In the eyes of Robin Monks

Microsoft’s Browser Selection + User Ignorance Lets Google’s Chrome “cheat”?

Robin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:11:41 +0000

Michael B. from the Mozilla Marketing list recently posted an hypothesis on why Google Chrome may suddenly start taking a much larger chunk out of the browser market now that Microsoft's browser selection screens are appearing in the EU. "I've a hypothesis to explain Chrome's recent and sudden surge of usage share the last couple months. Let me first say that almost every time I ever ask what web browser someone uses, the answer I get is Google...."

Europeans Get a Taste of the Browser Choice Screen

Robin — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 14:59:31 +0000

We might finally get more people off of IE, FINALLY. It might seem like a minor thing, but it isn’t. Microsoft has been fined billions over browser choice (or lack thereof) in Windows, and the solution that finally satisfied EU regulators was a browser choice screen, which would let users choose a web browser rather then having [...]

Directed Energy Weapon Downs Mosquitoes

Robin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:50:36 +0000

via rss.slashdot.org I so, totally, want one of these….badly.

Setting up a Google Nexus One in Canada on Rogers/Fido

Robin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:32:46 +0000

Image via Wikipedia Another question I recently answered on Aardvark, thought it would be useful to more folks as well. Where can i get the Nexus One in Canada and will it work on Fido? The first thing to note is you can’t get Nexus One’s that easily if you’re in Canada, since, the Google store that sells [...]

Moving from Windows to Linux, iTunes to…?

Robin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:07:23 +0000

Image via Wikipedia Here’s a question I get hit up on Aardvark with earlier today: I have a very very big collection of music in iTunes. I want to move to Linux but I don’t know if the players can handle 200,000+ files as efficiently as iTunes. Help? The answer, is rather simple. Songbird is probably the closest [...]

Thanks Microsoft!

Robin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:37:19 +0000

Image via Wikipedia So, Microsoft sent me a complimentary copy of Microsoft Expression Studio 3 today for being a partner. Kudos to them. As to Expression Web, it works wonderful for prototyping but, doesn’t really handle CMS themeing that well. Will be playing around with Expression Blend a bit later to see what geekiness I can come [...]

Web 2.0 MacGyver

Robin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:35:38 +0000

Image via Wikipedia TV shows like MacGyver and Junk Yard Wars, as well as real world survival and minimalist training [even camping] tell us that it’s cool to take bits of whatever is lying around, and jury-rig it into something useful, and potentially vital to our survival. Today as I was thinking about the plethora of [...]

Microsoft may have crippled up to a million of their Xbox 360 consoles

Robin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:06:38 +0000

Image via Wikipedia A recent PCworld story, suggests in a measure to prevent hardware modding (which does have fair use purposes as well, such as making backups of content) they have banned up to a million Xbox 360 consoles from the Xbox LIVE service, and may have rendered the machines mainly unusable. DailyTech’s sources claim the ban [...]

Social Experiment for Prizes! Yellow ribbons and red balloons (messin’ with DARPA)

Robin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:38:51 +0000

Image via Wikipedia So; someone pointed me to a rather interesting contest by DARPA, the DARPA Network Challenge. Now, I appreciate what DARPA tries to do as much as the next guy (basically throwing money at problems hoping someone finds the solution). But, this context in particular struck my fancy; socially organizing a way to [...]

Wordpress Upgrade: I could cry

Robin — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:54:54 +0000

[This whole post is written tounge-in-cheek. Please don't flame/bash/perl or python the author.] I just did an upgrade from Wordpress 2.7 to 2.7.1, and it was completely done in under 5 seconds. Didn’t need to connect to SSH, didn’t need to connect to FTP. I click two buttons and my blog was running the [...]