While there are dozens of web-based services that let you send and receive faxes from the computer without requiring a fax machine, Interfax goes one step further – it turns your Google Docs into a complete fax machine.
You just have to connect your Google Docs account with Interfax and once the link is enabled, you can fax any of your existing Google Docs documents, or spreadsheets, to any fax number in the world right from the browser. You may even send the same Google Docs file to multiple fax machines in one go – remember to separate the different fax numbers / Google Contact names by commas.
The cost for sending faxes from Google Docs varies according to the destination country and the length of the document. For instance, if you are to send a fax to US, the cost would be 13¢ per page, 15¢ for UK while a single page fax to an Indian number would cost you 60¢. There’s no monthly fee for sending faxes though you’ll have to buy minimum credits for $10.
GinzaFax is another online fax service that is built around Google Docs. It is slightly more expensive to send faxes through GinzaFax – the cost 40¢ per page for US numbers and 60¢ for other countries – but here you get a $5 free credit for sending faxes the first time you sign up for an account.
Other than sending faxes, you may also use both Interfax and Ginza Fax to receive faxes from anywhere in the world directly into your Google Docs account. The incoming faxes are automatically converted to PDF format and they get saved in a separate folder thus making it easier for you to locate them later.

Last month, my story about Facebook hitting a trillion page-views received an unexpected amount of interest around the web. I obviously don’t have inside sources nor did anyone contact me with those numbers – so how did I get the news about the trillion milestone before anyone else on the web?
The answer is simple. I use a web monitoring software that tracks a list of web pages (URLs) at set intervals and alerts me whenever content is added or deleted from these pages. In the above case, the monitoring utility was watching a page on google.com and the moment Google uploaded the new numbers, I got an alert on my desktop.

Tools for Monitoring Web Page Changes

The utility that I have on my Windows machine is called Website Watcher from Aegnis.com – a single-user license for the basic edition of Website Watcher is about €30 and it supports all types of web addresses including secure http and ftp based URLs.
A web monitoring tool, in simple English, works something like this. You specify the address (URL) of a web page that you would like to track and how frequently the tool should ping the given page to determine if the content has changed.
In the case of Website Watcher, you can also visually specify the portions of a page that should be ignored for tracking (like the sidebar or the footer). Later, if the tool detects that a page has changed, you can compare the before and after versions of the page side-by-side and, like any other diff tool, the changed text is highlighted for quick comparison.
Website Watcher works well but if you are looking for a free alternative, check out NotiPage. This is again a Windows-only utility for monitoring web pages with basic monitoring features except for one limitation - NotiPage only highlights the new content that has been added to a page but you won’t be able figure out what has been removed from a page.
If you are monitoring a page that follows a regular pattern – like a Google Search results page where all the different results are rendered as a pattern using a similar set of HTML tags – you may also use Google Docs as a page monitor. You essentially scrap the page content into Google Docs with the help of ImportXML function and then track changes through RSS. This does however require some knowledge of XPath and CSS.
Versionista is another awesome web-based tool for tracking web pages. It lets you compare the two versions of a page side-by-side and thus you can know what has been added, or removed, from a page since you last viewed it. Versionista also lets you apply regular expression based filters to help you specify what kind of page edits should be ignored by the tool during the comparison.

Our 32" Sony Bravia LCD TV wasn't really old but felt a bit obsolete. There were no USB ports, the TV wasn't network-capable meaning it cannot connect to the Internet or the home network, the 32" screen looked rather small in the living room and, most important, the TV didn't support full HD.
It was therefore time to upgrade to something bigger and more advanced.
I am no expert to offer you any advice on buying TVs but I’ll still try to summarize the key things I learned from the various websites and my Twitter friends while researching for my own purchase.

A Buying Guide for TV

There are several points to consider before buying a TV. What screen size should you choose? Is LED better than LCD or Plasma TVs? Which ports should you look for in a TV? Is it worth paying extra for networking related features? HD (720p) or Full-HD (1080p)? Which TV brand should you go for? And finally, is 3D necessary?

LCD, Plasma or LED?

There are basically two types of TVs - LCD and Plasma. The other category, LED, is actually a type of LCD but one that is slimmer (looks matters) and consumes less electricity than regular LCDs. I haven't had a chance to compare the picture quality of equivalent LED, LCD and Plasma HDTVs side-by-side but most online material seem to suggest that Plasmas offer the best picture quality.
The other point in favor of Plasma HDTVs is the viewing angle. LCDs and LEDs are best viewed from the front but if your room’s seating arrangement is such that people may have to watch TV while sitting at either sides, Plasmas may be a better option as the have a wider viewing angle. That said, if your TV room is brightly-lit or has too many windows, the Plasma screen may carry glare or reflection. LCDs have a matte screen and thus don't have the reflection problem.

Size of the TV Screen

HDTVs are available in various sizes and the one you should choose depends on two factors - the length of your room and obviously your budget.
As a rule of thumb, the ideal size of the TV screen should be anywhere between .3x and .6x where x is the distance between your sofa and the TV. For example, if the viewing distance is 6 feet (or 72 inches), you can go for a 24" - 48" screen.

TV Input Ports

Most newer TVs have HDMI and USB ports but what's also important is the location of these ports. If you are planning to wall-mount the TV, make sure that there are enough free ports at the sides of the unit because, once you mount the TV, it will be inconvenient, or rather impossible, to use the back ports for connecting your gadgets to the TV.

Screen Resolution – 720p, 1080i or 1080p

The next factor is the screen resolution where your choices are 720p, 1080i and 1080p - also known as full HD. Unless you are getting a small screen TV - like 32" - go for 1080p resolution and here’s why. More and more TV channels are becoming available in high-definition, the HD picture quality is vastly superior but you need a 1080p TV to experience the difference.
Jason Bonney adds – “Although I see no reason NOT to get a TV supporting 1080p, it's currently only really needed for Blu-ray. Broadcast HD TV is only 1080i and most video games (XBox 360/PS3) are native 720p being upscaled to 1080. So you can get by with 1080i if need be. I had an HD DLP 1080i for years before upgrading recently, and for HDTV and my 360 games it was still great.”

3D or 2D?

All brands are working hard to sell you 3D-capable TV sets but is 3D worth the extra cost or should you just settle for the good-old 2D? It depends.
We have a joint family and the TV is placed in a common room so we mostly watch it together. In order to enjoy 3D content, one needs to wear 3D glasses. If there are four other people in the room, they also need to wear compatible 3D glasses. The glasses are expensive but cost aside, I highly doubt if folks at home would be willing to wear a pair of glasses for watching a movie or a TV program. Also, there's isn’t enough 3D content available anyway – especially in regional languages - so we decided to go with 2D.

Network Connectivity

The other important feature to consider while deciding a TV is network connectivity. The expensive TV models often have built-in WiFi (or Wireless LAN) while others are WiFi-capable meaning you can attach an extra dongle, always old separately, to connect the TV to the home network or for watching web videos - like YouTube - on your TV wirelessly.
All Internet-ready TVs have an Ethernet port so if you can stretch the LAN cable from the router to the TV, you can go for the WiFi-capable model but without spending on the USB wireless adapter. Also look for DLNA support as it will become easy for you to stream photos, music and videos from your computer and mobile phone to the TV screen.
One more thing. TV vendors like Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and LG bundle various 'apps' to help you watch YouTube videos, Flickr photos and other web content on the HDTV. However, the number of apps offered by these vendors is still small, they have no built-in browsers, no web search and you are thus limited to a very tiny portion of the web.
So what we finally picked is a 50" Panasonic Viera Plasma TV, full HD, lacks 3D, Internet-ready but without built-in Wi-Fi. It is definitely not “razor-thin” but since the unit is mounted on a wall, you rarely notice the thickness. Also, Panasonic offers limited Internet apps but not that we have connected it to Logitech Revue (read review of Google TV), family members can access almost the entire web in the living room.
While everyone has different requirements or “wants” and there’s no such thing as ‘perfect’ when it comes it to buying electronics, the above points may help you make a slightly more informed decision and get more value for your money.

Would you like to download the entire Wikipedia on your computer or mobile phone for offline reading? Well, here are some good options to consider.

Download Wikipedia Articles for Offline Reading

Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, offers downloadable copies (or database dumps) of all its wikis that one can download and thus access the entire Wikipedia content on computers that are not connected to the Internet.

The database dumps are frequently updated and include every single article that’s available on the main Wikipedia website. The dumps are available as .xml.bz2 files that you can easily open on your computer using the free and portable WikiTaxi software.

WikiTaxi ships with an importer that will first uncompress the Wikipedia database files (.bz2) and then converts them into a .taxi file format. Now you open these .taxi files inside WikiTaxi just like the way you open .doc files inside Microsoft Word and, if you are running low on space, the original Wikipedia dumps may be safely discarded.

A good alternative to WikiTaxi is Kiwix – this is also free software and available for Mac, Windows and Linux systems. You first install the Kiwix software on your computer and then download one of the Wikipedia editions – the articles are packaged as .zim files that’ll open directly inside Kiwix without requiring any conversion.

Kiwix is definitely easier to use than WikiTaxi and that packaged .zim files can read across all popular platforms but the downside is that, unlike the database dumps used by WikiTaxi, the .zim files aren’t very frequently updated. Also, the zim package for English Wikipedia doesn’t include every article though the packages for other languages are complete.

If you have an iOS device – like the iPhone, iPad or iPad Touch – you may grab the excellent Wiki Offline app and carry all the Wikipedia articles in your pocket. The app renders Wikipedia articles in a beautiful interface and supports tabbed browsing so you can open multiple articles side by side. Wiki Offline is also available in the Mac App Store for your Mac OS X.

The other option for using Wikipedia offline is WikiReader – this is a 3.5” monochrome device with a capacitive touch screen and contains over 3 million Wikipedia articles. The  updates to Wikipedia articles are released every quarter – you can update the device by connecting it to your computer – or you opt to receive updates on SD cards.

The WikiReader device costs  $99 and though I haven’t tried it myself, it did get a huge thumbs-up from Ars Technica. You definitely don’t need this if you carry a smart phone that is always connected to the Internet but could be a good reference tool for the rest of us with an impressive battery life – much like the Kindle.

There’s a free Windows utility called BeCyPDFMetaEdit that can help you remove passwords from PDF files* but without make any other change to the document. (I am not sure why the developers picked such a complex name for this useful utility).
Here’s what you need to do:

1. Launch the program and it will ask your for the location of the PDF file.

2. Before you select and open the PDF, change the mode to “Complete Rewrite.”

3. Switch to the Security tab and set the “Security System” to “No encryption.” Click the Save button and your PDF will no longer require a password to open.