Totseans Tech Series (Preview)

Dfg

I had bunch of tech related articles open and I thought why not just make one thread instead of going haywire with different threads all cross the forum. Now keep in mind, I just woke up and I haven't eaten anything yet. So, if you see mistakes (DEAL WITH IT). I had the worst day of this month few hours ago, the whole Sunday was a mess. I will talk about that in another thread.

Helping with Time.

Most of the time, people have trouble understanding different time zones or you have to Google for a timezone type chart and just see what time is in another country. Well, not anymore, now we can just head over to this website: http://time.is/ and check the time. The best about the timing is how good it looks. I was thinking of adding a widget on the CMS or the forum but it only supports one Time zone. Which means it will display PST only. But still it's a great website to check.

Control Application Using Gestures

If you're TDR or an Opera user you already know about using Gestures, like in Opera you can move your mouse in certain fashion to automate something as simple as opening a new tab or a macro function. Well, what if I tell you, that you can use your Webcam to do the same thing? A Company called Flutter is releasing something like that, I haven't tested or tried it yet but I am on their invite list. I suggest you give it a go as well.

Website: http://flutter.io/

They're offering jobs as well:
http://flutter.io/jobs

[h=1]What Peter Thiel Wants You To Do[/h]Peter Theil is known for Paypal and Facebook and the likes. He is seen bashing University education and promoting users to leave it and then focus on their startup ideas and presue it. Some of his ideas make sense but what surprises me is, that he is well educated, it's like me saying to everyone not to go to school or don't ever read any books. Now, he is offering a class in Standford University "CS:183" which is already overbooked. In his class he will be taking about startups and companies he worked in, which seems interesting.

Now, I do have tons of things to say about this but I am short on time. This sentence explains it all: But his views apparently do not apply to himself - or to Stanford University.

Reuters) - Peter Thiel, the superstar Silicon Valley investor, has famously dismissed university as a waste of time and money, and even offered students cash to drop out.
But his views apparently do not apply to himself - or to Stanford University.
Thiel, 44, will teach at the elite university this spring, sharing pearls of entrepreneurial wisdom in a class called "Computer Science 183: Startup." The course is already oversubscribed, with Thiel's return to his alma mater sparking both enthusiasm and skepticism on a campus increasingly obsessed with start-up success.
"It's puzzling to us what he has to say," said Nruthya Madappa, a senior in electrical engineering who saw rumors of Thiel's class explode on her Facebook news feed on a recent evening and rushed to sign up "several minutes" after course enrollment went live.
"He's famously known to make people furious with his views and the way he questions things," she said. "But he's challenging us to look at our education here in a different way."
Thiel, who co-founded online payment processor PayPal and later reaped billions with bets on gilded names like Facebook, LinkedIn and Zynga, is known for his maverick ways, even emerging recently as the main financial backer for libertarian presidential contender Ron Paul. Thiel has argued that the brightest young minds should strike out on their own and start companies rather than take on crushing debt to pursue a college degree.
Never mind that Thiel himself holds both a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a law degree from Stanford; he has backed up his talk with his checkbook. Last year, Thiel started a fellowship that offered $100,000 to 20 budding entrepreneurs between the ages of 14 and 20 who would drop out to focus on their ventures.
But Thiel last year also submitted a formal course proposal to Stanford after approaching Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford computer science professor, to discuss the possibility of teaching. (Thrun has since left the university to work on an online education project.)
Mehran Sahami, the department's associate chair for education, said the curriculum committee debated whether Thiel would use the class as a conduit to recruit students to his companies. Other faculty voiced concerns that they were "not sure of his motivations given his history with respect to universities," Sahami said.
"We went into this with eyes wide open," said Sahami, a former research scientist at Google. "But on balance, this would be something our students would benefit from."
Still others, like Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford's Rock Center of Corporate Governance, were not so sure.
"It's hypocritical, but I'm not surprised," Wadhwa said. "The same people who go around bashing education are the most educated. What's he going to do? Tell students, ‘When you graduate from my class, drop out right after that?'"
Thiel did not respond to requests for comment.
SPECIAL GUEST ZUCKERBERG?
With several weeks to go until Stanford's spring quarter begins, Thiel's class — capped by the university at 250 spots, the capacity of the lecture hall — is already oversubscribed. There is a wait-list. And those who have managed to enroll in time may participate only with Thiel's consent.
"Inner accounts from the early days of startups including PayPal, Google and Facebook will be used as case studies," the listing for CS: 183 reads. "The class will be taught by entrepreneurs who have started companies worth over $1B and VCs(venture capitalists) who have invested in startups including Facebook and Spotify."
Students expect the lectures — and particularly the guest appearances — to be high-wattage affairs. There's already speculation over who he might bring in: Sean Parker? Mark Zuckerberg?
"It could be anybody," Madappa said. "He's well-connected in the Valley. Who knows who he's going to pick to come?"
The excitement bubbling around Thiel's class speaks to the startup-mania that's consumed Stanford perhaps more than any other American university. Although interest waned in the 2000s, Stanford's introductory computer science class recently broke an enrollment record last set during the 1999-2000 academic year, at the height of the dot-com bubble, when 762 students took the course during the 1999-2000 academic year.
Sitting in the student union cafe on a recent evening, Zach Weiner, a senior majoring in symbolic systems, described a campus where Andrew Luck, the football team's star quarterback and 2011 Heisman Trophy runner-up, could pass largely unharassed but where the undergraduate daughters of the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla are considered quasi-celebrities.
"Kids are rabid about entrepreneurship," Weiner said. "They say Stanford can't sell out a home football game but they can sell out a Peter Thiel talk 20 times over."
Travis Kiefer, 24, is one former student who followed Thiel's recommended path. He left Stanford before his senior year and moved into a two-bedroom house off University Avevenue in Palo Alto — just a few blocks from the storied garage where Hewlett-Packard was born - to start a travel website.
Although his parents "expressed very strongly that they want to come out and see me in a cap and gown," Kiefer said they would understand if he never returned. But Kiefer called Thiel's arguments "too extreme," saying that skipping college altogether "might work for some people, but those people are so few and far between."
Kiefer said he fully planned to return if his startup stalled, thanks to Stanford policies that do not penalize but almost encourage leaves of absences.
"It's really easy to just take a year off," Kiefer said. "They welcome you back with open arms."
Harry Elam, a vice provost of undergraduate education, said that exposing students to Thiel's arguments was consistent with the university's mission.
In fact, he said, the university considered one of its most important commencement speeches in recent years to be the 2005 address by Steve Jobs, the late Apple CEO, who recounted his own experience dropping out of Reed College in 1972.
"The spirit of the message, and the idea of what it takes to succeed in entrepreneurship, is something we understand," Elam said.

Build With Bootstrap

Bootstrap is platform that enables you to rapidly build website using already provided code. Twitter has it's own Bootstrap and now you can see different websites using it as well. I have an interest in this because it might enable me to create something that I can use on Totseans and other projects. I am sure if you're into this stuff you will enjoy it as well. Here is the showcase gallery: http://builtwithbootstrap.com/

[h=1]Creating Effective Landing Pages[/h]Something that Internet Marketers would love to sell you. I will paste it all here since it's a good read.

Imagine you walked into a car dealership to look at a brand new Hyundai. You’ve wondered if they have the leg room you need. You approach a sales rep and ask if the Hyundai Sonatas have adequate leg room for a big galoot like yourself. The salesperson nods and says that they are surprisingly roomy and then shrugs and walks away.I imagine you’d feel a bit confused. Our image of car salespeople is that of the consummate closer. In fact, many people avoid car salesmen because of their reputation for aggressive pursuit of the sale.
You walked into the dealership to find information. Having found that information you’re now in a position to take the next step. The fact that the salesperson just walked away instead of suggesting a next step is something akin to malpractice.
While that situation seems absurd in the context of a car dealership, it is surprising how many business people aren’t bothered that their website is doing that every day.
When a visitor comes to your website the very first page they land on is the “landing page.” This is not always your website’s home page. In fact it is very rare that the home page will be very good at converting prospects to paying customers. The best landing pages are specific to the visitor’s interest and intent. Your landing page should answer your visitor’s questions and invite them to go further.
In this article series, we are going to analyze:

1. What makes a great landing page?
2. How do we measure the results our landing pages are producing?
3. How do we optimize our landing pages for maximum engagement and ROI?
4. What are some best practices and things to avoid when creating a landing page?
5. What about the confirmation page?

[h=2]What makes a great landing page?[/h]When we think about building a landing page, the parts that come to mind immediately are things like a compelling headline, scannable copy, interesting images and perhaps even streaming video or other multimedia. While these features are important and challenging, the single most important part of a landing page is the call to action.
[h=2]What is a Call To Action?[/h]The call to action is the part of the page that asks the visitor to take the next step. For the subset of landing pages called “squeeze pages” that action might be as simple as clicking a link or button. A lead generation page will usually have a form that begins the qualification process. Other landing pages might invite the visitor to download a file, share the page on social networks or email their representative.
One important thing to note is that we are talking about “the” call to action. There are many things a visitor can do when visiting a webpage. One of the most common things they do is click the back button on their browser. Some visitors will do things you could never predict like view your source and attempt to backwards engineer your page or stumble on your contact form to request information on donating her body to an online college (true story)!
The action that you are calling for, or the action you most want your visitor to take, is the call to action.
There is almost never a good reason to attempt to offer more than one action. Visitors prefer to not think too hard about what to do next. Presenting a choice might seem like a great way to serve all types of visitors. Usually, you just end up serving fewer visitors altogether. It is better to have a separate page for that secondary call to action.
For example, if your primary call to action is completing a lead qualification form, asking the visitor to sign up for a newsletter on the same page can only serve to lower your action rate on your primary CTA while muddying your analytics. It is far better to present that secondary action on the confirmation or encore page after the visitor has completed the primary action. If there is a segment of visitors that are responsive to the newsletter form than your primary call to action, you may wish to split that traffic and send them to two different landing pages to get the most out of your visitor flow.
Anything you add to your page besides the call to action has to have a good reason for being there. It’s better to not have a headline than to have a confusing headline or a headline with an irritating grammatical mistake. Skip the stock photo if all you have is a careless or distracting picture. Every element on the page has a job to do and that job is to direct the visitor toward the call to action.
So how do you know which parts are helping and which are hindering conversion on your CTA? You test. You test ruthlessly and objectively. Headlines don’t have baby sub headlines to feed, so you don’t have to feel bad about firing a poor performer.
[h=2]Parts Of A Landing Page[/h]In order to properly test a landing page, you must be familiar with the parts of the page that you can experiment on. Below you will find a list of the important parts of a landing page. Not every landing page will use each part, but these are the most common elements.

1. URL or Web Address
   1. The first thing to consider when looking at your landing page URL is all the stuff at the end. Query strings are the accepted way to pass campaign tracking information from an advertising publisher to your analytics. Make sure your links are passing the right information and that your analytics system is consuming and associating that information correctly.
   2. Another purpose your URL serves is to subtly pass information to the visitor about where they’ve landed and that you are trustworthy. Use a domain that doesn’t seem shady or unprofessional.
   3. Requiring an SSL connection is becoming much more common and is necessary if the information you collect is sensitive.
2. Title
   1. If SEO is part of your marketing strategy, the titles you use are extremely important. For one, the visitors will be selecting which link to click based largely on what the title is promising. If the visitor is looking to buy new headphones the title “How to select the best new headphones” is likely more attractive than “BobsSuperStore.com – Home of the best deals on everything from coffee to band aids!” If the CMS you are using does not allow you to make a unique title on every page of your website, you should fix it or find another.
   2. The meta-description is important for the same reason. It should clearly state what a visitor to your page will find.
   3. Also, your title will show up in the “tab label” area and often in the top bar of the browser. The visitor will be able to see even less of your title here than in the search results. Having your important keywords early in the title is helpful to getting the visitor’s attention back when they wander.
3. Headline
   1. Your headline is often the only part of your page a visitor will read. When I talk about a “headline” I mean the most prominent text immediately visible when visiting your page. The headline should use short action words that state what you are offering your visitor.
   2. If your visitor came to your site by clicking on an ad they are almost certainly looking for whatever you promised in the ad. Your headline has to repeat that promise to show the visitor that they made the right click.
4. Sub-headline
   1. A sub-headline exists to say what you weren’t able to fit in the headline. Often it is an offer of proof or an extra guarantee.
   2. Consider using your sub-headline to explicitly tell your visitor what to do next. For example, suppose you have a landing page with the headline “Free Cookies.” You might follow that with a sub-headline that says “Sign Up for our newsletter and receive a box of delicious cookies for free!” That sub-headline clarifies the headline and instructs the visitor on what to do next.
   3. If you can’t express your thought in a just a few words it’s not a sub-headline, it is copy. Put it in a P tag.
5. Copy
   1. Use short words and short sentences.
   2. Rely on bullet points that are easy to scan. Use action words, not adjectives.
   3. Show don’t tell. In other words, describe the benefit don’t explain its specs.
   4. The copy is there to support the CTA. Your copy should focus on talking the visitor into taking the next step. Rambling, dense copy or shallow fill are both worse than not having copy at all.
   5. Relevant content makes Google happy. Google assigns quality scores that are partly based on the usefulness of the content you offer.
6. Hero Shot
   1. The big picture of your product (or the box it came in) is often called the “Hero Shot.” Humans are strongly influenced by visual information. Putting your product on a pedestal on the top of your page is a great way to persuade your visitors of its value. Humans ascribe a lot more value to something they can see.
   2. Use crisp pictures devoid of compression artifacts or gimmicky filters. Yes, you should use aggressive compression to lower the file sizes and speed up your page, but you have to apply compression correctly. The jpg format is great for photographs, PNG or GIF files are best for images with text and clear lines. There are a lot of free and cheap image tools that will compress your images in the optimal way.
7. Video and Multimedia
   1. Video has seen an explosion in popularity in the last few years. Combine high quality digital video recorders and sites like YouTube and you have made video accessible to anyone with a smartphone and a little hustle.
   2. There are just as many rules and hints for producing decent video as for landing pages. I don’t think I could adequately cover video in this post. Here are a few valuable tips:
      1. Record outdoors or in a room with lots of open windows. The light from the sun is brighter than any lamp you can afford.
      2. It is tempting to use the webcam attached to your computer. That’s fine for casual v-logging but as a pitch often it just comes off as lazy.
      3. Straightforward and honest is a lot easier to pull off than zany, gimmicky or high-tech. Don’t underestimate the power of looking someone in the eyes and just talking.
8. Pictures and Photographs
   1. If you have people in your pictures, you might try to edit and place them in a way that makes it appear their eyes are looking at your call to action. You may want to avoid photographs of people who are too attractive or sexy unless that’s part of your offer.
   2. Free stock photo sites are useful, but everyone else uses the same images. You don’t want your landing page associated with the scam ads and hokey sites that your visitors have gotten lost in before.
   3. Having an eye-catching or weird photo can attract attention. You will see that in action in Facebook ads and the mini-display ads on news sites. Those ads are attempting to compete with the content on the page where they are embedded. That’s why they use ambiguous, alarming or just plain weird pictures. However, on your landing page, distraction is not what you are after.
9. Forms
   1. Aim for small wins, especially at the top of your funnel. Asking for personal information like and email address or phone number right off the bat will scare off a big chunk of your visitors. That’s not to say you absolutely can’t ask for that sort of information on the front page, just that you will have to explicitly explain what you’re going to do with it.
   2. Don’t ask for anything you don’t need to know. It might be interesting to find out their job title, or home address but if you don’t have an immediate business use for that information it will just serve to depress your conversion rate. Data you don’t use is worthless.
   3. In the same vein, try to make each step in your conversion funnel the smallest possible commitment available.
   4. Asking the visitor to check a judiciously worded checkbox along the lines of “Yes! I’m ready to [RECEIVE BENEFIT] can unconsciously commit them to progressing through your entire conversion funnel.
10. Buttons
    1. The most important thing to know about buttons is that they work best when they look like buttons. Google has recently begun using buttons without bevels or shadows. That’s fine for Google, but I wouldn’t recommend that on a landing page. Your visitors have likely never been to your website. Expecting them to learn new conventions is too much to ask. Make you buttons easily recognizable as buttons.
    2. The text you use on the button is something worth experimenting with. My rule is to always make it clear what the button is going to do when you click it. “Sign Up”, “Log Out” and “Subscribe” are great examples of clearly communicating what the visitor should expect upon clicking your button.
    3. On multi-page forms the verbs “Continue” and “Next” are common. They can also be used to push the visitor through optional pages after the initial conversion.
11. Call Outs
    1. Make your strongest point and answer the most objections in a way that draws the eye. Remember, visitors just scan and rely on your design choices to focus their attention.
    2. Call outs are a great place to put a link or button that advances your visitor down the funnel. Perhaps you have a call out that addresses a common obstacle to conversion. That’s a great place to put a link or button.
12. Testimonials
    1. Don’t use stock photos and fake testimonials. Everyone can smell that artifice from 3 clicks away.
    2. Do ask your customers how they like your product and ask to use the more enthusiastic responses on your website. It’s as simple as writing a personal email. Pull the most active customers from your analytics database and get in touch with them. A happy customer who gets attention is the best salesman you can hire.
    3. Details like their full name, an authentic picture and their website or contact information go a long way in giving your prospects the confidence to convert.
13. Navigation
    1. If you can avoid it, don’t include it. Build your landing pages to convert. Curious visitors are welcome to poke around your site after they complete your CTA, but a visitor that wanders into other parts of your site is very hard to get back on track. They are much more likely to leave unconverted than visitors who stay on the landing page.
    2. There’s no law that every page on your site has to look like all the others. Remove your cruft and navigation and widgets, anything that a visitor can interact with that doesn’t advance him or her down the funnel is a waste.
14. Analytics
    1. Before your landing page ever sees a visitor you should test and re-test your analytics software. Google provides a free analytics product that is popular and well made. There are many other providers like getClicky.com, crazyEgg.com and Piwik.
    2. Google analytics also integrates with your google webmaster account, which can give you an even deeper look at your data.
    3. There are so many powerful features and tasks involved in managing analytics that it can seem overwhelming. Start with constructing a conversion funnel. A funnel is simply a view of the data that shows you where in the process your visitors stopped. A successful conversion is a visitor that makes it all the way to the end. You can have multiple funnels for describing different conversion events and the different paths your visitors take to get there. I will discuss this topic in detail in a future post in this series.
15. Fine Print
    1. You absolutely need a privacy policy with a clear and easy to see link. Advertising networks will not sell you traffic without one. There are a number of web applications that will help you create a valid privacy policy.
    2. Terms and Conditions are also important but vary depending on your business, how you use personal and business information and what types of activities people can do on your website.
    3. Put a link to an unsubscribe page in your footer (or where appropriate.) Even if you don’t send email, people will think you do and will feel better if you give them an easy way out. If you do send email, remember that being marked as spam has much higher consequences than making it easy for your visitors to unsubscribe.

There is more to this thread and I will add another update when I have some tea and my Internet reconnects. But I will hopefully do this everyday. You will see the first edition on the CMS instead of the forums btw. You can contribute in it because I will be making a discussion thread for each article in this way it will make it easier for everyone to add or fix things.

Dfg

We Can Finally Use Firefox in Windows 8

I love and hate Firefox but I wouldn't be using it as my File Browser for Windows, considering how it handle my web pages and how much RAM it consumes, I don't think it would be a wise choice. But regardless Windows 8 will have the option to use a different browser for navigating files on your system. It's not like you can't do it on any browser, open any local path location in any browser and it will give you a directory view which is limited but with the new application layer in place it can allow the third party apps to get access to other features. Read this:

And thus, Microsoft bites itself in its behind with Metro. As you all surely know by now, the Metro environment in Windows 8, and its accompanying applications, need to follow a relatively strict set of rules and regulations, much like, say, applications on iOS. For one type of application, Metro has already proven to be too restrictive and limited: web browsers. Microsoft has had to define a separate application class [.docx] - aside from Metro and desktop applications - just to make third party web browsers possible for Windows 8.Web browsers and Windows have a troublesome history. Internet Explorer was supposedly tied so deep into Windows, it couldn't be removed, according to Bill Gates. This put the competition - Firefox, especially - at a severe disadvantage. So much so, even, that the European Union forced Microsoft to implement that silly browser ballot box thing.
In trying to bring the restricted iOS-like environment from Windows Phone 7 to the desktop, Microsoft ran a risk of pissing off the European Union again. Since the Metro environment imposes numerous restrictions that would hinder the development of a decent browser, Microsoft has created a new application class, called "Metro style enabled desktop browser".
This type of browser will work in both the traditional desktop, with a traditional interface, as well in Metro, with a fancy modern Metro interface. The user then gets to decide which variant of the browser he uses - similar to how Internet Explorer 10 currently works in Windows 8.
Aside from the new WinRT APIs, such a Metro style enabled desktop browser also has access to the full Win32 API, which it needs for things like optimal HTML5 support, as well as support for multiple background processes, JIT compiling, and other browser-specific stuff (like background downloading of files). A Metro style enabled desktop browser runs at the medium of low integrity level.
As great as this all sounds, there is one downside: such a browser will not work in Metro unless it is set as the default browser. This is an artificial limitation set by Microsoft. For what it's worth, Internet Explorer 10 also suffers from this limitation - but there's no word yet on if, say, an OEM could opt to ship a different browser as default.
This stuff all came out because the Firefox team has announced it's working on implementing such a Metro style enabled desktop browser. However, Microsoft has provided very little information on this obscure third application class as of yet, making it very hard for browser developers to properly target it. Of course, Windows 8 is still in development, but considering the company's past behaviour, it's easy to assume they're doing this on purpose.
"As a developer, your job gets pretty hard when you do a Google search for topics surrounding this barely supported third Metro application type and consistently get zero, one, or if you are lucky, two search results. All results being only slightly on topic," Mozilla developer Brian R. Bondy writes.
Another uncertainty at this point is the ARM version of Windows 8. A Metro style enabled desktop browser must be distributed the old-fashioned way as opposed to through the new Windows Store, and since the traditional desktop is locked down on the ARM version (i.e., it is not possible to install applications outside of the Windows Store on ARM), this currently means Mozilla and Google will not be able to distribute Firefox or Chrome for the ARM version of Windows 8.
All this illustrates just how troublesome it is to implement a locked down iOS-like My First Operating System™ on a versatile, general-purpose computer. What about the HTML rendering engine inside an email client? Or do we need another application class for Thunderbird, a "Metro style enabled desktop email client"?

Via http://www.osnews.com/story/25704/Microsoft_creates_special_application_class_for_Windows_8_browsers

I am using Metro in VM and so far, I don't hate it. The whole UI is different and there is not taskbar or start button but F it, it's about time we change to something else.

Dfg

Interactive map of Linux kernel

This website: http://www.makelinux.net/kernel_map/ offers and interactive map of Linux Kernel, it gives you not only an overview but also gives you a structured layout. Each segment of the kernel is divided by it's functions and you can see how complex the kernel is and what interface are controlled by what. I know most of you won't find this useful but it's still something to check out.

Tether Launches HTML5-Based iPhone Tethering Solution

Tether is a company that launched an App called ITether which was taken down by Apple App Store. What it allows to do is connect to any Wifi or hotspot and use the Internet without affecting your data plan. It's a great feature which the Mobile companies don't want you to have. So, now the company has launched an HTML5 version which works without messing around with anything and plus it doesn't have be on Apple App Store. It's still sort of work in progress but according to the reviews and comments it works.

Link: http://tether.com/tether-relaunches-iphone

They don't have any trial option, so be careful.

Adding a Blur Effect on the Forum

I found this neat code and I am thinking of using it for our new Layout, yes we're going to make a custom theme based on this current theme. It will be HTML5 and CSS3 and it will have some cool features. I will be making a clone of this theme and then testing things out. Since I love this theme but the colors don't work with the current logo which needs to be updated as well. Anyway, here is the link: http://www.blurjs.com/

With this, I am able to blur certain parts of the forums and make it look a bit modern. I might actually go with a blue glass type look but I am more interested in Zen type style which focuses on content rather than the extra fireworks but still, it's a good thing to play with. I am sure Trx and Bk will find this useful.

Be Careful When Handing Your iPhone or Blackberry to Police Officials.

Cellebrite's Mobile Forensic Solutions is a company that specializes in making Forensic tools for law enforcement and Goverment agencies. They're known for the BlackBerry Extraction system which can extract all the good stuff, you can actually get a 30 Day free trial but you will need to have there UFED System before that. Here is the link. Now, apart from Obama most people use iPhone which uses iOS, now according to them they can extract information out of that as well, how cool is that. Link is here. What this means is, that the good guys can take your phone and within minutes get the goods or the bad guys can swipe your phone and get the information. It's just in the movies but unfortunately it's quite real. So, think twice before handing your phone to someone and be advised the bad guys can get access to this equipment as well.

Live Ships Map - AIS

Ever wanted to keep tabs on a Ship? Well, now you can, AIS is a system which monitors registered vessels throughout it's coverage area which according to the map seems pretty big. Well, the best about this is, that I can check which vessel is going where. Although this informaiton seems pointless at first but if you view it from the eyes of a pirate you can see some potential here. But right now, it's just something that seemed cool to me. It uses Google maps and the GPS data from the ship to pinpoint their location on the sea. Another good thing about this is that YOU, yes I am talking to YOU. Can get the AIS receiving station for FREE. Go here: http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/freestation.aspx I am really interested in this, I might be able to buy something. Btw I am sure Dak would love this.

We will be collecting applications from any interested party. Although we will try to respond to all applications, we will give priority to the following cases:

• The proposed location is not already covered by our system.
• The proposed location is of special interest, such as crowded port, high traffic ship route, canal, point at high altitude, etc.
• The applicant has some experience in similar technology and generally in radio equipment.

I should conclude this because it's turning into a full edition considering the amount of information I have right now. Suggestions?