Category: Toys & Tech

Hit me up in the blog comments, send an email, or think about me hard enough to set off my spidey-sense.
Note: I plan on giving away a couple; the rest are for family.
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My Wave invite (and Gmail as well) came from Osaka Bill, so anybody who gets an invite should feel compelled to sign the petition for The Cure to play live in Japan (except that the actual signing page seems hosed. Oh, and the deadline passed 2 years ago..).
UPDATE: Invitations have been reserved to be sent to a couple lucky winners; Google says that they aren’t always sent out immediately. Also, the Cure petition ended because they actually played at the Fuji Rock Festival in 2007 after a 23-year absence from Japan. Duh.

Thinking between metric, imperial, and traditional Thai/Japanese units is not so easy for a math wimp like me, so I rely on unit converters to do heavy (and sometimes quite light) lifting:
For a dedicated Windoze app I use Converber. There are many like it, but this one even has some Thai measurements in it.
A good online unit conversion utility can be found here: Online converter

If it seems some of your friends recently stopped posting on Facebook, it might be due to a recent Facebook “upgrade.” Here’s the fix:

1. Go to FB Home Page
2. Choose “Live Feed.”
3. Scroll to the bottom & click ” Edit Options.”
4. You will then see your “News Feed Settings.” Change the 250 to 5000, which is Facebook’s friend limit, and your feed will work correctly again.

Quick! Type “why won’t” into Google and look at the drop-down suggestions…

Give it a try here: http://www.pingtest.net
This is especially useful for people in Thailand trying to stream data or play multi-player games on servers overseas. Try testing your latency to Bangkok, then to a foreign destination. The traffic bottlenecks at the undersea data cables after being squeezed through government filters and ISP proxies, which explains the pitiful latency. It’s not quite as bad as DSL being beat by carrier pigeon, but it does explain why Skype and internet radio reception can be so crappy a lot of the time.

This is really interesting: Dark Stalking on Facebook

“But by far the most interesting part of all of this have been dark users. Like dark matter, these users are not directly observable, usually because they’ve completely disabled API access. In fact, some of these users are completely dark unless you’re a friend. They don’t show up in search results. They don’t show up on friends’ lists. You can’t send them messages. If you try to navigate to their user page (assuming you know it exists), you get redirected back to your homepage. These users have their privacy settings turned up real high, and are supposed to be hard to find.
However like dark matter, dark users are observable due to their effects on the rest of the universe. If a dark user comments on a stream entry, I can see that comment. More importantly, I can see their user-ID, and I can generate a URL to a page that will contain their name. I can then watch for their activities elsewhere. Granted, I can’t directly search for their activity, but I can observe their effects on my friends.”

So, even if you think you’re cloaked safely in the thermocline like a lurking nuclear sub (by using “safe” Facebook practices), the very act of trying to be invisible can give you away. You cannot be detected directly, but you invariably leave clues just by being there. I keep wondering what form the Great Facebook Meltdown will take, but it’s definitely building up to that definitive moment.