I used to be an apple weenie, but then I decided to live in the third world, and as we all know, apple doesn’t care about poor people. So it’s been a revelation visiting home and using my sister’s iPhone for a week when she was on a cruise, and to a lesser extent, my mom’s MacBook to aggregate photos and video from several different sources.
The iPhone was pretty cool and three killer apps for me were Google Maps (although I tried the Android version on my cousin’s phone and it was even better), Gmail, and a Mafia Wars-type world war game that I got addicted to in a frighteningly crack-like way.
What really tickled me, though, was seeing an iPad for the first time. My cousin S got free tickets for Stars on Ice (which people still call Ice Capades) a few days ago and invited us to come. We took the babies and I had to check in our stroller at the Guest Link office at Staples Center before we could enter the stands. While I was getting my claim stub, a woman came in with her iPad, sobbing. She explained that the ushers were insisting that she had to check in her “baby” because she couldn’t have it in the stands. When I left, she was still trying to convince the clerk to make sure nothing happened to her baby and going so far as to wrap it in her cardigan.
Category: Toys & Tech
A quick note about the Garmin nĂ¼vi 1450t
I bought one today for navigating around my home country… Took it home from Walmart and thought it was broken because it wouldn’t sync with the satellites. Eventually decided to look it up online and one Amazon reviewer said that it took quite a while to acquire a satellite signal upon first use – so I took it outside, restarted, and let it sit on a plastic table for a while. Almost ten minutes later, it was good to go.
It’s funny, though, if I hadn’t read this review on Amazon, I would have thought it was defective for sure.
Yet more reasons for quitting Facebook
Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook
Why You Should Still Quit Facebook
Baa baa click click have you any nails?
Antenna app for online radio
Antenna, an application based on Adobe Air is easily installed from this site with a couple clicks and is one of the best online radio apps I’ve ever used because of its clever interface. The approach is so novel that it actually turned me back onto online radio after forgetting about it for ten years or so.
Screen shot:
Shift + Esc
This is the best Google Chrome shortcut / utility I’ve come across recently (try it; it’s an internal Task Manager).
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I’ll even give you another killer one just for reading this: You can delete entries from an auto-complete drop down list by highlighting them and hitting Shift + Delete (this is actually a carry-over from Firefox).
Fuji Pet Detection
Fujifilm wants you to buy a dog or cat for your digital camera, and not the other way around: Guide for Auto Dogs & Cats Detection
Whoever actually does so will kick themselves in four months when Canon’s heartbeat sensor function comes out.
Google Chat vs. Skype
Recently, Google Chat is consistently better in terms of voice and video; this was not the case a year ago. I wonder if switching to a dedicated Jabber client would yield even better results, and might enjoy having Google Chat and Facebook Chat accessible from a single dedicated app, but at the same time I’m really enjoying the simplicity of the Google Chat setup.
AUTORUN.INF and Flash Drive Infections Spread Faster than Cholera in Developing Countries
Viruses are often spread by something inserted into the orifices of unprotected hosts, although some are virulent / evolved enough to get around basic protection as well. In Thailand, USB drives spread nasties faster than digital treatment can be applied, so after several years of taking care of many computers, I’ve decided that vaccination is the best option*.
This consists of planting a hidden and practically undeletable AUTORUN.INF file in the root of a removable drive.
I use Panda USB to vaccinate.
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*Like all vacs, you run a chance of getting sick if you have a reaction. Specifically, you could lose all the data on your NTSF-formatted drive in a worst case scenario (most “handy” drives are formatted FAT32). My advice is not to use this feature until it comes out of beta.
Buzz text formatting = Google Chat formatting = Facebook chat formatting
Enclose in asterisks for bold: *sample text* –> sample text
Enclose in hyphens for strikethrough: -sample text- –> sample text
Enclose in underscores for italics: _sample text_ –> sample text
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Previous entries on Google Buzz:
Predictions about Google Buzz
Google Acquires Aardvark – Will it Be Integrated into Buzz?