Archive for the Category Computers

 
 

Google Maps Mobile Rocks!

After catching wind from a Google Blog post about Google Maps Mobile for a specific GPS enabled phone, I decided to investigate further using my handy Palm TX with WiFi and Bluetooth.

Upon going to the website for Google Maps Mobile on the Palm, there was a message that recognized that I was on a PalmOS handheld and asked me to install a .prc file for Google Maps. I was hopeful that the program would work with my bluetooth GPS unit, but found that it doesn’t. That lack of bluetooth GPS functionality doesn’t downplay all of the other amazing features that the program offers. You can search, browse in map and satellite mode, get directions, and zoom in to all levels that the web version allows; all through a high speed wifi connection.

I’m still hopeful that Google will eventually enable bluetooth GPS devices, but until then, I’ve got a really handy new piece of software to play around with.

I hate spamers

I woke up this morning to over 650 emails sitting in my gmail spam box (I forward all emails from this domain to there). What was most shocking about it was that a very large number (around 90%) of them were really failure to deliver notifications or messages stating that an email sent from me was blocked by the spam filters. It’s amazing to think that a spammer would use a fake email from my domain to send out his/her crap mail!

A quick google for “email authentication” found a few articles describing the failing process for establishing a common email authentication method:aricles 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I also found an interesting Wikipedia article describing the process of email authentication and also what challenges it faces. Hopefully, one of these days, there will be an authentication requirement prior to using a domain for sending email. Honestly, right now, I hope that day comes quickly.

As I was writing this I got hit with another 100 200+ spam messages… this is getting annoying…

Does anyone know of good solutions to this problem or how to prevent a spammer from using my domain name?

Update: another 600 spams in my inbox and spam box while I was out biking for a few hours. I’m shutting down my forwarding account until this gets fixed.

“Hell, it’s about time”

Starcraft II is coming!

The much-anticipated sequel to the space-strategy game has just been announced by Blizzard Entertainment. They haven’t stated when exactly it will be coming out or how much it will cost; according to the site, it’s too early in development to reveal that information. One great thing that Blizzard has stated is that, like all previous releases, they will support both PC and MAC from day 1 of the release of the game!

The trailer movie is really amazing! and makes me wish I had gobs of time to use playing the game when it comes out. The title quote comes from the movie and this splash screen image from Blizzard’s site.

Future of Computer Interfaces

Bah! Too Bad

I just successfully hacked my CVS video camera a few hours ago and was able to liberate the videos of our little kittens only weeks old from the contents of the memory. The image quality, for a $30 “one-time-use” camera, was quite nice! That was the good news…

The bad news is that I got a little “greedy” and wanted to modify the image resolution size to get better sized movies out of the thing and bricked it. Upon tweaking the flash, it got stuck and restarted… or at least tried to… it never started back up again. I now have a nice little paper weight reminding me that I should have been happy after getting the thing hacked after 100+ attempts and getting the videos off of it that I had been hoping to save.