Recently I switched my entire gallery of photo’s from StockExchange to RGBStock.com due to some personal reasons. If you need some real free stock photo’s then I recommend to go and have a look at RGBStock.com too!  This website is the new kid on the block and since they launched in januari the amount of free quality stock photo’s is growing by the week. With almost a 1000 users subscribed and 30.000 pictures available it’s a great source for free photo’s. You can find almost any sort of photo there and if it’s not available you can request them in the forum.

When browsing forums on the Internet that are discussing “Privacy on the Internet” You can see that it’s a hot topic. Most people are really frustrated by the fact that their name is somewhere on the Internet. Some of them have friends who put them on their own blog for example. The majority however are putting there-selves online. They are creating profiles on Facebook like websites and think it’s nice to comment on other users profiles. But when they find out their name is on Bing or Google, they get outrageous! Not the proper response I’d say.

Some of them are flooding the forums with hate topics about: “That search engine finds me on that website! I don’t want that! How can I get rid of it?”. Most of these topics are getting properly solved by people who are willing to help. Most search engines have the ability to trash a result. But you’ll need to get rid of the source first! So if you don’t want people to find you on Facebook, just don’t make your profile public or don’t create a profile at all!

And even then it’s possible people find you online. Why? because friends can still have you mentioned somewhere on their profiles or websites. Of course it’s possible to get rid of those results to. You’ll have to talk to your friends at first (the source) and discuss the problem with him.  Most of the time they’ll agree and remove you from their profiles. You’ll then have some more privacy. But keep in mind there always be tons of sources on the web where you’ll probably be found, the yellow pages for example.

The best way to get almost complete privacy online? Yes it’s still possible, but I don’t think it’s worth all of the work. Anyway, if you want to give it a try do the following:

• Don’t use Internet
• throw away your (mobile) phone
• throw away your credit cards. Yes people can find something about that to if they want!
• live in complete solitary. Don’t talk to anyone, don’t go to party’s where you might get photographed
• in conclusion don’t live at all..

I know this is pretty black and white. But people need to know in which era we’re all living in right now. It’s not possible to have online privacy anymore! welcome to the world.

Most GMail users have recognized the new service Buzz by now. Most of them however didn’t exactly read everything as they should and now have a Inbox that’s flooding with Buzz messages. Getting tired of all those Buzzes? Well, there are two solutions available depending on how much you like Buzz.

The first solutions is very simple. Just click on the link “turn off buzz” at the bottom of your GMail screen. Buzz will then turn of. If you need or want it at some later point you can easily turn it on again in the same way as turning it off.

The second solution gives a bit of work in GMail, but in the end you’ll have your Buzz messages located in just one location.

First of all create a new label in GMail. Go to the More link on your left side and click “Create new label”. Fill in the desired name, in my case it was “Buzzes” and press OK. If you like you can assign a color to the newly created label by clicking on the tiny arrow in front of the label name.

Then click on Settings on the right top corner of your screen.

In the next screen choose filters and then “Create a new filter”. A screen comes available where it’s possible to create your filter.

In the “Has the words” field insert: label:buzz. When you go to the next step GMail will give a warning like message in your screen. Just press OK there.

The screen that follows will show you the result of the is:buzz part. All Buzz messages should be there. In this screen you can choose from different options. For example, it’s possible to archive all messages immediately (Skip the Inbox), Delete the messages, forward it, Star it etc. etc. We however select the “Skip the Inbox” check box and the “Apply the label” box. When selecting the last one, you’ll need to choose your newly created label (Buzzes). If you like it’s possible to check the “Also apply filter to # conversations below” check-box.

Finally press “Create Filter” and all your future Buzz messages will skip the inbox and get the Buzzes label.

For more information on how to create a filter see the Google Help Forums:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6579

The last few months I keep getting confronted with lazy people and online stupidity. Especially on discussion boards it seems to be more common every day I visit one, not to mention the help forums. More and more people are finding it hard to do a decent search first. Or maybe the net is flooding with so called n00bs these days, who knows. Anyway, it seems that the same questions are getting asked repeatedly recently.

A little example. Some Gmail setting was changed as response to the recent hacks originated in some Chinese dudes. Gmail now starts in https:// mode instead of the normal http:// protocol. Google stated it could give performance problems for some people and of course it will for some of us. I mean there are still people using IE as default browser, solely through ignorance. And we all know that IE becomes slow while using https:// sometimes, that comes with the product unfortunately.

Due to these performance problems users experienced, the forum got flooded with the same questions. After four threads there was already a solution available! But people kept asking the same questions over and over, meanwhile the solutions was easy to find using a simple search option which was: Gmail is slow. And if they looked a bit further they would have seen similar topics on the first forum page! Really frustrating to see that many people just not taking any time to search or even look! I won’t say I’m a saint on the Internet, but I do read and search before I ask something. I also feel a bit stupid when I find out that the solution is there to take.

It seems to me that this sort of situation are getting more common every week. Don’t have a solution for it, even pinned topics doesn’t solve this problem. Then again, we still don’t have a solution for stupidity, guess that’s the same in this case. Ah well, maybe the future will bring us some sunshine for this, I can’t wait for that day to come.

The old design was already running for a few years. The past week I finally managed to have some time for a new design and logo. Today it’s finally up and running. A newly designed logo which had to be simple and recognizable in my opinion. The design itself had to be even simpler. I think I managed to achieve my goals with this design, however don’t be surprised if some other changes will be noticeable the next few months.