June 2012 archive

Social Media Beats Online News Outlets Hands Down

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Last night, Melbourne experienced an earthquake somewhere in the vicinity of 5.3 magnitude at around 2050 hours AEST. It’s a sizeable earthquake but quickly dwarfed by some of the major ones experienced in recent memory such as the the 9.0 magnitude quake that occurred in Japan last year – just under 10,000 times more powerful …

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What’s Not to Like About Facebook Photos

Everybody likes a good photo and the concept of “liking” something on Facebook has fast become a convenient way to allow people to provide positive feedback about something without having to write something. Sure, this could be laziness but sometimes people might not have much to say about it except to convey their appreciation for something in …

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Test Drive Android on Windows with BlueStacks

If you’ve been wanting to try out Android without investing in a device then you might be interested in a piece of software called BlueStacks. Think of it as an emulator of sorts that allows you to run Android apps in a window and use them as if they were running on an Android smartphone …

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The Evolution of Television and Print Media Advertising

Just an observation that my wife made today when watching television this evening. I remember growing up as a kid that we would have phone numbers flashing on the screen and even some phone numbers sung as part of the jingle so it stuck in your head (like the ABC Shop was 008 02 33 …

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Copy Ringtones to an ICS Android Smartphone

A lot of people love to customise their smartphones and one popular thing to do is change the ringtones and even set unique ones for each person who calls. If you’ve got a more recent Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) smartphone then all you have to do is connect it to your computer and copy …

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Optimise Battery Life for Smartphones with AMOLED Screens

Here’s a quick tip. If your phone has an AMOLED screen (as opposed to an LCD screen) it’s worth knowing how these displays work. In a nutshell, LCD screens rely on a backlight and a liquid crystal matrix in front of it which blocks certain colours and allows other colours through. Power usage will be …

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Keeping the Family Connected in Transit

As someone who does undertake several long haul drives every year (usually between Sydney and Melbourne or Sydney and the Gold Coast) it is handy to be able to maintain an internet connection for all of my devices while in transit. For instance, my iPad doesn’t work that well in regional areas given that it …

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Has Your LinkedIn Account Possibly Been Compromised?

Here’s a quick tip. If you use LinkedIn to keep track of your professional circles you may recall a leak of 6.5 million passwords. These had been stored in the form of unsalted hashes which means that many will be easy to crack if you have used password consisting only of dictionary words and if …

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How to Successfully Shuffle eTags

Maybe two or three times a year I might drive down to Melbourne to see friends and family and I have a mental cue to swap over my eTags when I cross the border. I have done this in order to avoid the surcharges for using an interstate eTag but I am unsure as to …

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Chrome Beta for Android Smartphones

After making a switch back to Android (for the time being) and getting back into the platform ecosystem from the perspective of daily usage I thought I’d make a web browser recommendation. Since Android first appeared on smartphones, we’ve always had a web browser available on it but it wasn’t the Google Chrome browser that …

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