Zen Monthly Newsletter

If you would like to listen to the podcast for this newsletter please follow this link: Zen Monthly October 2009 Podcast

Google's sparse home page has hardly changed since the search engine launched over a decade ago, which has prompted 'search and save' start-up company WebMynd in Cambridge to sponsor a competition to redesign it. First prize is a MacBook Air and the competition closes at the end of this month. A panel of judges will pick the best designs and submit them to Google and they will be available from WebMynd for anyone to use as add-on skins for the search engine in the meantime. WebMynd offers a browser extension that lets users create their own custom search, placing results from other sites at the side of the screen in Google, Yahoo! and Bing and making visited sites available for offline browsing.

PC Pro is offering parents and teachers a free download of the magazine's 'Give Your Kids The IT Edge' lessons for 5-15 year olds. It features step-by-step tutorials for each of the school key stages, introducing schoolchildren of all ages to "fun" computing challenges, including how to create a blog using the free Edublogs software, which is used by schools across the country. The guide is a PDF that parents and teachers are free to print out and distribute at home or in schools.

Software manuals are mines of useful information, but quick answers are often hard to find. Fortunately, there are some ready-to-print PDF cheat sheets for commonly used applications that provide handy guides to software productivity essentials. They cover Microsoft Office, Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook, browsers like Firefox and Google's Chrome, as well as shortcutting some of the complexities of PhotoShop - and even Linux, for which there's a wall poster as well as a cheat sheet for beginners.

This excellent and easy to use tool gives you the ability to create bar graphs, excel graphs, line graphs, area graphs and pie charts online. You can either create a custom graph, or choose one of the sample graphs and edit it according to your needs. To save for use in a document, or to include on a Web page, simply right click on the final image to save and store it on your PC. There are plenty of competing online tools online, such as ChartPart.com, charts.hohli.com and onlinecharttool.com, but Chartgo produces some of the most attractive results and is so simple to use that it's hard to beat.

OnlineLogoMaker does what it says on the tin and comes in handy for anyone who needs a new logo but is reluctant to pay professional fees. A Web-based tool that allows you to create a logo without registration, OnlineLogoMaker is completely free, regardless of the logo type: it can be a business logo, or just a simple logo for your personal Web site or blog. The online tool is very easy to use. You can include and adapt your own images, add text and symbols, and then customise position, size, colours, fonts and shadows until you're happy with the result. When the logo is ready, you simply download and save.

Cycling to work instead of driving is greener, cheaper and will help to keep you fit. You knew that already, but did you know that you can save money by hiring or buying a brand new bike through the Government's Cycle to Work initiative? You might even find a free second-hand bicycle available locally on Freecycle or SnaffleUp, which are recycling (not bicycling) sites.

Most of the recent efforts to produce more environmentally friendly cars have focused on alternative fuels. British engineering company, Torotrak, has turned its expertise to another vehicle component with the development of a new transmission that it claims will not only slash CO2 emissions but also boost performance and improve fuel efficiency by up to 20 per cent. Instead of the conventional toothed gears found in traditional transmissions, the companys Continuously Variable Transmissions (CVTs) and Infinitely Variable Transmissions (IVTs) use innovative steel discs and rollers. In place of a conventional gearbox, the new transmission offers seamless acceleration from standstill to cruising speed and back again, eliminating the fuel waste and polluting 'emission spikes' caused by gear changes. Fuel efficiency is also increased, even at high speeds, because the transmission ensures that the engine operates at low speed and optimum efficiency, running at around half the normal fuel-burning RPM.

Graffiti on public buildings and historic monuments in Britain costs millions to remove and often can't be cleaned away using basic caustic solutions without damaging surfaces. Local authorities will welcome news of a coating that could help preserve some of our most valued buildings, recently announced by a research group at the Fraunhofer Institute in Potsdam. Our innovative polymer film seals the pores in the substrate, so that graffiti paint doesnt penetrate. But its micro-porous structure also creates a hydrophobic barrier that allows water vapour to escape from the building while at the same time preventing the infiltration of rainwater", says Prof Andr Laschewsky, who heads the team. In trials, coated samples of ancient stone and brick were repeatedly covered with graffiti that was removed completely each time.

Spotify has denounced SaveSpotify - a rogue Web site that claims it allows users to download music from the popular online music player - making it clear that the newcomer is not an official add-on for the Swedish streaming service. Spotify is a unique free music resource that allows users to find and play almost any album - or almost any track by almost any artist. It works in much the same way as an online commercial radio station, albeit with fewer interruptions, but allows the listener to choose what they listen to, offering a virtually unlimited range of titles when it comes to finding and deciding what should be played.

Sucuri is a free Web site security monitoring service that will scan your site at regular intervals and notify you via e-mail, SMS or Twitter about any unauthorised changes. It checks for things like DNS and Whois hijacking, malware injection and site defacement. You can also choose to be notified if your domain is added to a blacklist database (SpamHaus, Safe Browsing, etc) or try Sucuri's instant WIGS (Web Information Gathering System) tool to see what else it can find out about your Web site before you sign up for anything.

What does the Internet know about you? - that's the question posed by a new Web site that checks your browser history and determines which of the Web's 5,000 most popular sites you have visited recently. Virtually any Web site that you point your browser to could do the same thing; this one chooses to tell you about it.

The European Commission has published a no holds-barred report detailing how Intel broke EC Treaty antitrust rules, using illegal practices to exclude competitors. The document describes the tactics Intel used to make sure it kept ahead of its 'we try harder to cost less' rival chip maker, AMD. As Intel was digesting the news, AMD was having a much better time of it, announcing its cheapest-ever quad-core chip. The Athlon II X4 620 should sell for under 70 in the UK, much less than AMD's previous quad-core processor, the Phenom X4 9950. Intel's cheapest Core 2 Quad, the 2.33GHz Q8200, which is slower, costs around 105.

Inspired by the high profile of its Christian American counterpart, Muslim creationism is becoming increasingly visible online. In the year of Charles Darwin's bicentenary, on scores of Web sites and in dozens of books with titles like The Evolution Deceit, a new and well-funded version of evolution denial seems to have found its voice. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, recognises the impact of this new phenomenon: There has been a sharp upturn in hostility to teaching evolution in the classroom", he says. The patron saint of this new movement, the ubiquitous 'expert' cited and referenced by those eager to demonstrate the superiority of 'Koranic science' over the evolution lie, is the larger-than-life figure of Harun Yahya. Operating from Istanbul, Yahya is the founder of the Science Research Foundation, an impressive publishing empire that boasts more than 50 Web sites dedicated to his writings.

If you wondered at seeing Forrest Gump appear in historical film clips and like the idea of getting into the movie spotlight yourself, Yoostar has a DIY kit that lets you do just that. You can pop up like a suddenly promoted understudy in a variety of extracts from films and TV programmes alongside your favourite actors, play the role however you want, and share your performance with the world. With a kit that includes a "studio-grade" webcam, a portable green screen, a remote control, and PC software, Yoostar lets you act out roles from well-known film scenes while recording your performance and digitally adding it to the original. You can insert yourself into scenes alongside the likes of Marilyn Monroe and the Blues Brothers and save your production as a YouTube-ready clip. The Yoostar package comes with 12 film extracts and a few bonus scenes, with additional clips available for download from the Web site.

Take a trip through Britain's past with a growing collection of BBC archives now available online with iPlayer and discover radio and TV programmes spanning 70 years.

VideoLAN has a new version (1.0.1) of its free VLC Media Player, which we've been plugging in the newsletter since 2004. There are a number of open-source media players out there, and VLC Media Player is definitely one of the better options. With this update, users can advance files frame-by-frame and, as ever, the application will play most DVDs and a wide variety of formats. There are no additional codecs to install, even for DivX and Xvid. It can also be used to record. The new release is compatible with computers running Windows 2000 or later and Mac 10.5 or later.

There was an unexpected twist in Googles book digitising plans last month when the search giant acquired reCAPTCHA, the security and text scanning firm that is also an open source provider of CAPTCHAs, the anti-spam additions that protect online forms by requring users to type letters shown in small graphic images. Computers cant read the letters, which look like bad photo copies of snippets from fax messages, but people can. In fact, the words in the CAPTCHAs are taken from old newspapers and books. The reCAPTCHA system scans publications and converts content into plain text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) the same technology Google employs for its much-debated Google Books project. By typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text", says reCAPTCHA founder Luis von Ahn. Google will be applying the technology within Google "not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process".

OpenAmplify, the Semantic Web platform, has introduced TopicIntentions, a feature that can be used by advertisers to identify the intentions of people on the social Web. Advertisers and ad networks can now enhance marketing campaigns or check user-generated content by analysing data to discover real wants and needs and predict actions that potential consumers are considering. The TopicIntentions application analyses Web content, online conversations and forum discussions and uses linguistics programming to find out what is important to particular users. It can help advertisers identify the meaning and tone of Web content before they post adverts around it. Michael Petit, Co-founder of OpenAmplify, says: This will make a big splash in digital media and make for more intelligent targeting to make advertising more relevant. Brand safety is ensured. You wont see those horrible examples of an airline advert appearing next to a story about an air crash. Another use could be to moderate forum comments automatically, since the software can be set to check for worrying language by both looking for key words and by analysing context. Search engines could also benefit from the tool, according to Petit, and social media is another area that he expects to see showing interest. Social media content is a massive collection of peoples views and opinions," says Petit. "The problem is how you mine that stuff".

Is real-time search a lasting trend that Google and Bing will have to acknowledge with major changes to the kind of results they deliver? Twitter and Facebook must think so. They're battling each other to establish a lead before the big search engines can make a move.

Google is the search engine of choice in most countries, with one glaring exception. Google China pulls in $250 million per year, and says it hasn't finished growing, but it's still a long way behind Baidu, the country's most popular search engine with a $460 million revenue stream and a fan club that treats its founder like a pop idol.

Innovation in search these days is not limited to Google's latest results page embellishments or the ongoing developments for Bing at Microsoft. Zakta.com is a new search engine that offers not just a credible return of keyword-rich results, but also allows users to cull or edit what they see, save results for later, and share them with others. Zakta's creator, Sundar Kadayam, calls it a personal search engine and the closest thing to the next big thing in search. Kadayam isn't a new face on the scene; he's the former founder and CTO of Intelliseek and was a leading light at Nielsen Buzzmetrics. As an added interest, Zakta's search results are US-centric, providing British users with an opportunity to see how well some UK-based Web sites are ranking beyond this country, without any of the anglophilic weighting that is imposed by all the major search engines when they are used here.