BlogAllAlong

BetaNews is reporting on a deal between Microsoft and Nikon that “covers digital cameras made by Nikon as well as a [range] of other consumer products each company manufactures and sells.” according to Microsoft spokesman.

No further details have been revealed yet about the deal between the two, but BetaNews is predicting it could be around the wireless technology. For me, this brings nothing to my mind but the long anticipated Microsoft Surface.

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After years of Lab testing, and inclusion in some search plugins like Google Firefox Search plugin, allowing major competitors to go fully live before them, Google finally released their Google Suggest autocompletion feature on their main page, and I guess there would be so many people who didn’t know it existed several years back.

I have been trying it for long time and it was doing great. So my two wild guesses as to why Google kept it in labs for so long are:

1- Google was afraid of increased load from the service usage, as it’s automatically querying for suggestions.

2- Google for some reason did not think it’s very useful and needs that much attention (I doubt it!)

Anyways, now it’s here. Go and enjoy it, if you haven’t been already for years.

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Just in case you were looking the other way, I thought of sharing this piece of news I read. A recently discovered SERIOUS security hole in the iPhone software would allow, according to the news source, access to your address book, e-mail, text and voice messages. Regardless of how many people actually DO lock their phones, the simplicity of the hack is what concerns me most:

1- Click Emergency Call Button

2- Double Click Home Button

Favorites menu shows up! I am not an iPhone owner, but no one on Engadget seems to be denying it. One guy did suggest a temporarily workaround till a fix is released for it:

“This is an issue with 2.0.1 as well. Re configure the home button double tap to go to the home screen and you will be fine till apple fixes this. — Sent from my handheld device” JacindaQeneus

UPDATE: If the issue wasn’t serious, I guess we won’t be hearing Apple already working on a fix for it for next software update.

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It’s sometimes nice to see how Cinescape brings movie on their worldwide release date, and with our early weekends, we actually get to see movies such as Star Wars before so many other countries. But that’s for certain top movies. Others however have to wait long enough, perhaps to get a discount on the price before they show up. I remember reading about the movie 88 Minutes for Al Pacino, and just today I saw it coming soon to Cinescape.

28/8/08 when the movie is actually released 18/4/07! 16 months late is really not a cinema movie anymore. It’s already out on DVD for $25. But that’s not as bad as it gets. I recall 1.5 year old movies which had ratings of 3-4/10 being brought to the big screen. Wonder why would they bother showing them, unless if they got them for FREE somehow!

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Is anyone else facing this or is it just me? ShowtimeArabia.com is not returning anything since yesterday.

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A relative and close friend of mine was on his honeymoon for 2 weeks across Europe. On his last night in Paris I was talking to him over Gmail. He was talking to me about Euro Disney and how marvellous it was. He was taking the train next day to Barcelona. He said it’s more cost effective, but hard with the large amount of baggage they are carrying.

Two days later I heard his baggage, wife’s laptop (with all their honeymoon pictures), money, credit cards, and passports were all stolen at the train. How hard can it be? Their honeymoon ruined, photos lost, money and cards stolen, and no passport to go back home. New passport can also take up to one year.

Now, to get papers for traveling back home, he has to reach Kuwait Embassy in Madrid. Unfortunately, the office was closed for summer vacation, and now he has to reach Malaga. No passport so no air travel, no train tickets available, and Taxi would take 12 hours. I tried to search for available transporations, sent him an email thinking how would I even start my email after what happened. I figured this would be the best thing:

“Salam ***,

I heard about what happened to you. Really sorry to hear that, must be real bad. Nevertheless, you are all safe and have each other, and that’s what matters.”

As much as it’s hard for someone to accept it, even me who was saying it, it remains true for observer. All is lost can be overcome, as long as you are still alive. Two days later I heard he managed to DHL his documents and just needs to wait for his papers now. OK, I said. What’s happened is history, let them go out and enjoy their day. They got their papers and are on the way back right now to Kuwait.

Oh and by the way, without passports, they couldn’t continue their honeymoon as planned to Canary Islands and had to stay in Barcelona. They missed their flight!

Crashed Spanair airplane from Real Madrid to Canary Islands

So now somehow they owe their lives to the guy who stole their baggage, and their mistake of keeping passports in their baggage rather than next to them. A friend of mine was asking me few weeks back how could a bad thing be good in other way, arguing why we should be thankful to God in all matters. I was trying to bring him good examples, and this one is the best one I can remember right now.

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So I just finally got my self a NetGear ReadyNAS device and was thinking of trying the Time Machine that everybody have been talking about for long time. Unfortunately, for either technical or business reasons, Apple has made it that Time Machine by default does not use NAS drives. Why exactly? I don’t know. I just know that Googling for a solution, I found lots of similar requests, and lots of complicated long procedures, some suggesting you must have 2 MacBooks to get it to work. Others were as simple as one command line.

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Now personally, I am still facing other problems that might be related with access to the drive, but at least now I can select the drive as the primary location for backup. I will update if I find anything else also related.

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