It’s been quite a while since the buzz about a new sleek and cool cellphone from Nokia Research and Development came up. Though the cellphone is still in the process of being developed (or perhaps even fully conceptualized), it’s already starting to make major ripples in the sea of cellphone users around the globe. It’s called the Nokia Aeon.
The general idea is to get rid of the keypad at all and make the whole front side of the cellphone one big touch screen LCD. When the moment comes for you to use a keypad, the lower section of the LCD screen turns into a touch screen keypad which you could use much like an ordinary keypad.
Take a look at each photo below (click to enlarge in a separate browser window)
The advantages? Well, lesser parts. The disadvantage? A bigger LCD which could be more susceptible to breaking. Well, I’m sure Nokia and its avid clients (including myself) will find a way to handle the upcoming cellphone with care.
Now, if they can only get the Nokia Aeon fully off the drawing board and into the stores.
I never knew Brian May of the Queens had an interest in astronomy.
Brian May traded rock ‘n’ roll for the big bang as he launched a book about the origins of the universe. May, who abandoned doctoral studies in astronomy to play guitar with `70s rock legends Queen, has returned to his first love as a co-author of the book “Bang! The Complete History of the Universe,” which was launched Monday.
Co-written with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott, presenters of the British Broadcasting Corp. astronomy program â€The Sky at Night,” the book recounts the formation of the universe from its origins more than 13 billion years ago and looks forward to its end, several billion years from now.
I haven’t read his book yet (c’mon it was just launched) but I’m sure it’s gonna give people some rock n’ roll facts of the universe and its origins. Good work Brian!
More of this story at SPACE.com — Queen Guitarist Launches Astronomy Book
I receive lots of emails and instant messages from PHP newbies asking me why their script (or the script they copied form some site) is not working as they expected. The emails and instant messages alone make me happy since it reflects the person’s interest in learning ‘why’ something works and ‘why’ something else doesn’t.
Here’s my advise to you dear PHP newbies. Don’t rush. Take it slowly and take on simple problems first. Most of the time, newbies don’t even understand how the script he’s looking at works. Most newbies, no matter how smart they are, are dumbfounded by the simplest PHP problems simply because they still don’t fully understand the basics of PHP. Dear newbie, It’s not your fault if you don’t understand the basics of PHP yet though I think it will soon be your fault if they will keep on not understanding the basics.
To newbies, I say read these first:
By the time you’ve finished and understood the above sections, then you’re most likely ready to tackle on the more advanced stuff.
One more important piece of advise to newbies. Try experimenting first. Experiment a lot of times and if you still can’t figure it out, then ask questions but don’t ask for the solution. Rather, show the person you’re asking what you’ve tried and ask them what you missed. That way, spoonfeeding is prevented and you get to think and exercise your mind. PHP experts will be happy helping you this way.
Lastly, this article is not meant to make newbies look stupid. I was a newbie once. Rather, I wrote this article in the hope to help newbies learn more of PHP.
The Netscape versus Internet Explorer days are over and many will say that IE won back then. Now, we have a new browser war. This time it’s between Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox (FF) and it appears that IE is lagging far behind the achievements of FF. Though majority of the people are still using IE, more and more users are switching to the more powerful and easily expandable Firefox.
One of the powers of Firefox is the ability to accept addons / extensions. Because of this, the capabilities of FF were easily extended while IE’s powers lagged behind. Now that Internet Explorer 7 is out, will Firefox finally find it’s match? IE7 boasts the ability to accept addons as much as FF does. At this point however, IE7 still has a lot of catching up to do. With thousands of plugins written for Firefox, I think it will be a tough job for IE7 to stand at par with FF.
There are however plugins that support both Internet Explorer and Firefox. We have the Google toolbar for one. One of my favorites is the Trailfire Firefox Extension; Internet Explorer 7 add-on. It’s pretty cool because it allows me to leave trailmarks in websites allowing me to retrace my steps back to the point of origin. It works a lot like those cookies in fairy tale stories. I find it pretty important since it makes it easier for me to keep track of where I’m going and from where I’ve come from. It also sports a ’send to friend’ feature.
Here are a couple of screenshots showing Trailfire in action under Firefox and IE7.
Trailfire on Firefox (Click image to enlarge)
DOWNLOAD Trailfire Addon for Firefox Here
Trailfire on IE7 (Click image to enlarge)
DOWNLOAD Trailfire Addon for IE7 Here
As you can see, the extension / addon works pretty well on both browsers. Eventually, I hope that there would be some sort of cross browser standards in writing these extensions / addons but I don’t think that will show up anytime soon since the competition between browsers is still hot.
Now, as of IE7 vs Firefox. IE still has to prove its track record especially when it comes to security. Well, I think MS Windows in general has to prove it. On the other hand, though Firefox had it’s own share of problems and bugs, it’s still a ton better compared to IE.
My say on this? Firefox wins - no doubts about that.
If you’re using wordpress and you decided to use the service of Feedburner to handle your feeds, then you’re most likely worrying about making all those edits in your wordpress template so that it reflects the new feedburner feed URL instead of the default wordpress URL.
One option is to do a 302 redirect using .htaccess but that’s way to tough for most bloggers and even for those who knows how to do it, I’d still prefer a much simpler way.
And that much simpler way exists. Enter the feedburner wordpress plugin. It’s cool and amazing. It automatically redirects all feed requests to your Feedburner and configuring it is pretty painless.
Check it out at http://orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-feedburner-plugin/
I pay less than $10 / month for my Cable TV and though that’s not much, the idea of being able to watch Cable TV for free is still very much interesting. I learned about the idea of free cable tv on the action online blog and I immediately decided to give it a try - though I have a Linux installation and have no Windows PCs within reach.
I’m talking about TVUPlayer and though it’s designed to run on Windows, I still took the step of downloading and installing it on my Linux system. I believe that setting it up on Windows would be pretty trivial but doing it on Linux required some extra efforts. In the end, I got it working. Here’s what I did. Note, I’m assuming that you already have wine installed and so I won’t go into the details of installing wine.
- Install IE6 using IEs4Linux. This step is crucial as it setups the required runtime libraries for TVUPlayer. I know that there could be another way but then again, this is how I did it.
- While IE6 is installing, I downloaded TVUPlayer here.
- After IE6 was installed, I unzipped the TVUPlayer installer in a folder of my choice. The only content of TVUPlayer.zip is Setup.exe
- Then, I ran wine Setup.exe and went through the installation process
- After installation, I typed (including the quotes) cd “$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/TVUPlayer”
- Then I typed wine TVUPlayer.exe
Here’s what I got for my efforts:
TVUPlayer - runs on Linux via Wine
As you can see it’s working but there’s one problem. When the streaming video starts to play, my screen goes crazy. Everything turns black and only the portion that shows the video is visible. This is typical for wine and I still can’t find a solution to fix it. Here’s how it looks like while playing.
TVUPlayer - runs on Linux but doesn’t look so good
As you can see, it’s not much of a pretty experience but hell it works - that is if you have nothing else to do but watch. But there’s a rather acceptable workaround and that is to let wine emulate a virtual desktop. You can do this in winecfg by clicking ‘Graphics’ then setting the virtual desktop parameters. Won’t go into details with winecfg so you have to give it a try for yourself. Anyways, after configuring wine to emulate a virtual desktop, I still get the same problem as before but at least this time I can work since the screen corruption is limited to the virtual desktop only.
Not so elegant but it works.
My verdict… TVUPlayer is good for Windows users. Linux users, unless you’re really into watching, I guess we have just to wait until a new solution comes up - one that supports Linux.
If you’re looking for something that really works then you might just want to get a real service…
Why not get something better? Click here for Cheap Satellite TV for Computers - PC or Laptop
Just received the following phishing email claiming to be paypal. Here’s a copy of said email (HTML Links removed and changed to Bold):
*** Start ***
You’ve added an additional email address to your PayPal account. If you don.t agree with this email glasshk32@comcast.net and if you need assistance with your account, please click here to login to your account.
To make sure you can use your PayPal account the next time you make a purchase, all you need to do is confirm or not your email address. If your email program has problems with hypertext links, you may also confirm your email address by logging in to your account.
Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team
—————————————————————-
Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response.
For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and click the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page.
—————————————————————-
PayPal Email ID PP059
*** End ***
Note that the email attempts to cast worry upon the reader by saying that some email address has been added to his/her Paypal account and eventually encourages the user to login to his/her Paypal account. In my copy of the email, clicking any of the links, including the email address, will send the user to this url:
http://69.178.165.130:2121/www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr=home=p/index.php
Said URL displays a website that looks very very similar to PayPal and if you login, then *poof*, they get your paypal email address and password.
If you happen to have fallen victim to this phishing scam, it is best that you change your password immediately in the hope that these scammers have not done any major damage to your account yet.
Furthermore, to avoid being a victim of such phishing scams, be sure to check the URL of the website that you’re visiting and make sure that it is really Paypal’s URL. Paypal’s URL at the time of this writing should start with https://www.paypal.com/
Cheers!
