Toys & Tech
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Ping Test
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.
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Dark Stalking
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.…
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Toyota Floormat Recall
This is a pretty serious problem: Toyota plans huge U.S. recall for dangerous floormats It sounds more like a headline from the Onion, but it seems like it’s responsible for deaths. I can attest to the dangers of certain types of floor mats because they caused problems in my car last year a few times. I was using an aftermarket rubber floor mat on the driver’s side of our Cefiro and the mass of the raised lip made the front edge heavy. The mat was naturally pushed forward when I moved my feet around while driving, and once in a while it would get pushed up onto the accelerator. When…
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Meta-wankery declared useless
It’s official: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking
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Frak Yahoo Mail
As an added incentive to switch to something better if you already haven’t, consider what happened to my Yahoo Japan email account (used as a third backup) after I didn’t log in for four months: They deleted all my messages and declared the same would happen time and time again unless I logged in more often or subscribed to one of their pay services like broadband or “online security!” Then, waiting in my inbox was a mysterious email saying that all of my deleted messages could be restored – for a fee, of course. This whole affair reminds me of Hotmail of olden times, except that Yahoo Mail has nothing,…
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Best speedtest for Thailand
I’ve tried a few, and this one gives the most consistent results from different areas, even though many of them are supposedly based on the same speedtest.net parameters: http://speedtest.3bb.co.th/
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Blog –> FB + Twitter Test
I’m experimenting with a combination of Twitterfeed and the Twitter app on Facebook. Feedalicious.
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Best Firefox Plugin, Ever
At least, that’s what the guy who sent it to me claims. Check it out: (thx hui)
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Papa Piggy
Almost a month ago, a big storm came and blew my ceramic boo-chan (pig-shaped mosquito coil holder) over. As you can see, he did a Humpy-dumpty which made me really sad because I bought him for half off at Jusco in Sumoto a few years back and will probably never buy a 7,000 yen ceramic pig ever again. Luckily, it was nothing two and a half tubes of super glue (the most popular brand in Thailand is called Power Glue) couldn’t fix: Actually, if you look closely, you can see that mommy pig’s been put together again, too.
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Adless Gmail
I don’t really mind the ads in Gmail*. I’d actually feel kinda guilty/uneasy if Gmail were totally free, because I depend on it so much. This is interesting, though: How to avoid Gmail’s Sponsored Links Forget Big Brother – we need top worry about those who we willingly trust with our privacy every day. ///////////// *If they bother you that much, you can always use a dedicated email client with Gmail.
