Post Like a Pirate is a web-service that allows you to post messages using pirate speek (duh!).The Pirate Translator translates your messages into pirate-speek as you type. You can also email your friends and post messages to twitter directly in pirate text using this service. The website itself is far from being hip and cool. It doesnt funtion properly in Firefox, Opera and Safari which is disappointing. However, Post Like a Pirate does what it is supposed to fairly well. Obviously this kind of service has no utility and is just meant for some fun between friends.

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And speaking of relish, you probably don’t relish the thought of transferring your data over from a new computer to an old one. Think about this: You might be able to reuse your old laptop computer with a laptop repair service. The Web brings you to places where you can shop for laptop batteries, DC power adaptors and laptop hard drives for your computer.

Blog Project Three by ‘Daily Blog Tips‘ was a huge success. As many as hundred and fifteen blogs participated in the project. The full list of participants is available here. You can read my submission here. After going through the rest of the entries I have finally come up with my Top 5 list. Here is goes (in alphabetical order) -

Three essential steps to great blog posts by Corner Scribe : A comprehensive checklist by Corner Scribe that will help you in coming up with quality blog posts.

3 Ways to Track Your Comments by David : David reviewed three services that will allow you to track all of your blog-comments - co.mments, Commentful and coComment.

What “The 3 Little Pigs” Can Teach You About Blogging by Jan : I wish I could come up with posts like this! Not only is this post informative its also imaginative and interesting. Well done!

Make your WordPress blog more Search Engine friendly by Shankar : Another great post from my friend Shankar. Three simple yet often overlooked steps to make your blog more Search Engine Friendly.

3 reasons why comment relish is not good for your blog by Vijay : I have always hated Comment Relish. It’s just another useless email that I have to delete, because it’s a valueless auto-generated by a script. Unfortunately, I have seen many popular bloggers using this plugin (and even recommending it). Hopefully Vijay’s article would make them change their opinion.

Slow websites are rough; slow data transfers are also a drag. One of the biggest problems with setting up a new laptop is bringing your old data over. And when you’re cruisin’ with the new PC, you may even be able to reuse your old laptop computer with a laptop parts service. Cheap laptop batteries, keyboards and laptop hard drives are available, too!

Nothing annoys a visitor more than a slow loading website. With the proliferation of broadband, most of us have become used to websites loading within a few seconds. Many webmasters spend hours trying to optimize their website for search engines but forget to optimize their website for human beings. In this article I would touch upon three (plus one) basic steps involved in making your website load faster. I have not discussed solutions that involve installing new software on your webserver or making other modifications to the system.

This is the simplest yet often overlooked step. Proper compression can often reduce file size by 50% or even more without any perceptible quality loss. I use Irfanview (Freeware) for this purpose. I had covered this topic in one of my previous articles (Ten Things You Can Do With IrfanView). Here is a short guide to compressing images in IrfanView :
JPEG/GIF Images : Open the Image and press “S” (or select “Save as” from File menu) to bring up the Save as dialogue box. Check the �Show Options Dialogue� check box. Set the appropriate quality level and save the image. A value between 65 and 70 generally does a job.
PNG Images : Once again while saving bring up the “Options dialog”. Tick the option to “Use PNGOUT Plugin”. The default settings work quite well, however it can be time consuming. If you are in a hurry limit the maximum number of passes.

The biggest advantage of Irfanview is that it supports batch operations, so you can compress hundreds of files at a go. Although IrfanView works well with normal images it doesn�t work with animated GIF files. For animated GIF files you can use Spinwave GIF Cruncher. However you will not be able to download the most optimized versions of your images unless you are a Spinwave member. Alternatively you can give GifWorks a try . The “Reduce Colors” option reduces the colour palette thereby reducing the image size.

Selecting the right image format also helps. JPEG works better with photographs and images without text. In such cases using PNG is recommended. Use GIF when you need transparent background or animation. GIF and PNG are also recommended for simple diagrams.
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Pownce is Kevin Rose’s (of Digg.com fame) latest venture. Its pretty much Scrapping meets Mini-Blogging meets File Sharing. Personally, I am not a fan of Twitter and similar services. I am not interested in knowing if my friend is taking a bath or eating breakfast or is getting a massage. In spite of that I see definite potential in Pownce. There are two things that makes it stand out.
Ability to send files to a single person, to a group or to everyone in my buddy list.
Similarly you can send messages, links and event updates to a single person, to a group or to everyone.

Pownce is mainly web based however a light-weight desktop module based on Adobe’s Apollo (AIR) is also available.
I am not going to review it in detail but if you are interested you should check out Mashable and Webware’s coverage.

Pownce is still very young and I expect a lot more from it in the future. If you want to try it, just leave a comment here requesting an invitation. Make sure that you provide your proper email address, Pownce doesn’t like temporary email providers. I have six invites left.

P.S. : Thanks to The Witness Exchange for inviting me to Pownce.

Don’t be bummed if you didn’t get a Spock invite. You would’ve had to wear the pointed ears and a too-tight suit. Now on to more pratical matters: The world wide web is the best place to look up many different do-it-yourself articles from blackjack to golf clubs  - or how to golf and play blackjack at the same time - or even how to perform an oil change while you double down and roll in a birdie putt, all at the same time!

Last week I had reviewed a new search engine called Spock. Spock allows you to search for people and people related themes. You can read my review here. Spock is a very impressive service with a lot of potential. It was one of the 12 new and promising startups showcased Supernova’s 2007 Connected Innovators session.

Spock is still in closed beta. However, I have 100 invites to give away. If you are interested just drop a comment here. Just make sure that you use your full name and real email address while commenting.

Sometimes your own “personal metrics” need reinvigorating. A little learning helps to remedy the doldrums, and the Web is a fantastic place to learn, with many informative articles on a wide range of topics, including  blackjack, golf clubs and even a loan calculator for those tricky amortization issues.

Reinvigorate is a new free web analytics service. It offers everything that a standard website metrics service provides, but it offers so much more.

Reinvigorate sports a very clean and well organised web interface, that�s not only functional but also fast. Let�s have a look at various reports offered by Reinvigorate.

Traffic : Reinvigorate displays the number of page views and the number of unique visitors on an hourly, daily and monthly basis using tables and graphs. The screenshot below demonstrates some of the graphs offered by Reinvigorate.

Traffic (Graphical)

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Consider this situation. You have just downloaded a file from a little known website. And although your antivirus didnt detect anything malicious you suspect that the file may be a rogue file. And since no antivirus software has a 100% detection rate (many popular AV software have a detection rate of below 90%) it is possible that you are right. What should you do?

Thanks to web-services like Jotti’s Malware Scan and Virustotal you can now get your file scanned by multiple antivirus engines. These services allow you to upload any file and get it scanned by several antivirus softwares. Virustotal scans every file using 30 antivirus engines where as Jotti checks every file with 18 antivirus engines. However most of the time Virustotal servers are overloaded and you are made to wait in queue. If the file isnt deemed clean by all AV engines then it’s safe to assume that it is clean (unless its a 0-day exploit).

Do you think the real Spock can do pdf conversion with a simple mind-meld?That may be the way of the future, but for now you need old-fashionedpractical pdf conversion for your small company. The Internet is the best source for more info about pdf to word and pdf to image conversion. Find out about how to convert pdf to doc, too!

Spock is a new (vertical) search engine with a difference - it’s a people search engine. According to Spock press release thirty percent of all internet searches are people related, and this is the market they are targeting. Like other search engines Spock employs bots that crawl the web looking for people related information. According to its CEO Jaideep Singh it has so far indexed more than 100 million people.

I have been playing around with Spock for last couple of days and I must say I am extremely impressed. It presents the search result in a very well organised manner which ensures that you are able to find the information about the person quickly and easily. Below is the search result for famous Indian author and film maker Satyajit Ray.
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