It’s sort of a morbid thought to think of, but what would happen to your “social profile” if you were to become unable to communicate or worse, died?  Many of these types of websites have no or very little ways to allow the immediate family or beneficiaries the ability to “re-claim” these profiles on behalf of the person who created them.

Now there’s a new web app on the block that aims to fix this hole in social networking. Legacy Locker aims to protect your online assets the same way you would with your physical ones like your savings account, retirement account, etc. Having a will, estate or even a trust protects all of your things including your house, accounts, and all other assets. Legacy Locker comes in to protect all of your “internet assets” the same way.

Think about it for a moment, do you have accounts like email, eBay, Amazon, Paypal, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, iTunes, etc? Normally, all of these would be lost upon your passing, but Legacy Locker takes them, protects them for you and ultimately puts them in the hands of those you’ll list as your beneficiary.

If we were to think about how much time and effort we put into our online profiles and identities these days, it makes sense to protect that and have them safeguarded in the event that something was to happen to you.

Ease your Mind

Using this service obviously isn’t the only method to save and store your online information. You could write everything down on a piece of paper and secure it in your desk drawer at home/work or even write it to a file on your computer. You could also just always use the same login/password for every site you’re a part of. These scenarios often happen, but we know that these are not good ideas to protect your identity.

This service is easy, safe and convenient when it comes to storing, tracking, and updating your account information and they promise to only provide the data to the right people at the right time. Of course you can easily update, change, or modify not only your accounts but the beneficiaries at your whim. You can also have Legacy Locker send you reminders to update old passwords, or to add new assets occasionally.

Ease of Use

This app is simple to setup; they boast that setup takes less than 60 seconds! As soon as you’re logged in, you can begin inserting your “assets”.

For each account, you can assign a beneficiary to that account who will have access when the time is right. Plus, since this is a web app, all data can be added/edited from anywhere in the world. Think about it as life insurance for your online identities.

Legacy Locker is easy to use and understand. First things first, you must create an account and fill out your profile with your basic information. Then you start the simple step-by-step process.

Security Questions

Security questions here are just the same as in any other online web application.  Just things that you have knowledge of and those close to you do as well. Here are some of the available security questions:

Verifiers

Then you should enter what they call “verifiers” or the people whom you have complete confidence in to handle this information in the unfortunate event of your passing. For most of us, its our spouse or other family member that quite frankly you think might just outlive you.

Legacy Locker likes two verifiers, but will allow you to continue using only one. After you enter these verifiers, Legacy Locker will email them to verify once again that you are who you say you are and they are indeed your “verifiers.”

Online Assets

Thirdly, you need to identify all your online assets, entering the Website, username, and password for each of them. On each one you enter, you’ll assign one beneficiary to whom will have this sensitive information.

Think of your Legacy Locker as being similar to a safety deposit box – it’s a secure place to store important assets – only online.

Upon your Demise

Mortality isn’t fun to talk about, but its real for all of us and to truly give this app justice, you have to mention what happens next (with Legacy Locker, not death).

Basically, its very straightforward. When a Legacy Locker customer passes away, one of their verifiers must report the death. Then the service uses something called “human oversight with secure technology” to ensure the user’s assets are passed off correctly and to the right people. Emails are then sent to the beneficiaries with secure links to the site that contains the secure assets.

Pricing Options

It wouldn’t be on MakeUseOf if there wasn’t a free option. The free option gives you one beneficiary and three online assets to protect. This is free for life. If you need more, they have a very reasonable price for two more tiers of pricing. $29.99 annually, or the one-time fee of $299.99 and with both of those you have unlimited assets, beneficiaries and legacy letters.

Are there any other services like this out there?  Do you use a service like this yourself? Let us know in the comments…

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• (32)Threadsy – Integrates Your Email and Social Networks (+Invites)

While we’re always looking for neat web applications and such here at MakeUseOf, recently I found this little site called Filtermusic and it really has made my enjoyment of music that much greater. There’s tons of other great music apps/web apps here on MakeUseOf, but here’s yet another.

I realize that there are some great other web apps out there, what with LastFM really grabbing some market share of streaming music and the great Pandora, but there’s just something about hearing something “fresh”. And that’s exactly what I feel that I’ve found in Filtermusic.

What is it?

Essentially, Filtermusic is a listing of Interweb radio stations that stream in high quality (128Kbps) and feature uninterrupted play. That’s one of the greatest features. To listen to their streams, they just require that you have either iTunes, VLC, or Winamp. With some additional tools you can record streaming music as MP3 files as well.

Currently, this site is translated into a ton of languages: Greek, English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Romanian, Turkish, Serbian, Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Danish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Latvian, Slovak and Swedish with more coming as listeners offer up appropriate translations.

Styles of Listening Pleasure

Filtermusic’s got all kinds of styles. Here’s a rundown of what’s out there:

• Easy Lounge, Groove tunes
• HipHop, R&B
• Funk, Soul, Disco
• House, Dance
• Progressive, Techno, Trance
• Electronic sounds, Industrial
• Breaks, Drum ‘n’ Bass
• Downtempo, Dub, Ambient
• Independent, Freestyle
• Hits, Mainstream
• 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s
• Rock, Alternative
• Popular, Eclectiv
• Jazz
• Classical
• Reggae, Dancehall
• Latin, Salsa, Tango
• International, Ethnic

Each one of these sections has tons of available stations to listen too, that’s the beauty of it. It seems like just about whatever your preference of music is, they’ve got you covered.

Mobile Access

If you feel the need to jam out on your mobile, they’ve got a page dedicated to that too with direct links to the playlist files for easy grabbing and play. That makes it easy to streamy internet radio stations on iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows mobile phones.

Just insert the “pls” file into your mobile phone streaming music app and you’re in business.

Love it? Hate it? Sound off in the comments and let us know if there’s more out there that we’ve just not covered yet.

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• (25)Record Streaming Audio with Screamer Radio

Weather Watcher Live is your personal, real-time Windows desktop weather station. View real-time weather conditions in your neighborhood from WeatherBug weather stations, or as reported by NWS.

Weather Watcher Live is able to automatically retrieve current conditions hourly forecasts even severe weather alerts. You can even always view the current conditions by hovering your mouse over the Weather Watcher Live system tray icon.

Like most weather applications you can set it up to automatically retrieve weather data at set intervals and even change what you’re system tray icon shows at any given time. This great application even has a ton of contributors livening up the interface by supplying icons and skins.

Weather Watch Live currently only works on later builds of Windows. 98 and above.

Features

• Weather as reported by WeatherBug and NWS
• Forecasts available for thousands of cities world-wide
• Current weather conditions
• 60-hour forecast
• 7-day day/night forecast
• Severe weather alerts from NWS (US only)
• 700+ weather maps
• Easy access to weather news, cameras and photos
• 18+ weather unit conversion choices
• Locally export and log weather data
• Skinned interface/forecasts
• Customizable system tray icon/tooltip
• Dual tray icons for temperature and condition image
• Proxy server support

You can check on skins, plugins and random support by checking out the forums on The Singer’s Creation website.

What other good weather applications do you use? Let us know…

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• (12)Twittastic Desktop Twitter Client With Nifty File Sharing Tools
• (2)Turning Any Web App Into Desktop App with Fluid [Mac]
• (8)Transfz – Search the Web From Any Application (Windows)

DestroyFlickr is a new application that was built for beauty and functionality. DestroyFlickr does its magic by giving you a whole new way of exploring Flickr images. The user interface is absolutely beautiful, with its dark neutral backgrounds, you can view pictures in a new amazing way.

Getting Started

First off, you’ll have to download DestroyFlickr (& Adobe AIR if you don’t already have it).

Of course the first time you launch DestroyFlickr, Flickr requires you to authenticate this program with your account. Once you agree that you trust the application, you’ll be taken to a success page and DestroyFlickr is awaiting your response. Just login at that point and you’ll be rockin’.

One note: You have to have two settings turned to “No” in your Flickr account. On the Privacy & Permissions area of your settings page, you have to have “Hide your stuff from public searches” and “Hide your profile from public searches” turned to “No”.

User Menu

You can use the personalized user menu to view the current user’s photos as well as their contacts and the ever popular Flickr Interestingness photos.

The “interestingness” factor is one worth mentioning. Flickr constantly goes through looking at photos to determine this factor. Things like where the clicks are coming from, who comments and when, its tags, who marks it as a favorite, etc. This makes for a very interesting view of photos out in the Flickr world. Yahoo! has even filed for a patent on this.

Landing Page

When we open up our profile page, we see a page like this which loads up a few of our recent photos as well as recent photos from contacts.

Where the fun begins

While browsing through your lists of photos, you can easily see a close-up by hovering over the images. This makes it very easy to see a slightly larger view of the photos before clicking on the actual photo. Believe me, you can spend hours browsing through all of the photos you can find.

It wouldn’t be great if you couldn’t search. DestroyFlickr gives you the ability to search all of Flickr for a specific term or you can search just the particular user profile you’re viewing at the time. This makes it easy to find that one picture from your friend that’s buried deep in his Flickr photostream or any relevant Flickr tag you’re looking for.

Once you find one you would like to see, click on it. You’ll see a small loading screen while DestroyFlickr pulls all the data down, and bam…there you have it.

Zoomed in photos look great. You’ve got all the data right there at your finger tips. You can see everything about the image. All the EXIF information is pulled down making the photo speak for itself. You can see when it was taken, what type of camera, exposure, aperture, etc…

DestroyFlickr is great in another way too…the ability to leave Flickr comments right there on the photo. Since you’re already logged into Flickr, just click “Post a comment” and you’re ready to leave your mark. You can also add this photo to your favorites in Flickr.

Download & Upload

Another amazing feature of this application is that you’re able to download the largest photo automatically just by dragging the thumbnail into your “Downloads” box. It’ll prompt you where you want it, and just like that, you’ve got it.
This makes it extremely simply to download numerous images for your personal collection or use.

So you want to upload some Flickr photos now? Not a problem, DestroyFlickr is here for you. You can either add files by clicking “Add” or just drag-n-drop them into the window. DestroyFlickr then starts queueing your new photos to be added to your Flickr photostream. Just click “Submit” when finished, and DestroyFlickr will upload for you.

Overall, I’ve been quite thrilled with this application. Its good looks and ease of use make it a staple application for anyone who loves the Flickr world of photos and the ease of Adobe AIR apps.

[rating=5]

Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

• (17)Manage your iPhoto with these plugins
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At Make Use Of, we’ve covered a ton of tools to make your Twitter better. From 4 Tools for More Productive Twittering, to other Tools and Apps to Improve your Twitter Experience. All you really have to do to see everything we’ve listed on Twitter is to check out the “Twitter” tag here on the website.

Today, I bring you a new service for Twitter. It’s called TwitterFone. TwitterFone is unique in that it offers users of their free service the ability to send Twitter messages using their voice. Yeah, that’s right…your voice.

Twitter….over the phone?

Yes, that’s right. Tweet to your heart’s content without internet access. Really, all you need to do is call TwitterFone, say what you want to “tweet”, and then hang up. Just a minute or two later, your Twitter page will update. Magic!

How does TwitterFone do this?

TwitterFone transcribes your voice message into text, then posts the message to your Twitter account. It’s free to sign up or the Make Use Of team wouldn’t bother with reviewing it. However when you call up Twitterfone, you are charged the normal cost of a national call in your own country.

They’ve also got numerous numbers in many countries so a lot of Make Use Of readers should be able to use it in their country.

As the name suggests, this service is for Twitter only. This is not some multi-purpose “voice lifestreaming” service.

One thing I hope they improve on is the ability to do Twitter replies and direct messages. Currently, only personal tweets are possible.

Cool, what do I need?

Just a Twitter account, a private beta code, an email address, and a mobile phone fone.

To get setup with the TwitterFone service, you’ll need an invitation code (don’t worry, I’ve secured some so you can register). Once you have that, you’ll register for your account. This is just your basic signup form with fields for your email address, Twitter info, and your mobile number. For security’s sake, they’ll send you a text message with another code in it and this must be entered for the service to enable. After that, you’re ready to tweet using your mobile phone.

Once you’ve tested the TwitterFone service, you’ll see something akin to this. You’ll see by the tweet here on the right, its not perfect. But it has gotten all of my words correct.

Invitation Codes

If you’d like an invitation code to join TwitterFone, please fill out the form below and I’ll send you one. Once they’re all gone, I’ll remove this form.

Update: Unfortunately, TwitterFone invites are all gone. But not all is lost. You can request one here.

So if you’ve used Twitterfone, what do you think about it? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

• (10)How To Twitter From A Low-Tech Cell Phone
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Videos are everywhere these days. They flood your inbox, they find their way into social media sites. They even allow you to watch them at the most convenient time for you. But none of them on the mobile front, can mess with vTap.

vTap is different. While on YouTube or other video sites, you often get overloaded with content. Before you even know it, you’ve spent hours there. With vTap you can find perfect small videos designed to stream to your device. Since most of the web sharing services out there are basically desktop based, they simply weren’t designed for mobile usage. They might boast that they have those capabilities, but none really break the mold in that department.

vTap is able to quickly, and easily, search and find web videos that are exactly what you’re looking for. You can even keep the videos for later viewing from nearly any source on the Internet and nearly unlimited topics. If you decide to go ahead and sign up for a free account, you can build vTap Feeds that will allow you to customize their preferences and receive more relevant videos from the vTap interface.

This great product runs on a myriad of mobile devices:

A great feature they’ve implemented is the ability to have this active search feature in their mobile client, so basically as you type…the search results start appearing below.

So run out there and download this free gem at http://m.vtap.com from your mobile phone.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

• (51)4 YouTube Tools you Probably Don’t Know About
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• (9)Play and Download YouTube Videos On Your Mac with MacTubes
• (12)Place Yourself & Your Downloads Into Orbit

GmailAssistant allows you to completely customize your notification options. You can choose to have it find all mail, unread in the Inbox, and even mail with specific labels. You can even choose different alert methods…i.e. popup message, chime, blink keyboard LED.

Features

Single-File – GmailAssistant is launched from just one file. All you need to run it is contained in that one executable .jar file.
No Installation – GmailAssistant is packaged into one executable .jar file, which means it runs on any Operating System.
Leave It – GmailAssistant does not modify any system settings in any way. Everything needed for it runs in the .jar file.
Convenience – Always on top, SOCKS proxy, save/load program and account settings in encrypted profiles, automatic profile loading, adjustable mail check frequency, persistent and navigable popup messages
Updates – Easily update GmailAssistant with one click.
License – GNU General Public License version 2.

What it looks like

Here is the GmailAssistant Main form. From this page you can configure your various Gmail accounts.

Listed below is the “Account Form” where you specifiy your specific details for your various Gmail or Gmail for Domains accounts. This is where you’ll also set up the specific privileges about how you want GmailAssistant to notify you and alert you to your accounts.

Last but not least, is the view from the system tray. Here you’ll see the small GmailAssistant icon where it will display your alerts.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

• (35)19 Tools and Tips to improve Google Reader
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If you’ve used the web-based version of Gmail on your mobile browser you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Like when you open an e-mail, read its contents, then decide you want to archive or delete it; you usually have to scroll nearly all the way down to the bottom and click on the appropriate link or whatever other link you were trying to click. This can be quite awkward if you’re reading an e-mail that your sister sent you that’s 45 pages long and you’re just trying to easily delete or archive it. In last month’s Gmail podcast, Chuck Tomasi talked about a feature he calls “Speed Dialing”.

Instead of scrolling all the way to the bottom of the screen to click one of the common links, think of them as an ordered list and assign numbers to them in your head.

1. Reply
2. Reply to all
3. Forward
4. Archive
5. Marked unread
6. Add Star
7. Delete

So now when whizzing through your e-mail there’s no need to aggravate yourself by having to scroll all the way the bottom to perform one of these common actions. Simply press the number, and your browser will do the rest.

Remember: these numbered options are not the same in the very popular Gmail Java applet… except delete.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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WinRoll easily takes care of that for you.

Before

After

WinRoll was made so that it could “roll up” the current window into its title bar. Thus producing a very small window of an open application.

You can minimize, maximize and even close all visible windows at once. You can even minimize to the system tray and make the window semi-translucent on Windows 2000 and above.

The best part about WinRoll is that it was written in 100% assembly language making its speed and response super fast and has a tiny footprint.

Of course, it wouldn’t be on Make Use Of if it wasn’t free.

You can choose to download either the recommended setup file (89k), the binaries (9k) or the source code (41k)

They currently also have support for English, Russian, Italian and German.

I use WinRoll on all of my PCs (work and home) due to its ability to quickly and easily “roll up” the windows I’m working on in order to see or find something that’s behind it.
WinRoll gets a huge thumbs-up from this guy!

Anything else out there similar to WinRoll? Lets us know in the comments.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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In comes a great site called CodecGuide.com with two great alternatives for these two aggravating applications.

QuickTime Alternative

QuickTime Alternative is a slim and trim version of the popular QuickTime. It only contains the essential portions of the program crucial to playing QuickTime content that might be embedded into web pages you visit. I mean, who wants to load that QuickTime package only for it to add itself to the startup every time you boot up and trying to check in with Apple’s servers?

From the site:

Advantages of QuickTime Alternative are:

• Quick and easy install
• Ability to make an unattended installation
• No background processes
• No unwanted stuff and other nonsense
• Smaller size

There is also another variation of the QuickTime Alternative known as QT Lite. The only real difference is that the QT Lite version does not contain the Media Player Classic.

OS: Windows XP/2003/Vista

RealPlayer Alternative

The “Real Alternative” allows you the ability to play RealMedia without requiring you to install the dreaded RealPlayer. Even though RealNetworks really doesn’t have a foothold on the internet media war that they used to, this is a perfect solution to that one site you visit that still streams audio/video in RealPlayer format.

All the “Real” file formats are supported including the ability to view streaming content.

Formats:

• .ra
• .rm
• .rmvb
• .ram
• .rpm
• .rv
• .rp
• .rt
• .rnx
• .smi
• .smil

From the site:

Some advantages compared to RealPlayer:

• Quick and easy install
• It’s easy to make an unattended installation
• Proper uninstallation
• No background processes
• Use a player of your own choice
• Low on resources
• No advertising, no registration forms, nothing annoying

As with the Quicktime Alternative above, the RealPlayer Alternative includes a Lite version without the Media Player Classic.

OS: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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Now the header image goes all the way across the screen. Not a show stopper, but something that needed a little touch.

Also, the posts have changed slightly. You’ll still get the MakeUseOf goodness you’ve grown accustomed to, but now with fresher icons and a little more color.

Two words…tagging support!

You now have a few seconds to edit your comment once you’ve submitted it. So for all of you who accidentally forgot to include that URI or left half a sentence off…you can now go right back in a fix it.

A few things on the sidebar have changed as well. The Authors section has been moved to the bottom and cleaned up a bit.

That about wraps up the current changes, hope you all continue to love, read, and support MakeUseOf.com.

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Fear not, Mp3tag is here. It can rename files based on tag information, replace certain characters and/or words currently present in your tags and filenames. Mp3tag also can import and export tag information. It even supports the freedb database to lookup selected files so you can automagically get the correct tags for your music.

Features

Mp3tag can perform many features for free. While supplying full Unicode support, it can write ID3v1, ID3v2, APEv2-Tags and Vorbis comments to multiple files at the same time. This allows you to retag whole collections or albums with little effort. It can download the CD cover art for the files you’re editing while helping you create new playlists for them.

While renaming or tagging, Mp3tag has recursive sub-folder support which means it can dig through your folders and sub-folders for this tagging renaming sensation. A nice feature it has is the ability to export tag information into user-defined formats (html, xml, etc).

Compatibility

Mp3tag supports multiple file formats. This is essential for those of us who have their collection in various audio formats. The following is a list of the supported formats:

• aac
• flac
• ape
• mp3
• mp4 / m4a / m4b
• mpc
• ogg
• ofr
• ofs
• spx
• tak
• tta
• wma
• wv

Is that enough? Sure seems to be a quite comprehensive list of formats, eh?

Operating System: Works on Windows XP and up.

Convinced yet? If you want to see more about Mp3tag, check out their huge list of screenshots or just download it and start fixing up your MP3 collection right away.

You might also want to check out Mark’s MakeUse Of review of Audioshell which is also a MP3 tag editor.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

• (13)How to Edit Your Music ID3 Tags with Audioshell
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MoFuse in Action

MoFuse works by mobilizing your feeds. Sounds simple huh? Well, I assure you that the guys behind MoFuse are diligent to ensure that this application tickles your mobile fancy. They’ve included all kinds of features including an SMS widget, an automatic redirect script, automatic image resizing, fully compliant .mobi sites hosted entirely on MoFuse’s servers, and even the ability to brand your mobile site with your own logo.

Even if you don’t have feeds (but who doesn’t these days) MoFuse has provided a way…just create an account and add your static mobile content.

Customize your Mobile Content

Maybe you’re like me, and just not satisfied with the vanilla wrapper. Get your customize on!

Want to change your default “grow” generated domain name? No problem, sign up for an account and you’ll be able to change your URI to something more appropriate. Not enough? Keep customizing you can even add things like static text, links, RSS feeds and comments. They’ve even included the ability to change the colors of everything from the text to the header background. If that’s still not enough, you can now add your logo (scaled down to under 200px wide and 30px in height) to be the default header.

MoFuse also has an automatic redirect script you can place in the top of your website that will redirect mobile visitors to your MoFuse site automatically with no fuss. They’ll think you’re just that good, but you’ll know the truth…MoFuse’s handling this for you.

Little Quirks

When creating the mobile site for MakeUseOf.com, we ran into an issue with the redirection script not working. Through many-a-emails, and ultimately talking with David Berube (MoFuse’s Founder & Chief Architect) via IM, we figured out that there was indeed an issue with the way PHP was setup on the MakeUseOf server.

The MoFuse API (which is used to determine mobile devices) uses the PHP directive “allow_url_include”. Many hosts either disable this feature, or don’t allow this directive at all. Since MakeUseOf.com is on a dedicated server, we have the ability to enable this for this feature to work. If you have it, there are two methods to turn on this PHP directive.

• .htaccess – Edit your .htaccess file on your webserver and add the following: php_flag allow_url_include On
• php.ini – This will either require you to be a server admin, or require your host to turn this feature on for you in your php.ini file.

If you don’t have access to this, you might just ask your host for this. All they can do is say no, right?

Wrap-Up

MoFuse gets an A+ for ease of use and in the end result product. While I had a little bumpy ride trying to get the mobile MUO site going (the whole redirect issue), the end result is great. If you browse to www.makeuseof.com from a mobile device you’ll see the mobile site automatically. Those of you who just want to see it, can visit m.makeuseof.com in your normal browser and the good guys at MoFuse will emulate a mobile device for you.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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The problem was rectified this evening and feeds are now back online.

We also noticed that our nice little “Google” hosted search functionality was displaying a blank search results page. It didn’t matter what was typed – it returned a blank page. Until we get this issue resolved, we’ve re-implemented the default WordPress search functionality.

Both matters are back in working order, but being the dedicated geeks that we are, we felt it necessary to notify our readers of these issues and their current status.

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With lots of mobile users in the US, unlimited internet and wi-fi enabled phones; browsing the web can be quite the experience. If you don’t have Opera on your phone, chances are you’re using a crappy built-in browser that rarely, if ever, renders pages correctly. That’s where Mowser steps in.

By mobilizing web content, Mowser delivers perfect pages for your phone of popular websites. While you can input any web address in there and Mowser will do a fairly good job of converting it, my experience with it is that if you type in RSS feeds of websites, you’ll get a much better return.

As you can see above, the one on the top is browsing MakeUseOf Feedburner feed, while the one on the bottomght is viewing MakeUseOf website. It doesn’t take much more than a quick glance to figure out which one makes for the more mobile friendly site! Also, all the links clicked from within the Mowser site will also be mobilized. Bonus!

Mowser has also added other features that might interest you. As you saw from the home page screen shot above, they also offer topics such as subscribing to popular tag feeds, free games, mobile directory, the tech 100 (powered by TechMeme’s top 100 technology blogs), top 100 politics, and the top 100 search engines made easy by using keywords directly into the site.

Do you have any thoughts about better web page mobilizers out there? Share them with us!

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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What Can It Do?

FastKake can do a plethora of things. It creates shortcuts so that you can quickly shut down, reboot, standby, and hibernate your computer as well as lock the desktop and log off the current user. It even creates shortcuts to empty the recycle bin, quickly compose an e-mail, launch the default mail client, open or close the CD drive, adjust the volume up or down or even mute it…and we’re just barely scratching the surface.

FastKake include shortcuts to enable a screensaver, launch Google in your default browser, close all open windows, launch media players, even the calculator and character map shortcuts are included.

How to Bake a FastKake

Like with many things on the Internet, it all starts with a simple download. Just point your browser over to Kunle Adegoke’s site where FastKake has been in the oven for quite some time. After downloading this tiny file, run it. FastKake will prompt you that it’s about to create some shortcuts on your desktop. Go ahead and allow this, and you’ll see all the available shortcuts FastKake can offer.

After this, you’re done. Sit back and enjoy all the shortcuts FastKake offers. These shortcuts all point back to your fastkake.exe file that you downloaded, so make sure once its downloaded not to move it. If you do need to move the fastkake.exe file, it will work fine as long as you delete your old shortcuts and fire it up again allowing it to make a new series of shortcuts for your kake pleasure.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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What can ÜberNote do?

All sorts of things. Users of the service have reportedly been using ÜberNote for numerous things such as tasks, contacts, bookmarks, web clips, passwords, documents, notes (of course), meeting notes, recipes and even little clips of research. Anything you want to jot down for further review, ÜberNote can accommodate.

One great thing about ÜberNote is the fact that it allows all of these things to be stored in one single location. Many other online storage solutions allow you to store documents and such, but that’s all they do. ÜberNote is meant for storing notes. It takes note taking to a whole new level and since it works with any computer (with internet abilities), you can access it from anywhere.

Why ÜberNote?

It is fast, easy, smart, free and private.

ÜberNote’s simplicity plays into their design as well as their user interface. It’s extremely easy to use and they pride themselves on that. Also things are very easy to find. Notes are automatically organized in a natural order by when you created them and also by when you made changes and every node supports tagging. If you still can’t find something, the search feature will no doubt locate it and in record time. It’s also worth noting that all of your notes are private. There are currently no limits to the amount of notes and/or tags you can use in ÜberNote which should make all the note-happy internet users out there excited.

Just like most everything else at Make Use Of, ÜberNote is free. They are planning to add paid features in the future, but right now everything ÜberNote has is free.

The notes section below reminds me of Google Notebook.

The future of ÜberNote

In the future, ÜberNote plans on adding a number of features. These features include the ability to share notes with others and they soon plan on introducing a mobile version of their platform. These two features, in my opinion, will really make a difference in users adopting ÜberNote as their note-taking application of choice.

They’ve also got a nice community forum where users are encouraged to participate especially in bug reporting and requesting new features. This will only help ÜberNote become a better product for future note takers.

Do you take lots of notes? What other note taking applications are worthy of MakeUseOf fame? Leave them in the comments below.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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Getting Started

To get started, point your browser to SkyDrive and sign in. You’ll have to have a Windows Live (Passport) account to use their services. Once you sign in and accept the EULA, you’ll be able to get started uploading some of your important backup files.

SkyDrive Dropbox

The SkyDrive dropbox is easy to navigate and look at with all the shortcuts at a simple glance. Listed below are the folders I have.

The personal folders have a default setting of not sharing their contents. This is of course the security level that most users are going to want to stick with. One nice feature is the “Public Folders” section whereby you can upload anything and make it visible to the world or just a select few of your contacts. The default for the “Public Folders” is obviously, viewable to all.

As a matter of fact, each folder gives you that explicit ability….to add/remove anyone from your contact list or just by email as a reader or viewer of your documents.

Uploads

Uploading content to SkyDrive is as easy as uploading a picture to Flickr or any other upload site.

Just point your “Browse” button to any file on your hard drive or network drive and SkyDrive will take care of the rest.

The only drawback to this service is that you’re locked into only 50MB uploads per file. This should not be a problem for most users, but worth mentioning anyway.

Coming up soon on MakeUseOf.com, we’ll be reviewing lots of online storage web applications and their respected features. Stay tuned.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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AviScreen

AviScreen captures screen activities and converts the output into an .avi file or alternatively into several images. It does include that very nifty feature often referred to as “follow the cursor” which means you can create a smaller dimension video and the software will automatically follow the curser to the location so that the user watching doesn’t miss anything.

AviScreen is very easy to use and I really like its “follow the cursor” feature. There is also a ton of help information.

The one thing I don’t like is that it does not support audio and the GUI seems clunky sometimes. Other than that, its a good program.

OS: Windows only

CamStudio

CamStudio is a nice capture program that records all screen and audio activity and creates standard .avi files. CamStudio has its own built-in SWF Producer and can turn those .avi files you converted into stream-friendly Flash video .swf files. CamStudio uses their own lossless codec that produces nice, clear results all the while at a smaller file size than most other popular codecs (so we’re told).

OS: Windows only

Copernicus

Copernicus is for you Mac people out there. It prides itself on being very fast allowing the program to record directly to your RAM for super fast access. Use it to easily create screenshots  or simple how-to movies.

OS: Mac only

Screencast-o-Matic

Screencast-o-Matic is a neat online application that creates videos. This one actually allows you to create video recordings all from your browser. Like all other great web apps, this is in beta, but it’s got potential that’s for sure.

The simple fact that it integrates so nicely using Java will be enough for many to catch on. Creating a screencast is as simple as anything ending in “o-matic” usually is. Just click Create on the website and you’re in business. Screencast-o-Matic starts recording video and audio as soon as you hit the red record icon and gives you a nice 15 minute window of time. That should be enough time to explain something…not all things, but some things nonetheless.

This really is a simple tool to use with options of creating titles, descriptions, notes at certain times in the video, and even allowing comments and making the screencast searchable. Or, if you’re not feeling like sharing just yet, export it to a .mov file for viewing later. There’s even a Screencast to show you how to screencast.

Caveat: Java Required
OS: Who cares, its Java!

Jing

Jing isn’t just another great screencasting application. Jing is an interesting “project”. At first glance, I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what Jing was all about. It seems to rely heavily on TechSmith’s (Jing’s Creator) Screencast.com service and provide an interesting “social” sort of feel about it.

A quick look at the Getting Started page explained a few things as well as the little video tour.

Basically, it goes like this:

• Download and Install Jing
• Run Jing and click the Capture button and select something
• Grab an image or even record a video
• Edit the image or preview your directorial masterpiece
• Share your creation when your file is uploaded to Screencast.com, Flickr, or your own FTP server and the URI is copied to your clipboard
• Use that URI anywhere you want to share your screencast.

It should be noted that after setup, Jing requires you signup for a Screencast.com account. Even if you plan on using your own FTP server for your Jings, if skipped, this step will close down Jing.

After signing up, I was able to start my Jing experience. My first Jing was created simply and after supplying my FTP info into the Preferences, I was uploading small .swf files to my server for viewing. It was tremendously painless and easy. I think Jing has the most potential of becoming a great application.

OS: Windows & Mac

Any great screencasting tools out there not on this list? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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Now it’s out, and Windows Live Writer is a great application with millions of users using it as their desktop blog publisher of choice.

Blog Services

Currently, Writer works with most of the major blog providers out there. Including but not limited to Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Movable Type, etc. It really only takes a few seconds to get started thanks to Writer’s built-in automatic configuration that sets up your application, syncs your categories and downloads your blog’s template files so that you can see what your blog post will truly look like.

Post Preview

As mentioned above, Windows Live Writer gives you the ability to preview what your posts will look like by downloading the templates locally. This truly is as WYSIWYG as you can get. Once you’ve finished typing that long post, or in my case a simple Lorem ipsum dummy post, you can see what it looks like.

Publish Now or Later

Writer allows you to create blog entries and then post them to your weblog for further review. Alternately, if you’re without Internet access, you can save a local draft and post at a future time. An interesting feature of Writer is that you can set a particular post to publish at a certain date. Say you write your regular Friday-night article on Wednesday. Fine, just set your article, once finished, to publish two days later. Done. WLW will set the publish date for your article and Friday it should show up (If your blog service permits).

Extend WLW with Extensions

With the growing number of extensions, Windows Live Writer is even more powerful than ever. At the time of this article, there are 80 extensions available for Windows Live Writer including adding things like music feeds, picture galleries, emoticons, and even a Digg This plug-in.

One of my favorites is Flickr4Writer. As the title states, its an extension that allows you to access and interact with the Flickr™ API. You can browse photosets, search tags, and more.

Easy Does It

Everything you add to your blog entries, Windows Live Writer will post to your blog provider. This makes adding rich content to your blog entries a breeze. Just type, add pictures and other content, then click a button to publish…its literally that simple.

All in all, this is the best desktop blog publisher out there. I’ve tested a few of them, but Microsoft wins the gold prize for getting all the nice features most bloggers want.

Who uses Windows Live Writer out there? Let us know about your experiences and your favorite extensions for the best desktop blog publisher.

Hungry for it? Get it here.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, visual communicator, web developer and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

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This concept isn’t new, Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight do very similar things but Mozilla’s stance is that they are not building a new proprietary platform to replace Web applications, they are just bringing the advantages of desktop apps to the Web platform.

Using Prism couldn’t be easier. After you’ve installed it, all you have to do is start it up and you’ll be presented with an “Install Web Application” box.

As you can see below, I’ve configured the Google Calendar web application using Prism. But you can also do it for Gmail, Facebook, Twitter etc.

After inputting the necessary values for your new web application and clicking OK, Prism launches the application and you’re in business.

With flavors available for Windows®, Mac, and Linux…Prism’s got you covered.

Prism is still in beta so there might be a few bugs here and there, therefore Mozilla is requesting that users participate in the forums as well as in submitting bugs.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, visual communicator, web developer and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com

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Information / News Web Apps :

CBS News: www.cbsnews.com/iphone
Fox News: iphone.foxnews.com
Google: Google.com
Reuters Mobile: mobile.reuters.com
BrainyQuote: www.brainyquote.com/iphone.html

Social Apps :

Digg: www.digg.com/iphone
Facebook: iphone.Facebook.com
Twitter: m.twitter.com/login

Reference:

Wikipedia: www.keishi.net/ipodia/
People Finder: www.2robots.com/iphone/#_ByNumber
Urban Dictionary: www.idotg.com/apps/iwurd.php
Realtor: iphone.realtor.com

Weather Web Apps :

AccuWeather: apple.accuweather.com/widget/iphone1/iphone.html
Weather Underground: i.wund.com
Weather.com: www.weather.com/iphone

Shopping :

eBay: iphone.ebay.com
Amazon.com: www.amazon.com
iCoupie (coupons and deals): www.icoupie.com

iPhone optimized games :

Tetris: iphone-tetris.com
Bejeweled: static.popcap.com/iphone
iBowl: mynumo.com/iphone/ibowl/ibowl.php
Jacks or Better: elenor.net/iphone/poker
Mahjong: 38i.biz/mahjong/

Productivity / ToDo lists :

Tada List: tadalist.com
iNozbe: www.inozbe.com
Remember the Milk: i.rememberthemilk.com

Chat Messengers (MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, GTalk etc.) :

Meebo: www.meebo.com
Beejive: iphone.beejive.com

Just Neat:

Guitar Tuner for iPhone: iphoneguitartuner.com

Are you an iPhone user? Have any more great iPhone websites for us? Leave them in the comments and we’ll be sure to update our directory.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, visual communicator, web developer and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com

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Lets look at OpenDNS’s feature list. It’s quite impressive. The offer a nice list of great DNS related tools to help you secure, customize, and protect your network. To start, we need to create an account. Do this by browsing to the OpenDNS website and clicking on the Create Account link at the top of the page. You’ll get access to all their features including:

• Adult site blocking
• Domain blocking
• Domain whitelist
• Phishing detection
• Custom statistics

Upon logging in, OpenDNS will create a network for you based off your IP. This is the default and you’ll easily be able to click “Settings” and start your OpenDNS customization. You can start off by uploading your own logo. This just allows you to have your own image on the error pages generated by OpenDNS. You could put a picture of a big red X, or if you’re a real geek, a picture of yourself with a not-so-happy face.

Whitelist – The whitelist allows you the opportunity to always allow access to specific websites. These websites will not be affected by the remaining settings.

Adult Site Blocking – this setting is broken down into six categories. It allows you the ability to pick and choose which specific set of categories you’d like to include in your domain block list, with another option for proxy/anonymizer sites. Simply select each one you would like to block, and apply the settings. OpenDNS takes care of the rest, giving you an error message when you try to connect to something listed in these categories.

Phishing Site Blocking – This option utilizes PhishTank to block every computer using OpenDNS’s DNS servers from suspected phishing websites.

Domain Blocking (Blacklist) – This option allows you to block specific websites. So say you don’t do your kids (or someone else) going to myspace, no problem – just add myspace.com to the domain block list and it won’t be accessible anymore.

One of the neatest things about each one of these options is that they allow you to create your own specific error messages or informational messages you wish to show up in the browser of the user trying to connect to these websites.

Shortcuts – This is one of the neatest features available to users of OpenDNS.

The shortcuts allow you to create single word shortcuts to specific URLs. If you browse many websites, and a lot of those websites are ones you would go to on a day-to-day basis, this option is perfect for you. Create simple, one-word shortcuts for those websites. Since I’m an avid Gmail user, I’ve listed the shortcut “mail” to go to https://mail.google.com. I just type mail in my address bar and I’m off to Gmail. It’s that simple.

Do you use OpenDNS as your DNS? Have any other info about this topic? Let us know.

Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, visual communicator, web developer and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com

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During these times I would normally use the trusty SpyBot – Search & Destroy application because it’s superior in many ways, but if I don’t have it with me or feel like just doing a quick online check without having to install a client application, the few choices below provide a good alternative.

BitDefender – Easy on-demand virus scanner using powerful BitDefender engines. It scans system memory, files and drive boot sectors. It also automagically cleans infected files. Uses ActiveX components (IE Only)

CA – Online virus scanner. Just agree to a little ActiveX component and you’re scanning with ease in just a brief moment. Uses ActiveX components (IE Only)

ESET – Online malware scanner. With just an acceptance of ESET’s TOS, you can scan your PC for known malware including viruses, worms, Trojans, phishing, and spyware.

ewido – Simple cleaner for malware. Uses ActiveX components (IE Only)

F-Secure – Simple virus scan from web. Uses ActiveX components (IE Only)

Jotti – Simple file checker. Jotti uses several scanners to look into the file you upload to determine if it’s infected.

McAfee FreeScan – McAfee FreeScan is a great virus scanner using the award-winning McAfee Scan Engine. Uses ActiveX components (IE Only)

NanoScan – Great, fast scanning application previously covered by the MUO Directory.

Panda ActiveScan – Get a free Panda scan that checks for viruses, spyware and other various internet threats. Current count over 185,000 viruses, worms, and trojans. Uses ActiveX components (IE Only)

TrendMicro – Scans for Viruses and Malware. It also scans for vulnerabilities and and fixes them to prevent re-infestation.

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Google has been really stepping up their efforts in making many of their products usable from the mobile phone. Whether you’re using a regular cell, an iPhone, or even a SmartPhone, Google has you covered. So here at MakeUseOf.com, we’ve summarized all the Google Mobile services here in this comprehensive list.

Search
Get a fast answer to what you’re looking for. Sports, Flights, Images, Weather…its all there. Even local listings have quick responses to your queries. You can even create a little iGoogle start page for quick access to your favorite headlines, updates, stock quotes and other feeds from various websites.
Just visit Google Mobile from your phone at: http://m.google.com

SMS
Add GOOGLE to your contacts and use the mobile number 466453 (that’s Google on your number pad). Send a quick SMS to that contact with the text “help” for a instant response of the preferred way to text Google. Tips for Google Mobile SMS:

• Local: blockbuster <zipcode>
• Weather: w <zipcode>
• Movies: m <zipcode>
• Flights: aa 1234
• Sports: score dallas cowboys
• Definitions: d ozone
• Products: price ipod or price
• Calculator: 123*8
• Driving Directions: to ex. tulsa,ok to dallas, tx

I use this service a ton. With the quick access to data by simply texting GOOGLE, I’m forever in “the know.”

Want more? Yes that’s right, theres more! Visit the SMS help page to find all the available queries that Google will respond to. (I’ve included a list of most of them…see below)

Maps

Google’s mapping has come a long way. Their most recent version includes the new “My Location” whereby Google can find you you can find where you are without GPS. Google’s claim is that “you’ll never get lost again.” That might be a slightly lofty goal for some, but this release of their mapping software is leaps and bounds better than before. It’s available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Nokia/Symbian devices. If you still need more coaxing to get started with Google Mobile Maps, take it for a test drive.

Gmail
Gmail for mobile devices is simply amazing. It’s lightning fast, works well, and even allows you to view common attachments (ex. photos, PDF files, Microsoft Office products, etc.). Most of the readers visiting this site I’m sure know about Gmail. As far as I’m concerned, it is the single greatest web app in the world. Google really showed what they were capable of and millions of accounts have proved their success in this endeavor.

YouTube
You can check out the best YouTube has to offer right from your mobile device, including YouTube’s Featured Videos, Most Views, Recently Added, and more. Just point your mobile device’s browser to: m.youtube.com.
Uploading clips from your phone has never been easier either. All you need is a mobile profile tied to your YouTube account and you’re in business.

Even if you find a great video you’d like to share with friends, they’ve got that covered too. You can easily send videos from your phone to your friends.

Google 411
This one’s easy. Google’s answer to National 411 service. Just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 and follow the voice prompts. You’ll quickly find the business you’re looking for and Google will even connect your call for free! You can then even just say “text message” and Google will text you a map to the location they found for you. Oh how convenient. For more details go to previously posted Get FREE 411 Directory Assistance with GOOG411

Google Calendar
With Google Calendar’s web access, you can view your Calendar from anywhere. Browse any day to see all your events. You can even add events as you think of them by typing out the details and simply pressing “Add now”. Google Calendar will automagically add it to your calendar. Not only that, but these events are always in sync. As long as you’re signed in to Google, they will show up wherever you may roam and find yourself looking at your calendar. Just point your mobile browser to Google Mobile, then click the Calendar link and you’ll be all set.

Google News
With Google News you can easily search for the latest news headlines right from your phone. You can even set your own personalized news to show the stories you’d most like to see. Google also includes thumbnails of images included in these news articles linked to the original article. Point your mobile browser to mobile.google.com to find the latest news articles and begin your journey with Google Mobile.

Picasa Mobile
If you use Picasa, you can easily browse through your latest photo album’s pictures and view any images stored on Picasa Web Albums. Just for you, Google resizes them to fit on your devices screen. With their built-in search functionality, you can find and download any photo you’ve posted online as well as find other Picasa friends and explore their photos too. Travel out to PicasaWeb’s Mobile site to start browsing pictures.

Google Reader
If you’re a user of Google’s Feed Reader application, they’ve thought of you when producing their mobile site for it. You can easily access your favorite feeds right from the phone. If you’re stuck in the doctors office waiting or other realms of boredom, kill time reading your feeds. They always stay up to date. On your phone, browse to Mobile Reader.

Google Notebook
Google’s Notebook has saved me a ton of work. The easy to use interface works perfectly for creating little notes complete with links to websites to view etc… Well, now Google’s added that to their repertoire of great mobile apps too. You can quickly jot down little notes that are synchronized to your Google account for looking at later. Or say maybe you keep your grocery list on Notebook but forgot to print it to take with you to the store. No problem, just grab your phone and browse to Google Mobile, click on the Notebook icon and pull up your grocery list. There it is in all its glory. Now, don’t forget the milk!

Google Docs
Finally, there is Google Docs. Google Docs Mobile (docs.google.com/m) is optimised for use on a smaller handheld screen and shows a list of recent documents and document folders from your Google Docs account. Supports word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents. At the moment, you can only view, not edit, documents.

iPhone
If you’re an iPhone geek, you’ve no doubt already found your very own Google page. If not, just point your Safari mobile browser to Google.com and it will format for you. How nice of Google.

Do you use Google on your mobile phone? Have something to add? Let us know…

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