Is this a gadget? Not really, but it is cool so at least it’s halfway there!

Moonpig is an online greetings card company with a difference – they will personalise the text of the card for you. On the surface that may not seem like anything special but the nice thing about these guys is that the cards are exactly the same as the ones you can buy over the counter, but with the generic names and messages replaced with something more personal.

For example you’ve probably seen the “Muriel was having a bad day…” type of birthday cards. Well now you can be much more specific with your insults!

Having used them last year I can say that card quality is excellent and for a small extra fee they’ll also take care of posting the card as well so it makes the whole thing about as hassle-free as it gets.

They’re a UK service but they will post internationally, although at $2.50 postage per card you may want to be selective about who gets the special attention!

Two posts on the trot without an image, I must be slipping. Google have just expanded their impressive range of search services by releasing Google Blog Search and as with most Google products it’s in Beta.

With Google’s purchase of Blogger it seemed inevitable that that they would combine their existing search technology with blogs, though I am surprised it took this long.

The search isn’t just limited to blogger blogs, they also index any blogs with an available feed, so us WordPress users will be in there too .

Indexing works differently than the standard web search. Blogs are indexed via their RSS feeds, which should provide more near real time indexing. They only started indexing in June this year so all earier posts will not be indexed though I’m sure big G will find a way around that.

Check it out here.

FreeWorldDialup (or FWD) is one of the popular and widely-used telephony software in the market available. From time to time, FWD has presented new features and functionality to the program. On top of FWD, the Pulver communicator is also used as the software to utilise the free VoIP service, as compared from that of Skype’s.

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Mozilla’s Firefox 1.5 beta was released today to the surprise of many, and those who awaits the promising new feature of the popular web browser. It has been released to the community, especially for Web application developers, and extension developers. Home users can also make use of the availability to try out this new web browser
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GNOME have just released a new version (2.12 ) of the their award winning desktop environment and development tools for Linux (and UNIX). It looks to have various fixes and improvements over previous versions. In the release notes they even say how they have improved the mines games, now the first click is guaranteed not to be mine, now how nice is that little attention to detail.

You can download it from the GNOME 2.12 page. If you fancy giving it a try but don’t want to vape you system or do a full install you can download a boot able CD image which will let you play with desktop with the minimum o fuss.

VOIP (Voice Over IP (Internet Protocol)) is becoming the in thing at the moment due to the money it can save you with free international telephone calls. Skype is one of the leaders of this growing technology boasting 161,473,977 downloads of their software so far and increasing by the second.

The latest beta version released yesterday boosts:

• Our call quality is the best ever for talking, laughing and sharing stories.
• It’s now faster to get set up, and easier to add your contacts, so you can get more friends talking for free.
• You can forward calls on to mobiles, landlines and other Skype Names.
• Make calls instantly from Outlook email or Internet Explorer with our new toolbars.
• Personalise your Skype — play around with sounds, ringtones and pictures to show the world who you are.

You can download it for free from the official skype site

In the time it took to write this post another 5,000 copies have been downloaded (161,478,749) which is kind of crazy.

I’m often amazed at the things Google release and I’m equally fascinated at services, tools and games that are dreamt up by people using the Google search engine and API.

Guess the Google is a really simple (as many of the best are) but addictive game. To play you have to work out (or guess) the keyword used to find 20 pictures on Google Images. This may sound easy but be warned it’s not and can be a serious time waster, it took me multiple goes befor I scored over 200. Check it out here

A new version of the FairUse wizard is out. This tool does a pretty good job of backing up your DVDs to various AVI formats in it’s free guise. Paying for the more advanced version gets you more control over the finished product. It’s a lot simpler to use than many of the other offerings out there, although in the end they are all capable of producing similar output. There’s not much more to say really… download it and give it a try.