Chris O.

A brand-new site which attempts to answer any need you might have to roll back from recent software upgrades and install older versions.

Sometimes every time a piece of software is updated, your computer seems to run worse than before, or the application is even more bloated than it was, or it invents new ways of running in the background and slowing everything else down. Most of us have been there, you know what I mean.

Version Download plans to store older versions of a problematic or increasingly irritating application, so that you can uninstall the latest behaves-like-a-beta and find a version that actually works. They already have a range of apps, in most cases with multiple earlier versions to try out. No doubt the range will grow.

It's a new idea, and feels like it might be a good one. I think it's going to have to develop some sort of a guide to help you decide which recently installed or upgraded app. Is causing issues, or else you could find yourself downgrading something that would be a lot more useful left where it is. But if you work from the general premise that "less is more" when it comes to those ever-increasing but largely unnecessary functions in applications, this is going to be a site you bookmark and use often.

Everything points to this being a Bulgarian operation. I'd ignore the English company, which exists, in all likelyhood, on paper only. There's nothing to suggest any distribution or sales facilities in England and there is no indication where the goods are manufactured or shipped from. There are already some bad complaints about the both the business and the products, and it looks like too many people have already been burned by * already. Let's not have more.

*Personal information redacted by admin

Very expensive for replicas, way too cheap to be genuine. Take note:

"We are not in any way affiliated with any designer brand name on our website, nor do we make any claims to be a part of their company"

Site is a free storefront from http://www.vstore.ca, and the owner has used the privacyprotect.org service to prevent anyone from seeing the domain registration details. That's suspicious in itself, given that this is allegedly nothing more than an honest trader. Site design is thrown together poorly, everything leads me to have zero confidence in this one. Just take a look and ask yourself if you'd send $600 here.

Take note also of part of the returns policy:-

"If I'm not satisfied with my purchase, can I return it for a refund?

"We do not accept returns based on buyer's remorse. Please make sure you want the product before making a final decision on your purchase."

I'd second that. Please, make sure.

This is the new partner for speedtest.net, which measures your broadband upload and download speeds.

pingtest.net measures how successful your connection to a local server is in terms of packet loss, which unfortunately didn't work for me even though I disabled my firewall and tried a few times; jitter, which for me was 1ms and indicates the variance in ping times, and the ping time itself, which the site measured at 13ms. I repeated the test and got the same results each time. All the results were plausible and I have no reason to assume that they're anything less than accurate.

The killer part is that having run a local test, which is what you'd generally do, you can go on to select a target anywhere in the world and ping that. This is going to be very useful for businesses which need to monitor the quality of a connection between two offices, for example. And you can play idly with it over coffee, though I suspect the novelty would wear off eventually.

I was going to hold back a star because I thought the graphics were a major overkill until I realized I was supposed to play with them. That could be clearer indicated but otherwise this is very cool and a worthy partner to its sister site, speedtest.net.

Also see http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.speedtest.net

A very pretty interface to display a common basic test we can all use from time to time, speedtest.net locates a suitable server near you (it's smart enough to figure out where you are) and then runs a ping, download speed and upload speed test. Unusually, you can use the same test, at the same site, anywhere in the world.

I'm on a 6Mbit connection in the SF bay area with SBC Global, which is now AT&T but powered by Yahoo!, if you can follow that. So my result, at 5.15Mbit wasn't too shabby and actually not as bad as I'd expected. My upload speed was 630k which is around 100k below optimal. Ping speed was recorded as 17ms.

Over at speakeasy.net (http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/), where I usually run this test, the result was exactly the same. Though the interface at speedtest.net is slicker, the speakeasy interface is clearer, less fussy. Other than that, either test is fine.

The first difference with speedtest.net is that if you like, you can see the best broadband speeds from anywhere in the world, and discover that even in the backwoods of eastern Europe they get better DSL speeds than I do here, at the cutting edge of web technology. Oh well. The weather's better here, though.

The second difference, and actually way the most interesting one, I didn't realize until I came back to the site some time later and discovered by idly fiddling with the graphics that you can select any destination in the world to run your speed test to and from. In other words, you can pick, say, Ekaterinburg in Russia (ping 266ms) and run the test from California to there and back. This is very, very cool and my rating went up a point straight away. If you have any geek cred at all you'll be playing with this one for a while.

Also see http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.pingtest.net

This is an unusual Chinese fake merchant, in that you have to become a "member" to get the prices. It's claiming the products are authentic, which not all such dealers are cheeky enough to do, and it's difficult to tell whether some of the products are fake or not (though all are, of course, fake). Nasty one, this. Avoid.

More: http://bit.ly/2b5y9g

For some years now, "photoshopping" has been the term used to describe photo-manipulation for both fun and commercial purposes. Adobe Photoshop is the premier professional application, and fashion and industrial images are routinely "photoshopped" to remove blemishes and enhance the more glamorous aspects of the final product. photoshopcontest.com, in a much lighter vein, has members constantly competing to win $50 in a variety of themed competitions, which at the time of writing include such varied topics as "squirrels and lemons", "arm disappearance", and "hikers are dangerous". Members vote on aspects of the images including execution, authenticity and humor.

The current version of the site bears a remarkable and no doubt intentional resemblance to Flickr, which in this case is not a bad thing. If you're a Flickr user, you'll have no trouble navigating around here. And as with Flickr, there are two levels of membership, free, and "Advantage", which costs around $30. A nice touch is that even non-members may view the competitions, and there are many tutorials which are also freely available to all.

If you're already improving your own images but haven't ever thought of entering a competition, this is well worth a visit. The community looks friendly and there's always some sort of challenge going on.

Self-appointed the world's most influential online design magazine, Yanko Design boasts a regular following of around half a million users and more than 23,000 subscribers to its daily newsletter.

If you aren't yet one of those but you're interested in any aspect of industrial design, you have to see this. Now don't be put off by the term "industrial", which conjures up images of dark satanic mills. Industrial in this context means products for use, and includes automobiles, furniture, household products, technology, architecture and a range of frankly weird, fantastic and sometimes astonishing products that don't fit entirely into any category at all.

The magazine is in blog format, which means daily updates on the front page, and previous postings are neatly categorized. For a taste of the content, click on "Random Designs" and see what you get, or just start at the front and work backwards in time. Either way it's quite a ride, as the designs here come from all over the globe, and represent almost every aspect of everyday life as the designers would like it to be.

Just be careful you don't touch your monitor, this site is cool enough to give you frostbite.

The Japanese Ladies Clock. Awesome. Updates every minute.
For some reason SiteJabber chopped the end of the URL, so you need to go to
http://bijint.com/en for English or http://bijint.com/jp for Japanese.
Go see.
Then come back and pretend you didn't watch for at least 2 minutes.

Go on, admit it. You're hooked.

I don't often laugh spontaneously when I hit a site front page, but I did, at this one. This site is run by a representative of Ardyss International, a large international MLM scheme (also sometimes called pyramid marketing). None of the photo sets on the front page have anything to do with Ardyss except by coincidence. It's immediately obvious that they've been copied from around the web and some of them clearly don't have anything to do with any type of body shaper. They're phony.

If you want to buy an Ardyss body shaper, there are a lot of reps pushing these garments and "health" drinks online. You don't have to choose one who can't even be honest about the product.

Please bear in mind that the role of MLM reps is to recruit more MLM reps, because that's how MLM works. It'll be in the interest of anyone who's been recruited by this person to post positive reviews here. Which is not to say that every positive review must be phony. Just bear it in mind when you read them, that's all.

As there's not space to discuss more here, there's more on this at my blog:
http://neofile.posterous.com/business-is-shaping-up

If you're one of the millions of people who uses the same password for every site you have to log in to (and has to look sheepish and deny it when others start talking about security), this may well be for you.

SuperGenPass is a password generator that uses some esoteric math to construct unique and complex passwords from a combination of one "master" password (probably the one you already know off by heart) and the domain name that you are logging into. Hence every domain will have a new, unique, highly secure password that can't be reverse engineered. Only you know the master password.

It works by bookmarklet, you simply type your old login into a site and click the tab. The app creates a new password for that domain and inserts it for you. Passwords also work on all subdomains, so your login will be the same on all pages of a site.

It's claimed to be totally secure, and nothing is stored in the bookmarklet itself, making this an ideal system for shared or public computers too.

It's free and open source, and there are more FAQ on the site. I can't immediately see why you wouldn't want to try it out, given that security seems to be more and more of an issue as time goes by.

You'll be pleased to know this one has gone already, nothing there but a spam search page on a parked domain. It's currently in the hands of NameMedia, a company that trades in domain names.

Peter Payne has been running the jlist.com and jbox.com sites for about fourteen years now, so the name is well established in the West. Or at least on the West Coast, as the company has a branch office in San Diego, down in southern California. But the heart of the business is in Japan and it caters for anyone with a love of Japanese pop culture, an interest in Japanese traditions, or a need to educate themselves in the language and customs of the Japanese. The "j-list" version of the site contains a lot of adult material including Hentai and Bishojo material, of which more in a moment. But there is also a filtered, family-friendly PG rated version of the j-list site at www.jbox.com and that's where you should be heading if you're reading this review and you're under 18. http://www.jlist.com has an over-18 notice on the homepage and offers you the choice of visiting http://www.jbox.com instead. You choose.

Jlist's main appeal - aside from the adult material - is to westerners who love collecting those small examples of modern Japanese culture that amuse, amaze or confuse us folks over here in the civilized world. Such as black chewing gum, for example. And there's a comprehensive range of Mimikaki, or traditional ear cleaners, to satisfy anyone's desire to emulate the frequent ear-cleaning that the Japanese are apparently obsessed with. There's a wide range of Tees, including a very Japanese "Expel the Foreign Barbarians" shirt (not sure where in the USA you'd want to wear that one) and another with the characters for "Now accepting applications for a Japanese girlfriend". Cosplay outfits abound. There's a pretty good selection of Japanese snacks, sweets and candies, traditional Japanese items, calendars, magazines, and of course Manga, now highly popular with us western otaku (fans, and more than fans. The translation is insufficient).

All of this would make j-list worth a visit, and makes j-box worth a visit if you aren't in the market for the more adult Japanese interests. If you are, there is Hentai, or adult pornographic anime (animated movies) here, there are adult calendars and magazines, and plenty of adult manga (cartoon books) as well. The site does make very clear that it will not display or distribute any images that are intended or appear to be of under-18's. And although there's no legal obligation for the site to say so (Japanese law doesn't ban the use of under-18 characters), that's good, and right, even if it might confound the large section of the Japanese porn market that revolves around pubescent schoolgirls. In fact most Japanese manga and anime porn, which we call "Hentai" in the west, does revolve around or feature schoolgirls, even if they are claimed to be 18 or over. Come to think of it, you'd be hard pressed to find anything Japanese, porn or otherwise, that doesn't feature at least one incident with a female of indeterminate age dressed as a schoolgirl.

But a drawing is a drawing, and frankly there's not going to be a huge difference between a drawing of a 16- or 17-year old and a drawing of an 18-year old, or of a 20-year old dressed as an 18-year old. So please, be aware that regardless of any well-meaning assurances, there may be images in the adult manga section that you could easily believe to be a sort of kiddie porn even if they aren't. But this is not a porn site by any means, it's not shadowy or distasteful and the adult material is only a part of a much wider and more interesting range. One man's porn is another man's People looking for the hard stuff currently have about ten million other websites which will fulfil their more specialized needs, they aren't going to be around here.

The site is also known for its selection of dating-sim games, a type of Japanese computer game that really doesn't have any equivalent in the West. The player finds himself in a series of situations in which he has to choose the right responses, in order to complete a quest, win the hand of a heroine or, in the more erotic games, achieve something less romantic and more physical. At least I think that's about right, I've never played one myself. And western translations of the Japanese experience tend to leave something wanting. But the Japanese seem to love the concept and it has lately branched off to produce BL games, also known as yaoi, which I'll leave you to find out about for yourselves, and a variation for girls which features bishōnen, attractive but androgynous boys.

To wind up, there are further categories of items which include bento equipment and Japanese accessories for iPods and MP3 players from the ELECOM company. If you sign up for the free newsletter it arrives regularly in your inbox with some interesting tales of life in Japan, often worth a read, and it keeps you up to date on what's new, and what's in or out of stock.

I'm sorry for the lengthy review but being a Japanese-focused site there are some foreign concepts and language that need to be explained. I haven't got all you need to know in here, so I recommend using a source such as Wikipedia to research anything you find on the j-list site that isn't clearly explained.

I'm fortunate in happening to live close by a huge Japanese supermarket and a Japanese bookstore, and a couple of miles in the other direction I have Japanese household goods and novelties, more stores and food too. So I'm pretty well covered for things Japanese. Even so, there are many items stocked by j-list that I can't buy here. For most people, your visit to j-list will be the first time you've seen items like this and it'll be the only way for you to get them, so if you're otaku, or otherwise hooked on things Japanese, this is a resource that you're going to bookmark and return to.

You may like to research these terms at your own risk: otaku, cosplay, hentai (and "H games"), bishōjo, eroge, yaoi, bento.

Oh, and buy Pocky. Everyone loves Pocky.

Adbusters is, and I quote, " a global network of activists, artists, writers, pranksters, students, educators, and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we live in the 21st century."

No, don't run away, come back. It's really more fun than it sounds. Adbusters is in the business (non-profit business) of attempting to open your eyes and mind and encouraging you to see the deceptions going on around you. Life across the globe is voluntarily and constantly responding to messages that are handed down to it: buy this, you need that, shop here, eat this, wear this, ignore that, applaud this or suffer the consequences. And whether you want to admit it or not, you're responding in ways not of your own choosing.

This is not conspiracy theory, it's an encouragement to look at what's in front of you in new and unexpected ways. And instead of just acknowledging that there are more ways to look at something, and then moving on, it's asking you to think about why you just walk away and leave it for others to worry over. You know that the famous American designer tee you're wearing was actually made in a sweatshop in China, where they have no idea what the logo means anyway and could care less. You know the quality is no better than any other, similar garment. So you paid three times as much for it why? You've heard that the food industry is cruel and inefficient and contributes to poor health and a poor environment. It doesn't encourage you to change your diet. Why? You went to the store and selected brand Y from a range of brands X, Y and Z. Why? Is your first answer really the complete answer, or are you maybe thinking about what you've been told you should think?

Nobody's trying to give anyone a guilt trip, because some of the forces which influence your thinking are extremely powerful, subtle and invasive. Adbusters is asking you to rethink some of your fundamental assumptions, that's all. And if you do, and you get the relevance of the message, then Adbusters will happily sell you a pair of boots made from recycled car tires. Ethically manufactured and sold only by independent retailers, they're not Nike but how much do you care?

Uberreview has been around since 2004, predating the wave of blogs now clamoring to show us their skills in locating fun, cool, geeky things on the web. It's competent, the writing isn't so self-consciously trying to be funny as some, and the selections are maybe a touch more eclectic than the last blog I visited. But the web is awash with bloggers all aggregating content from much the same range of sources. Spend an hour or two visiting them and you'll be hard-pressed to remember which was which, or why you liked one over another.

This one has been around long enough to have archived postings right back to 2004, which many others can't claim. So one good reason to come here is to explore what was supposed to be cool back then, and see if it survived our changing tastes or not. Otherwise there's not much to see here that you won't find elsewhere.

The partner site of Nerd Approved, this apparel blog aggregates fun T-shirt designs from around the web. So, nothing new here. Except that their writers are pretty much spot-on in their selections most of the time, so the range is much better than I've seen elsewhere. Of course some people will find some of the designs mildly offensive, that's just the nature of T-shirt design, but I think you'd have to be very sensitive indeed, or totally lacking in a sense of humor, to find nothing to amuse you here.

Living in Silicon Valley as I do, I've seen these cars for real. Even though last year's software engineers are now sweeping the streets, it's not that uncommon to see a hundred grand's worth of car sweeping by. Such is the nature of the dot com business and it's what makes the Valley what it is - the place to raise eight million bucks for a softcore porn site or a few hundred thousand for a web 2.0 startup with a bit tacked on for the company car. And this is not your father's company car, not by a long way. It goes like the proverbial bat out of hell and it runs on a thousand lithium batteries - that's one hell of an Energizer bunny right there.

From the front or the back it's every inch a sports roadster, though if you view both simultaneously it's a collision between a Lotus and a Ferrari. Which is not in itself a bad thing, it could have been the front of an FJ Cruiser and the rear of, well, an FJ Cruiser. But it's not, it's a sleek running shoe of a car and it's electric, and the darn thing does 0-60 faster than a motorbike. That's under four seconds, and the site tells us:

"The first time you drive the Tesla Roadster, prepare to be surprised. You're at freeway speed in seconds without even thinking about it."

Clearly, you have to be very, very careful driving this one out of the showroom.

As for the website, it's slick and black and it presents the vehicle competently. Though for a $100k car, it could do a lot better. Using YouTube to host your video clip is workable but not very polished, and I'd really hoped for one of those galleries where the big picture changes when you mouse over the little thumbnails. Ebay has that, you know. And there ought to have been one of those applets where you can get a 360 degree view if you waggle your mouse around.

Ah well, nobody's perfect. And there is a great deal of data on the site, and to be honest it's well presented and a good, educational read. The experience is much like leafing through a glossy brochure in the showroom, while the salesman goes off to make you an instant coffee and mentally calculate his commission.

The most memorable features of the product are that, as mentioned, the acceleration is phenomenal by gas-powered car standards; it will run up to 250 miles on a single charge from any wall socket, and it costs just 2 cents a mile in electricity. Plus, if you can resist the temptation to drive it every day and want to give it a rest for a while, you can put it into "storage mode" and leave it plugged in for as long as you like. Which makes it the only expensive toy that you don't have to take the battery out of if you aren't planning on using it for a while.

If the car can achieve sustained profitability it will be a landmark; it's not the first electric car to be seen on Californian roads, but it may be the first to claim acceptance from a previously cautious market. The Tesla is the hare to Toyota's tortoise, sorry, Prius, which is claimed to be only half as efficient as well as half as sexy. Or less. A lot less. Sadly, only the top dogs among us can run with this electric hare, but I wonder, would it still be so sexy for ten thousand as it is for a hundred? Perhaps exclusivity will be the key to its survival.

I really had no hopes of being impressed by Fizzy. Flash arcades have been around ever since Flash was adopted as a platform for in-browser games, and as that platform matured, so these sites proliferated. The business model was simple: encourage visitors to play demo versions of the best games, so that they'd want to pay $10 or $20 to download the full versions. And in order to raise the audience, the sites offered other webmasters a simple piece of code that would embed some of their games into any website for free. If you were building a personal website, you could slap a little code in there and you had a whole arcade to offer.

The result of this, as you've probably guessed, is that everyone suddenly had to have games on their homepages and forums. And not just a few of the top ones, but a range of dozens. And that generated a demand for more and more games to fill up these selections, and there came forth a great outpouring of mediocrity in the form of chicken-throwing, duck-shooting, hamster-bashing mayhem. Not all the new games were awful, but an awful lot were. Every site had that motorcycle one, the car race one, the shooters, the throw-trash-in-the-office-wastebin one, the old-fashioned but recycled word games, the ones that looked vaguely like mah-jongg but weren't, the endless card games and that one where you had to see how far you could chuck a penguin (which was actually good fun).

So I wasn't expecting much. And the business model hasn't changed much today, you can still pay to download games, and you can still embed code in your own site. Fizzy goes further, though. By signing up, you get to experience the social element: you can save and display your scores, download demos of all the games, build a social profile, win awards and more. And that gently leads you into the next level, VIP membership, for which you're about to ask your parents to stump up six bucks a month. It's pitched just about right and compared to spending ten times that much on buying PC games from the store - and then finding out that how disappointing they often are - you might think it's a bargain. What you get for your six bucks is the privilege of playing all the "VIP-only" games, which are the ones you'd previously had to pay for to get the full versions. You also get to chat with other players. You get ad-free pages, though that isn't an issue if you run Firefox with the right extensions anyway, and you get 20% off the prices in the site store.

But none of this is going to work if the games themselves aren't worth playing. And they are. At least, I tried out a few at random and was wowed by how far Flash games have come since I last looked. Of course, I'd forgotten that those early games had to be small and simple because of the long download times. With DSL and cable, that restriction has largely been lifted and the designers can do so much more. And that really shows itself in some of the best games here, which rival full-priced boxed games in looks and sound.

Thought has gone into designing the site to be attractive to parents, with a fairly conservative layout that still manages to ooze Web 2.0 street-cred. And if there's any of the cheap grossness that characterized some early Flash arcades, I didn't find it. Fizzy hosts 622 games, which will keep most players occupied for a while, and it boasts over 400,000 members. I grudgingly confess that my low expectations were entirely unwarranted, Fizzy is fun.

A simple word game in which you are required to make as many words as you can from what you're given, which is nine letters, but you must use the middle one in every word. It's an old, old game that a lot of players must know already under different titles. It's been here in its online version for a few years too.

Presentation is basic but it all works fine. You can add your name to the scoreboard if you do well in the puzzle of the day, and you can register so that you may continue the game later from any computer with a browser. You have 24 hours to finish the puzzle before it expires and a new one appears, so it's ideal for beginners and experts alike. And you can polish your skills non-competitively on previous days' puzzles. Good, harmless fun.

Just thought, since the site popped up as the "most hated" on the front page, that I'd point out that it's gone. There's a parked domain there, nothing more.

No doubt many people will be relieved to see this one gone.