But aren’t these people a little too geeky even for my tastes?

So far I think Windows 7 is cool, appart from some problems with Firefox it’s been a dream to install and the new features are mostly benificial. But I don’t want to get carried away. A lot of the new features should have been addressed a long time ago and this won’t halt the migration from the desktop to more flexible mobile devices for the masses (iPhone, netbooks et al). Keep trying Microsoft the wars not over yet (ever).

Oh and if anyone thinks this isn’t real, very sorry to say visit: http://uk.houseparty.com/windows7uk I know I will

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One annoying problem for me is sometimes it “has difficulty” sending the email from your domain, maybe a timeout on the server or some other network issue. When this occurs Google will “kindly” forward your email using your gmail account instead. Now this sounds reasonable but it’s annoying if you have your own business and you are effectively replying to customers with a free gmail account, that looks so unprofessional.

gmail sometimes sends my domains mail from it's own address

This is a little suspicious as Google doesn’t have an equivalent of the old hotmail footer advertising that this person uses free email and you can get yours here link; but effectively this is a gmail advert through the backdoor. People will see you are using gmail and therefore endorse it. But worse than that it is confusing for the recipients as it wouldn’t be the same email they sent to originally.

It happened to me so many times in July that I was about to start using my own webmail service and drop gmail then while changing the settings on one of my accounts I spotted a new setting, goto “settings” (top right of menu on gmail page) then click on “Accounts and Import” then in the “Send mail as:” section “edit info” on your domain click next and you will see something like:

you can now use your own SMTP server

Once you put in your SMTP servers settings gmail will only send through this and you shouldn’t see the dreaded free email address again. Since changing this I haven’t had the problem, if you do have any issues with it let me know.

Cheers

Dave

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Now you can find out at http://blindsearch.fejus.com if you do try it please leave a comment with what you’re results are I’d love to know.

Finally we can have answers…

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Ok stop laughing, what is your score? I bet you are just as bad. (if not what are you doing reading my blog in the first place ).

Seriously no it’s no time for us nerds to fight each other, let’s vote for nerd-world-peace… ideas please.

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With this kit you can put your favorite plant on the internet and allow it to express it’s inner feelings!! Cool or what?

How does it work?
The device detects the moisture levels of the plant’s soil and based on predefined levels will send a twitter to a specified Twitter account (for those who don’t already know twitter is a micro-blogging social network site- http://twitter.com)

The botanicalls 2 kit lets your plant use twitter

A neat little package the kit plugs into your switch/router/hub to get onto the internet and send those all important tweets, add your mobile number to twitter and your plant now has the ability to send you an SMS when it’s thirsty! And I thought plants were boring…

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The botanicall in action, you can just about see the probes at in the soil and the ethernet cable is plugged in

I found a live example of the device in action http://twitter.com/pothos Cool!

At $149.00 it’s not that cheap but if you’re serious about your plants welfare, in my opinion it’s essential.

So where can you get one?

http://www.adafruit.com

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Here is what I think is one of the most innovative pieces of advertising I’ve seen for a while, it’s a website for a Japanese clothes store but they have made it a bit more compelling than a normal clothes website.

uniqlock - this is the clock bit

It starts off as a clock showing the local Tokyo time with some very addictive music in the background.

This shows a dance routine

After 5 seconds we see our first dance routine, the routines are flash video and are very high quality full screen. The trick is that the video buffers while the clock shows and that makes the site responsive and sharp on even the slowest of computers with the slowest of connections (still broadband though).

Another dance routine, there are loads of them randomised

The routines are randomized so it rarely gets boring, it gets very addictive although more changes in the music would have been better.

Check it out for yourself:

http://www.uniqlo.jp/uniqlock/

or check out summer season:

http://www.uniqlo.jp/uniqlock/season1/index.html

and for the winter collection (yes they have thought of that too):

http://www.uniqlo.jp/uniqlock/season2/index.html

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Twitter is really great, maybe not in the way people think it is.

Just out of interest most people seemed to recommend godaddy.com as the best domain registration company.

Cheers

Dave

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1. most read, most email varies depending on what page you’re on! How is that possible?

2.Video/Audio/text content is only available in 1 form, you need to support at least text, but many stories are video only. Why? At least have a subtitles option.

3. “Scientists say” stories! Tea is good for you, tea is bad for you… etc. etc. no evidence, rarely do they even bother to name the scientists involved, this is dumbed down nonsense. STOP IT! This is true of the TV news as well as the site.

4. Sources should be clearly quoted at the end of each story; so that we can check these sources and find out more.

5. They boast accessibility but the “new” website still uses tables for formatting!!! Making the site very hard to navigate for the visually impaired. this is a basic stuff come on BBC if you need some help with this please just ask! Other BBC sites are very accessible so just no excuse really.

6. The news ticker on the front page should have a back/forward button, it’s so frustrating when you get a glimpse of a interesting story then have to wait for it to come around again.

7. Very biased reporting on Bill Gates recently, seemed to be just free publicity for Microsoft

The good news is the bbc news site could really be a world class site if it could address these problems. Generally news is the BBC’s flagship product, they must not fall into the trap of dumbing down news to retain more viewers.

Cheers
Dave

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