Category: Toys & Tech

iBaby

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.

A quick note about the Garmin nüvi 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.

Shift + Esc

This is the best Google Chrome shortcut / utility I’ve come across recently (try it; it’s an internal Task Manager).
/////////////
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).

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.
////////////
*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.