Zen Monthly Newsletter

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Microsoft opened a new "mega datacentre" in Dublin last month, the largest complex it has built outside the US, to support online services including its Azure 'cloud computing' hosting platform and the recently introduced Bing search engine. The company chose Ireland for its year-round cool climate, according to Arne Josefsberg, general manager of infrastructure services at Microsoft's Global Foundation Services, who said the facility would use "outside air economisation" to deliver greater power efficiency. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, said the growth of online services would lead to more datacentres being built outside the US, citing the need for datacentres "everywhere on Earth".

Big technology vendors are hurrying to build giant datacentres that will enable them to offer more Internet-based services to consumers and enterprises over the next few years. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are ignoring the recession and leading a global 'cloud computing' datacentre construction race that they believe will change the face of business and consumer computing.

By 2020, it is estimated that technology and consumer electronic products will account for 45 per cent of domestic energy use. The electricity consumption of datacentres resulting from the explosion of Internet use is also becoming a major issue. Since 2006, PC Pro magazine has been working with the environmental charity UK CEED on National eWell-Being Awards. Dedicated to celebrating efforts to use ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in helping society and the environment, the awards recognise those working to reduce energy consumption and the adverse effects of ICT. Local authorities, businesses, charities and academic institutions submitted some remarkable work in areas such as greening datacentres and improving public services. The National eWell-Being Awards online digital magazine highlights this year's winning projects.

Microsoft has announced that "the final, completed version" of the Windows 7 operating system has been released to manufacturing (RTM) in preparation for general availability in October.

Samsung is to drop its 1.8 inch hard disks to put its energies into solid state drives, according to a number of Internet reports. Pundits say the electronics company has suspended its development of HDD to change its focus to the SSD market, which would leave Toshiba as the only manufacturer of the 1.8 inch hard drives. SSDs - Solid State Drives - are silent, consume far less power, and are more robust than any mechanical hard drive. Because of higher speed and near-infallible reliability, the solid state alternative has always been an attractive option, but now falling prices are making the drives viable for everyday use in PCs and laptops.

Last month's newsletter included an item about the free disk space viewer for Windows, Drivespacio, recommended in a recent edition of the BBC's Click Online programme. Reader Sam Duckfield wrote in to recommend an alternative, TreeSize, that he thinks might just have the edge on DriveSpacio. "I've been using it for years and have found it indispensable", says Sam.

In January's newsletter, we reported on the launch of a new .tel domain, designed to put contact information online using business card style Web pages optimised for mobile access. Unlike standard domain names, which usually address independently controlled and designed Web sites, .tel domains are controlled by the registry operator, Telnic. The London based company hosts the pages and owners must use a Telnic Web site control panel to edit their content. Typical examples can be seen at http://tcfcommunications.tel and http://birmingham.locations.eoffice.tel - two pages found with the help of Qwista, a new search engine dedicated to the "business e-card" listings.

When the iPhone arrived, users scrambled to get their hands on them. Competitors scrambled to make a device that would have the same appeal. Now we have Android phones, Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold alternatives, all vying for position. Two of these will outshine the rest, says Jack Wallen, because they have the advantages of open source. At ZDNet, he lists ten reasons open-source smartphones will outshine the iPhone.

Test your hearing and see how well you can discern sound in the ultrasonic range. Download ultrasonic ringtones and use them on your phone. The ringtones are popular with teenagers because adults cannot hear them when phones ring. If you pick one at the limit of your own hearing range, many other people will not be able to hear it.

If anyone sends you much-too-large photos or other graphic files that take ages to download and would need a cinema screen to display at full size - but say they don't know how to reduce them to sensible proportions - there's a Web site they can visit that will do the job for them before they send you anything else. It's ImageMerger.net, named for the drag and drop two-photo image blender that's also on the site.

Have you ever had a PDF file that you needed to convert to an editable Word document? There have been a few software solutions over the years, but even some of the most expensive offerings have been prone to losing something in translation. AnyBizSofts PDF to Word Converter does an excellent job - and it's free. You can convert to Word 2007 (.docx) or Word 2003 (.doc) and the company sells versions for PDF to Excel, PowerPoint and HTML.

Here's a Web resource where you can download free Excel templates, financial calculators, calendars, templates and articles that are designed to increase productivity, educate, entertain and help manage time and finances using Excel.

This is an online application that can take any plain text and automatically enrich it with links to relevant Wikipedia articles. In other words, it turns plain text into hypertext. Copy and paste your text into the provided field and click on the Start Wikify button. The application will run its process and present a Wikified version that you can take away. A clever idea, but much too anxious to please, Wikify finds and inserts Wikipedia links for almost every word, including the likes of "this" and "that" and even individual letters of the alphabet given half a chance. When it can be toned down a little, it might be something more than a try-once diversion.

There are plenty of online dictionaries and thesauruses that will give you the definition of a word. WordNik goes beyond the obvious and provides example sentences, word usage in recent Twitter posts, plus Flickr images, statistics (rarity or popularity), audio pronunciations and more. The site mines several sources including Web pages, books, magazines and newspapers to show the word you query in everyday use.

"An aphorism is not an aphorism unless you know what it means" - Winston Churchill.

Would you want to watch online videos or browse the Internet on your TV? Iogear has a wireless USB-to-VGA adapter for sending anything you can see on your PC to the TV set in your living room. It can support streaming video up to 720p (720 horizontal pixels) and a desktop PC resolution up to 1,600 x 1,200 pixels. At around 150, it's not cheap, but there may be similar products arriving soon that will cost less. In the US, new-launch ZillionTV is offering "a free, one-of-a-kind device that connects easily to both the TV set and home network" and a choice of content. "You simply turn on the TV set and select whether you want to watch free ad-supported programmes, or rent or buy something". Eventually, someone will have the nouse to build a TV set with plug-in Internet connectivity and its own mini operating system and browser, along the lines of Google's new Chrome OS. Meanwhile, Samsung is already introducing sets in the UK that use the Yahoo! Widgets TV platform, allowing viewers to browse a range of video sites like YouTube.

Rather than the stay-at-home activity that you might expect it describes, "couchsurfing" actually involves sitting in front of your computer for only a short time, before getting out of the house altogether to try a new low-cost travel experience. Couchsurfing is an Internet based scheme that puts generous people with floor or couch space in various parts of the world in touch with travellers looking for a free place to stay for two or three nights. Sometime journalist, Fleur Britten, who worked on the pilot edition of Vogue China, put it to the test, spending ten weeks travelling in Russia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Her adventures are recounted in a new book: On the Couch - Tales of Couchsurfing a Continent, published by Collins.

According to The Jerusalem Post, Koogle is the name of a new Hebrew-language Internet search engine that allows surfing without getting drowned in sexually explicit and other offensive material. The brainchild of Yossi Altman, Koogle is a pun on the Jewish noodle pudding known as "kugel". The new search engine may be a boon to the haredi religious community, whose rabbis often ban the use of the Internet altogether because it provides access to pornography. The new Koogle search engine filters out the unwanted items and even prevents a user from purchasing goods online on the Sabbath, when business transactions are prohibited. The site also does not allow buyers to purchase forbidden items, such as televisions. Rabbis encouraged the development of the search engine in order to solve the problem of the haredi religious community in Israel that often uses Internet cafes to surf surreptitiously. "This is a kosher alternative for ultra-Orthodox Jews so that they may surf the Internet," Altman said. "If you try to buy something on the Sabbath, it won't let you".

Search engine Ixquick was praised for its outstanding security and data handling practices last month by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - http://www.eff.org. The EFF praised Ixquick for its truly excellent privacy policy, which has been cited as the best in the industry. Ixquick does not record users IP addresses or make a record of their searches. The EFF also praised Ixquick for supporting HTPPS, a security feature that prevents eavesdropping as data moves across the Net. It should allow a user in China to search using 'politically sensitive' terms without authorities there being able to intercept the query. We hope that other search engines can catch up with https://www.ixquick.com some day, said EFF technical analyst Peter Eckersley, noting that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! do not offer the HTTPS service.

Unlike Google, Bing or any other traditional search engine, Collecta searches "whats happening right now". When you enter a search term, it looks through social media content like Twitter updates, blog posts, comments, news articles, Flickr photos etc, and shows results that list new items as they appear on the Web for the first time.