Not like Google at all huh? I started wonder whether Google will force everyone paying for used-to-be-free service or not although Google said that it was free before.

However, in this transient state, you still are able to signup for Google Apps: standard edition by this link. It works now. I don’t know how long this link is going to last though and more importantly, how long this free Google Apps lasts. If you are using it, just backing up all your mail data more often. That should do it! =) I just hope that Google would honor free edition as they claimed when we signed up. No new features? that’s not a problem. For me, GMail engine solely is the factor here. I bet most users are the same.

However, System Update made its way back by tons of requests. I’m really happy to see it back and it works just fine with Win7 (which I don’t have complete set of ThinkVantage software such as Fingerprint and Active Protection System) but CSS still doesn’t get along with clean install Win7. Oddly upgrading Win7 from Vista, CSS works flawlessly!

This can be either the way to waste Lenovo’s bandwidth or it’s the way to keep the crowd with Thinkpad. But the bottom line is happy customers. You are on the right track, Lenovo!

Download TVSU 3.14.0024

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I won’t deny that it feels great in my hand. The rubberized texture on the back does help a lot, but I hate to say the qwerty keyboard is too small & too thin—like Centro which I couldn’t even type comfortably and correctly. When sliding the screen up, I almost lost how to control the device between keyboard and the screen. It’s like keyboard couldn’t do anything to control stuffs and screen is way too far. I wish Pre was taller, had larger screen and used only on-screen keyboard or make the keyboard like what we have on Treo! That would be much better, but with only $199, that’s tough decision! haha

On software side, webOS does give such a nice feeling. Although I hadn’t tried to get to know it much, I feel it has potential to be real successor for Palm OS day, but what I couldn’t figure out is where the zen of Palm. Ease of use? Well, let me tell you one thing, Calendar, and all PIM are only the reason why I still wait for Palm. However, when I made new event for calendar, I had no clue how to get out of that page to the day/week/month view. I have to get to main page, throw the card away and call calendar again. At least, one thing I can say is it’s not that intuitive like what I’m waiting for. Learning curve is definitely helping here, but it’s sad somehow losing all that feeling from this company. Other than not quite intuitive UI like what we have on iPhone, I don’t feel Palm Pre has the edge over iPhone much. Honestly, I don’t like iPhone much, but it still rule mobile’s world.

Time… is the factor here. This is only first time—10 mins perhaps. I might not know the OS and the phone enough to say that it’s worse than iPhone, but the smaller screen, below-par keyboard, not any notification besides screen doesn’t help Palm Pre cuts the edge over iPhone. We’ll see how 3rd generation of iPhone looks like. Then I definitely make a decision whether I will be Palm fanboy like old days or turn myself to be cool carrying iPhone.

I still wish webOS found the way to have PDA-style device on its own. I would buy it in matter of second for sure =)

After trying for a while, I don’t see anything much interesting or persuasive enough to convince me that it’s much more than a re-brand & putting useless features like category, search history. I honestly don’t know if you feel the same way, to me, search is built to destroy any classified, categorized data since if you do arrange stuffs neatly, you don’t need search, but if you do need “search, “ then you have no need of organizing them [that includes others’ stuffs which is categorized in the different ways of your brain]

In short, if Bing couldn’t change attitude about putting more and more bots for much larger coverage, like Google, and try to get most out of those huge database, they are not going to be even close to the first choice. Don’t think Google is the only competitor here. Yahoo, which gives the results much different than Google, might be much better alternative to Google rather than old archive search like Bing.

ps. I really feel sorry for Microsoft that they have soo much potential in every ways, but they couldn’t come up with the ace solution to the market. They might need to re-organize or something to aim their goals much more efficient. For instance, if they happen to amalgamate all E-mail clients’ teams such as Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Outlook 2007, into only 1 e-mail client—might be 2 sub-divisions: web-based & desktop-based. I believe they can have GMail-equivalent easily. But, they are dividing into small groups to achieve in everything as far as the products go. Consequently they just divide themselves… and think of it as a good plan. Hurr what a waste..

Anyone that knows me knows that I don’t care having antivirus on my PC since most of the time you know how virus get into your computer. Network?, flash drive? or whatsoever. If it’s severe one, there is always a separate tool to check and kill it. That’s the way I choose.

However, with some of my wrack nerving clients, they just prefer to have something make them feel more secure although that’s slow them down. Most of the time, I recommend free one such as AVG, Comodo, etc. These anti-viruses works pretty well according to many people, but after a while, I still have to do cleaning up all infected PC with all free or paid tool installed. What the heck? What do they do really? Don’t they have recent virus signature? I don’t know. Signature/definition update issue might be one of them.

Recently I found our that Panda Could Antivirus, it’s still BETA last time I check, and it will likely to be free. What distinguish this antivirus from others is they loading definition on-the-fly while scanning. I am not sure if they send some info to the server for scanning or just downloading new signature, but it works to me. This can kill the hidden virus that Comodo Antivirus (installed) can’t in only 1st times of full scan. I don’t think they do on-access stuff which is good, no waste resource. You can just go do full scan once in a while. That should do the trick.

It, nonetheless, has a cons as well. It does take forever at 99%, but it is known issue and should be fixed in next release. Go check it out! at Panda Cloud Antivirus

ps. I still stop it all the time on my system unless I really want to scan anything =) This way works for me. It left only 1MB or so while turning off and about the same while on, but will consume like regular apps (20MB+) while scanning =)

added 2009-05-15: my worst fear happened. Panda deleted almost any of my tools, e.g. Cain and Abel and all kind of that stuff -_- darn it. That’s why I never like having Antivirus on my machine :’(

From my experience, UPS 3-day service means the box needs full 3-day time to propagate from west coast to east coast and vice versa. If the destination is shorter than that, it will take less time. simple idea, isn’t it? For example, from shipping from NJ to NY takes only 1 day.

If shipping from NJ to NH, take 2 days.

However, FedEx defines 2-day 3-day service differently. What they really mean is no matter how far the package goes it will take time as you choose. For 2-day shipping, it takes 2-day for either shipping from west coast to east coast or vice versa or even NJ to NY. Unfortunately, but true. In case of NJ to NY, they probably decide that it will be wrong if they ship sooner than customer wants, then they just leave stuff in warehouse, let it relax a bit.

I can’t say that FedEx is worse than UPS though. They both achieve the goal, with a bit different approach =) Nonetheless, what I would love to know is what either UPS or FedEx will compensate if they can’t make it deliver on time? things went to wrong route, for example. I had that once in a while, but for such a small claim like this. Would they compensate anything for what they promise? If anyone has any experience about this, please share since they (and I too) never seems to care in my cases.

Although all ThinkVantage softwares are likely to be just redundancy from Windows stock, System Update is one of the best ThinkVantage software provided for Thinkpad. It basically automatically finds all necessary drivers and apps (of course within ThinkVantage suite) that need to be updated or installed and set all we want up by single-click. It works on and off sometimes but, 70%-80% chance, this helps save quite a lot of time spending on IBM support site. I don’t blame their unorganized site by any mean since there are tons of update every week. It’s just hard to be that organize and up-to-date at the same time.

By the way, I COULD NOT UPDATE ANYTHING with System UPDATE recently. What they tell us is only this pop-up?!? Well, May is coming—tomorrow!!. I hope it would turn out to be something very good for us, Lenovo!!! Don’t just refresh new UI like all new ThinkVantage but only a few improvement then. I don’t care if that looks cool; I want it to work well.

I’m PC Ad: I’m not cool enough to be Mac. That’s why I’m using Thinkpad, perhaps LOL

1. open WMP
2. Menu: tools > options (if you can find it, click "alt" on the keyboard)
3. Tab: Network

    uncheck RTSP/*, but  leave HTTP checked under protocol section
    check "allow to receive multicast stream" below.
4. Done!

happy watching whatever you want =)

Note: if you are one of Thaitv.tv followers and have this issue, this definitely helps.

How to:-
1. Enter InPrivate mode in IE8 (Ctrl + Shift + P)
2. Menu: Safety | InPrivate Filtering Settings
3. Get into Advanced Settings
4. Then import this file "rules.xml"

You are now good to go! You will find that ad is gone in InPrivate mode. However, how about normal mode? All ads still there. If you like to enable this feature, you gotta get yourself into Registry Editor.

1. Start | Run "regedit”
2. Add “DWORD 32-bit” entry named StartMode with value 1 as shown below.

Start your IE again, you will see InPrivate Filtering Feature is on and available in normal mode too. You can always disable and enable at all time or by shortcut Ctrl + Shift + F

Well, it works =) Happy surfing without any extra stuff.

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They look pretty good, don’t they? TechCrunch came to talk later about the detail that it is still the same idea they want at first—dead simple web tablet. Spec is still unclear, but it is 12” touch screen equipped with camera, speaker, microphone, 1*USB port, audio ports. That’s it and it’s probably powered by Intel Atom or VIA Nano. These two won’t make anything different anyway. One more thing is price. They mentioned that less than $250 is the cost. $300 could be the price for sell. How does it look to you? Will you like to try?

For me, 12” might be a bit too big for me. Also battery life is a deal breaker. We’ll see how it turns out pretty soon

more info @ techCruch.com

That’s really neat. I couldn’t wait figure out what is running behind. As a result, it comes with unknown processor, 128MB RAM (as storage??), 10/100 Ethernet, WLAN, support most video and audio codecs, and 7” (800×480) touch screen. On application layer, it has sort of gadget for weather, traffic, movies, traffic, calendar, contacts, tracking system w/map, and messaging (I assumed that it is e-mail?)

Yeah, sounds nice, but when it comes to the price and how to hook it up, that really kills the deal since it basically is VoIP phone and you need *your own* broadband to do so. $200 for device and $35 more a month for service. That is about $420 a year excluding all surcharges. If it really is home phone with DSL + access point, that would be fine. However, this thing uses up our internet. Nationwide free unlimited call is what you can find for free or much cheaper, e.g. Google Voice, or ~$15 for 4 months free US call with VoipBuster, $10 with T-mobile@home, etc, thus this is not counted. That’s just too much $ for Verizon to ask.

Briefly with this setup, I guess $15 or $19.99 for service charge would be an okay point, $25 maximum! For me, I would love to have Eee Top thing + T-mobile @Home over this any day, but hey! this would be nice replacement for Vonage-like users though. In the end, Verizon hub is just another toy with premium price basically, not any innovation or evolution as I expected. You still can’t make a phone call when blackout. If you want more info then jump to VerizonWireless.com/hub [This is not even on Verizon.com]

note: This setup costs $620 for first year + $420 more next year, while Eee Top 15” touch screen costs $600 + $120 a year for T-mobile @home. That’s 7” with limit vs 15” with almost anything

In *nix system, everything is a file. Whatever they are, they are represented in file format. There is no extension to distinguish any type of file, but utility called file can identify it. directory is also one kind of file. Process is also represented in file. We’ll talk about ‘file’ in detail later. Ok, I got to start with what each of directory in *nix is for.

note: basically each of these will be in different partition/disk as well, so there is another factor involved, speed. That’s why it has commands in all over the place. Some utilities are just more important than others.

Above matrix should cover basic filesystem structure. As usual, different distribution might have a bit of different point of view, but they all share the same idea =) After knowing each of these files are for, then you will know where to expect particular files or things you need. Have fun with *nix experience.

Besides using package manager which is truly find and click, when you are going to add fonts in Linux by yourself, you should put in fontpath. They are in /usr/share/fonts or /usr/local/share/fonts or ~/.fonts/ then what you have to do is copying.

$ cp *.ttf ~/.fonts/

At this point, it will not notice the change yet. New fonts will not be visible. You have to run command, to update and rebuild its of fonts first.

$ fc-cache

That would be it. However, if you decide to put fonts in somewhere else, you have to edit ‘fonts.conf’ to add font directory in the list as well.

$ vi /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

Where <!— font directory list –> is by adding

<dir>/opt/fonts/xxxx</dir>

Then rebuild the list and restart x (easiest way is Ctrl + Alt + Backspace). At this point, all fonts will be available to use =) Anyway, I still don’t think font smoothing or crispness in Linux is good enough so far. If that day comes, I bet Linux will outpace Mac and Windows in desktop environment surely.

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

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

	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 again

Yeah, 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.

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

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

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?

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.