Author Archives: feeling entropy

There’s two downs and only one up to the FCC’s notion to allow theatres to ban mobile
phone signals in theatres.

I use AIM and Yahoo! Messenger almost everywhere I go: in a theatre, public bathroom, grandma’s house, even in the car (at stop lights only I swear). Missing out on that connectivity during my viewing of Harry Potter just may push me to the brink of a panic attack.

Reason number two on my list against this petition passing is the commercials. I look forward to the movie mockery commercials that are interrupted by the original Nokia beep-ring. They are just a comical way to notify those absent minded movie goers to mute or power down their mobile phones. I get a kick out of those commercials no matter how many times I see them. With signals blocked, nobody will need to watch a commercial like that, and I would start a theatre boycott.

The one good thing, is, of course, that annoying girl. The one who’s phone is on mega-super-loud, buried at the bottom of her purse, she has a megaphone voice, and of course she takes the call –for 3 mintues.

Here at LIVEdigitally, we love most anything USB. Jump drives, thumb drives, flash drives, keychain drives, they all drive us crazy. I can’t say we’ve tested out a duck drive, a sake drive, or a Barbie doll drive. (I would like to test out a sake drive however, lately I’m a fan of the unfiltered kind.)

Fosfor Gadgets has a top ten list, which I’m also a big fan of, lists that is, titled “The Top 10 Weirdest USB Drives Ever”. They aren’t lying. I don’t know what Mikan Seijin is, but there’s a usb drive that looks like a yellow tomato with a painted face. Apparently it’s a mandarin alien, those kooky Japanese sure know just what I like!

There’s also an alarmingly high number of asian food usb drives. Dim sum, sushi, battered and fried shrimp, a human thumb, who does this? Weird.

802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, Pre-N, 802.11n, MIMO, WiMAX, 802.16, 802.11i, IEEE, etc.

what do all of these numbers really mean? What do they stand for? If you’ve seen them before then you know that they all pertain to wireless networking, but that’s about it. Check out what InformationWeek.com says about the wireless jargon. In 10 minutes you’ll be jumbling wireless 802’s and acronyms like a real pro.

After posting the Yahoo! news, I received a comment from the developer of ZapTXT. These guys do the same thing Yahoo! did, only better. SMS + RSS is ZapTXT’s only game, whereas Yahoo! is trying to play defense, offense, special teams, cheerlead, mascot, and commentator.

My issues with Yahoo!’s new alert system was lack of information. I would receive a text message from a generic Yahoo! address. The body of the message contained only 120 characters of text. I had no idea which website was updated. I was simply informed that one of my registered RSS enabled websites were updated, and given the first 120 characters.

Yahoo!, this is useless. I registered more than 20 blogs and websites in that Yahoo! alert account. Each time I get a message, I have to surf each website to see which is the one that sent me the feed.

That problem is eliminated with ZapTXT. You are given 7 characters to name each of your feeds! Not only that, you can turn off late night messages, so that the 4am blogger doesn’t wake you up when posting to his “what I do at night when everyone sleeps” blog.

I admit it, I have since disabled my Yahoo! feeds and set up an account with ZapTXT for my RSS + SMS needs. You can also have the feeds emailed to you, but that’s just not as sexy as SMS, am I wrong?

SMS text messaging on the other hand is established, understood, and used by almost all. Hey, my mom replied to a text message I sent her, she’s in her mid 50’s I mean, she looks 28 tho (hi mom).

So Yahoo! has decided that meshing the two together would be a nice means to get RSS into the public’s eye. SMS meet RSS, WTH, OMG, BRB!

What do all these 3 letter acronyms mean? Continue reading →

I’ve always lived near the coast, and as a result have fished most of my life. I even took up spear fishing a few years back. Spear fishing is great, you swim around with the fish, and shoot only the ones you will take home and grill.

That’s why this new term, “Spear Phishing” has really got me worried. Phishing is a tech based form of conning individuals into revealing sensitive information like passwords, account numbers, etc. Spear Phishing is a newer, more malicious form phishing.

Imagine an email from your bank, or what appears to be your bank, asking for your account number and pin. Some spear phishing attempts may look like your employer, or a bank/payment service you use. The “spear” is a spoof of your existing relationship with a sensitive company.

Instead of getting a realistic email from “Bank of the United States needs your Visa Check card number and PIN”, you’d get one from what looks like your actual bank!

What’s next? Bomb Phishing? Net Phishing? Harpoon Phishing? Out of season Phishing?!

“Idle hands and idle time give kids the urge to commit crime.”
-lots of old people have said this to me

What’s wrong with having a regular crew of teenagers and pre-teens hanging outside your neighborhood liquor store, smoking cigarettes, stealing candy bars, and badgering patrons?

Everything if you’re the sucker that owns the store! What are you to do? Get a mosquito of course! Studies show that younger people can hear higher ranges of sound waves, hence the high-pitch pulsating-noise-emitting-device deemed, The Mosquito.

This concept in theory would work, except our buddy Steve Jobs has the mass marketed the perfect sound canceling device -that’s right, I’m mentioning it again, iPod. Whoever doesn’t have an iPod of some color, shape, size, generation, or form will most likely get one this holiday season. And then out with the annoying high pitched teen deterrent, and back to the zit lamp (a light that accentuates whiteheads and blemishes). What will they do then? Wear ski masks?!

RSS is what we’ve all been looking for. Really Simple Sindication or Rich Site Summary, is great! but what the heck does it do?

RSS is a faster, easier, way to check your favorite websites for updates. If you were looking for a “free bookshelf” on craigslist, on way to search is the old method would be to keep checking back every day to see if anyone has posted a listing with those key words. Or you may just set up an RSS feed, and as soon as that free bookshelf listing pops up, you get notified via your RSS reader, which can double as your email client.

RSS isn’t new, it’s just a difficult concept to grasp for those who only have one email address, and don’t know the speed of their computer’s GPU. It’s ok.

Yahoo has made it easier, so I hear, to snatch your RSS feeds. Yahoo email users will notice a new folder dedicated to RSS. As you can see, I wasn’t part of the elite few who were able to test this new feature out. But keep on the look, this is the next big thing.

Hollywood, move it on over! The Hollywood Walk of Fame is now demoted to the
Walk of Lame compared to San Francisco’s Metreon sidewalk. The San Francsico Walk of Game is a sidewalk thunder stealer, and inducting members by the fist full.

The Walk of Game is gaining 6 more members, on behalf of Sony, the Metreon’s older brother. Starcraft, Final Fantasy, John Carmack, Sid Meier, EverQuest, and of course… the lovely Laura Croft.

October 2004, San Francisco, the WCG conference was held. I was there. Not as a player, but as a volunteer helper. The World Cyber Games is to gamers, as the World Cup tournament is to soccer, the Super Bowl is to football, the World Series is to baseball, the gold medal to ice skating. It’s the one, all the marbles. 64 different countries were represented last year, and this year 67 attended.

Some teams show up in matching jump suits, with handles embroidered on their breast and a team name, sometimes accompanied by a logo, across the back. Geeks Gamers of all shapes and sizes, ages and ethnicities, gather to compete in almost half a million dollars in prize money. This isn’t your neighborhood LAN party, we’re talking Seoul, San Francisco, and now Singapore. In the final standings, the USA placed 2nd overall. Korea took top for most overall wins. Brazil, Germany, and China filled the 3rd-5th spots. This isn’t a game anymore, these… games.

Next year it’ll be in Italy. Bonjourno!

“Hey, take a picture with my camera!”

“Oh, take a picture with my camera too!”

“Eh, just email me the pictures”

“Yea right, who actually emails the pictures?”

This is where Kodak swoops in with a red cape and a flashy camera, with a flash. The Kodak Easyshare camera solves your group photo problemos. That’s right kids, a camera that emails photos via WiFi.

Kodak assumes that the need for a camera that emails pictures fills a wide gap in the American lifestyle. I’m a bit skeptical. This could be a neat marriage of digital cameras and WiFi. But I’d like to see a three way melt of high quality digital cameras, mobile phones, and wireless data networks provided by the mobile phone carriers. Am I victim of wishful thinking? I already snap, send, and receive pictures with my phone, better quality is all I really need.