fairly wide selection of current and older models from all the major electronics brands (not just LG). If you can't find a specific model number for your aging telly, you can always choose 'generic device'.

Obsolete options

One downside is that Wirewize seems a little of date. You can select tape decks and VHS recorders but there are no MP3 players, PMPs or media streamers listed on the site at launch - often the trickiest devices to get working with older kit.

The site then recommends a selection of cables (with links to purchase online) and gives a 1-2-3 guide of how to plug them in. The cable choice makes sense, with the site choosing HDMI over component and only resorting to analogue connections when necesary.

However, some back-panel photos are missing from the site, even for popular LCD and plasma tellies

Overall, Wirewize is a good site for anyone struggling with getting their system to work - and definitely worth trying before you spend time and money on customer support or tech call-out services.

Electrolux fridge keeps students' food safe

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:42:00 GMT

The winner of Electrolux's Design Lab 2008 competition is Flatshare, a stackable fridge for houseshares that consists of a base station and up to four stackable modules.

The modules allow each person in a house to have his or her own chilling space and can be customized with colourful skins as well as with add-ons like bottle openers - and locks, presumably.

Handles on the side make it easy to transport the modules when the rent cheque bounces.

Flatshare is the brainchild of Stefan Buchberger, from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He noted "There is nothing more disgusting than a dirty fridge in a shared flat," before adding wisely, "It gets filthy because no one person feels responsible for cleaning it."

Spaced Lab

Electrolux's annual Design Lab contest sees design students come up with a range of concept white goods that might just make it into future production.

It's well worth heading over to the Design Lab photo gallery on Flickr, where the Flatshare is shown stocked with orange juice and eggs. Today's design students are clearly a healthy bunch: when I was at college, fridges were all about half-eaten takeaway curries, boxes of German wine and jars of mysterious pickle.

Other bonkers products in the showcase include a kinetic-powered cooler bag, a Wi-Fi laundry hamper (for wireless bras?), a santizing clothes rack, a toaster that burns headlines on your wholewheat and a social networking recipe generator ("now with electronic tongue!").

For his efforts in de-grotting the student lifestyle, Stefan wins a six-month internship at an Electrolux global design centres and Euros 5000 (£3950), which should keep him in eggs and OJ throughout his work placement.

ITN '100 year' news archive goes online

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

ITN has brokered a deal with universities in the UK to make some of its archive footage available online.

The clips, which date back 100 years, will be available to students as of this week under the banner NewsFilm Online, and can be found at nfo.ac.uk.

Chief executive of ITN Mark Wood said about the project: "This great video content brings the events of the past century to life.

"The NewsFilm initiative is yet another example of the rapidly expanding use of video content at all levels of education."

Subscription based

The amount of footage available adds up to 3,000 hours, which is around 60,000 stories. And it's not just video, either, with ITN adding 25,000 programme scripts to the website.

Footage includes the 1969 Moon landings, and news about the death of Princess Diana.

Students need to be in a university that subscribes to the service to view the content. The project is being funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), ITN, Reuters and the British Universities Film & Video Council.

Man has to sell yacht for €22.50 after auction snafu

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:21:00 GMT

The German courts have ruled that man who sold his yacht for €22.50 on an online auction site after failing to set a minimum bid must go through with the transaction.

A Cologne court ruled that the man must indeed flog his 6-metre yacht for the fee after deciding that his claims of 'technical problems' with AllesAuktion.de didn't, ahem, float.

Speaking to English language, German news site The Local – court spokesman Hubertus Nolte said: "The standard laws of business transactions also apply to internet auctions.

Make good

"Now the seller must make good on his offer. He can't say after the fact that he didn't want to sell.

"I remember a similar case that involved an tractor that should have been auctioned for a minimum of €60,000, but went for €51 when the owner forgot to set a minimum bid.

"The bidder won the court case in this instance too."

The man in question was told that unless he handed over the boat he would have to pay the €12,000 legal fee.

He probably wishes that he'd noticed his mistake earlier, but that ship – it seems – has sailed.

The Pirate Bay Italy block deemed illegal

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:12:00 GMT

The Pirate Bay has seen a block on its website in Italy overturned by a judge.

The website was censored in Italy back in August when an Italian prosecutor managed to get the majority of ISPs to stop their customers from accessing the site.

After an appeal by the website, however, this decision has been overturned, and better yet deemed illegal by the Court of Bergamo.

This change of tact may set a precedent for the access of foreign websites in Italy, mainly that no foreign website can be blocked for having content that allegedly infringes copyright.

No provision for copyright infringement

Pirate Bay's lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi spoke to Torrent Freak about the decision and said: "Under Italian law, this is possible only for child porn and for unauthorized gambling, but there is no such provision for copyright infringement.

"We have to make sure that no legislative bill promoting such filtering provisions will be passed in the future.

"At the European level, many authorities pointed out the need to find a balance between the enforcement of alleged copyright infringements, users' rights, and privacy issues."

Should ISPs protect us on the net?

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:32:00 GMT

An anti-virus software company has called on ISPs to protect their customers, rather than leaving it to consumers to do themselves.

With the House of Lords debating internet security, F-Secure's UK and Ireland manager Richard Hales has insisted that it is not the government or the consumers that should look after security, but the internet service providers.

ISPs are currently doing their utmost to be seen as merely conduits to the internet, meaning the active monitoring of people's downloads and browsing would not only be a massively unpopular breach of privacy but also ramp up their responsibility.

Stronger control

However, Hales insists that the government should assert stronger control over ISPs and make them provide 'security' as part of the package.

"The Government is right when it says consumers should not manage their own Internet security. Many people do not realise how vulnerable their personal information is and many rely on outdated security software or even worse, none at all," said Hales.

"In contrast to other members of the EU with much tougher restrictions, the Government has been slow off the mark in dealing with Internet crime. In a perfect world, the consumer would be completely removed from the equation with internet service providers taking responsibility.

"This would mean that Internet security would be a de-facto addition to any and every Internet connection, security-as-a-service offered by ISPs protects customers much more effectively."

Escalating internet threats

He continues: "Our own experience of 175 ISPs globally shows that in cases where security is part of the package, in excess of 70 per cent of consumers make use of the service.

"By asserting stronger control over ISPs and introducing industry-wide security standards, users will be better protected from escalating internet threats.

"It is also the responsibility of the security industry to work with local Government and international law enforcement agencies to report Internet crime and bring criminals to justice."

Of course, should this happen and ISPs opt for companies other than F-Secure, Hales' comments could well come back to haunt him.

Symantec to send comp winner into space

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:22:00 GMT

We at TechRadar don't often publish details about competitions because, well, they're not very tech-related, but the latest one from the makers of Norton Anti-Virus is a humdinger.

As the press release says, less than 500 people have ever been into space, but one lucky virus-fighter will get the chance to join that exclusive club in the sky (no, not that one... apparently you need harnesses for that in space).

Three competition winners will be first invited for a zero-gravity flight on the 'Vomit Comet', where they can experience weightlessness and all the fun that brings, then one of these will ascend to the final frontier.

Fit

We're not sure how Symantec plans to choose the grand prize winner, who will spend around five minutes in space before being brought back down (we know it's a short amount of time, but it's space. Come on).

We assume they'll be assessing those winners to make sure they won't have a heart attack or something on the way up... you know, sensible things like that, and not a simple fight to the death kind of competition when weightless.

The competition is meant to represent the fastest software from Norton's new software, which can blah blah blah, we don't care about the reasons, we're going to register on the website four billion times (if we're allowed) to get a chance to see the great firewall of China from the sky.

Netflix: Blu-ray has had little effect on business

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:19:00 GMT

The chief financial officer of Netflix has played down suggestions the future of video rentals is in hi-def, after he said Blu-ray will have little effect on the company's business this year.

Speaking to Home Media magazine, CFO Barry McCarthy explained that for 2008 the format won't really bring in money, stating that "It may grow after the holiday selling season, if sales are slow and prices are cut more aggressively."

The company also recently revealed, according to the magazine, the percentage of people renting HD discs was in single figures.

Price rise

The comments come after news Netflix is to make its membership more expensive to make way for unlimited rental of Blu-ray discs. The price of a monthly membership is being upped by $1 dollar (60p).

This will happen 5 November. Those who do not want to rent hi-def titles must adjust their membership via Netflix's website.

Channel 4 abandons radio

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:47:00 GMT

Channel 4 has canned its radio projects, in a cost-cutting move reportedly saving the broadcaster £100 million.

Fifteen jobs are to go immediately, with a question mark over the future of former head of BBC Radio 5 Live Bob Shennan, who joined to head up C4's radio projects last year.

The broadcaster was to launch a series of radio stations, including a competitor to BBC Radio 4, and youth music channel E4 Radio, as part of a second digital radio platform that would carry a host of other new channels.

Planned stations included E4 Radio, the Radio-4-a-like Channel 4 Radio, and music station Pure4.

No more, unfortunately

The move follows GCap Media's canning of its own DAB stations earlier this year, including TheJazz.

Channel 4 chief executive, Andy Duncan, said: "We've taken this decision very reluctantly.

"We've pursued our radio plans in good faith and continue to believe DAB has a strong future and that we could make a return from radio in the medium term.

"Frustratingly, our plans have been overtaken by a drastic recent downturn in our revenues and we will have to forgo this future profit stream."