Today is a western festival, the Valentine’s Day, I wish all my blog readers a romantic day.

Nowadays, Valentine’s Day is more and more popular in China too, especially for those young people. And lots and lots of shops, supermarkets,  merchants promote their products this day. And many Chinese well-known websites placed their Valentine’s special logos, here are some of my favorite.

Google China (g.cn) Valentine’s Day logo

Sohu’s Sogou search engine special logo

Netease Yodao Valentine logo

Douban Logo on Valentine’s Day 2009

Almost all Chinese seach engines has a special loto today, except Baidu, because it seems to be a little bit traditional.

Have you ever been addicted to a certain website? You visit this website again and again for times a day, and this habit makes you very hard to concentrat on your work? If so, try KeepMeOut, KeepMeOut is a very simple online severice which is, I think, very helpful for you to break the habit of visiting a certain or any other websites.

KeepMeOut is very easy to use, just input the URL of the website that you’re addicted to, and, bookmark the new KeepMeOut alias in your broswer, when you want to visit that site, you visit the bookmarked URL, KeepMeOut will not allow you to visit that site again if the time not expired as you told it…

Today is our Chinese Lantern Festival, January 15 on the lunar calendar (15 days later after the Spring Festival). It marks the end of the celebrations of the Chinese New Year. We eat dumplings this day on the Lantern Festival which are made from glutinous rice.

I didn’t have a holiday to celebrate this festival today, but working in the office. We will have a dinner in my company with my boss and other workmates in the evening.

Happy Lantern Festival…

Twuffer got its name as it’s a Twitter™ buffer. It allows you to compose a list of future tweets and schedule their release. It’s useful if you need to schedule pre-written, post-dated tweets.

Twuffer is easy to use, just log in with your Twitter username and password, input your tweet, and set a time when you want your mesage to be scheduled, and set this status, and Twuffer will work for you. Oh, you need to tell Twutter your time zone so that your tweets can be posted at the proper time

Mechanical Plurk is another Twitter tool that automatically updates your Plurk page from your Twitter account. Perfect for faking activity in Plurk even when you don’t feel like it.

To sync your Twitter tweets into your Plurk account, simply type your twitter and plurk username and passwords. Mechanical Plurk now automatically rewrites your @replies from Twitter and switches it to the corresponding Plurk user (only works if that person has also signed up on Mechanical Plurk).

I haven’t been to any netcafes because I have my own laptop, I run Fedora Linux and connect to the internet with a Huawei EG162 USB mobile broadband modem. The netspeed is really limited, and I can’t even download large file and see a movie. Today is Saturday, and I don’t need to go to work tomorrow, so I came to an internet cafe nearby to see a movie online.

But when I opened IE7 browser trying to type a website address to download a P2P software, I saw a different Google China (谷歌 g.cn) logo. This is the default homepage of IE7 in this netcafe computers on http://www.google.cn/hp?sp=china&client=aff-cafe-icafemedia , which seems to be Google China cafe edition.

I am sure this is a specialized Google China homepage for netcafe computers, in the url, I noticed there’s a word “icafemedia”, I searched this word on Google, and found iCafeMedia (北京网媒趋势科技有限公司) is a company in Beijing specialized in developing netcafe computer system software and providing netafe services. Google may be cooperated with them prompting G.cn in China, where most people come to the net cafes to get online for gaming or chatting with their friends.

Well, this is the G.cn default homepage, Google China cafe editon has a different logo and layout compared with it in the image below. This homepage seems to be specially designed for Chinese netcafe users, where people have a glance at the top searched keywords, top music searches, and top novel searches, while music search and novel  search are the frequently used Google services in netbars.

• Google China (G.cn) default homepage: http://www.google.cn/webhp?source=g_cn
• Google China cafe homepage: http://www.google.cn/hp?sp=china&client=aff-cafe-icafemedia

There’re more and more lifestreaming services, such as FriendFeed, Tumblr,  Soup.io, Stream.us, LifeStream.fm, and much more… But today, I found a very interest lifestreaming service, yet another one, compared with these services I memtioned, this one brings us a lot of unique and much needed new features. This new service is called Storytlr (story teller).

If you don’t have a Storytlr account, I strongly recommend you register one compeletely free of charge. After you’ve signed up you are able to import and manage your data resources. Storytlr reads and imports data from your delicious, flickr, last.fm, twitter, and your own feeds etc accounts RSS feeds, and output it in ONE page.

Well, one of the most amazing features that you may be probably like is that Storytlr allows you to post your own content, for example, post your own current status, inseat your link, upload your images, and even write a blog post or inseat your own video files.

Well, the last great while unique features, all other lifestreaming services don’t have, but Storytlr brings us, is a compeletely new to the lifestreaming services, it’s named “Storytell”, it’s just this part where Storytlr got it’s name. You can easiy creat a “story” with your Flikr or Picasaweb photos, Twitter tweets, Youtube videos. You can think of a “story” as a text and media about a particular event compiled into one. To creat a story, you need just to input the title and click your mouse, Storytlr then puts all tweets and photos and videos into a little slideshow, take mine for an example, you will see what did I say on Twitter, what videos I uploaded and favourited on Youtube, and what photos I shared on picasaweb or flickr in October 2008 daily, with a certain time that it took place.

What’s more, your Storytlr account homepage is essentially a blog, where you can add your own comment  ajaxedly, just like you comment on a normal wordpress blog. You can also customize your homepage themes with your own background and header images, you can also add/remove widgets so you homepage meets your requirements most. Well, the last point I think you will be happy with is you can customize your own domain name, so it can be used as a real “blog”.

This is my own Storytlr homepage with customized background image and my own domain: http://my.pengjiayou.com .

Smashing Magazine released a new Feed Me Animals Free RSS Feed Vector Icon Set, which is very cute, I recommend it to my readers.

This set contains 5 original RSS-feed icons. The icons are available in in .png, .jpg, .eps and .psd.

• preview (0.3 Mb)
• download the set (png and jpg-files are available) (.zip, 1.4 Mb)
• download .psd (.zip, 3,9 Mb)
• download .eps (.zip, 3,1 Mb)

NOTE: You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use.

Just put this cute fox icon on your blog site, it will certainly attract a lot of readers to subsribe your feed. Isn’t it?

Originally posted on Smashingmagazine: Feed Me Animals: A Free RSS Feed Vector Icon Set

Well, I just burned my blog rss with Google Feedproxy, my new feed address is http://feedproxy.google.com/charlespeng , please kindly resubcrible my blog RSS if you like, so that you’re able read my blog posts in your favorite RSS reader. Thanks

This is their former 2D logo

LG’s new logo doesn’t have any differences with their old one, only changed from 2D to 3D. This is also the trend of all IT companies to design their new logos. Here are some 3D logos of the world’s famouls companies.

The Firefox add-on China Channel offers internet users outside of China the ability to surf the web as if they were inside mainland China. Take an unforgetable virtual trip to China and experience the technical expertise of the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (supported by western companies). It’s open source, free and easy.

Exhibition Web 2.0 A gallery implementation of the China Channel Add-On

Web 2.0 is a gallery installation consisting of two internet enabled computers, a hacked mouse and keyboard, and a custom plugin for the popular (and free) Firefox web browser. Two computers are connected to a single keyboard and mouse allowing visitors to control both identical machines at the same time while using just a single input device. The only difference between the two internet terminals is their network connection; one machine is connected to the less restricted internet in Hong Kong, while the other is connected to the internet through a connection point in the mainland of China.

Unlike many tools which enable Chinese people to freely surf the web via connections to computers outside of China, this plugin routes all internet traffic to computers on the inside of the Chinese firewall, allowing web surfers to experience an Internet identical to that of Chinese.

Censorship The full story and background

The Internet is not the same for everybody. Despite it’s reputation as a borderless, global, connected, democratic network, access and content filtering based on national boarders has become the norm. The BBC, for example, filters content for copyright reasons to visitors accessing their website from outside of Great Britain. Much more serious, however, is the heavy political censor^ship happening in countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. China, being the most extreme example, strictly censors political content on the web through the blocking of IP addresses and dynamic content filtering. With the support of western technology companies such as Cisco, Yahoo, and Google, The G^olden S^hield P^roject (sometimes referred to as the the G^reat F^ire W^all of China) censors the web for China’s 1.3 billion inhabitants. The Internet police in China is estimated to contain over 30,000 workers, and is responsible for blocking content such as T^ibetan independence, T^aiwan independence, police brutality, the T^ienanmen S^quare p^rotests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, religion, and some international news.

China Channel add-on is simply to help lower the technical barrier to surfing the Chinese internet. With this great Firefox Add-on, you are able to experience the censored Chinese internet at home! If you are outside china mainland, and wonder to know how we Chinese people surf on the internet, please visit China Channel homepage and install the addon…

China Channel Firefox Add-on: http://chinachannel.hk/

The latest and full featured version of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now available through Ulteo.com using a web browser with a single click of a mouse. No download or installation process of the productivity suite is required. This new service by Ulteo offers many benefits for users of the productivity suite, and is compatible with any operating system that can run Firefox 2.0+ or Internet Explorer 6.0+.

http://www.ulteo.com/home/ooo

Using Ulteo’s service, users can exploit features of OpenOffice.org which may be missing from their current desktop software. For example, OpenOffice.org can read and write Microsoft Office files, and generate .pdf format files without requiring any additional software. OpenOffice.org also reads and writes documents in OpenDocument Format, the ISO-approved standard for office documents, which can only be read in Microsoft Office after installing a plug-in.

Ulteo powers the online version of OpenOffice.org 3.0. With Ulteo, you are able to run OpenOffice.org 3.0 within your web browser with its Ulteo Online Desktop, manage your office document online, share your OpenOffice.org session in realtime, share your prints and get PDFs…

To get started, please enable your Firefox browser Javascript and the Sun Java Runtime 1.5+ Environement plugin, and then creat an account for free or log in with your existing account.