Apple Spying on iPhones, RFID at the Olympics

by on August 8, 2008 in Main, Quick Links, Tech

Here are some interesting links from today:

  • Hacker Claims Apple Can Spy On iPhone Users
    Apple may have opened up the iPhone to third-party applications, but it is keeping a very close eye on those apps. According to hacker Jonathan Zdziarski, the iPhone can “phone home” to tell Apple what apps are installed…
  • RFID goes prime time in Beijing Olympics
    Radio frequency identification technology will be facing one of its first major tests during the Beijing Olympics, taking care of ticketing for the estimated 3 million athletes, journalists, and spectators. The chips embedded in Olympics tickets will…
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Passport Hacking, Olympic Coverage, SlingPlayer 2.0

by on August 7, 2008 in Gear, Main, News, Quick Links, Security, Tech

Here are some interesting links from today:

  • E-Passports Can Be Hacked and Cloned in Minutes
    Tests have concluded that new e-passports can be hacked within minutes. A researcher cloned the chips in 2 passports and then implanted images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. Both passports passed as genuine by UN approved passport readers.
  • Google Search Provides Olympic Event Schedules Inline
    Find out when events in your favorite sport are going down in a single Google search: Simply enter the event name and “Olympics” into the Google search box to see upcoming dates and times, like tennis Olympics, or diving Olympics.
  • SlingPlayer 2.0 beta goes public | Crave, the gadget blog – CNET
    The beta version of the SlingPlayer 2.0 software is now available for Windows users as a free download from Sling Media’s Web site. The software, which allows owners Slingbox products to access their TV programming via any broadband-connected PC…
  • Watch the Olympics Online
    The 2008 Beijing Olympics will happen while most Americans are sleeping. While NBC will be providing thousands of hours of content on the web, the only way to truly ensure you won’t miss any action is to take advantage of the many video outlets online.
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Build a Secure Family Blog with WordPress

by on August 6, 2008 in Blogging, How To, Main, Security, Tech

Just before the arrival of my 2nd daughter I launched a new WordPress site so we’d be able to keep family and friends up to date with the latest pictures and goings on.  We’d previously tried this but after a couple weeks it would start to fizzle to one post a week, then one a month and so on to basically a dead site.

The first couple sites were ones I was building in Dreamweaver with static pages that all had to be updated by hand. Part of the reason in the past that we didn’t just use a blog site was because we wanted pictures and sensitive information to be password protected.  Family blogs are different in that respect. You aren’t looking to get huge viewership, you just want to be able to share private photos, videos and stories that you wouldn’t share with the entire world.

Long story short it was never easy enough to post, much less for my wife to be able to post, there were security issues and password communication problems with family, etc.  There were just too many obstacles to overcome to create a successful family blog…  until now.

Finally! This time we got it right.

Thanks to the help of this post on Simply Basic, I decided on WordPress and a pile of plugins. Surprisingly it works nearly flawlessly, is easy to use, my wife can post with ease (and therefore posts more often), it’s secured, family can all have their own login, and much, much, more.

Here are some more details on setting up your own secure Family Blog.
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Aurora, ISP transmission caps, Jobs on MobileMe

by on August 6, 2008 in Main, Quick Links, Tech

Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

  • Jobs: MobileMe “not up to Apple’s standards”
    Apple CEO Steve Jobs conceded in an e-mail to Apple employees that the company had made numerous mistakes during the launch of its MobileMe Internet service, saying that the service “was simply not up to Apple’s standards”
  • Google backs ISP-guaranteed minimum data rates
    If Comcast can’t use TCP reset packets to limit the number of BitTorrent connections a client can spawn, what legitimate techniques can ISPs use to deal with congestion ? Google’s Vint Cerf, today weighed in with his answer: transmission rate caps.
  • Aurora: The Future of the Internet
    What will browsing the web be like a decade from now? Leading design and UI company Adaptive Path offers one possible answer in a new concept video series called Aurora, demonstrating what the future of the web might look like.
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Postalicious Fix Is Out

by on August 5, 2008 in Main, News, Software, Tech

As I posted on Friday, the WordPress Postalicious plugin broke on Friday when Delicious launched their redesign.  Thankfully, the plugin author, Pablo Gómez Basanta, quickly cranked out the changes and updated the plugin to v2.6 which fixes the issue.

I’m not a full time blogger or anything so I rely heavily on the Postalicious plugin to keep my blog active.  All I have to do is bookmark interesting sites/pages/articles using the Delicious Firefox plugin and the links are published automatically for me on whatever interval I choose.

Features

  • Automatically create posts in your blog with your bookmarks
  • Works with delicious, ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit and Yahoo Pipes.
  • Complete control over how often your bookmarks are posted and how many bookmarks should appear on each post.
  • If the post is not ready for prime time, Postalicious creates a draft with the pending bookmarks which you can publish any time.
  • Full customization on the look of posts created by Postalicious.
  • Integrates with WordPress tags.
  • Filter the bookmarks that are posted to your blog depending on how you tagged them.
  • Logs all the activity so that you know what Postalicious did and when.
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Quick Links for Aug 5th

by on August 5, 2008 in Main, Quick Links, Tech

Here are some interesting links from today:

  • Microsoft’s New Vista Ads Don’t Work
    Microsoft’s bait-and-switch campaign for Vista, the “Mojave Experiment,” is baffling. Why base a campaign around the core assumption that everyone thinks your product sucks, and that people who have felt wronged by Vista are ignorant fools?
  • Oh happy day — the new Delicious is here
    Over the past few days we’ve been transitioning Delicious over to our new platform, quietly starting with RSS feeds and APIs. Today we’re taking the final step and flipping the switch on the new web site: delicious.com.
  • Firefox market share exceeds 20%, Internet Explorer dips below 70%
    It has been six weeks since Firefox 3 has been released and it appears that Mozilla has had a successful launch with market share gains, especially at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
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Feedburner Hack – Inflate your subscribers

by on August 4, 2008 in Demo, Humor, Main, Security, Tech, Videos

With this simple “hack” anyone can go from zero to 500, 5000, 50,000 subscribers in a single day!  Well, at least that’s what your Feedburner badge will say.  It’s quite obvious that you would be able to subscribe to your own feed and inflate your numbers but who’d have thought it could be this easy?

I may have a couple thousand subscribers by tomorrow ;) .

Here’s the original article on TechCrunch.

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More On SlideRocket Presentation Software

by on August 4, 2008 in Demo, Main, Tech, Videos

If you saw my SlideRocket Review post the other day you know that my first impressions were pretty good.  I neglected to mention some of the more powerful features such as PowerPoint import and being ablet to pull in live data from Google Docs & Spreadsheets not to mention the offline client that is coming soon!

Here are some of those processes demo’d by SlideRocket.

Import PowerPoint Slides into SlideRocket

Import Google Spreadsheet Data into SlideRocket

SlideRocket Offline Player

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Delicious Updates Site – Postalicious Broken?

by on August 1, 2008 in Favorite Sites, Main, News, Quick Links, Software, Tech

Popular bookmarking site del.icio.us has updated their site to a sleeker version and also changed their name to delicious.com.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal right?  Might be for me.

I use delicious to bookmark sites and articles I think are noteworthy almost everyday.  While bookmarking still works for me looks like the WordPress plugin (Postalicious) that automatically pulls my bookmarks out and makes a post here on my site (like this one from yesterday) has stopped working.  It’s generating an error now and won’t update.  I haven’t really looked into it too much but if it’s not broken I find it highly coincidental to be throwing errors on the day delicious did a major change.

If I’m lucky, it’ll just start working again… if not, I’ll have to wait for an update to the Postalicious plugin.  Lots of bloggers use this plugin so it shouldn’t be long before an update comes out.

Anyway, in the meantime, here’s a delicious video of the site redesign showing the transformation.

You can also see a list of all then new features on their site.

Is Postalicious broken for anyone else or is it just me?

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Microsoft's New Ad Campaign

by on August 1, 2008 in Apple, Demo, Humor, Main, News, Software, Tech, Videos

Yesterday there was a Microsoft Ad showing on my site. I captured it in the video below (chances are it’s running on the page today since I’m writing about it).  It’s about their new ad campaign, The Mojave Experiment (I first mentioned Mojave in an earlier post July 25th), which takes people with negative preconceived notions about Windows Vista and lets them test out Microsoft’s new beta operating system Mojave.

The catch is… they are really testing Vista!  The Mojave site has some pretty funny videos with the users bashing Vista then doing a 180 when they get to test Mojave. Microsoft has posted some really interesting before and after survey numbers from the experiment.

  • 94% of respondents rated Mojave higher than they initially rated Vista
  • 0% rated Mojave lower than initially rated Vista
  • Average pre-demo Vista score: 4.4
  • Average post-demo Mojave score: 8.5

It’s about time Microsoft is finally attempting to dispel the Vista sucks rumors. I’ve been using Vista for two years now (since beta 2).  Ever since RC1 it’s been pretty good except for some compatibility issues.  Since the RTM release though it’s been solid.

Is it too little, too late?  Can Microsoft turn around the reputation the Mac commercials gave to Vista? We’ll see.

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