Boydo's Tech Talk

Not all electronic devices are created equally and sometimes, due to poor manufacturing or lack of testing, product recalls are necessary to correct these defects. Companies may take out newspaper ads, attempt to contact customers based upon their product registration details and perhaps even television ads (if they are brave).

Anyway, there is something you can do to keep on top of product recall announcements.

You can visit the Product Safety Recalls website here on a regular basis but unless you can remember to keep swinging by all the time it’s probably not the most effective way to keep tabs on what is going on. The best thing I could recommend is subscribing to one or more of the RSS feeds here so that you can browse through the lists as they trickle through.

I think it’s perhaps better to skim over listed recalls that may not necessarily affect you, your family or friends in order to find out about hopefully the very few product recalls that do end up affecting you and those around you.

Here’s a quick one for tonight.

In amongst the melting pot of social media sites is a new social image sharing site called Pinterest. As the name may imply, this service allows you to pin images and videos of interest to one of your virtual pinboards. Probably the easiest way to pin stuff to your Pinterest account is to use the Pinterest bookmarklet which will find all the pictures and videos on a page and let you choose which one you want to pin to a board along with a short blurb. Some sites also offer a “Pin It” button so you can do it right from the page itself.

However, you should also be aware that websites no also have the power to prevent their content from being pinned to Pinterest. Now there could be good reasons to prevent pinning but in most cases I would see benefit in allowing people to pin content as it would drive additional traffic to your site as Pinterest does provide that link back capability.

For the time being, if you’re interested in seeing what Pinterest is like you can check out my page here and, if you like the look of it, sign up for an invite to join Pinterest here. Or, if you ask nicely, I could perhaps give you an invite as well.

I’ve been on a bit of a weight management thing lately (i.e. getting out and exercising instead of sitting on my butt all the time) and part of that is obviously tracking and recording your stats to make sure things are going in the right direction.

Anyway, I’ve had my Fitbit for a year (still going strong) which has been great to track my activity throughout each day and historically. Here are some stats I have collected using the Fitbit:

• I have walked 2,398,407 steps since I received it,
• Those steps equate to around 1,336.41 kilometres,
• The day with the most steps was March 20, 2011 with 26,483 steps (or 14.57 kilometres),

I reckon that’s pretty neat!

Anyway, Fitbit announced that they are releasing new Wi-Fi scales called the “Fitbit Aria”. Essentially, these are like regular scales but with Wi-Fi built into it along with the capability to link it to your Fitbit account. All you need to do is hop on everyday and it will send off your stats for you to track online.

It even works with up to eight people with a clever way to work out who hopped on the scales most of the time. It manages this by keeping track of last known weight for each person and then allowing for a suitable tolerance around that weight to make an educated guess as to which record belongs to which account. However, if the Fitbit Aria cannot definitively work out which person to assign a given measurement then it will send the data to all linked accounts (which could be embarrassing - it would have been better only to assign the measurement to accounts it believes are potential candidates given tolerance). You can claim or assign a wayward measurement online through your Fitbit account.

Anyway, the Fitbit Aria is released in April and I’ve ordered a white one (because it matches the bathroom, not because it’s white). I’ll be sure to unbox and preview it when it arrives.

For more info, check out the Fitbit Aria product page here.

Stay tuned!

Here’s something I found out the hard way.

I wanted to brush the dust off my old Flickr account and I noticed that it has the option of Facebook authentication. Given how rarely I use Yahoo services I thought it’d be a neat way to avoid remembering another username and password combination (not that it’d be a burden with LastPass).

Anyway, if you want to use Facebook authentication do not sign in with your Facebook account unless you have already linked it to your Flickr account. If you do, then you’ll end up creating a second account.

What you should do is:

1. Login to your Flickr account,
2. Go into your account information by clicking your username up in the top right-hand corner of the screen,
3. Click on the “Sharing & Extending” tab,
4. Click the link to link your Facebook account.

Once done, you can login either with your Flickr username and password or provide Facebook authentication.

Just one final thing, if you did create a new account by accident you can disassociate your Facebook account from it but you need to wait 24 hours after account creation in order to do so.

This might polarise the audience a bit but I just wanted to expand on my thoughts in this earlier article.

In that article, I noted the only 100% effective solution to cure an infected computer is to format and reinstall or restore from a known good backup. Today, I tried and tried unsuccessfully to eradicate a trojan from a computer belonging to a business which drove their primary point of sale terminal. Unfortunately, it was so deeply rooted that it could not be removed manually or with specialised tools. Fortunately, they had another computer on hand to swap in to keep things going.

The problem is that antivirus software won’t catch 100% of the bad stuff coming in with pattern-based current technology. In order to detect a virus, it first must be known but there will always be a window of time where new viruses, worms, trojans and the like where they can get in and your AV might let it slip through. This is where being cautious with your online activities and portable storage comes to the fore.

Do you trust the site you are browsing or from which you are downloading a file?

Do you know where that storage device has come from and the computers to which it has been connected?

Were you expecting an attachment from that particular person?

If the answer to these questions is no, then you might want to think twice. These are popular vectors for malware infection.

Prevention is always better than the cure particularly as the cure cannot be known to completely reverse what has been installed. Also, regular and clean backups are also going to save you from losing data and time reinstalling and reconfiguring everything from scratch after an incident.

Seems like a slightly crowded field these days for mobile OS market share. Up front we have Android and iOS while BlackBerry OS and Symbian are slowly being sucked into a black hole. Meanwhile, Windows Phone is carving out a small niche for itself prior to Windows 8 hitting the scene as WebOS is stuck in a vacuum.

It’s a harsh environment and betting the farm on a mobile OS can take a company under.

So why would Mozilla think of a mobile OS when it could be argued that they have lost control of their own browser?

That remains unclear at the moment but perhaps with their Google partnership for search engine revenues on the default homepage under doubt beyond the current contract. With Google having its own browser and mobile OS and Microsoft with its own browser, mobile OS and search engine it leaves slim pickings for search engine revenues if the two major players don’t want to play ball. Early diversification may help mitigate against this risk but only if there will be monetary gain which is not yet known.

Will B2G be a winner? Time will tell…

A quick tip for tonight.

One disappointing “feature” in Windows 7 is when you are playing back audio to a television over HDMI and the power saving feature kicks in to turn off connected screens it also stops audio from being transmitted over HDMI. This can be annoying when you are relaying sound to a television or home theatre system and you want to listen to music from your computer.

If you want to get around this issue then one solution is to create a new power plan that doesn’t allow the monitors to go to sleep.

Create an HDMI audio power plan

Whenever you fancy playing back audio just change the power plan to “HDMI Audio” but don’t forget to put it back to balanced just so your computer isn’t on all the time chewing up power.

Perhaps Microsoft can fix this in time for Windows 8?

It’s been in the news today but I thought this topic was worth mentioning. I’ve also written about this in the past, specifically:

• R18+ Video Games – One Step Closer
• R18+ Computer Games Classification – Its Time Will Come
• Draft R18+ Guidelines for Computer Games Released

Today, a bill was introduced into Federal Parliament to create a new R18+ category for video games. This classification has existed for films for quite some time but games that exceeded the MA15+ category were refused classification and became unsuitable for sale in Australia. Such examples include:

• Left 4 Dead 2 (which was later modified and granted the MA15+ classification),
• Mortal Kombat 9 (refused classification and banned from sale).

If this bill manages to get through Parliament unscathed then we can expect this classification to take effect from January 2013. This would also be a victory for common sense in my eyes in amongst the malarkey going on in Australian politics at the moment.

One thing that we should remember is the fact that these classification is designed to prevent minors from gaining access to R18+ content from retail channels. Such a rating in addition to the other ratings can be helpful to adults to assess and determine the suitability of content for their kids while allowing gaming adults to access such content if they so desire.

Here’s a software pick for those looking for a Twitter client for Windows other than TweetDeck.

MetroTwit is a Metro styled Twitter client for Windows. For those that don’t know, Metro is the interface found on Windows Phone 7 and will also be the interface for Windows 8 tablets. The Metro design language basically gives you a grid of tiles (or varying sizes) with clean typography that are easy to touch with a finger whilst also stripping out the graphical chrome that added little value. Live tiles are an evolution of this language which allow tiles to show useful information without actually having to open an app.

For instance, the icon for the weather app on an iPhone or Android device doesn’t tell you anything apart from the fact that it’s an app. On a Windows Phone, you could see the current temperature, forecast high and low temperatures or other metrics of interest. Being able to glance and determine if you want to find out more rather than hop in and out of apps to gather all of that information is far more efficient.

Anyway, we’re going to see more of Metro and for those wanting to get a feel for it without getting a Windows Phone can try it out with MetroTwit.

MetroTwit

It’s quite similar to TweetDeck with the ability to add and remove columns of interest but the headings are very much set out in the Metro style. Even the settings screen is reminiscent of Windows Phone.

MetroTwit Settings

As far as it goes in terms of a client it seems to do what it’s supposed to do as a Twitter client. The only drawback maybe the amount of memory it uses on your system as it is using 670MB on my system with 12GB RAM. I’ll see how it pans out but the memory usage hasn’t affected the general responsiveness of the application. However, you will need .NET Framework 4.0 to run it but you’ll be prompted to install this if your system doesn’t already have it.

For those looking for multiple account support, you might want to check out the beta version of MetroTwit called MetroTwit Loop but beware, there could be bugs.

You can get MetroTwit here and installation is a snap.

From time to time you might receive an Excel spreadsheet that has been created by an application but it has output the dates in its own text format instead of being stored as an actual date value. I’ve seen instances where the time has been placed before the date which would leave many to think that the only way to reconstruct a proper timestamp is to fluff around with string formulae to find and extract the date and time components and join them all back together (assuming the formatting is consistent)

Don’t waste your time doing that, there’s an easier way!

All you need to do is use the DATEVALUE function and point it at the cell you want to convert to an actual timestamp value that can be used in other calculations. Excel will work out the rest for you and return the result as a serial number representing the date and time (which you can then format however you wish).