How to send big files

Mashable has a post about seven ways to send huge files (up to 25 times of what Gmail currently offers - 20MB attachments) but as it often happens the readers' comments are even more interesting than the original post. There is over a dozen other FREE (as in lunch) services/tricks how to do that listed and described in the comments (some of them covering the volumes of up to 2 gigs) - definitely worth reading.

How to speed up the Firefox browser

If you have a broadband connection, you can use pipelining (you don't have to know what that is) to speed up your Firefox. To do that, follow the below:

• Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Find “network.http” in the list of options, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
• Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
• Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.
  

Searching blogs

There are hundreds of different search engines around but searching the massive iceberg of blogland (nine tenths of it under the radar) is not always their forte. Enter Zuula. It's a search engine for many things but their blog-search capacity seems to be particularly impressive (in fact, they also cover del.icio.us and a few other, not strictly bloggish, sites.

http://www.zuula.com/blog_srch/blog_index.html

YouTube to the max

Well, after following this link you won't ever ever have problems with YouTube clips and videos!

http://mashable.com/2007/05/05/download-youtube-video/

Amazon.com's useful tools

Amazon.com is not just for buying books - it can be used as a very useful database and information center about titles. Two most interesting tools are Search Inside function and A9 search engine.

In the books which are marked with the logo of Search Inside you may not only check the table of contents (something that even publishers of the book don't do very often), index, sample pages and other portions of the text but also find terms IN the text of the books. Of course, if your search query is very general, you're going to get millions of hits, but if you're looking for a very specific term or name, or only remember the name of the main character in a book, or the name of the town in which the story is set, the search will yield the titles in which your term or word appears.


A9 does not only power the search that makes Search Inside possible but allows you to search information on all Amazon products ("ordinary" googling may give you a pointer to a title on Amazon but will not search inside the book or customers' comments).


So, even if you're not buying from Amazon, you can still check whether the inside of the book has what you needed from it.

TextArc

How about looking at a text intead of reading it? This is what TextArc does - feed it a text and it will produce a combination of the index, concordance and summary. Some of the samples on the site are pretty stunning - like Alice in Wonderland or Hamlet. Presumably, this can help to uncover the idden strucures and meanings of texts. No sure about that, or whether playing with TextArc will qualify as reading a text. Probably not but it's still fun.

Voice of the Shuttle

Googling Google is good but when you have so many search results with no grading or evaluation how good this or that resource is, one needs something more organized and proven. Enter Voice of the Shuttle. Run by the English Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, VoS is a collection of carefully selected, verified and (briefly) annotated links in all the disciplines that might be possibly of interest for English or American Studies students. Ok, linguistics seems to be kinda under-represented but other than that ... A great resource!