Seems the good people at TorrentSpy have decided to stop letting US users search the TorrentSpy site due to uncertainty around US privacy laws. While I can certainly understand TorrentSpy’s position, I don’t like the fact that our country continues to try to apply laws which are out-dated. Like many out there when I’m told I can’t have something; it makes me want it more.

So I say, if you can’t search in the US, then just move to another country, virtually. Visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org) and download their TOR Onion router. If you follow their instructions the TOR Onion will route your internet connection through several random servers in various countries, thereby giving websites like TorrentSpy the appearance that you are in another country.

It’s a simple way to bypass the system. Better yet, donate to the EFF and help them protect our freedoms online.

Here at Imulus we recently set a goal to streamline our design and development process by creating templates for starting a new project. As a first step in this process I coded out a simple HTML / CSS example page that offers information on basic HTML elements and what CSS can do to them.

It contains visual examples for the following:

• font rendering (PC and Mac)
• link styling
• heading styling
• list styling
• border style options
• and table styling

You can download this cheat sheet in zip format or view it online. Enjoy!

From time to time it becomes necessary to take pictures of a website in full view. Sometimes to show a client the current design from a local server, sometimes to print out the full page and make changes on paper, and sometimes to make group notes via PDF. However, there is one common problem with taking web screenshots, most websites are too tall to be captured on a normal monitor.

Paparazzi! to the rescue! Paparazzi is a free light weight application that allows you to take full size web screenshots and save them out as images or PDFs. It’s incredibly convenient and a joy to use (it takes about two seconds to learn the interface). Check out the example to the right of what Imulus.net looks like in full view.

For the past few months I have been using a utility for OS X by the name of gSpell. Pretty much it takes misspelled words and runs a Mac OS X service to check them against google’s suggested spellings. From there it replaces them with the closest match. gSpell can be is invoked using a global keyboard shortcut, which means you can quickly change spelling in any application. For instance, if while chatting on AIM I type in “I garuntee you will love it” OS X’s default spell checker won’t give me the proper word suggestion for “garuntee” but gSpell replaces the word perfectly with “guarantee”.

So if you’re a compulsive bad speller rejoice and start using gSpell. One last helpful tip, when using gSpell in small instances (IM, web forms, etc.) select all the text (cmd-a) and then run gSpell command (cmd-shift=’).