News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
For the iPhone users out there, are you tired of AT&T’s poor coverage? “Mark the Spot” is an iPhone app that, when you have a service failure, registers a complaint with AT&T and tells them the exact location of the failure.
Link: http://lifehacker.com/…
Here’s a nice power outlet that includes two USB charging plugs in addition to the standard three-prong electrical outlets. It costs $9.95, fits in any existing wall outlet, and doesn’t drain any “vampire” power. The downside is that it’s only available for pre-order (but should be shipping fairly soon).
Link: http://store.fastmac.com/…
(via Engadget)
There are advantages to using cloud computing services such as Google Docs, but there are also some definite disadvantages. Chief among these are the potential loss of access to your data, and getting what you pay for.
Link: http://it.slashdot.org/…
A Taiwanese man is the first person to finish World of Warcraft. According to the article, he “killed 390,895 creatures, accumulated 7,255,538,878 points of damage, completed 5,906 quests (that’s 14.62 quests per day, apparently), raided 405 dungeons and hugged 11 players.” Some people have way too much free time.
Link: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/…
(via Neatorama)
Given the unbelievably large number of Coca-Cola cans sold every day, one artist has a simple proposal to save significant amounts of energy and materials: don’t paint the cans.
Link: http://gizmodo.com/…
(via digg)
Nearly all web surfing makes use of a DNS resolver, a computer program that takes your human-readable domain name (e.g., www.chadsnews.com) and turns it into a numeric IP address that’s understood by the routers and switches on the Internet. DNS resolvers are typically supplied by your ISP, but astute Chad’s News readers will already be aware of OpenDNS, a free DNS resolver that has advantages over the ones provided by ISPs.
Now Google is getting into the business by offering a free DNS resolver service. They say it speeds up the browsing experience, increases security, and does away with those pesky redirects to advertising pages (which my ISP, Qwest, does when it can’t find the domain name).
The downside is privacy. Here at the Chad’s News network command center, for instance, Google already knows a lot of information about us because we use gmail and the Google reader. Using the resolver would give them even more data about our web browsing habits.
If you want to do a trial of the Google resolver, there’s a Windows program called Google DNS Helper that does the switch for you and, if you don’t like it, will switch you back.
Link #1 (Google Site): http://code.google.com/…
Link #2 (More Details): http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/…
Link #3 (Negative Analysis): http://arstechnica.com/…
Link #4 (Speed Tests): http://www.pcmag.com/…
(via digg)
NORAD’s Christmas Eve Santa tracking has embraced Web 2.0. The linked article explains its history, starting in 1955 with a typo that accidentally directed callers to a top-secret phone, to the present day where the Santa tracker is on gmail, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and others. The big event, however, is the real-time NORAD radar/satellite tracking on Christmas Eve. Military fighter jets meet up with Santa when he enters North American airspace and escort him as he goes about his duties. It turns out that Rudolph’s nose is bright enough to give off a heat signature detectable by NORAD’s satellites.
Link: http://news.cnet.com/…
(via Neatorama)
According to the linked article, it’s estimated that 1.5 billion Coca-Colas are served daily. When you figure in the other brands owned by the company, the number of daily servings rises to 50 billion. I find that to be mind-boggling.
Link: http://www.busmanagement.com/…
(via digg)
Are you tired of people asking questions online that can easily be answered by a simple Google search? If so, then the linked website is for you. Perform the search like you normally would on Google, and you’ll get a link. Copy that link and give it to the person instead of an answer. The results are funny.
Thanks to Tom for this topic.
Link: http://lmgtfy.com/
Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we use Avast! as our anti-virus program, because it’s free and is more or less mandated by our corporate masters for VPN access. The folks at Avast rolled out an update yesterday, at about 5:15pm Mountain Time, and it had severe problems. The update caused many false positives and crippled the programs that it incorrectly flagged as having the “Win32:Delf-MZG” virus. At 10:50pm Mountain Time, they released an update that fixed the problem.
If you are experiencing this issue, first update Avast! If you saved the corrupted files to “the chest,” you can safely restore them, and that will be that. Here at Chad’s News, however, we were caught by surprise and spent about 8-9 hours “fixing” the problem before finding out that it was all a mistake. Sigh… The linked article contains the official explanation and solution.
Firefox has reached a milestone: its market share for October beat that of Internet Explorer 6 (24.07% vs. 23.30%). What I find most amazing is that IE6 still has a 23 percent share. Security holes, standards noncompliance, and lack of features are all good reasons to upgrade to IE8. I’ve heard that much of the IE6 use is from corporate computer systems that are locked down by their system administrators, such that they can’t be upgraded.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Airlines have had e-tickets for some time now, but it’s still necessary to get a printed boarding pass. Well, even that is on the way out. My friend Josh sent this screen print of his iPhone. It’s a “mobile boarding pass,” and the airline accepts it from the phone display.
