March 2011 archive

Nintendo 3DS Unboxing

For those of you following the blog you would have read about my first impressions of the Nintendo 3DS and my decision to purchase an Australian model given the news of region locking for this handheld console. Well, launch day has arrived and I have gotten my hands on one of these devices for myself …

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Diagnose Dataflow Problems: Potential Issues on the Local Computer

Leading on from the last couple of posts outlining how to do a ping test and a traceroute to attempt to troubleshoot dataflow issues there are also some other things to look out for as common offenders on your own computer. These may or may not apply in all situations nor is this an exhaustive …

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Diagnose Dataflow Problems: The Traceroute

Traceroute with Unresponsive Hop

Leading on from yesterday’s post about how to do a ping test we move on to another test which might uncover more information about where dataflow problems may be occurring. In a nutshell, a traceroute shows you all of the various entities (also known as “hops”) on the Internet that sit between you and a …

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Diagnose Dataflow Issues: The Ping Test

Suboptimal Ping Test Results

Some time yesterday evening, the ADSL connection at home started playing up. Usually, our connection is quite solid save for a few hiccups back in the TPG network so my first thought was that this was just another one of those hiccups. However, this was not the case in this instance. Anyway, there are some …

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Use the Character Map to Find Unusual & Lesser Used Symbols

Character Map

Here’s a quick tip for tonight. Sometimes we need to get a hold of certain symbols like the copyright symbol (i.e. ©) when we don’t know the keyboard shortcut (Alt + 0169) or we want to preview a whole stack of characters at the same time for unusual fonts like Wingdings and Webdings. Sure, for …

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Windows 8: Potential System Reset Functionality

Windows 8 might be a little while away (perhaps with a release some time next year) but one thing that caught my eye browsing the web today was the potential new feature being the concept of the “system reset”. Granted, this was shown off in a leaked image but it’s interesting to see what might …

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BlackBerry PlayBook: RIM Apps or Android Apps?

As the tablet wars start to heat up there was an interesting teaser from RIM about the ability to run Android apps on their new PlayBook tablet. While the details are still a bit murky as to how this will work (either through emulation, “Just in Time” compilation or some other means) it does give …

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Should Governments Request Removal of Police Location Apps?

This is not a new issue by any means but this topic has bubbled up to the surface again after four US senators wrote to Apple as well as RIM and Google to revoke apps that help people avoid police checkpoints. This was in response to a specific app called PhantomALERT that is at the …

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Attack of the Tablets

If you have been following the tech news today, details about two of the more significant tablets come to surface today in the form of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the BlackBerry PlayBook. The timing was good as the international pricing for the Apple iPad 2 was also released. As far as Australia goes, …

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ReGadget: A Way to Offload Unwanted Devices

Today, I had a new follower on Twitter under the moniker of “ReGadget”. As the name might suggest, this company is looking to buy old gadgets for cash like mobile phones, MP3 players, digital cameras and games consoles amongst other things. Their website is still under development at the moment (although their Facebook page says …

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