Solution Wanted!

I got my first tablet device a while ago during the season sale. It was a shiny new ASUS Eee Pad known as the Transformer. At $300, the deal was more than compelling, although it did not include the bottom part – the dock that could double up as the back cover, complete with a USB port and an additional battery. Rather than spending another $150 on something I did not really need, I just grabbed the tablet itself, and moments later was playing around with the cool new toy.

Eventually the tablet took up its residence in the kitchen where we would use it to show each other great new videos, keep track of weather forecasts, look up interesting things and try out fancy recipes, and all was good.

With time, however, I started to notice that something was missing: the ability to keep the device upright without using my hands, and one day I figured I needed a stand. Researching the idea I came across several DIY designs, none of which really inspired me, but then in one of the discussions someone mentioned a plate holder, and that did the trick. Continue reading →

Blackberry Curve is a pretty slick smartphone, and my girlfriend Tara definitely likes her 8900, no question about that. As for me, I don’t have anything against it, except it has the nasty habit of making inadvertent phone calls from inside her purse. It doesn’t happen very often, but it has happened more than once over the past four months that she’s had this device.

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In one of my previous posts I wrote about the Junk folder issue in Thunderbird. Fortunately, a simple solution was found soon that made the problem almost negligeable. Today, I am going to rant about Thunderbird once again. This time, it will be the signature functionality that we will review with scrutiny.

As you know, email signatures are those lines that contain your titles and contact information and which are somehow inserted by your mail client at the end of every message you compose. Now here is the tricky part. If you’ve never created a signature in Thunderbird, when you finally get around to doing that, you’ll be in for a big surprise: how theo heck do you do it?

If you are like me, finding the place to enter your signature string is not going to be easy. To save you the time and effort, I came forward with this handy screenshot that shows exactly where the signature setting is located.

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I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my desktop email client. Maybe it is not the finest piece of software in the world, but it kind of works for me. Besides, throughout the years I have seen a good share of different email clients, and not all of them were pretty. In fact, some were so ugly I do not even want to mention them.

So, like I am saying, I am OK with Thunderbird. But there is one recurring problem with it that really pisses me off. Every once in a while after collecting new mail and getting it sorted, Thunderbird ends up being very confused about the contents of its Junk folder. You can delete all spam messages to clear the box, but a few items will still be there. I call them ghost junkies. Here is what it looks like:

People say the problem has to do with some internal index getting corrupt, and luckily enough, there is a way to fix it. Here is how you do it.

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Here is what I found today. I came to the Rogers website to see what’s new with my wireless provider. The first thing I noticed was a large banner that read: “The Revolution is coming. June 2nd”. What got me intrigued was the picture of an HTC cellphone with its keyboard slid out and the display showing Google’s home page.

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I would like to warn everyone who uses Skype: beware of your chat/instant messaging client if you do any kind of web development on your computer, as Skype, for some very obscure reason, uses port 80 (yes, the standard HTTP port) to connect to whatever communication server it has to talk to in order to get you online.

Fortunately, there is a way to disable this unwanted behavior. Simply navigate to Tools -> Options -> Advanced Settings -> Connection and uncheck the “Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections“.

Disable port 80 in Skype configuration

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Hi folks out there!

Before I start blogging full throttle I thought I’d provide some background on who I am and what made me go public with my concerns.

I am a rather conservative non-techie guy who, like everybody else, has to somehow deal with the ever increasing complexity of the world around us. Apparently, this complexity has many dimensions: political, social, environmental, psychological, you name it. Some of these are very complicated by nature and hard to manage. Yet there is one side of it that does not really have to be adding to the world’s complexity. But unfortunately it is. I am talking about technology.

No, not that kind of technology that launches rockets, cracks genetic code and controls weather – these are true gems of scientific and engineering thought that can’t possibly get any better (well, of course they can, but anyway). I am talking about the trivial things that are supposed to make our life easier, but in fact bring up more complexity than they take away, to the point of making it almost a mess. Yes, I mean all those gizmos, gadgets, widgets and other thingies that we use on a daily bases and, instead of getting used to, find ourselves increasingly frustrated with.

Why is it so? Well, I have a theory. To put it shortly, it’s got to do with the way corporations work. There does not seem to be much control over these matters, so I am not on a mission to change the world for the better. Instead, I am trying to raise awareness and attract people’s attention, so we can unite our efforts in finding solutions to common problems, and eventually beat the odds against us.

That’s what this weblog is here for. Stay tuned 🙂