Honeymonster's Lair

So Google have launched their new Social Networking site Buzz. And in doing so have opened up their users to privacy leaks, as reported by the BBC (http://bit.ly/a6I0uf). Google are taking the user’s (read: “privacy activists’”) views into account and have set up a war cabinet to get the privacy concerns ironed out as soon as possible. The BBC report tells us Google representatives have indicated that they have already implemented some changes and others are due to go live within the week.

Personally, I quite like the new Google service, but then I’m a Google fanboi. In fact, I prefer Google over Apple, but only for software and services; Apple still make the best hardware that can be found. One gripe I had with the Buzz service is that it will link to your Twitter account and cross post your twitterings into Buzz, but the reverse isn’t part of the Out-Of-The-Box experience. Instead, I had to sign up to a third-party service (http://bit.ly/9K4k0P) to have my Buzz posts sent to Twitter. With this third-party service, however, it seems that it isn’t real-time or even a small delay. I’m wondering if only new buzzings get posted, and not replies to Buzz entries that you may make.

Image via CrunchBase

So I managed to turn my snazzy HTC Magic into something as useful as a brick, that can’t be used for building with. Hint, if you’re gonna flash a new SPL to your own rooted HTC Magic, then make sure it’s compatible because if you get the wrong file you’re screwed! Also make sure you’ve done your homework and do things in the correct order. I’m unsure whether I flashed the wrong image, or if I required the radio update to have been flashed before the SPL. Either way I now have a completely screwed phone that won’t even power on. The lack of response to keypresses to turn the unit on means, also, that I can’t get into fastboot to reflash the original boot rom. So, useless!

And so, I phoned vodafone to determine what my next course of action should be, which was suggested to me to be turning the phone over for repair or replacement with a refurbished unit. Needless to say these options meant that I would still have an HTC Magic, which some might think is a good thing. However, Vodafone now stock the iPhone!!! And thus I decided to shuffle my finances around to make room for a nice shiny iPhone 3GS 16GB.

Boy am I not disappointed, albeit that I only got the phone today (Weds 20th Jan 2010). I’ve installed the mobile version of Colloquy the IRC application, and also facebook, so far and played around with some of the inbuilt features. Compared to the Magic, this phone is so fast! My Magic would take a few more seconds to think about things such as rotating the phone to landscape. On the iPhone, you rotate the phone and the display keeps up with you, whereas on the Magic you would rotate the phone and the screen would dim for a couple seconds while it thought about rotating the view.

Comparing Colloquy to AndroidIRC, I prefer the former, due mostly to the way that the keyboard doesn’t obscure the chat view while you’re typing a message. This means that I can carry on monitoring the room while typing our my reply, and can respond to things said after I activated the keyboard.

All in all, I prefer the iPhone to my Android 1.6-based HTC Magic.

I’ve now reimplemented an older theme that I had archived. I feel that these dark nights require a dark theme. (Though the nights aren’t dark for those in the southern hemisphere, more’s the pity. I’m looking at you, Deadpan110! :-p) Plus, this theme has the nice snowy bottom, though I think it needs a bit of a tweak. I really should package up “ThemeDeFrem” and release the code, but that would mean stripping out the adsense, and that takes effort, which I’m just too lazy to put in.

Zemanta is a fancy firefox plugin that enables you to scour the social web for any related articles and images which can be utilised to enhance a blog entry. Once installed, Zemanta will modify the layout of your blog’s add new post screen to give you more options. These options being relevant photos, related articles and links all of which are derived from your entry’s text as you write it.

As you can see in the above paragraph, I have clicked the “apply all” button in my related links box to automatically link the words Zemanta, plugin and “social web” to the Zemanta homepage, and wikipedia’s entries on plugins and the social web.

What’s even more amazing about the zemanta product is that the entire thing is FREE!