Volunteers will receive a purpose-built broadband measurement unit which can be plugged into the existing modem/router. This is called the SamKnows Whitebox.

If you are interested in helping by hosting a SamKnows Whitebox, and playing a part in changing the face of the European broadband industry, then please sign up on this page! It’s worth taking the time to read through the requirements before proceeding.

When upgrading the account is out of the question (even though it’s really cheap). Sorting through the emails would be a never ending task, and unfortunately, Gmail doesn’t offer any built in feature to find the largest emails in your mailbox. So in this scenario, one has to turn to a third party offering to handle this tedious task.

One solution would be to use Gmail’s IMAP service to download the emails to Outlook, and sort through the emails using Outlook’s email sorting capabilities. Outlook will connect to your Gmail account via IMAP and therefore when you delete an emails with big attachments locally, the same happens in your online inbox as well.

If you however find the above workarounds a little complicated, and that it would take ages to download all email, there’s an even simpler method that won’t even require you download or install anything – it’s called findbigmail.com.

This incredibly useful and simple to use web service will quickly find all the big email messages in your Gmail account that are taking up the maximum space. These messages are categorized with special labels to help you decide which of them should be removed to recover more space.

To get started, you simply connect your Gmail account with Find Big Mail using Google’s OAuth. It then scans all your messages for their sizes and send you an email notification once the scan is over.

You can then log into your Gmail account and act on messages marked with the labels to instantly reclaim space. I have freed up about 1GB of space from files I didn’t even know I had in my account.

For business users, this could also be an incredibly precious tool, since it can be used to delete any unnecessary files from your account, therefore you might be able to reduce storage costs from your Gmail service.

This service is run on donation basis, so if you like the tool, a donation to the team would be appreciated to help them cover the costs and keep the service running.

This website is www.virustotal.com.  VirusTotal is a service that analyzes suspicious files and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines. This free, independent service features the use of multiple antivirus engines (Which is very important to be able to capture the newest viruses as quickly as possible) and real-time automatic updates of virus signatures. additionally, it also provides detailed results from each antivirus engine.

For those who are reluctant to install an anti virus software on their system (bad idea!) or maybe for those who just want to take the extra step to scan certain suspicious files for any infections, this could be the service you are looking for!

Recently, I came across a great website, Icon Finder, which allows you to search for icon for almost every application. IconFinder.com allows you to search through a huge database of  almost 124,176 icons.

All you need to do is type the name of the application or a web service and it will show you all the available icons available in the database.

The site has a very clean and uncluttered interface that makes it easy to find anything you want!

This new website allows you to virtually decorate any room and chosing from thousands of different colours so you can actually see how the room would look like, before you take the plunge. You can test drive the website for free, but if you want to save the images, you’d have to create a free account, or for further features you can sign up for a pro account. This could be also a very handy tool for interior designers and enthusiasts.

One small caution note… although some colours might appear great on the computer screen, some colours might be very different or difficult to produce as paint, so keep in mind that the end result might not looks 100% as the image.

Twitter 2.0 – my vision for a better twitter.

I’ve taken some time to write this post and write my ideas on how twitter can be improved and did my best to create a cheat proof system that would allow twitter users to have a better experience. I’ve taken my points and joined Twitter, digg and eBay to finally create the system below.

• Voting buttons – (digg style) – the voting buttons on the side of the picture would allow the people who receive the tweet to vote on it’s value. A person that finds the value useful can vote for it. The second button is to add to favourites, and the bottom button is to rate the post as spam.
• Score Bar – The score bar calculates the percentage of good value posts together with the posts considered as spam, and creates a user score. – this however should be calculated only based on the user tweets, and not in any way relative to other users. It can also be calculated according to a certain time period (Say 30 days). I got the idea from the eBay seller rating.
• User States – Active, Silent or Disabled – Any users that are within set target user score would be the normal active users, silent users are those who get below a set user score threshold and are therefore punished by switching them to silent mode, where they can only receive tweets, or maybe limit the URL posting capabilities. any users who end up in silent mode for an x amount of times will be disabled – and probably considered as spammy accounts.
• User grouping – this is an additional feature that I think would enhance Twitter’s usability a lot. There should be an easy way to categorise the people you follow into groups. Like for example – twitter users who talk about technology, some might be bloggers, some might be companies and organisations etc…

In my opinion, these are all great ideas that could be incredibly useful for all users and to have a better experience while using twitter. Let me know what you think on the above points in the comment area. I do have a lot more ideas on how twitter can be improved… but ill write those up in another post later on. I’m looking forward to hear your thoughts!

I have found the perfect tool for you – Namechk.com. This is an online tool which let you check your desired username across 84 popular websites at once. So this tool can help you find better or unique username that you can sign up with across these sites.

At first I was looking for a PHP software that I can install on my server. I actually tried quite a few, and managed to come to a conclusion on a final decision to go use the Clientexec application. Installation wasn’t so straightforward, in-fact at the end I just gave up, and asked my web host guys to do it for me. It required messing up with some php.ini files to install ioncube loaders (way too complicated for me). Once the software was up and running, I couldn’t really figure out everything, and after a few days I just scrapped the thing off.

Started looking around again for a remote hosted solution; basically an online invoicing service. And a after a few minutes of looking around, I bumped into zoho.com. They offer a whole suite of services, and the online invoicing was one of their services. I went ahead to register for a free account and I fell in love with it in the first couple of minutes!

Setup was extremely easy, and it guides you step by step, some very basic users would probably not understand the e-mail section since it requires the basic understanding of variables in the email templates (just like the Microsoft Office Mail Merge options) but for me it was incredibly easy. You can upload company logos to customize the invoice and also there are several templates you can use for the invoice styles – a very basic but very useful feature.

I started inputting client details (that actually reminded me to try to update them all with the latest details) and I started setting up scheduled invoices for all my client’s domains and hosting accounts. The process was extremely easy. One major feature that would save you tons of time was the recurring profiles. It allows you to schedule daily, monthly, or yearly invoices so the software would send an invoice automatically so you don’t have to take care of renewals. It also integrates with paypal and some other merchant services, so you can even automatically process online payments. For clients that prefer other payment methods, you can also just input the payment details when a payment arrives, and the client is automatically informed that a payment has been processed.

A very important feature for me is data backup. At first I didn’t find any information on that, however using the built in feedback facility in the website, I got in touch with support, and I got the info needed within less than a day, they assured me that all data is backed up very frequently, and that there is an exporting feature that allows you to backup the data locally if needed. That gives you an extra piece of mind!

Other great features include the ability to store customer details, extensive reporting features, and also automatic reminders for due invoices – very handy indeed!

I applied for a paid account after only about 1 hr of using it, since I’m absolutely sure that it will work very well for me! So if you are looking around for such a software, just go ahead and give it a try at http://invoice.zoho.com – very highly recommended!