Pingdom Now Offers Free Website Monitoring

Over the last few years, Pingdom has established itself as a well-regarded uptime monitoring service, but until now, its services were only available to paying customers. Today, however, Pingdom launched a free version of its service. The free service offers all the features of Pingdom's paid accounts, though users are limited to monitoring just one website or server. This free account also comes with up to 20 SMS alerts per months, which is a nice perk, given that you probably want to know that your site or server is down as soon as possible.

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Pingdom gives users a large number of options. You can, for example, choose to have it ping your server anywhere between once per minute or once per hour. Pingdom is also flexible enough to be able to ping specific ports on your server and also check the state of your SMPT, POP3, or IMAP email server - though with the free account, you can obviously only choose one of these.

In addition to its free service, Pingdom also offers a basic account for $9.95 per month, which allows users to monitor up to 5 sites. The company also offers a business account for $39.95 per month, which can check up to 30 sites. The basic account also comes with 20 free SMS alerts, while business account users can receive up to 200 alerts by text message.

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3G Speeds Tested & Compared, City by City [Performance Tests]

As wireless users know all too well, not all 3G networks are created equal. PC World recently put Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T to a multi-city test to determine which best delivers speed and reliability.

The magazine took a snapshot of the performance of those three major networks in 13 markets during March and early April (specifically, 5443 individual tests from 283 testing locations). Weather, time of day, and other variable factors not withstanding, the magazine found that Verizon had an average download speed of 951 kbps, and produced uninterrupted speeds in 89.8 percent of tests.

For its part, Sprint's 3G network delivered solid connections in 90.5 percent of cities tested, with average download speeds of 808 kbps across 13 cities, while the AT&T network's average download speed clocked in at 812 kbps. But where reliability was concerned, AT&T delivered only 68 percent of the time.

Take a look at the link below for the full city-by-city results, then let us know your take on PC World's conclusion. Do they match up with your own wireless experience in those cities? Let us know which network you use and how it fares in your location.

A Day in The Life of 3G [PC World]

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Aviary.com Creates Edit-Ready Web Screenshots [Screenshots]

Looking to grab a copy of the entire scroll-able content of a web page? Aviary, makers of a previously mentioned online image editing tool and Firefox extension, make it really simple: just add the site's URL after aviary.com/.

The speed with which Aviary's Flash-based editor pops open depends on their server load and the content of the site you're trying to paste over—Lifehacker is a "large image," while aviary.com/xkcd.com loads just fine. But the full-length capture works, allows you to save to the desktop (through the "Export" function) and make basic edits like cropping and text and shape addition. Our initial tests showed some real lag, and a few failures, when trying to open the right-hand tools for "Advanced Editor" or "Image Effects" on larger web captures, but when they work, you're getting a pretty neat Photoshop-lite to play with.

Aviary's URL appending service is free to use, requires a free account to save images online and access certain advanced features.

Capture any webpage: Just add Aviary.com/ in front of the URL [Aviary blog]

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The Most Detailed 3D Map of Earth Yet [Maps]

Forget Google Maps: NASA and Japan's Ministry of Economy have released the most detailed three-dimensional map of Earth yet. It covers our planet between the 83 north and 83 south parallels thanks to 1.3 million stereo images like these:

The images were captured by ASTER, ! and then stitched together into a seamless map. ASTER—Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer—is the instrument taking maps of land surface temperature, reflectance and elevation flying onboard NASA's Terra satellite. Once the Global Digital Elevation Model was complete, it was divided into 23,000 GeoTIFF files, each covering 1 x 1 degree of the globe. You can download the map here. [JPL]

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Philips Cinema 21:9 TV Will Cost $7400 [TVs]

I don't know if we will ever see the 56-inch Philips Cinema 21:9 in the US, but if I didn't have a projector, I would totally fall for it. Even at the $7400 price tag just published in the UK.

The Philips 56PFL9954H Cinema 21:9 uses the same aspect ratio of most movies out there, which means that it eliminates the black bars while watching a Blu-ray title. And while every single consumers electronics expert in the UK is raving about the amazing quality of this 8.3-million-pixel TV set, the Philips Cinema 21:9 still has to do zooming to make the movie to fill its 1080-pixel vertical resolution. In other words: It looks great, but it's still not perfect. [Daily Mail]

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