Mobile phones now allowed onboard aircraft

“Halo, ya, the plane flying now ar…”

Airline passengers

I love travelling. I like going to see new places, experience new cultures. But I absolutely loathe flying. All the fuss about turning up at least 2 hours early at the airport, the check-in queue, the security checks, the queue to get to your seat, the babies crying, and the list goes on and on and on. Why do we put ourselves through this kind of torture? Is the destination even worth it?

Well, if you think the list is bad, you can add another ‘Things you don’t look forward to when flying’ onto it. Last Monday, the European Commission had introduced a new rule regarding mobile phone usage on the aircraft while it is airborne. Yes, you heard it right. They had finally relented and said ‘Yes!’ to passengers who wants to use their mobile phones during the flight.

Mobile phone approved

Before this new regulation was approved, mobile phones were strict ‘No-no’ as soon as the passengers board the plane. Mobile phones were prohibited from being used on any flights, for fears that it could interrupt the navigation system and land the plane in a technical fault. And unfortunately for me, I vaguely remember a movie in which the navigation system on the plane was disrupted by a mobile phone signal. Paranoia, I know.

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Online File Sharing Reloaded

Online file sharing is undoubtedly one of the most convenient ways to get large files across to your friends and the people who need them. Email attachments have a 20MB limit (Gmail) and that’s surely not enough, unless you split the files up and send them one at a time, but what a hassle! I rely on online file sharing to share lecture notes, slideshows and photos with my friends and family. Here are some services which I use the most:

Dropbox
Dropbox was created by 2 MIT students back in 2007. Although they are now a three-man team. Its aim is to simplify file sharing, but it also has a lot of cool features besides the ol ‘upload-and-share’. It is still in private beta but you can get an invitation to join from getdropbox.com

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Terminator: P2P elimination

It seemed like the era of P2P might come to an end after all, in the near future. The Japanese ISPs have apparently agreed to disconnect any users that they detected to be using any P2P (peer-to-peer) program such as BitTorrent, BearShare, and Japan’s very own Winny.

They did have a go with an attack on P2P users a couple of years back, but the Japanese government told them that their plans could backfire and they could be violating the piracy law if they (the ISPs) went spying on the Internet usage of their users. With that, the plan was abandoned.

P2P elimination

Just in case you are wondering (or for the new Internet users out there) but peer-to-peer files sharing software is a software that allows users to share files among themselves. Users that are sharing the same network will be able to download files if their peers have them and needless to say, this has created “headaches” for a lot of parties as they cannot control their product or materials from being passed around the globe, losing out on royalty and license payments.

Users are already able to find any kind of files from the Internet, even more so from the peer-to-peer file sharing network. File types from music to movies, from books to published research papers; these are all readily available to be shared on the network. For FREE!

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8 tricks to Google more efficiently

Don’t You Just Love Google?

Well do you? I know I do. I don’t think I’ve gone a day without using Google. Because of the time period that I spent on the Internet, there are always things to be searched for; Music, movies, TV shows, books, how-to tutorials, you name it, I always end up using Google for my dose of information.

Simpsons Google

Being a student, Google is my life. 95% of my information for researches and assignments came from the Internet and of course to get to these information, Google is the perfect highway.

But for some people, sometimes googling can be a tedious work, annoying even, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I have friends who don’t use the Google much, and they do lose out on time and good (or relevant) information, time especially when there’s a dateline just turning up on the corner, and they don’t know where to start with Google returning more than 2,000,000 results.

But Google doesn’t only have to be useful to students or to get long-winded information. It can be handy for our daily tasks as well. This article will list out the more popular and useful Google search tricks, tailored to the usage of Malaysian Internet users of course (I hardly think that the “Zip Code Movie” information is relevant to us, it is more relevant to the US users).

1. The “phrase search” method

To start off, this is the more common and popular one, used to search for exact strings or phrases as entered. Just enter your search string with quotation (“”) mark. It is very useful, especially if you don’t want Google to search on separate words. It condenses and filters the results into more relevant and useful results.

Google search

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Universal Share Downloader

Have you ever found that downloading off websites like Sendspace.com and MegaUpload.com a pain? What with the download limit and the ever-busy servers of theirs? I find it very hard to wake up in the middle of the night just to check if my download has finished and to click on another link to run another download again, only to be told the server is busy, and to try again in another few minutes.

Yes, I’ve lived that life (ONLY for a day) and then I grew tired of the routine. So I searched the Internet to find me a good solution to this and alas, I found my favorite software of all time, well, at least for the time being. 🙂

This software is called the Universal Share Downloader. With its simple interface, this piece of software will make your life easier at downloading, because all you need to do is copy the download link and paste it into the software. The software will then start on the download, by-passing any annoying Captcha request and it will also automatically re-connect to the server if the server is busy until it can secure a slot.

Let me give you step by step screen shots.

MegaUpload

Copy the download link from the MegaUpload address bar.

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How I use Schnitz Remote Lite to remotely help Mac users

We’re all used to it. Our parents, non-tech savvy friends, (some) girls, your kids. These are the people who often cry out for help when something is not quite right with their computers or when they hit a hurdle and they have absolutely no idea what just happened. Instead of Google-ing for the solution online or calling a technician, they normally call you – the only person who can help them.

For me, this is happens quite often. I usually try my best to help everyone I can, but sometimes there’s just so much you can do for someone over the phone or through instant messaging. At those time, I either tell them that I should view the problem in person or if they’re too far away then I can’t do anything for them, unfortunately. There are some solutions to remotely access their computer, but can you imagine trying to ask your parents to set up Remote Desktop and open the related ports of their router? I’d rather throw they the laptop against the wall.

Luckily for Mac users, there’s a simple solution.

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Easiest way to make Windows Vista run faster

Of course there are numerous ways you can do to tweak your Windows Vista system to make it run faster. You could do the following:

  • De-fragment your hard disk
  • Apply windows updates
  • Uninstall unnecessary software
  • Do a through scan and remove viruses and trojans
  • Clean up the Windows Registry
  • Optimize the RAM and virtual memory settings
  • Disable and reduce unnecessary startup programs

Of course you could also add more RAM and stuff like that, but this is a little more costly. Out of the above checklist, I believe the easiest way to make Windows Vista run faster is to defrag the hard disk, and to disable and reduce unnecessary startup programs. These days, seems like every program I install wants to start automatically when Windows Vista starts. Most of these programs unnecessarily insert themselves into the Windows startup process so that they can have their very own system tray icons from whence they can spam us with annoying messages. Each of these startup applications wastes memory and slows down Windows Vista’s startup process.

To configure or disable startup programs in Windows Vista, we need to use access the System Configuration tool. Follow the following steps to do that.

Windows Vista run

Click on Start > Run…

Enter “msconfig” in the Open text box. Click on OK.

You’ll need to give permission for the program to start unless you’ve disabled UAC, and then you’ll see the System Configuration utility.

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What is Digg and how does it affect me?

Digg logo.jpg

In a nutshell, Digg is a social bookmarking website, with a twist. It’s a place to share stuff which you have found online with others, and to discover what other’s have Dugg. Everything and anything can be Dugg (except those which are NFSW) so long as it is submitted. So how does this affect us?

Well, as readers, you can see the interaction between Digg users. For a social bookmarking website, it’s pretty uncommon. Digging an article makes it more popular, and hence more people will notice it. They will tend to start to write comments about that article which may or may not agree with everyone, creating a little bit of controversy. And since there’s no such thing as bad publicity, that article will probably reach the front page of Digg.com, and handing that site what is called the ‘Digg effect’ – which essentially means that it is so heavily Dugg until the server crashes.

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Unlimited RapidShare downloading

If you find yourself visiting RapidShare everyday and are spending a good amount of your time waiting every time you download files from it, you might want to get yourself a premium account. Yeah, I know, when talking about paying for a RapidShare Premium Account, you would rather wait and download slowly.

However, that’s about to change because you can use RapidPremium to download files from RapidShare servers for FREE! Still remember two hugely popular websites to download unlimited files from RapidShare, namely RapidGrab and MegaDL? RapidPremium is similar to these two websites, it uses its own RapidShare Premium accounts to download from RapidShare servers, after that you can download from RapidPremium.

RapidPremium

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Big M Cashing In On iPhone’s Success

iphone

The iPhone is probably one of the most successful mobile communications device ever sold. According to Apple’s quarterly sales reports, the iPhone sold more than one million in Q4 of 2007 (see the report here), less than 3 months after it was launched and Apple is more than halfway in achieving their target of selling 10 million iPhone by the end of 2008.

It’s not a surprise if Microsoft wants to hop on the iPhone’s success/popularity bandwagon.

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