26 posts tagged “technology”
For me personally, all the features that they offer on this account will actually save me money in the long run. I was thinking for a long time that I needed to evaluate my service plan and the Eee PC was what got me going.
So I'm expecting my free Eee PC from the Royal Bank sometime after Christmas but before my birthday. Hopefully sooner?
Be aware that this is the low end model and that you can't upgrade the RAM. So forget running XP on it.
I Twittered this week about Encyclopedia Britannica opening up the walled garden to web publishers for free and whether or not I qualified. Now either the barrier to entry is pretty low or my blog is much better than I thought because I'm in!
If you were wondering here's my take on this. Britannica even with a 237 year lead on competitors like Wikipedia, is not the first stop when you need some annotated reference material online. I'm sure that "kids today" are perfectly happy checking out Wikipedia and Britannica must certainly be worried about losing market share if not branding.
So what better way to increase your online presence than open up your service to web publishers (such as myself) that will start referencing you in their blog posts (like this one).
With Wikipedia's recent and on going shenanigans at the hands of founder Jimmy Wales, the online community certainly has not been against discussing the possibility that the collaborative online encyclopedia might be broken. Britannica might be able to get some traction here.
But Britannica has some work ahead to usurp Wikipedia as the webs first stop for all knowledge. Though Wikipedia has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate it, scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Britannica does offer up widgets (but they do get a little cropped here on VOX) if you add it to your sidebar) on different subjects that you can embed on your site and even has a twitter feed you can follow. So if you have a site or blog and publish regularly why don't you see if you qualify for a free subscription.
In past weeks I have been friended, added or followed by people / companies on the usual social networking platforms. I don't have any examples from Facebook since they already have all my personal information and can serve up highly targeted adds. I don't know if that's better or worse.
But one would think that as the popularity of these social networking services like Pownce, Twitter and VOX push them into mainstream adoption companies will follow the masses to push their brand and win our hearts and minds. Oh and our pocket books.
Apple shipped me next day new replacement headphones that I am still treating with kid gloves. I had to return the damaged ones in the supplied envelope and called UPS for a pick-up, lucky I am the shipping department at work so no worries. Funny enough though this is where I ran into some difficulties.
Supposedly there was a preprinted return waybill on the envelope after I removed my receipt. For two days the friendly UPS driver refused to pick it up. On the second day I was getting worried (they would bill me in 10 business days) so I called Apple support and they suggested that since I had their UPS account number just fill out a waybill myself and drop it off and that's what I did.
So I got an email from Apple yesterday saying that they received my return and everything looks good. Thank goodness.
Living in Canada sometimes you just go without the luxuries our neighbours to the south enjoy. No, not Mexico the other one.
Over the years names like Old Navy, Starbucks, Taco Bell and Best Buy have made their way north. And we have rejoiced. Well except Taco Bell, that stuff goes right through me.
But with the good must come the bad (like Taco Bell). It's called traffic shaping. Internet Service Providers (ISP), like Rogers & Bell (well that's pretty much it I'm afraid) are deciding what has priority on their network and degrading your service that you have payed for.
In my opinion the ISPs have painted themselves into a corner by promising customers a certain (high) speed that they can no longer guarantee if everyone actually uses the service at the same time. Here are some examples for perspective. Imagine the electric company downgrading your service during peak hours for fears of brown outs. Or if your city ran out of water in the morning because everyone was having a shower before work. What if your phone only worked sometimes due to lack of lines? There would be huge outrage right? People would demand the level of service that they are paying for and these utilities would be held accountable.
The truth is ISPs don't throttle or pack shape to safe guard the integrity of their networks. They don't want you downloading content because they offer television or downloadable services themselves and you'd be cutting into their margins.
I love eventually getting everything the United States has. Us Too!
I'll let you know if Apple will even replace this.
I'm surprised that this happed since I've only had it for 3 months and didn't even use the headphones for the first month (I use the Touch mostly in the car dock).
This is the first pair of head phones that have failed on me (that I can remember). Even when I commuted into Montreal everyday on the bus and Metro, the (probable) thousands of hours I listed to my other media players not one died.
On the other hand if something was going to fail, I'm sure glad it was the head phones and not the iPod Touch.
UPDATE: Maybe I will send them back. The same headphones are at Best Buy for $50. For $50 they shouldn't fall apart.
Hopefully this is just a first step in VOX developing an application for the iPod/iPhone. Back in March Six Apart
's CEO Chris Alden stated that Typepad would be developing an application using the newly released Apple SDK.Hopefly this signals that iPod/iPhones users will be able to use VOX on the go. At the very least my home screen now looks much better.
I couldn't help myself after listening to Buzz Out Loud Episode 688. This is totally rushed and just for comedic effect so forget how bad it looks and enjoy. Or I'll through you out the nearest airlock, gods help me.
We all have had a moment like this with a friend or family member when it comes to our beloved Battlestar but since I haven't yet started recording all my conversations Jason will be held up as an example for us all to see.
I paid the now open and packed Micro Boutique a visit on the weekend. It's quite a small and underwhelming store but there must have been 30 people in there. It might have had something to do with celebrating their 25th anniversary.
Now here's the interesting bit. For their anniversary they are having a draw for an iPhone (that goodness it looks like 1.1.3) which ends April 20th. No word if it's the 4, 8 or 16GB version.
So here's the two possible scenarios:
- Apple is releasing the iPhone in Canada and Micro Boutique is giving one away for their anniversary.
- Micro Boutique is giving away a jailbroken iPhone.
The second scenario seems much more plausible but could get Micro Boutique in hot water with Apple. Last year Apple went after sellers in Asia of jailbeaked iPhones with the threat of $1000 fines. I wonder how Apple would feel about one of their official resellers giving away a jailbeaked iPhone for a contest prize? If it is a jailbroken iPhone, who ever wins it might be a little disappointed when they brick it with a future firmware update from iTunes.
Of course this wouldn't be the first time a jailbeaked Apple device has shown up in stores.
Even in my short time on twitter I've experienced outages. Thank goodness I don't rely on it like the technorati such as Leo and iJustine.
TechCrunch has an article about the twiiter outage that happened during January's MacWorld Keynote. Duncan Riley talks about the possibility that twitter users could become disenchanted with the service. Yeah right. Of course I might add that twiiter is a free service and beggars shouldn't be choosers. ;-)
My Groups
-
The Green Life Updated: 4 minutes ago
-
Voxaholic Updated: 9 minutes ago
-
Photographers Updated: 1 hour ago
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
