Tracking cookies are small text files that can tell advertisers and Web analytics firms what you (or your computer or your IP address) are doing online, even though they usually don’t record your name or other identifiable information. They are used all over the Web, but in most cases, their presence is only disclosed deep inside privacy policies.

If the majority of the sites you vist are customers of the same one or two advertising companies, this would be useful in that you should only be served ads that have relevance to you. If you find this to be the case, then by all means keep the tracking cookies, if you wish. However, if you do want to know how to get rid of these tracking cookies, read on.

First of all, here are links to pages where you can opt out of the cookies set by double-click (probably the most common source of tracking cookies):

• http://www.doubleclick.com/us/about_doubleclick/privacy/
• http://www.omniture.com/privacy/2o7

I’d prefer a totally opt-in system, but obviously, it’s much more useful for the ad industry to require the opposite.

If you want to clean out all tracking cookies from all your Web sites, here are links where you can download three programs that can clean out tracking cookies:

• http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad-aware_se_personal.php
• http://www.spybot.info/en/download/index.html
• http://www.webroot.com/consumer/products/spysweeper/

You can also change the preferences or settings in your Web browser to control cookies. In some cases, you can choose to accept cookies from the primary site, but block them from third parties. In others, you can block cookies from specific sites or advertisers, or clear out all cookies.

Remember: Not all cookies are tracking cookies. For example, many Web sites place cookies on your computer to save information like your registration information or preferences for that site. They aren’t read by third parties (like advertisers) and can not tell the owning site about where you go online.

They have a large array of useful WordPress tips and tricks, including another recent one about 10 awesome .htaccess hacks for WordPress.

Microsoft will also continue providing free security-related hotfixes to non-subscribing customers. So unless you frequently make calls to Microsoft support, the April 14th deadline might not really affect you.

via April deadlines loom for Windows XP, Office 2003 product support.

You can either limit your partner search to a selected set of Bollywood actors and actresses or you may even upload someone else’s photo and the “facial search” feature promises to help find other profiles in the matrimony database that match the face in the picture.

This could become a privacy nightmare… If it works as advertised, it would let people locate any random person (that was a member of the Website) that they have a picture of, and get personal details about them.

Mike Sansone of converstations.com has written about a cool way to capture all your tweeps Twitter URLs in one place — and that solves a big problem for those of us who follow a hundred or so especially helpful people.

The trick — and it literally takes 2 minutes — is to use Yahoo Pipes to filter all your incoming tweets that contain a URL then use Pipes to make an RSS feed of same. Elegant, fast and it works.

There’s a usefull iteration, as well, which means you don’t even have to sign up to Yahoo Pipes, just input your twitter name

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via ConverStations: Twitter + Yahoo Pipes = Signal.

Check Places is the first Firefox 3 extension that can check all Firefox 3 bookmarks for duplications and invalid references aka dead pages. The experimental add-on can be downloaded right from the Mozilla website after logging in as a user. The new Check Places entry will be added by the Firefox add-on to the bookmarks menu. A click on that link will open a new window that the user can use to configure the scan behavior.

It is possible to scan all bookmarks or only selected folders. Exclusions can be made so that some bookmarks or folders will not be scanned in the process. The scan itself can check if the pages that the bookmarks point to exist and if it is stored more than once in the bookmarks.

Some extensions (such as Bookmark Duplicate Detector) could perform some of theses functions, but Check Places is the most comprehensive one (so far) for firefox 3.

What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?

A standard way of saving money when buying on eBay is to find auctions that come with misspelled titles and descriptions. Someone selling a Playtation 3 will probably most likely earn less than someone who is selling a Playstation 3.

Auction Bloopers is a website that will search for misspelled auctions on various eBay marketplaces including eBay.com, eBay.co.uk and eBay.com.au. The standard search requires you to enter the correct spelling of what you’re searching for. The site uses common misspellings to build and run a search query against the selected eBay site. For example, using Playstation found over 80 auctions at eBay.com.au.

There’s advanced options that can be used to exclude search terms from the results. Only the title of an auction is searched, but because the result is given to you as an ebay web page, you can easily extend the search to include the description.