Using Xplornet as my primary source and my cell phone tethered into my computer via USB, I’m actually able to get fairly reliable service – the computer switches back and forth between whichever connection happens to have access to the Internet.

This could work…

I see that Bell is now offering a 2Mbps modem for rural residents. I’d like to try that as an alternative to Xplornet – maybe I’ll be able to drop my contract in March and have reliable net.

Related posts:

1. Using a Cell Phone as Backup Internet

photo credit: abulhussain

My phone has turned out to be a decent alternative; using instructions I found online I was able to re-purpose my Palm Pre as a WiFi router. It’s still not broadband but it gives me a way to check my email when my Xplornet fixed wireless (often) fails.

Although Bell Canada supports tethering with their smartphone plans, they don’t go out of their way to make it obvious how to do it. My Tether turned out to be worth the cost; even though there is a free version you can use if you want to play with the settings.

Related posts:

1. Tethering the Internet, Week One

YourFriend@hotmail.com says (2:26 PM):
http://PictureFreakz.com/?user=yourmsnname&image=DSC00567.JPG ?!?

… HAHAHA!!

Be careful – this is a scam site that invites you to enter your login information and password – then uses it to rope in your contacts with similar messages sent from your account.

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photo credit: rockcohen

The EU wants to stop Microsoft from bundling Internet Explorer with its operating system. In today’s day and age, how does this make sense? The charge is led by Opera, who claims that having Internet Explorer ship with Windows unfairly limits competitors from getting through to customers.

Any web designer will tell you that Internet Explorer is one of the most challenging browsers to target since it basically ignores web standards and renders web pages in its own proprietary way. So the design pattern we follow is:

1. Design web site using sane browsers
2. Mutilate our markup so it renders as desired on Internet Explorer

Apologies for the digression, but the point is there is a lot of work needed to make web sites work properly for one web browser. Why do it? Depending on the site, up to 65% of your visitors will be using some version of Internet Explorer – not because it is any “better” but simply because they don’t know about alternatives or haven’t taken the time to try them. Likewise for Safari among Apple users – most people don’t customize their computing experience and simply deal with their default settings.

In that regard, Opera’s proposal makes sense – force vendors to include 3rd party browsers along with Internet Explorer on new machines. But… which browsers should be included? Firefox, Opera, Safari, Netscape? What about the dozens (hundreds?) of others? Who chooses which ones are “mainstream” enough to be included?

The biggest problem I have with this is that Microsoft has done nothing to prevet users from switching web browsers. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, your first move upon booting a new PC is to download Firefox/Chrome and ditch Internet Explorer (that’s one of the main advantages I get from targeting a technical audience).

Suiong Microsoft is not the answer – we need to work on the unwashed masses and teach people to make their own/better choices when it comes to their web browsing experience. While we’re at it, perhaps we can all learn to keep our systems patched as well…

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photo credit: michelb

You have to shake your head every time someone goes off about “netbooks”, those wonderful, tiny, cute computers that don’t cost very much. When you look at them, what do you really see? How about a crappy laptop that can barely run Windows. The thing is cheap in more ways than one – but somehow marketers have been able to spin that as a good thing and make big profits off useless hardware without needing to develop anything new.

This Brave New World Seems Just Like the Old

Anything sounds better with a little bit of spin – Web 1.0 is clunky, slow, ugly. Web 2.0 is a designer’s dream, sexy, with new technology. Well, no. The technology isn’t new at all – the web is the same. The only difference is enough marketers held onto the “Web 2.0″ buzz phrase and shouted it repeatedly long enough that it became accepted as fact.

What’s So Social About Media?

There was never anything truly “new” about New Media. There’s nothing earth shattering about Social Media either. Call it a new paradigm all you want, there is nothing different between it and “old” media: the goal is to communicate our message to as many people as possible. How others perceive your brand and how you react to that feedback is not something new and alien – it’s just a lot faster now than it used to be. Your audience is your focus group. Traditional roles haven’t changed one bit – their owners have.

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photo credit: youngthousands

Over the weekend Facebook suffered a multiple hardware failure that caused its photo service to fail. Up to 15% of the site’s multiple-billion photos displayed as nothing more than a question mark on Sunday night.

Facebook is already in the process of cleaning up the mess and restoring the lost files, but the failure is just another example highlighting the importance of making backups of our own data rather than relying on “the cloud” for permanence.

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photo credit: kalleboo

In December 2008, a “fault” in three of the undersea cables under the Mediterranean Sea denied Internet service to thousands of subscribers in Egypt, India and the Middle East.

It’s hard to explain to people how the Internet connects together, especially to users in North America who have a hard time understanding about the world beyond our own shores. Communications don’t happen by magic – there are cables laid all around the world by commercial interests. Since much of the worldwide traffic is routed through hubs in the United States, American users rarely notice cable-induced outages.

Across the ocean, however, the Internet is more susceptible to damage. Regional links are expensive to maintain when much of the outgoing traffic is bound for North America anyway. The result is a small number of backbone connections servicing major routes across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

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Enter sites like YoBusted; members post photos and tag for the public to see – if you are the subject of a particularly hilarious (read: embarrassing) photo, you can remove it by signing up to a $20/month membership. Although some have suggested that YoBusted’s business model is nothing more than simple extortion, proving that claim in a court would be difficult – and what’s to stop a copycat site from doing the same thing (they probably already are).

The solution: guard your personal data. Don’t fill your Facebook profile with personal photos – if you do post pictures, make sure to adjust your privacy settings so strangers are unable to view your profile.

Don’t post drunken photos of yourself on the Internet! It may be funny in the context of your friends but any content you post to the Internet is indexed, cached and eventually findable. Future employers (maybe future voters and journalists will search your information online; when they do, what do you want them to see?

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I guess I got lucky this time. According to cnet, GoDaddy was struck by a denial-of-service attack on the morning of January 14, 2008. There are conflicting reports (naturally) of the exact number of sites affected ranging from several to several thousand.

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Early in December 2008, the W3C announced a new MobileOK Checker addition to their excellent suite of quality assurance tools that include the famous CSS and HTML validators.

Photo by Matt (Tj)

The MobileOK checker reviews the markup and overall page content against a set of basic tests created for mobile platforms. Always Get Better scores 81% – not bad considering the site is essentially an out-of-the-box Wordpress with no particular optimizations in place.

No related posts.