A while ago, I reviewed a program called AdBlock Plus, a popular Firefox add-on that nukes the annoying ads that get in the way when you’re browsing. It is super-effective, stripping ads from the screen and leaving only clean, white space in their place. As anyone who has ever spent more than 30 seconds on the internet knows, you’ll soon be assaulted by blinking, buzzing and flashing ads, my personal favorites being the ones that slide out and cover whatever it is you’re trying to read.

I thought AdBlock Plus was really cool and gave it a great rating, but just the other day I read this article by Ars Technica which made me stop and think. Could blocking ads be hurting my favorite websites?

Read on…

Now you’ve got no excuse to leave the computer and get on your bike. Google has finally launched a cycle route mapping addition to Google Maps. What makes it different from other features on Google Maps? The new biking feature plots routes that have been specifically designed with cyclists in mind. So no more setting off on your cycle route only to get blocked by a vehicles only road or other obstacle.

At the moment, the service only works in the USA and it’s still in beta. It’s also quite limited. If you try to plot anything more than a few kilometers, it will usually tell you that the route can’t be plotted and offer you walking or driving alternatives instead.

Google is encouraging users to correct them where they discover problems or blockages on routes. Much of the data currently used has been provided by the Rails-To-Trails Conservancy and while usually accurate, changes to routes can of course happen at any time.

To use it, enter your directions as normal and selecting Bicycling from the drop down menu:

You can then see the route and change different points along it if you want:

If you want to see other bicycling routes in the area, select Bicycling from the More menu and green routes display where they are. Read on…

If you’re a bit of a motorhead then you’ll no doubt be gearing up for the start of the Formula 1 season this weekend. I love F1, but I find it very hard to take time out over the weekend to sit in front of the TV and watch the events unfold. Luckily, there’s a bunch of apps that let you follow the action on your phone while you’re out and about. Here’s my pick of the best F1 apps for all the various mobile platforms. All of them keep you updated with the latest news, standings and race information, and some even deliver live coverage of races.

[Image: stock.xchng]

iPhone:  Formula 1 Live Racing 2010. If you want to stay close to the action on your iPhone then this is the app for you. Formula 1 Live Racing 2010 not only delivers the latest news during the season, but you also get live commentary, lap-by-lap race positions and real-time leaderboards. The application also offers in-depth guides to each of the F1 circuits, including distances and weather information.

Palm/Windows Mobile: F1 Season 2010. Although this one doesn’t offer any live commentary, F1 Season 2010 does make for a useful companion to the coming season. It offers lots of information about the drivers, cars and teams, and provides maps of all of the circuits. The app can be updated after every race so you have up-to-date stats on the current standings in the race for the Formula 1 championship.

BlackBerry: ScoreMobile. For some reason, F1 BlackBerry apps are a little thin on the ground. However, you can get coverage of races from the F1 section of the ScoreMobile application. You can view details of upcoming races, check the latest standings, and follow all the news on live blogs. One good thing about ScoreMobile is its integration with your BlackBerry calendar, allowing you to set reminders of when the Grand Prixes are on.

Android: F1Android. If you’re serious about Formula 1 then this Android F1 app is for you. Besides bringing you the very latest news from a variety of sources, the program offers detailed information about all of the courses, current standings, and even an archive of Grand Prixes from years past. The Teams and Drivers section gives you the full run-down of all this season’s contenders.

Symbian/Java: F1 Live Formula 1 News. The Symbian platform is another that’s poorly served in terms of F1 apps. This Java-based application is probably the comprehensive you’ll find. It offers Formula 1 news in six different languages, along with the latest information about teams and drivers. The app gives you a choice of news services to follow, so you can get fully informed about all the latest developments.

You could also check out the mobile sites of some of the big Formula 1 news services, such as Planet F1 or ESPN F1. Also, keep an eye on the digital store of the offical F1 site. It promises both a new mobile web site and a free F1 timing app, so it’s worth keeping tabs on.

Windows: Wondering where all that hard drive space went? Find the answer with Disk Space Fan, a simple, effective hard drive analysis tool that scans your hard drive in a few minutes. Results are displayes in a nicely designed colorful chart you can browse until you find the largest files and folders, the ones which are eating up all the space disk… and act accordingly!

iPhone: Chatting on Skype, GTalk, Yahoo!, MSN, Facebook, etc. on your phone is great fun. But constantly switching between all these networks can get annoying and constantly logging in. fring is designed to change all that, providing you with a single platform, based on your mobile, where all of your online friends are available in one place. It allows you to make cheap, or even free calls over VoIP and even has videoconferencing support.

Mac: Although Macs are fairly self maintaining, a little TLC now and again won’t harm it. Cocktail (now updated to version 4.7.1) can do all your essential maintenance tasks from clearing your cache to controlling sleep times. There’s nothing new in Cocktail that you can’t do in Terminal but Cocktail makes it so much easier through an easy to use GUI.

After having to temporarily suspend the desktop client last month, yesterday Voddler’s web client went live bringing free movies to a much wider audience and moved it a little closer to what Hulu offers in the USA. However, to watch the films, I think you still need a desktop client to stream them and an invite.

At the moment, even those that are lucky enough to have beta invites to the desktop client still have to wait. When you click on a movie to watch and try to login, you receive the following message:

So hopefully, at some stage later this week I’ll be able to test the web client properly to see how it performs although after waiting so long for a beta invite, it’s clear that Voddler aren’t in a hurry when it comes to these sorts of things.

It is still possible to navigate around the site and browse the Voddler movie catalog though. First impressions are the same as before - more recent films will have to be added for Voddler to become really popular but these are early days so hopefully that will improve. The web client doesn’t differ massively from the desktop client but the huge bonus of course is that it works within your browser and with your mouse unlike the awkward keyboard based desktop version. They’ve also added TV shows although being a Swedish based project, these are all in Swedish.

Voddler Homepage:

Most Popular Movies: Read on…

If you’re a Windows Mobile user you now have a reason to gloat at all your friends who have iPhones. While users of the Apple device are still waiting for their version of Opera to materialize, Pocket PC and Smartphone owners can now enjoy a better internet experience thanks to the release of Opera Mini for Windows Mobile.

The application makes it faster and easier to browse the web on your mobile. It features scaled-down versions of some of the excellent time-saving features in the desktop version of Opera. This includes a Speed Dial start page, which lets you add shortcuts to your favorite web pages and open them with a single tap. Tabbed browsing is supported too, through a stylish dock that lets you flick through thumbnail previews of the pages you have open and navigate to them quickly. Opera Mini also includes stuff like address autocomplete and a search bar, to help you get around the web quicker.

Viewing web sites in Opera Mini is a delight. You can move around the page with your finger or the cursor key and zoom in and out with a single tap. There are all manner of options for tweaking the appearance of pages, such as altering font size, adjusting image quality and viewing pages at full screen. Sites load much quicker than they do in Internet Explorer, thanks to the unique technology that Opera Mini uses to serve pages. Check out our full review then go and download the fastest Windows Mobile browser out there.

Do you want to get the excellent Mac web designer RapidWeaver for just €20? If so, you’ve got less than 48 hours now to claim a superb deal from the MacHeist team with their nanoBundle2 which includes RapidWeaver, Tales of Monkey Island plus nine more apps for the bargain price of $20. Even better, 25% of the profits go to charity so everyone is a winner.

However, until 50,000 bundles have been purchased, RapidWeaver won’t be unlocked so do yourself and everyone that’s bought one a favor and purchase a nanoBundle now. If you’re still not convinced, then check out what else you get for your money, all of which you can try here:

MacJournal Elegant and easy to use Journal designed specifically for Macs

RipIt Easy to use and powerful DVD ripper

Clips Extends the power of your clipboard

CoverScout Search for album covers on Amazon, iTunes Music Store and Google Images.

Flow FTP client designed specifically for Leopard

And if that’s not enough, if you tweet about the MacHeist offer after purchasing, you’ll get these thrown in for free:

Airburst Extreme A fun air-balloon shooting game

Tracks Search iTunes tracks from any app

Burning Monkey Solitaire Solitaire with a fun monkey theme.

Buy the nanoBundle here!

It’s 1990, and Parker Frog sees a certain plumbing duo on TV getting famous for platform jumping. He decides he must be the next platforming superstar, so visits a game company to audition.

Parker Frog is set a task - complete a series of platforming challenges set by the company’s sadistic game director.

So starts Next Action Frog, a browser game which begins like a history of platforming, but has some devilish level designs, that require perfect timing and quick reactions. It’s a pretty basic game, but well made, and I don’t think frogs have really been given a chance to star since the classic Frogger, so give Parker Frog his 15 minutes of fame, and play here! Requires Flash.

[via Kongragate]

Windows: If real time strategy is your favorite videogame genre, you’re going to like this one. Supreme Commander 2 is an excellent real time strategy adventure that focuses on huge scale. Set in a future where three different humanity factions are at war, your aim is to build up and maintain a massive army, and of course, defeat your enemy!

Mac: One of the most popular screen capture tools for Windows, SnagIt has now been released in beta for Mac users to check out. OSX has screen capture built-in, so can a dedicated program offer anything extra? The answer to that is most definitely yes. SnagIt has a neat interface that sits at the edge of the screen, popping out when you scroll over it. Here you can take full screen, area or window captures.

iPhone: Touch DJ is the first serious mixing app for the iPhone. It makes excellent use of the touchscreen to create a quite unique DJ-ing tool. This is a relatively expensive application at $19.99, but it’s a surprisingly powerful tool, packed with features. If you’ve used mixing software on a desktop computer, there is very little that you won’t find in Touch DJ.

There’s a whole lot of wallpapers out there, but don’t you sometimes get bored with the same old same old? It’s time to inject a bit of life into your desktop, and I’m here to tell you how.

If you want ‘wow’ of the low-effort variety, take a look at a wallpaper randomizer. If you’re a fan of Vladstudio’s pretty designs, try Vladstudio Companion, an app that will find fresh, size-appropriate Vladstudio wallpapers at the click of a mouse. Bing’s not my favorite search engine, but it has some impressive images that can be used on your desktop. Zapbing will grab the best, while the very cool NatGeo Wallpaper Downloader will do the same from National Geographic’s impressive collection. Obviously Flickr is the number one internet photo resource: apps like Flickr Wallpaper Rotator and Fleace will comb the website for you, finding images specified by tags or usernames.

If you’re handy with a camera, you’re in luck. Lots of wallpaper apps are specifically designed to use your personal photos. Look out for ones with good rotation and display options, so you can make sure that your works of art always look their best. Moody Desktop is a small, no-install app that does just this, while Walyk lets you change you images manually or automatically. Bee Wallpapers, meanwhile, lets you intersperse your images with ones from the net, so you can make sure you’ll never get bored. Read on…

The new beta version of Google Chrome, released this week, gives you more control over protecting your privacy while you’re browsing the web. The browser already has an incognito mode that stops other people coming onto your computer and seeing what content you’ve been looking at. Now the new Privacy section in Chrome allows you to control the level of access web sites have to your computer.

To access these settings you need to select Options from Chrome’s settings menu (the spanner icon in the top-right of the program). Click on the Under the Hood tab and you’ll see the Privacy section at the top of the window. Click Content Settings to continue.

The Cookies section, which opens in this pop-up menu, lets you control how cookies are saved on your machine. You can ask Chrome to notify you every time a site tries to access your data, or choose to completely block sites from setting any data. This latter setting isn’t recommended though, because it can spoil your experience of certain sites. Thankfully, you can define exceptions, meaning that your favorite sites or sites you trust can still access and set data. If you want to see a list of all the cookies stored in your browser then click Show cookies and other site data. Read on…

Most of us enjoy our favorite music on mobile phones and MP3 players. But every now and then I still need CDs to listen to music – for example, when I’m in my car. Ands this is when ImgBurn comes in handy: a free, easy CD and DVD burning tool that lets you perform all sort of disk burning related tasks. Here’s a short tutorial on how to use ImgBurn to create custom audio CD:

1. Open ImgBurn, go to Mode and select Write.

2. On the next window, click the icon with a CD and a musical note, so that ImgBurn knows you’re creating an audio CD.

3. Click on the top right button to browse files in your hard drive and add them to the recording queue for the CUE file. Read on…

My friend has a problem. He’s a Tottenham fan (a mediocre London-based soccer team, for those outside the UK) and although many might consider that a problem in itself, that’s not what I’m talking about here. His problem is that he has a paid subscription to watch Tottenham play live on the internet but he can’t watch it on his Mac.

When he tries to watch highlights and live matches on his spanking new Macbook he gets the error: “Flip4Mac WMV is unable to play DRM protected content”. Flip4Mac is a plugin that allows users to watch content designed for Microsoft Windows Media Player on Macs. However, it doesn’t work when content is protected with Digital Rights Management (DRM).

It’s extremely frustrating - and grossly unfair - that Mac users who have paid to watch something online should encounter this problem. Even worse, there’s no simple way round it such as installing a codec or using another browser.

The harsh reality is my friend and other users like him are innocent and unwitting victims of the multimedia war between Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft’s Windows Media Digital Rights Management is a protected and encoded format which won’t work on any other platform than Windows. It’s Microsoft’s little way of ensuring that ditching Windows isn’t quite as easy as it should be and in my opinion, is an issue that should be contested in court along with Microsoft’s sneaky bundling of Internet Explorer with new PCs.

I looked into the problem on my friend’s football website and the club say the reason they have had to protect subscription based match footage is because people have been taking it and posting it for free across the net. However, they blame Microsoft for “forcing” them into using Windows Media Player DRM: Read on…

Having a good homepage is important. After all, they’re the first thing you see when you launch the web browser, and usually the starting point of your working day. There are many different options and possibilities when it comes to choose the right homepage for you, so let’s take a look at some of them:

• About:blank – The classic option. It’s the perfect homepage for those who can’t stand overloaded designs and don’t really need a specific point to start from. The blank page gives you total freedom to choose a different path in your web browsing every day.

• iGoogle – The traditional option. Pretty much everyone has a Gmail account these days, so it’s only natural that iGoogle is another traditional choice for your homepage. It’s connected with all Google services, and you get lots of gadgets and themes to customize it with. Read on…

Do you remember the days when music applications were just for playing erm, music? iTunes has evolved from a simple music player to a sophisticated home entertainment app capable of managing iPods, playing videos and making online music purchases.

But what about all those that don’t have iPods, don’t buy their music through iTunes and don’t want to watch videos in iTunes? Is it any wonder that Windows gets clogged-up when applications such as this give you no choice over the components it installs? iTunes 9 installs five additional programs without asking for your consent.

As you can see here, the components are Apple Application Support, Apple Mobile Device Support, Apple Software Update, Bonjour and QuickTime (out of shot) in order to work on Windows.

A closer look at each of these add-ons shows that most users who don’t have iPods, watch videos in iTunes or stream music elsewhere, will have little need for them:

Apple Application Support A new addition to iTunes 9 which allows you to manage iPods, iPhones and iPod Touch devices

Apple Mobile Device Support Used for syncing iPods and iPhones although not needed for other iPods e.g. Nano, Shuffle etc

Apple Software Update Checks for new versions of Apple software installed on Windows machines (not just iTunes). This is the only component you can choose not to install when you originally install iTunes. However, even when I unchecked the box, it still installed it!

Bonjour Allows you to share iTunes (and other devices such as printers) over a network, or access other users’ shares

QuickTime Apple’s proprietary media player with codecs for playing back a wide variety of media

Some of these components can be removed without damaging iTunes (I recommend using Revo Uninstaller for this). Apple Mobile Device Support and Apple Software Update I removed with no problems. Bonjour also removed successfully although I was issued a warning that I wouldn’t be able to share music on iTunes without it and should repair the issue:

However, removing Apple Application Support and QuickTime prevents iTunes opening at all. Instead you receive the following error message:

In total then, I was able to remove 3 out of the 5 components but it wasn’t a very simple process. The point is though, it shouldn’t be necessary to do this just to have a streamlined version of iTunes on your machine.

Mac users - quite justifiably - complain of all the bloatware that Microsoft software often installs on Macs with Microsoft Office being a prime example. However, iTunes proves that Apple can be just as bad at clogging-up Windows with extra components.

A lite version of iTunes would surely be welcomed by all those Windows users who don’t need the added extras.