What’s more unfortunate is that this appears to be a growing trend across the world — China is well-known for its “Golden Shield Project” (more appropriately known as the Great Firewall of China); Pakistan was in the news recently for its attempt to censor the contents of text messages; the SOPA bill introduced into the U.S. Congress made waves all over the web last month. The list goes on.

The internet and social media have made it possible for information to spread freely and rapidly, and corrupt politicians all over the world are terrified of the power that this puts in the hands of the people. Kapil Sibal, the acting telecommunications minister in India, openly claims that a Facebook page criticizing the Congress President, Sonia Gandhi, is “unacceptable,” and that Facebook should be responsible for actively monitoring and blocking such content. Besides the obvious technical challenges involved in achieving something like this without expensive manual human intervention, the whole idea of preventing people from posting their thoughts on public forums is just plain wrong.

Kudos to Google, Facebook, et al for sticking to their guns, protecting their users, and doing the right thing.

As the years have gone by, there’s been an explosion of television shows and channels, and we’re now at a point where it literally takes several minutes to scroll from one end of the “channel guide” to the other. But in this insatiable quest for quantity, I feel like television networks have forgotten the meaning of quality content. Go ahead; turn on your television right now, and think about how many of those 1000+ shows are actually worth your time. Yeah, I thought so.

On one hand, we’ve been hit by the “reality television” plague, with shows that would make any reasonably intelligent human being want to cry. And then, we’ve got the so-called “news” networks, most of which are fear and propaganda machines that get fixated on and drum up the same inane topics for days, weeks, months…

I had enough.

So last week, I cut the cord. When our “triple play” package discount ended, and I realized that we hadn’t turned on the television for nearly a month, I knew it was time. People I spoke to who had already done so affirmed that they didn’t regret it one bit.

Now don’t get me wrong — in the vast ocean of mediocrity, I still think there’s a handful of really good stuff; the needles in the haystack, so to speak. But there’s no reason to fork over obscene amounts of money to your cable company every month in order to get that content. The seeds of change are already being sown — it’s now possible to (legally) watch a lot of this content online, on-demand, via services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, iTunes, and even some of the networks’ own websites. And devices like the Xbox, PS3, Apple TV, Roku, etc. make it dead simple to watch this content on your big screen TV from the comfort of your couch. The only missing piece right now is reliable/legal access to live sports content.

A combination of on-demand, a-la-carte access to shows that viewers care about, along with, perhaps, subscription packages for sports events would be an ideal future for television programming, in my opinion. The sooner the networks get on board the better it’s going to be for everyone.

As an iPhone user for the last three years, I’ve had mixed feelings about the App Store model of software distribution. Or rather, with Apple’s implementation of it. On one hand, the approval process that an application has to go through before it makes its way into the Store ensures a certain baseline level of quality for users, at least in theory. On the other hand, it also means that the decision on whether or not you can install a third-party application on your device lies in the hands of one entity — and it’s not you, it’s Apple.

One of the key distinctions between Apple’s App Store implementation on iOS versus Mac OS X is that “jailbreaking” aside, the App Store on iOS is your one-and-only source of third-party applications, whereas on OS X, the App Store is just one of the ways to download and install third-party applications. This is important, because it means that Mac users get all of the benefits of the App Store model (such as centralized searching and billing, automatic updates, quality control, etc.)  without any of the restrictions that come with the iOS implementation. This is great for independent developers and end-users. And Apple gets its cut every time an application is sold. Everyone wins.

Has Microsoft realized this yet? How long before something like this shows up on Windows?

But there’s one thing I was never quite happy with — Outlook Web Access (OWA), the Exchange web-mail interface. If you’re using any browser other than Internet Explorer, OWA falls back to a clumsy, limited-functionality version. While cross-browser support has improved somewhat in OWA 2007 (which I tested in a virtualized environment recently), it’s still not quite where I’d like it to be.

When it comes to web-based email, I consider Gmail the shining star — the UI is clean and simple, navigation is blisteringly fast, and its threaded messaging implementation is a killer feature. Offline access to Gmail and Google Calendar is now possible using Google Gears. iPhones and other smartphones can synchronize with Google Contacts and Calendar using the recently released Google Sync service (which, interestingly, happens to use Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync engine to “push” updates back and forth). The only missing piece is “push” Gmail, and that might be coming soon too.

So the question is — in the coming months, will the Google Apps suite finally be a truly viable, free alternative to small-scale Exchange Server installations like mine?  I think so. After all, it’s well on its way towards becoming something like a hosted Exchange account with a vastly better web-mail interface. If and when “push” Gmail does become available, I’ll definitely be giving it a very close second look.

After my previous post on the subject, I decided that I really needed to get some hands-on time with a few netbooks in order to make a decision. Because they’re all so similar in terms of hardware configuration, it really comes down to the smaller details.

So I went downtown to the J&R store here in NYC to have a look. They seem to have the widest selection of netbooks on display, compared to other retailers like Best Buy, etc. For about 20 minutes, I tried out a few different ASUS Eee PCs, the MSI Wind, two HP Mini models, the Acer Aspire One, and a white Samsung NC10. They didn’t have the Dell Mini and the Lenovo S10. The choice wasn’t very difficult…

I immediately realized that I simply couldn’t put up with anything smaller than a 10″ display, and that narrowed down the selection considerably. Next, I knew I wanted all the battery life I could get — after all, these things are meant to be on-the-go machines, so you don’t want to worry about hunting for the nearest power source all the time. The Samsung NC10 ships with a 6-cell battery;  reviews indicated that it could easily pull off 6 – 7 hours with WiFi on, and the brightness turned down a bit. And because the 6-cell is standard on the NC10, it doesn’t stick out like the “extended” batteries do on most other machines.

I liked what I saw of the NC10 — the build quality was solid, the screen appeared bright and sharp without the awful glossy coating that seems all too common these days, the keyboard had a good size and feel, and it was tiny and light. But I wasn’t quite sold on the toy-like white model that J&R had in stock.

So that night, I ordered a black one from Newegg, and it arrived the next day in a shockingly small box. My initial impressions were summarized in less than 140 characters, and that opinion hasn’t changed since… :)

Recently, I’ve been thinking about getting a laptop again. I still don’t foresee myself using it every day, but I’d like to have one to carry on trips, and something that I can occasionally use outdoors, or in the living room, etc. Plus, it’s always handy to have a second machine to experiment with.

With that in mind, my requirements this time are a little different…

1) Small and light.
2) Great battery life. Higher the better.
3) Cheap.

Since it’s a secondary machine, I’m willing to settle for a small display and take a hit on performance. After all, the desktop’s always around when I need two big screens and enough horsepower to run three operating systems simultaneously. :)

Looking back at that list, I realized something. I realized that this relatively new class of sub-notebooks that people are calling “netbooks” fits the bill almost perfectly. And with nearly every major computer company jumping on the bandwagon, there’s certainly no shortage of choices!

So which one is it going to be?

“Garamond Powerline” is something of an intricate experiment in typography — a typeface composed entirely of images of electrical power lines. Each letter of the alphabet is beautifully crafted with its own unique personality.

Taken as a whole, the typeface is also surprisingly usable; scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the “quick brown fox” sample.

Kudos to the designer, Daniel, for this little gem!

[via waxy.org]

The latest Messenger beta build introduced a number of major changes, including what appears to be the removal of the “Shared Folders” feature and the official “add-ins” API. As you might imagine, Twessenger relied on this API in order to hook into the application.

I haven’t had the time to dig deeper to figure out if there’s anything I can do to work around this, but the odds of a fix coming anytime soon, if ever, are very low at this point. I’m going to steer away from attempting to use undocumented and unofficial methods because they’re bound to break with any future Messenger updates, and I really don’t have the time to provide support and write patches.

I’m sorry if this answer is a let-down for you. I hope that someone out there can provide a working solution that you can migrate over to soon. Thanks for all the feedback and kind words that many of you sent in during Twessenger’s lifetime. It was fun while it lasted. :)

So what’s new?

• More reliable: Completely re-written from scratch to use the latest Twitter API.
• Easier to set up: Just install, enable the plugin, and enter your Twitter username. You no longer need to search for your numeric Twitter ID.
• New options: You can now change the update interval, and choose to ignore all Twitter replies – i.e. messages beginning with @
• Automatic update notifications: Twessenger 2.0 will automatically notify you when new versions are available!

Download: Twessenger 2.0