... unless they pay you enough. That's it, Google is now officially evil. Compare these two images:
One is a screenshot of an image search for Tienanmen Square on the American version of Google, the other one is what googlers in China get to see. Notice the difference?
More in this article on Yahoo!
Even though it is an American initiative related to Thanksgiving, I too would like to participate in Thank Your First Commenter Day. Wherever you are now, Mark Edwards, thanks for this one.
For all of you who remember the 'All Your Base' meme floating around the net a couple of years back, here it is again, with a cool new twist.
Time to bring out the bad google juice, enough is enough...
For a project I'm involved in, I'm currently carrying around a Qtek 2020i Smartphone. It runs Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC Edition, but it feels like Windows 95!
On paper, it all looked great compared to my previous smartphone, a Treo 600. Built in WiFi, BlueTooth and GPRS (only GPRS on the Treo). 1.2 megapixel camera, with video capture, night settings and loads of options (only .3 megapixel on the Treo, with very basic camera software). One-button audio recording (not on the Treo). Pocket versions of Word, Outlook (mail and calendar) and Internet Explorer (relatively spartan equivalents available on the Treo). Bigger screen. More colours. Streaming video...
Sounds great, right?
Well, that is until you start using it. First of all, the usability: I miss my Treo's keyboard so much! One-handed use with the Treo was a snap: making calls, writing mails, taking pictures or notes... Perfect for use while driving eating an ice-cream cone. The Treo was also much smaller, wich made it look like you were talking into a phone instead of into a brick.
But there's more! The Qtek 2020i also has these supposedly 'handy' buttons on the side for instant camera or memo recording action. The number of pictures and recordings of the inside of my pockets by now is enormous. Not to mention the number of times the batteries ran out due to this. If there is a simple button lock (like my Treo had), I haven't found it yet.
Which brings me to battery life: the standard battery it comes with is dead after two, maybe three days... if you don't use the thing for doing actual work, that is.
Just listening to audio podcasts for oh, two hours or so, is enough to drain the battery completely. Yesterday I even had the weird experience of taking the thing out of the charger (with the charging light on, indicating that it had been charging) after a few hours and noticing that the battery was empty... because the screen had been running while the thing was in the cradle! So it sucks down power faster than it can recharge, even in the cradle if you don't turn it off!
Fortunately, there is a backup battery for keeping your data safe in case of empty main battery. I've never lost data yet because of an empty battery, thanks to this reserve.
Which doesn't mean I never lost data. Oh, I've lost plenty of it. The device has the annoying habit of locking up completely when you do such arcane and exceptional things as ending a phone call, listening to music, watching a bit of video... Sometimes a soft reset will wake the Qtek 2020i up in this case, but in many cases even that brings no results: the device will power up, show the normal boot screen (but without the backlight on) and remain in this state until the battery runs dry or you take it out frustrated after half an hour of waiting to try again.
The only thing that seems to help in such cases is a hard reset... poof! All your data is gone! But what about synchronized data, you might ask? On the Treo, it was real simple: when you synchronized, all your data was backed up. Syncing a 'blank' Treo would just restore everything. Simple as that.
Not so with the Qtek 2020i: First you have to set up the 'new' device by giving it a 'new' name. After that, your calendar, notes, email and other default items are restored. But not your settings and files: GPRS user/pass, mail servers, theme, pictures, recording... all gone. Any pictures and documents you might want to restore need to be copied to the right folder first by hand.
Oh, sure, there is a backup-restore function in the synchronization client. But it is not on by default! And when it is, it is slooooow! And when you want to restore, you have to jump through quite some hoops: you need to make sure the 'new' device has exactly the same name as the old one, and that it's timezone is set exactly to the same one as the old one, else the backup/restore program will say you are not using the same device and refuse to do anything. Quite the user-friendly experience. I just want it to have a button that says: "dump the contents of this backup file on the device currently connected". Why is that so hard?
And there's loads more: the lack of keyboard, the way annoying wifi-popups keep interrupting you when trying to get some work done, the clumsy phone/address book interface, the way the thing seems to slow down enormously sometimes without noticeable cause... gah!
I'm so waiting to get my hands on the Treo 700...
Most people only take a fleeting look at any End User License Agreement (EULA), Terms of Service (ToS) or Terms of Use (ToU). That's because most of these text are writen in legal mumbo jumbo, often in all caps. This one is a bit different. for starters, is is not written in all caps. Secondly... well, you'll see. But I'm guessing these people are very serious about their Terms of Free Use.
Yesterday evening was a first for me: I had been asked to sit on an exam jury to help judge the final projects of some students who had been studying multimedia, internet and journalism related things.
I must say I found it a nice experience, being on the grade-giving side of the table for once, hehe. Brought back a lot of memories, too.
The students we had to judge all had to create a website or application and give a short presentation on it. We had to grade them on their presentation, the graphics, the technical side and on their concept in general.
Without giving too much away, I can say some of the concepts were quite good, others less so, but still worthy attempts. What surprised me most about almost all the projects we got to see was the lack of many things I and my fellow jury members found 'obvious' from our collective work experience: anti-spam measures, add-edit-delete functions, moderation, privacy statements, validated business models, explaining what a site is about directly on the first page...
In short, all the kinds of crap you have to deal with in the real world, after you come up with a great idea. But I'm sure they'll learn all that like we did: the hard way... I wish all of them the best of luck in their professional careers!
Well, what can I say...
| a Man with No Name You scored 7 Honor, 2 Justice, 10 Adventure, and 4 Individuality! |
| It's one thing to be a gunslinger. It's another to wander into town, leave nothing but a trail of those who'd try your skill and take the town's gratitude and cash with you. Hero or villan? It's all in how you look at it and whose side you're on.
Cigar in your teeth and colt on your hip, you are ready to step into the hazy desert horizon. You'll do just fine. |
 |
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Cowboy-Ninja-Pirate-Knight Test written by fluffy71 on Ok Cupid |
Heh! Check out these cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines. Guaranteed to make you smile (and lose weight, gain inches and make money fast... NOT).
Here's a fun little game: Guess-the-google.
It seems today I'm featured in a small article in Belgium's biggest free newspaper, Metro (click the image for larger version). For those of you who don't read Dutch, the article is connected to a larger article about the I-city project. I-city is a kind of experiment where they plan on setting up full wireless internet coverage accross Hasselt, a nearby city, giving or selling lots of people wireless-enabled PDA's and see what happens. For this project, about a hundred volunteers have been recruited to come up with and implement ideas on this infrastructure, so they can see which kind of ideas work and which don't.
I am one of those volunteers, and my project would be setting up some kind of wiki combined with software for determining one's location, so that people could 'tag' the location they are currently at with any information they choose. Other people would then be able to search for these tags, or be able to read the tags and info connected to a location. Example tags could be 'good bar', 'bus stop', 'home of XYZ'...
Anyway, be sure to check out my Dutch language blog about blogging Blogologie, if you are into that sort of thing, my Limericks blog if you like that sort of thing more, and my About page, to learn more about little old me if you are interested.
This must be one of the coolest clocks I have ever seen: timeline.swf.
Yes, that great, cool, open source browser with the ton of excellent functions and heaps of super-nifty plugins, *sucks*!
Why? Well, after having some trouble with my laptop not wanting to go into sleep mode or shut down, I had to do a 'hard' shutdown (keeping the power button pressed down until it shuts off). After rebooting, all my Firefox bookmarks were gone! Not a trace left, no backup, no nothing...
My plugins are there, my browser history is there, just my bookmarks have gone to the big bit bucket in the sky.
And that sucks!
It also seems I'm not the only one with this problem...
I'll probably be able to recover some of them from a backup somewhere, but it looks like I lost a few weeks worth of bookmarks... Not acceptable if you want to be a world-class browser!
Things have been a bit hectic in the past few days, so I completely forgot to announce this here: my hobby project site www.superblog.org is now also available in English. What is it? Basically it is a web-frontend to the Planet Planet aggregator software, with built-in RSS feed autodiscovery.
Say what? Okay, in simple terms: it is a site where you can create a page which has all the latest headlines and articles from all your favourite weblogs, and which is updated automatically every hour. It is also free, and dead easy to use.
If you have a blog or website yourself: I'm trying to get some more users on SuperBlog so I can start experimenting with feed top ten lists etc. , so any links or mentions would be greatly appreciated...
I just submitted an idea to the new www.eivanmij.be website, a part of the i-City project. Basically some organisations from the spheres of IT, government and academia teamed up to do a project to explore the possibilities of city-wide WiFi and other networks and a large number of PDA-toting users. They are looking for about 100 alpha testers to give them some good ideas for applications, and later on also beta and gamma testers to try them out.
As far as I understand it, the project will run in Hasselt and Leuven, which is great because the first city is fifteen minutes from where I live and the other one about half an hour.
Heh, this is funny. Generate your own Windows error message boxes:
(click the image to go to the site, if you dare)
If you are a geek living in or near Flanders, LVB.net has just posted an invitation for a Geek dinner in Ghent on the 19th of january. It looks like there will be some interesting folks there (like Cindy De Smet, Erwin van Hunen, John Baeyens, Peter Forret, Karel Uyttendaele (jr.) and Luc Van Braekel), talking about podcasting, gadgets, blogging and other geeky subjects. Add in some Belgian beer and... heaven!
Looks like I'll definitely be there!
Read all about it here, at Six Log: Six Apart Acquires LiveJournal.
Six Apart, the company I work for, has just announced the acquisition of LiveJournal, another blogging service. Six Apart now has three main blogging products:
This is pretty big news, as suddenly our number of users has skyrocketed overnight. According to LiveJournal's raw statistics page, there are 2.862 accounts in Belgium and 13.863 in the Netherlands. But of course this pales in comparison to the 2.812.130 in the United States.
Although it doesn't look like I'll be working much on LiveJournal related stuff personally (the current LJ staff will keep doing that, of course), let me welcome all Benelux LiveJournal users to the Six Apart familiy!
Fans of ridiculous action movies should see this: Fingersticks Presents : The Battlefield IV. More than enough stick figure death and destruction for your discrimination taste, I guarantee you. And the ending is, well, spectacular.
Harumpf! As you might have noticed, I just managed to moblog two pictures that have been stored in the outbox of my cellphone for over a week now. Apparently sending e-mail via relay.skynet.be doesn't work anymore, the new setting for the SMTP server is relay.proximus.be. How nice of Proximus to inform their users of this.
Via De Standaard's weblog, I found this little story at keldernet.tk. Apparently a shopping mall in Hasselt, not that far from where I live, was plagued by an unknown person who left behind human turds in a stairwell.
Some enterprising store employees got sick of having to clean it up every time, and installed a webcam to catch the perpetrator. And it worked: one day there was a fresh 'calling card' waiting for them, and the camera had captured it all.
To the surprise of the webcammers, it was no homeless person, drug addict or other loony: no, they saw a young woman in her twenties, not unattractive, pull down her pants, leave her message and get out of there.
Right now, they are trying to identify her. So if you recognise this girl, mail them!
(click on the pictures to see video)
Hehe, bet some of my coworkers will love this: FARK.com: (1221712) Theme: What if the Mac really was a cult?.
What do you mean, 'if'?
Read about this in yesterday's paper: Web Football Club
Apparently it is a small French soccer club that is ran entirely by fans over the internet. They vote over all decisions concerning tactics, deployment, training etc., and members that make good decisions get promoted and gain more influence in subsequent votes. The system is explained here, in French. It seems people who make good decisions are also rewarded and can gain money.
According to the newspaper article, the club started in the very lowest division and has won promotion three years in a row this way!
I've been wondering about applying a similar model to a political party for a while now, by the way. It would have no fixed platform, but the representatives would vote bills according to how the party membership is split about them. I.e. if half the members are against it, half the representatives will vote against it, the other half for (or abstain, depending on what the other half of members want). What do you think, could it work? Under what conditions? Why (not)?
Now this rules:
Using my new TV card, some video editing software and a trial version of Kinoma Producer and Kinoma Player, I can now watch recorded video on my Treo 600 smartphone. The image and sound quality are more than decent, and a single 20 minute episode weighs in at about 50 megabytes. Considering my current SD card of 250 Mb, that means I can carry around four or five episodes for watching whenever or whereever I want.
My Treo has a 150x150 screen, but it looks like that is more than adequate, unless you really want to read subtitles. In that case, you'd better get a device with a 300x300 screen and forget about having a decent battery life.
The only downside so far for me is the encoding/uploading time. It takes about two or three minutes to snip out the advertising from the raw recorded file, then about thirty minutes to save the file, and then about thirty minutes to encode it with Kinoma. Uploading via USB to the Treo also takes quite a few minutes, as is normal with files this large.
What does a geek do when he needs a break? Hack up a quick RSS feed for a website he's been co-webmastering for years: I give you the headlines of www.chiro.be in RSS 2.0 format.
Far from perfect yet, definitely needs some more hacking, but they work at the moment and that's what important.
The weblog of one of Belgium's biggest mainstream newspapers is starting an experiment. The site of the newspaper is protected by a password and can only be accessed by paying users. However, for bloggers who want to link to them this can be a problem. First of all they can't access the articles without paying, and secondly, their readers can't either.
Today however, they announced an experiment: they want to give selected bloggers the ability to link to their archived articles, and are looking for volunteers.
I just fired off an e-mail to them to volunteer. Let's hope they pick me...
What I'm most curious about is how they plan on enforcing this. Will they look at referrers to see which visitors will be allowed in and which ones won't? Or will the 'selected bloggers' have the ability to un-hide an article from the archives, making it visible for everybody... Enquiring minds want to know... (and lots of hackers too, I'm sure).
Recently a number of expat Americans tried to order via the internet the neccessary paperwork in order to be able to cast an absentee ballot in the U.S. presidential elections. Unfortunately for them, they were unable to connect to the government website where they needed to do this.
The reason? Apparently the Pentagon has been blocking selective foreign ISP's from connecting to U.S. government and military websites in order to 'defend' them from hackers. But for this case they might want to make an exception, as ZDNet reports: Pentagon may lift voting site blockade.
What do you make of this?
My German 'Geek-soulbrother' Carlo has released his latest project: Watchcow.net > An Amazon price watchcow for the syndicated generation.
Enjoy!
A guy named Brandon Fuller has released MT-Enclosures, a plugin for Movable Type which automatically creates RSS enclosure tags whenever you put a link to a media file in one of your blog posts.
Why is this cool? Enclosures basically are links to media files, which are embedded in an RSS feed. People using an RSS reader with enclosures-suport to read your blog will automatically download all these files, as soon as they are available. This means that anyone with a microphone and/or a webcam can now produce a show which is almost instantly available to subscribed audience members.
Combine this with a technology like bittorrent, and you have a distributed, peer to peer, subscription based media distribution platform.
Sounds too buzz-word bingo like to you? Try this: instead of waiting until some broadcaster decides to program a show you like, you just subscribe to a show and watch it whenever new episodes are available (or whenever after that). Plus, the number of broadcasters has gone from a few big boys with a huge transmitter or big servers to basically anyone with a PC and a microphone.
That, and probably way less ads ;-)
Recently I had 5 gigabytes of photographs (4000, to be more precise), taken during Krinkel 2004, a giant summer camp type of affair for 2000+ young people. I wanted to share these with the world, but I didn't have a server with a big enough pipe.
So I converted all these pictures to 640/480 size reducing the total size to about 1 gigabyte. Next I put all of these on my little webserver upstairs and created a bittorrent file for it. Now, since this webserver is behind a normal ADSL line, I only have about 20 or 30 kB/sec of upstream bandwidth. But using bittorrent 20 people were able to download the entire collection of pictures, while only using about 7 gig of upload from me. In total, 32 gigs were uploaded in the entire network (the difference can be accounted for by incomplete or still unfinished downloads).
By the way, I was using the Azureus bittorrent software to do this.
Remember RandomTV? It was my hobby project site that displays random video clips found on the internet via Google. I just refreshed the database so there are now a bunch of new clips in there.
For people who are into that kind of stuff, I also reduced the price for ads on the site to $1,- for 20.000 pageviews. (that's 90% off, by the way)
Enjoy.
Now this is cool: somebody wrote a (linux-only) hack so he could use his Gmail account as extra storage space on his filesystem:
GmailFS - Gmail Filesystem.
What this means, for non-nerds, is that he can store, move, rename etc. files in his Gmail inbox, just as if he were using a local directory.
Useful? Not really.
Cool? Definitely ;-)
A few days ago I managed to get GPRS working on my Treo 600 smartphone. My current cellphone provider is Proximus, the Belgian market leader.
Because the Treo is not supported by them, here's what I did to make it work:
In the mean time, the service has worked but not continuously: sometimes it says I'm connected but none of my network-enabled apps work. Resetting the phone helps, in that case. Sometimes connecting still results in the dreaded 0x7143 error message, but after one or two more tries/resets it seems to work out.
Am I happy? Well, overall, yes. But customer support could have been better... They should know about unreliability in the network and be informed about outages.
