I’m loving my HTPC once again thanks to my new keyboard from IOGEAR. This is a tight wireless keyboard with a laser trackball, perfect for surfing the web from your couch. Check it out at www.iogear.com/product/GKM561R/

I’ve been working on a GIS project for the last few years, and the one challenge that doesn’t go away is how to easily collect Latitude & Longitude coordinates for locations.  Today I discovered LatLng Marker within Google Maps Labs.  Here is a description from the tool author:

Adds an option to the context menu that lets you drop a mini marker showing the latlng of the position that the cursor was pointing at when the context menu was evoked

Thanks Marcelo C for creating such an awesome tool.  I’ll be using this in my GIS projects.

I’ve been doing online meetings for a few years now, mainly using Microsoft Live Meeting and Webex from Cisco. While these 2 products are excellent tools for conducting online meetings, they have a cost associated to them which can be difficult to handle if you are a freelancer trying to work with a shoestring budget.

Today, I’d like add a free alternative to your toolbox. Yugma web conferencing allows anyone, anywhere to instantly share their desktop and ideas online with others. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux and it’s free if your meetings have less than 20 users.

Of course they also have a professional version that you pay for, but I’ve been really happy with the free version so far.  I highly recommended it if you need to share your desktop with someone else far away.

Most people have heard of Google Chrome by now, a new web browser that is supposed to be faster, simple, and fully standards compliant. What most people don’t know is that Google Chrome is built from Chromium, an open source web browser with the same bells and whistles, but without all the Google branding.

After a full week of using Chromium, I like it so much that it has become the default web browser on my little netbook. Don’t get me wrong, I still prefer to use Mozilla Firefox with a few must-have plugins on my desktop for heavy-duty web development work; but this gives me another option.

What about you?  what is your favorite web browser?

Let’s face it, data can sometimes be boring. I recently discovered a really cool way to visualize your data and make it more interesting. Let me ask you a simple question — which one of the examples below is the easiest to understand?

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(2)

We can all read the data in the 1st example, but the pie chart quickly puts the data into perspective for most of us.

Did you mouse-over the pie chart? This interactivity is made possible with gRaphaël, an open source javascript library with a goal to help you create stunning charts. We are basically using pure code to render scalable vector graphics (SVG) on the fly.

If you want to visualize some boring data for your next project, head over to gRaphael for more examples and to download the source code. Remember that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Bryan Eisenberg has written about 69 Free (or low cost) Tools to Improve Your Website.  The article focuses on conversion so this isn’t simply a list of cool things you can do, there are some very useful suggestions for business owners as well.