Click Frenzy

Australia had its own version of the US Black Friday sales today. It's still going on now, but good luck to anyone who can manage to buy anything at all. Looks like the organisers sorely underestimated the amount of people that want to get on the site. The only click frenzy I was doing was constantly clicking on refresh to try and get past the 'File not found' or 'server too busy' errors.

In a silly mood

I am in a silly mood at the moment, due partially to sleep deprivation, caused by my 5 year old son. In this state, I decided to see how easy it is to set up a Facebook page. Answer is, very easy as long as you are not a terrorist organisation.

You see, it was perfectly easy to set up https://www.facebook.com/superheromrincredible about an ugly superhero but when I tried another page for an organisation named "Al Qaeda", strangely enough Facebook would not allow it.

So I checked why....

Obviously Facebook would only accept this page name from Osama Bin Laden or, perhaps
Ayman al-Zawahiri these days.

Apple iPad Mini

Yes it's smaller.

I don't really have anything more to say about it, but as I usually post something derogative about the newest Apple hype, I wasn't going to let that stop me.

On second thoughts, yes I do have one thing to add...I'm not really sure I like the idea of a seven inch tablet, be it the Google Nexus, the Kindle Fire or whatever. I have to admit, I'm with the late Steve Jobs on this one when he suggested it was too big to be a phone and too small for a tablet.

Anyhoo, now that it's out it will probably ignite a massive market for 7 inchers, and it may even eventually make 10 inchers look big and bloated for most folk.

We'll see.

I am sick of Chrome Instant

I love to Google.I love the way it has become a verb and so it should be as it's definitely an action word. However, I hate the new auto-complete feature known as Google Instant.

For the uninitiated, Instant is a feature that allows Google to 'fill in' the rest of your search before you even type it, based on what you have searched for before, and what others have searched for.

So you might be looking for the Carsales website for example, and you type "car", and sales gets added in at the end without you doing anything. Fine (and rather handy) for the times it gets it right but sometimes extremely annoying when you were actually going to search for "cartography".

I am not a touch typist and therefore when I type I spend the majority of the time staring at the keyboard as I type and then occasionally lift my eyes towards the screen to double-check spelling, typos etc. So it maddens me no end when I am typing into the Chrome address bar, and what I have typed is now been deemed by Google Gods to be something completely different.

For example, today I typed "Canterbury Council" and got "Canterbury Council elections, who to vote for". Not what I was looking for.

It's usually worse when you are trying to type a short word such as "spa" and before you look up you hit enter. Then when you do look up at the screen you realise you have googled "sparklebox" (huh?)

It seems to be a problem relating to Chrome Instant, not Google Instant. At least with Google Instant the suggestions appear below the box and you need to actually select the choice. Chrome just replaces the result automatically. 

By the way, I did read the other day that it has caused a bit of a problem in France, when it suggested the French word for "crook" at the end of a search for an Insurance Company name, and also 'prostitute' after a politician's wife's name search. Whoops.

For those interested here's the link to the "how to's" for disabling the feature

How to disable Chrome Instant

http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=177873

How to disable Google Instant

https://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&form=bb&answer=186645

Censored by the Sydney Morning Herald

I made a comment on this article in the Herald today. It got rejected. Seems you can't criticise journalists on their website. Yet, they'd be the first ones heralding (pun intended) freedom of speech if someone censored them.

My Muslim Mates..

There's a lot of negative media reports recently about the recent disruption in the Sydney centre by a group of protestors who were there to protest against an anti-Islamic film which apparently appeared in some version on YouTube.

From my experience in protests over the years, I hold an open mind over who provoked the violence that ensued, but any way you look at it it cast a pretty bad shadow on Muslims everywhere.

There has also been some interesting debate since, about whether Muslims should be falling over themselves to apologise for the tiny minority that caused all the fuss, as society would not expect such things from other religious groups (Christians being a good example).

Personally, I think the current Islamaphobia inflamed by the press in Australia is a joke and should be countered by any possible means people have on hand. Which brings me to the below video, produced by the Community Relations Commission for A Multicultural NSW entitled #MyMuslimMatesAre

Cranky old man?

A friend of mine called me today to tell me she'd come across my blog, and what a cranky old man I'd become.

So, in light of this, can I just say that the world is lovely and everything is coming up roses (whatever that means).

Apple hype continues

I have posted here before regarding the amount of free publicity Apple receives when anything with an 'i' in the front is about to be launched. Media outlets practically fall over themselves in the rush to add a new article about a rumour, an upcoming launch, a possible photograph etc etc ad nauseum.

This article however, seems to take the cake..

The headline reads "iPhone 5 May be Best Selling Gadget in History"

Come on guys. It's September 14th. The bloody thing hasn't even gone on sale yet and we're already waxing lyrical over some analysts prediction about how well it's going to do.

In the same publication there is also this interesting article reminding us that (shock, horror) new gadgets may not always bring us happiness.

Food for thought.

Google adds Public Transport support in NSW

Good news for commuters with Google today announcing public transport info within Google Maps from today for Sydneysiders.

I just had a look on Google Maps, and at first the bus icon (which really refers to buses, trains, ferries etc) wasn't visible but after what I assume was a cache refresh, the icon appeared and sure enough I can get to Wiley Park from Belmore in 8 minutes using PT.

https://maps.google.com.au/ viewed 25/7/12

Luna Park Sydney - Not for the budget conscious

I took my 2 boys to Luna Park yesterday. I have very good memories of the place from my childhood, including having my 10 year old birthday party there, so I was pretty excited to go back for the first time in years.

For those not from NSW, Sunday is "Family Funday" on public transport - probably the only decent initiative in NSW Public Transport for the past 20 years. For $2.50 per adult and child over 4, you get tickets which cover buses, trains, ferries and light rail for the entire NSW network. Being a miser, and a parent it's a doubly good deal for me and my family tries to use it as often as possible.

So the plan was that we'd head off into the city on the train, catch a ferry to Luna Park, take the kids for a couple of rides, have a picnic in the park with some pre-made sandwiches and head home on the train afterwards for a fun, yet inexpensive day out.

All went to plan until we got to Luna Park. Unbeknownst to us, the term 'budget' is obviously not recognised by the management of this establishment. To be fair, the pricing for unlimited rides is not too bad, but unfortunately they don't seem to have considered people in our situation who just wanted to go in, have a ride or two, and then leave.

Prices are as follows (from http://www.lunaparksydney.com/ride-passes-and-bookings)

UNLIMITED RIDES PASSES
Buy your Unlimited Rides Pass online to save money! Valid for use on any one day the Park is open to the public in Term 2 2012, from 1 May - 28 June 2012.
	Buy At Park		Buy
	Off Peak	Peak	Online
Unlimited Rides - Yellow (Over 130cm only)	$39.95	$44.95	$34.95
Unlimited Rides - Green (106-129cm only)	$29.95	$34.95	$24.95
Unlimited Rides - Red (85-105cm only)	$19.95	$24.95	$14.95

Add to this the fact that, with a 2 year old in the 'Red' category and a 4 year old in the 'Green', most rides require an accompanying adult who then must pay $29.95 to accompany a 'Green' child and/or $19.95 for a 'Red' and you are looking at minimum $100 for a family of 4 (slightly cheaper if bought online).

Standalone ride tickets are $10 a pop!

This means

• $20 to go on the dodgems!
• $10 to go the carousel (luckily the guy taking tickets at his one felt sorry for us and only took 1 ticket for the child)!

I swear, I almost turned around and left before paying anything, and if it wasn't for the fact we had spent the last couple of days over-hyping the whole thing to our two kids then we would have done just that.

I wonder how much business the Park has lost over the years due to this pricing policy?

To rub salt into the wound, we waited in line for at least 20 minutes to get these tickets. I also chatted to some people who had waited an hour in the ticket queue including a couple of poor souls who had pre-purchased their tickets online but still had to wait in the normal queue just to pick them up.

Poor form Luna Park. Makes me want to spell it's name backwards. (Think about it).

ICE CREAM SANDWICH

 ICE CREAM SANDWICH. YUMMY.

My Acer Iconia A500 has finally been updated (via the world's slowest over the air download) to Android's latest operating software - Ice Cream Sandwich.

At first, besides the obvious change in font style, I couldn't spot much difference but i've had a few days with it now and the most noticeable improvements are:

• Increased battery life
• Faster web browsing
• Faster scrolling

All of which make me a happy camper.

It's interesting to note that, as lover of new gadgets, this simple upgrade has toned down my urge for a new tablet. It feels like I just went out and picked up a new one and so has probably saved me $500-600.

Thanks Google!

Apple hype

Thank God. I thought I was going mad. I thought I was the only one noticing how much free advertising Apple receives through the Australian media.

Luckily, we can always rely on Australia's ABC MediaWatch to tell it as it is.

Watch the first few minutes of their latest episode to see what I mean.

Telstra 4g

Whilst at JB HiFi today, I took the time to check out the new HTC Velocity 4g. I was particularly interested in checking out just how fast the 4g from Telstra is.

The friendly sales guy suggested I do a speedtest via, you guessed it, the Speedtest app and so I ran that on the Velocity and also on my 3g HTC Desire.

The result was pretty impressive:

4g (Velocity) - ping 81ms 24.3 mbps
3g (Desire) -    ping 120ms 2.758 mbps

Wow. I expected a bit of difference but that is quite impressive!

Of course, I don't know the number, but there can't be too many people on 4g yet, so the network certainly wouldn't be getting overloaded. This is in contrast to the 3g network I was using (lunchtime in the Sydney CBD so pretty much peak time) but still!

Apparently at present the 4g network covers "5 kms from the GPO" according to the sales rep. The rest of the time you're still stuck on the (what now seems like) slow 3g network.

In a way, 4g is TOO fast at the moment. What I mean by that is I couldn't imagine getting blistering speeds and then the network dropping out and having to go back to just average. It would be like using cable bopradband and every now and again someone coming in, unplugging the cable and hooking up your old 56kbps modem.

In the future though, once the network expands, I'll be 4g'ing it all the way.

Ipad 3 review

For people like me with not a lot of liquid cash, and no connections with companies' PR departments to send out freebies, I rely on one simple method for reviewing new products. It's a method that many others use also, when deciding whether to purchase a product and that is, pop down to the shop and have a hands on play with the display device.

That is exactly the method I used today when I popped down to my local JB Hifi store and checked out the "new iPad" (God I hate that name!)

First impressions? It's OK. Frankly, I had read a fair few reviews which had discussed the miraculous, beautiful, incredible (etcetera) new display so I was looking forward to my eyes being treated to something good. Unfortunately, maybe due to the beat up, I was left disappointed.

Don't get me wrong, the display is nice. The colours are bright, the pictures are crisp, but overall it's not enough to sway me over to the Apple tablet world.

Oh, and the other thing...it does get bloody hot! I had read some articles about the new battery heating up but most were American and were blaming it on the 4G radio being turned on. Here in Australia, where I assume JB would have not bothered with the 4G, the unit was still VERY warm to touch. A fact made even more curious as I'm pretty sure the device was plugged in, not running on battery power.

So all up I rate the new iPad about a 3.5/5

Twitter has time travel

Einstein believed time travel is beyond our reach, but he never predicted Twitter.

I find it curious that when you add a new tweeter (is that the right term?) to follow, you not only get all future tweets but tweets from before you added them. I really don't want to see what people thought was relevant 5 days ago but maybe some people do.

So, I suppose the moral is be careful what you tweet. Something bad you say about someone a week ago, may be read by that person today when they decide to follow you.

Google AdChoices still needs some work

With my surname "Church" I have put up with many years of jokes, puns, comments etc regarding my religious beliefs but now I find a new type of problem.

It appears Google AdWords thinks my site must be of a religious nature as I keep having popup ads pointing people to church related sites. Don;t think I'm going to get too many clicks on those ones, somehow!

Probably this post won't help too much either, come to think of it.

Maybe I should add some keywords like "Satan", "anti-Pope", "paganism" or the like.

UPDATE 11/3/12: I have since found a way to edit the ads that appear on my blog and have taken out religion as an option. Seems I was a bit hast with this post heading. Oh well. You live and learn.

iPad 3, sorry.. iPad HD..um...new iPad - Gee didn't expect that.

Image by mobileszoo.com

The new iPad has arrived and I have to say it seems to be with more of a small pop rather than a bang.


Weirdest part? The name. New iPad just seems wrong. What's going to happen when they release the next one? Can I have a new, new iPad please? Or are they going to say iPad, iPad 2, new iPad, iPad 3? Very strange.

New features?

• it's faster
• it has retina display
• it has a better back camera, but surprisingly not a better front facing one
• it cooks for you (oh, no...sorry not yet)

 Really, nothing most punters had not already predicted

What's missing?

• There's no update on front facing camera (i.e. - the camera still sucks)
• It's not lighter
• There's still no USB port (but that's never gonna happen)
• You still can't upgrade memory with an SD card (probably dreaming on that one also)
• You can't get it in purple (just to keep up 'the last point must be silly' requirement )

iPad 3 - ho hum.

So, not long until the iPad 3 announcement. I don't think there's been a day this week that there hasn't been a news article or 20 about what we can expect.

I am less than impressed with models 1 and 2 and I can't think of much that will excite me about 3.

Feature-wise, Apple is always playing catch up with Android when it brings out a new model but somehow seems to be able to convince media (and consumers who read that media) that they are cutting edge innovations.

If the iPad 3 has a full USB port I might change my mind, but the odds of that are the same as Steve Jobs coming back from the dead for the announcement.

Whoops autocorrect!

A boy in America wanted to type "gunna be at West Hall" in his iPhone and the autocorrect changed it to "Gunman at West Hall" which sent the cops into a frenzy and the schools into shutdown mode.

Whoops. It pays to double-check before hitting send.

Here's the full article from SMH.com.au

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/smartphones-autocorrect-function-puts-high-school-on-lockdown-20120302-1u6pq.html

A Billion Times Faster Computer?

 

If you believe the headlines around today in some of the major newspapers, scientists are just around the corner from creating a computer one billion times faster than the PC I am currently typing this blog post on.
One billion times! (queue Dr Evil and his pinky finger).

Apparently, scientists at the University of NSW – yes that’s right, right here in Australia, have managed to place a single atom between two pairs of electrodes, which can then be manipulated to act as a transistor.

The scientists involved have also claimed to have ‘cracked’ Moore’s Law. Now, just to remind ourselves, Moore’s Law is attributed (perhaps incorrectly) to Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, who in Electronics Magazine in the 1960’s predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The law has then been expanded to where it is now accepted to suggest that computer processing power doubles every eighteen months.

So, if we consider a computer with processing power one billion times faster that our current ones, that really completely and utterly blows Moore’s Law out of the water. Interestingly, the scientists who created this new nano quantum technology were trying to achieve just that. They had calculated that according to Moore’s Law, 2020 was the deadline for having a single atom transistor and so began trying to beat that deadline. Well, it looks as though they may have done just that.

This leads me to another thought. If we can assume Moore’s law still continues after the new computers are designed, and that is a big assumption considering these scientists apparently just tore that law to shreds, but let’s just say it was ‘the exception that proves the rule’ (I hate that expression), and work with it. Performing some exponential calculations, this means that 12 years from now we will have computers 1,024 billion times faster than what we have currently!

Which means that by 2024 machines will have become self aware and taken over the earth and eradicated the virus known to them as human kind. Or perhaps, humans would have used the new super computers to eradicate all disease and environmental problems and be living a peaceful utopian lifestyle. Who knows, I’m no futurist, but if I could get my hands on one of those new quantum PC’s, I reckon it would have a good chance of calculating the answer.

Lumix FT3 tough camera

I have decided to spend my Panasonic winnings on a Tough Camera - the Lumix FT3.

Hopefully it will be here in a couple of days and I will post a few impressions as well as videos and photos from the camera.

Being a tough camera, it should survive a few drops from my 2 young sons (and their butter fingered father) and I am interested to see how it performs underwater so will definitely be taking it for a spin at my sons' swimming lessons. Hopefully chlorine doesn't hurt it too much...?

$500 of Panasonic products!

I am signed up to the Panasonic Insider, an initiative of Panasonic to get views, opinions, ideas etc from people outside the Panasonic inner circle.

Recently I was lucky enough to score Insider of the Month, which scored me $500 of Panasonic products.

I now have the enviable task of deciding what products to spend my booty on.

It's actually harder than you would think. Should I buy a few lower priced items...or 1 major product for the whole lot? Should I go domestic with a bread maker, iron, toothbrush etc, or should I go gadgety with a nice new tough camera such as a Lumix FT3?

As a lover of all things electronic, I pretty much have everything I need already but both my digital camera and my video camera are starting to show their age so common sense probably points to getting a new version of one of those.

That still leaves me with a tough decision on which I go for. It's a dirty job but someone has to do it.

Food vs gadgets

After a quick comparison of stats, it is apparent that my partner's blog is getting a ton of hits.

I however, am getting very few (sob).

She writes about food, I write about gadgets and tech...obviously there are more people trawling the net looking for recipes.

Sour grapes? Not on her site.

Hacked on Facebook

So, it appears my Facebook has been hacked.

I logged in the other day and noticed a few weird messages from friends asking if I was OK and how could they contact me.

I checked my messages and discovered private messages from 'me' telling friends that I had been mugged and lost my wallet and passport in London in one message and Malaysia in another. I do get around!

When spellcheck is not enough..

I know journalists are busy people, but proofreading requires more than just running spellcheck..

<http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/us-feds-shut-down-one-of-worlds-largest-filesharing-websites-20120120-1q930.html>, viewed 20 January 2011

Note to journalists: calling a company a conspiracy could lead to defamation action, particularly when said company has just been shutdown by US authorities.