PayPal is too smart or too cheap?
No offense. I have nothing bad about PayPal to talk about. They have such a great service, but “Contact us” is freaking me out.
I just saw Paypal had chat available—great was what I first thought. When I got into it, it was surprisingly fast. Every responses are too fast to be human. Darn, after 2 conversations, I find out that it’s just a bot, but it’s pretty good, too good to be true. I just thought of Terminator kind of thing. Probably it’s closer than you think. Oh no matter how deep I got into technology, but this idea really freaked me out.
If I were PayPal, I would pull this off. In case you didn’t have enough people, then don’t have it. I just prefer to talk or chat with real person or wait for replied e-mail from real human or it’s just me.
=) I just don’t like it really; you may try talking to *it* here
ps. I gotta watch too much science fiction lately
Popularity: 2% [?]
SmartQ Q5 – the most affordable MID in town!
I am not exactly sure how good it would be, but its official price tag is as low as I ever see—900 yuan (around $130) That price was on smartdevice.com.cn press release, so it should be reliable enough although it might hike up a bit when across the ocean to the US, but it should be under $200 anyway!
Look at the spec you’ll get from $130:-
- 4.3″ 800×480 capacitive touch screen
- SDHC support
- Wifi A/B/G/N
- Bluetooth with phone tethering support
- USB 2.0 host with full OTG driver stack and support for USB ethernet, 3g modems, and GPS. USB gamepads, as well
- Dimension: 120 * 74 * 14mm
- CPU: Samsung ARM11 S3C6410 667MHz
- 128MB DDR RAM
- browser: WebKit [here]
This ARM CPU has quite good feature, MPEG4 codec, h.264 codec, OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 (datasheet) From the spec and price tag, I wonder how they can make this cheap. I hope it would be available pretty soon. I would give it a try indeed.
There are also applications for Q5 already; as far as I know, SDK will be available right after this product releases officially. It looks promising and it indeed makes MID much more interesting than “Intel” MID. I hope this would give a new low-cost trend for all MID in the future as well.
Check it out smartdevice.com.cn & more screenshot at mp4nation.net
Popularity: 13% [?]
JavaScript playground: anything possible
I couldn’t believe it can do such a capability. Yes, the one pushing JavaScript to limit is not anyone, but Google and at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ there are a lot of experiments that you don’t even dream of its possibility.
This NY guys are speaking because of you. This one is real fun to play with. Bouncing ball through many windows. What a cool thing!! I couldn’t stop throwing the ball again and againYeah, they mostly work on every new browsers because of intensive JavaScript. Just don’t expect to play on this playground if you are running with ie6 or something like that =)
Anything is possible and indeed fun @ Chrome Experiments.
Popularity: 2% [?]
ie8 released finally
Although I’m Firefox user, I don’t deny ie8 still the first choice for many folks. Now it’s eventually out of RC. I honestly don’t know if there are any change much.
After trying for a while, there is InPrivate Filtering feature which I still can’t figure out what it is for. Developer tools also is really nice, but I still like to see adblock plus kind of thing, but it probably won’t be real anytime soon. One thing I could tell so far is it’s *much faster*. For example, when ctrl + t in the past, it will be few seconds lag before new tab will be usable. However, this final release does the job; open new tab instantly. That’s good enough for second web browser to me =)
Update yours at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx
Popularity: 2% [?]
Fennec – Firefox mobile if you say – is ready to try on almost every platform: Maemo, Windowns, Mac OSX, Linux. It’s basically the binary files, ready to run.
It’s really nice interface for touch environment if you ask me, really clean, pretty nice for small screen device like Nokia N8xx – Maemo platform. I’m really happy to see another good browser engine on mobile device, besides WebKit.
Give it a try if you have <7” device, here, otherwise, you won’t find any advantage of Fennec over Firefox ;-P
Popularity: 2% [?]
Linux 101: grub recovery
When you messed with many OSs, boot strap loader might point to somewhere you don’t want it to be. grub considering the best – easiest? – to deal with many OSs and of course, it’s easy to tweak or adjust as well.
Firstly get into any sort of shell. There are basically 2 parts needed to be done: set active partition and set MBR back to point at grub again. The first part is fdisk, there is ‘m’ for help. All you have to do is set the partition where grub is to active. Others are not.
The second part: set MBR point back to grub. That’s easy via grub command shell
The easiest way to find partition referenced by grub is to find it
find /boot/grub/menu.lst
Then you have to set toot and setup the hard drive. Then you are all set. For grub menu, Linux needs
Title XXX
root (hd0,0)
kernal /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/…bla bla bla
initrd /boot/initrd
For Windows, you just need to link to Windows boot loader again.
Title Windows XX
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,1)+1 # this is Windows partition.
That’s all you have to do. pretty easy, right?
Popularity: 2% [?]
No matter how Apple wants to say this is a big update. It looks like updating features waiting for Palm Pre to me.
* copy & paste
* SEARCH!!
* finally more Bluetooth support!
* Apple Push notification service [seems like Apple wants taking control of everything to me though]
* more GPS support
* etc.
Although there will be thousand of new API, I still don’t think it will change anything and make anything more exciting to well-established platform like iPhone. Jail-breaker one still is the way to go anyway—more apps, much cooler apps without any interferer. However, there is one thing that could make a difference—search. I would love to see how Spotlight goes in this update, that’s probably the only thing that makes Palm Pre look so great over iPhone to me. With the delay of Pre, I bet iPhone will rule mobile arena for another year comfortably. But $9.xx bucks for iPod Touch user again? That’s a lot. Thinking of $20 last time for 2.0 and a few more for minor updates. Such a greedy Apple.
All in all, I hope there would be a lot more “potential opponents” like Palm Pre over the next year, so iPhone 3.5 or 4.0 will catch up all iPhone 1.0 promise such as Flash eventually. What the heck are you doing Microsoft?? You were better than this I was so wrong; Windows Phone (formerly Windows Mobile) and all RIM army are still out there standing firmly—we shall see if they will be over hype of Jesus phone or not.
Q4 2008: WM beated iPhone in term of sale, not hype; also RIM shipment over last 2 years never go down a bit [over iPhone always of course]
That’s going to be much more interesting this year. If I were Palm, I would quickly unleash Palm Pre before the *hype* was gone although there still are several bugs or unfinished work—just disable/hide it like Apple did to iPhone.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Hotmail revision
As far as I remembered, Hotmail was such a bloated webmail fully loaded with ads, esp. on the top—around 100px height. That is about 15% waste in vertical space. Now, they are gone—and of course, it has changed to as right column instead which is much better considering new screen is wider and wider.Not only eliminating ad at the most disturbing place, but also add supporting for POP3 server for free as well. FYI, it will work with your hotmail, live and msn account too.
POP3 server: pop3.live.com:995 (SSL)
Username: Your Live ID
Password: That’s the one only you know
SMTP server: smtp.live.com:25 (SSL)
Authentication required: Yes
Nevertheless, Hotmail always provides such a nice alternative for e-mail client anyway and today it’s Windows Live Mail—using HTTP to fetch all stuffs in a secret way. It works flawlessly if you ask me. Is there anyone care about standard {protocol bla bla bla} if what they use work?
I, myself, prefer to use off-line e-mail client any day with any e-mail, but sometimes without my own computer, webmail is required. Thus, with this update, I see myself accessing more ‘used to be abandoned’ Hotmail account more often I guess.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Photoshop 101 – keyboard shortcut for switching tools
I always find Photoshop such a great tool, but it’s quite annoying that I couldn’t find how to switch between tool (in the same group) quickly.
Then: It’s the same keyboard shortcut, so how can I switch between them then? Hold ‘G’ would not do it, Ctrl + ‘G’ is not right. As a result, I have to stick with hold the left click and switch it.
Now: Just hold shift + ‘G’ (or whatever key you want) to rotate tools in the group. That’s easy, right? I really wish I knew this long time ago!!
Popularity: 8% [?]
Reminder: Check your bank transaction more often..
I don’t know if you guys have experienced this issue or not, but I have faced this several times by now. Unauthorized transactions magically appeared on my PayPal—oddly, I used many cards, but only PayPal one that has this issue. First time it was about half a year ago, 2 strange transactions buying some service from some unknown websites—about $150 in total—were authorized under my card. I contacted PayPal in sudden, mailed an affidavit form and waited about 2 weeks to get $ back. It was not that bad since we all know that we would get $$ back anyway. However, if we haven’t checked, that’s what we are going to lose.
Again, few days ago I got an unauthorized transaction from Square Enix, playonline.com, as shown below.
I never heard of this merchant before, so I dag for more info a bit. As a result, it was game online website. Some of kids in there probably needed $$ so badly since I’m not the only one who had the issue #1 #2 (same day & amount as mine too!), and a lot more. Thus they have to find the illegal way to satisfy their need. I honestly have no clue how my info was leak yet, but at least, this should be a good warn for everyone—check your transaction thoroughly before you will be the next victim.
Popularity: 2% [?]
