Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications has made 1-megabit broadband Web access a legal right, YLE, the country's national broadcasting company, reported on Wednesday.
According to the report, every person in Finland (a little over 5 million people, according to a 2009 estimate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broadband connection starting in July. And they may ultimately gain the right to a 100Mb broadband connection.
The service I rely on heavily now got it's domain, dropbox.com. In the past it used getdropbox.com.
I am using the service to backup all my docs, but also to run several databases from like with Pagico. By putting it also at Dropbox it is automatically synched, so at home or wherever I connect, also from the laptop I have a synched database.
Turkey has grown the most of late. The country gained 1.07 million
users, an 8% gain to reach 14.5 million total. The United Kingdom is
still the largest Facebook country in Europe, with 20.6 million monthly
actives. But it grew relatively slowly, adding nearly 300,000 users. In
other countries, Facebook grew at impressive double-digit rates per
month in September.
OK, it is not so nice as for instance printing through other websites or iPhoto, but hey it's for free or for a very low price.
The new free program is advertiser supported, which means books will come with removable inserts from sponsors, none of the ads will actually be printed alongside your photos though.
Check out HotPrints.
WASHINGTON - Nearly all the dollar bills in the United States carry traces of cocaine. This suggests a study that was presented Sunday at a conference of the American Chemical Society.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts found 90 percent of the survey notes miniscule traces of cocaine. That is 20 percent more than in a survey two years ago.
The U.S. capital stretched the crown with 95 percent of the tickets. Paper money is used for cocaine to sniff and most dealers pay in cash. The researchers pointed out that the spread of cocaine particles mainly by Elma machines shall be removed. However, this, alarming rate''out how widespread cocaine use in the USA is.
The analysis of banknotes were also four other countries, Brazil, Canada, China and Japan. In Canada exceeded onde looking at 85 percent of the tickets traces of coacaïne, in Brazil 80, China 20 and Japan 12 per cent.
Tele2 is my Internet provider, but also my phone and TV company. I just changed providers some month ago and had more problems with Tele2 then I had ever before with my old one, UPC. But I decided due to the much lower pricing (500 euro less per year ..) it was time to switch.
Having some smaller issues over the past few month, annoying, but most of the time solved rather fast.
Yesterday though for over 8 hours Internet was working, phone a bit longer and TV for 12+ hours. The last 2 I do not mind, and I of course have also a mobile phone. But not being able to use Internet, and especially when you work at home is a problem.
So I had to use my iPhone a lot, in general working fine, but also here my mobile provider T-Mobile sometimes has problems with covering my area.
It all lead me to the question, "what if all providers are down" ... I think all business (and not only business) will come to a complete stop. I read something about terrorists trying to do this, or bring the Internet down .. hm .. this could be major.
At work, in the newspapers, at Internet, with sports ... August is not a very entertaining month for these aspects. So everybody is writing lame stories or writes about stuff that already happened ages ago. For me it is more or less the same. So I have time to check out more websites and products I'd like to use. As written yesterday I found Springpad, very interesting service indeed. It is a productivity tool , like in GTD.
It is one of the services that tries to combine a lot of functionality. Still not sure to which other I should compare. It has something of Nozbe, something from Facebook, something from Wordpress. Meaning, list, social and blogging. So what is in? Well mainly it is about notebooks, they call it Springpads. Many predefined, but you can also add your own.
Some predefined, holiday, grocery, wedding, recipes, etc.
You can add tasks and (returning) meetings, which are sent by e-mail or in USA also by SMS. This is one of the disadvantages, until now it totally focuses on the USA, so it is less interesting for us over here as for instance no info from Europe about companies etc is added.
What I found out is that most people are using it, for the social part, to share recipes. Why? I do not know, but there seems to be great interest in this part.
You are able to import addresses from Google, works fine, but I would like to be more flexible by adding vCards or even synchronizing with Outlook of Apple Address book. They state many more connections will become available over the coming months. I think a product to watch.
I was checking out CRM systems and online notebooks and todo list and found Springpad. I have played with a bit and think it has a lot of potential.
Springpads are free online notebooks that help you manage your life. Use your springpad to keep track of notes, photos, maps, to-do’s, contacts, appointments & more. But it goes way beyond the standard simple tools. Connect to Gmail, connect to Flickr, also to Facebook and Twitter, it's all there.
I am testing it now to plan my upcomming Holiday and make a weblog in it. It is like Twitter and Inbox on Steroids ...
Check out the many examples and demos.
At home I am using Postbox. Until now I have missed a calendar integration. But Postbox can now run the Lightning 0.9 add-on from the Mozilla Calendar Team. Lightning for Postbox allows you to view your calendar as a separate tab in Postbox. It is as Postbox itself in beta, but seems to be a very nice addition, also the integration with Google Calendar is very interesting.
Changing provider that is ... I really like the support I get at Fatcow.com (at least until now :-)) and although I liked Hostmonster in the past, the last few weeks I have had several (severe) issues with them. I know I can have issues again here of course, but for now I think I have done right to transfer most of my sites to Fatcow.
This will also mean that both yesitsme.info and hpkok.com will be directing to this weblog, so a simpler url is available.
What I experienced is that much more people are now linking to my site, do not know what changed the/their behaviour. Yesterday even Fatcow itself added me to their (long) list of to follow at their Twitter page. Maybe because I wrote positive about them :-)?
As written before I am extremely happy with b2evolution as weblog system, especially the multiblog possibilities are great. It is also very easy to have new entries from the other blogs, like my visit to Canada appear on the main page. So will use that a lot in a few weeks when traveling to British Columbia and Alaska.
Bad, bad, bad .... at my Birthday my account at Hostmonster has been suspended due to a phishing attack. Instead of helping me and perform the necessary work to prevent from happening again, they just sent me this notice (website deactivated) after I asked and after my further inquiries sent me a doc with info on what to do and after I will do it, they will un-suspend me ....
There are several issues here. They state my account was safe at the beginning, but after I installed scripts (by their installation system though) I did not work on safeguarding the environment. Well I am not a system admin, nor do I want to become one, so working with their installations should be ok. At least they should help after this mess up, that is what I think.
I have had now 2 major incidents in the last few weeks at Hostmonster, first no backups available and now this. Chancing all now to Fatcow, although not totally preventing from happening again, is what I will be doing. But it also made me think of how to improve backups and more secure sites. Will work on that.
What is Phishing:
In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT Administrators are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting public. Phishing is typically carried out by e-mail or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Even when using server authentication, it may require tremendous skill to detect that the website is fake. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to fool users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security measures.
A phishing technique was described in detail in 1987, and the first recorded use of the term "phishing" was made in 1996. The term is a variant of fishing, probably influenced by phreaking, and alludes to baits used to "catch" financial information and passwords.
I checked out online backup or sharing solutions many times, used most and think there are many interesting webbased products out there. To name a few, box.net, wuala.com, diino.com. I am now using 2 more often, Mozy and Dropbox.
To begin with Dropbox, any easier it can not be. Just add your computer (and do with your other computers if you have them). Just drop your files in and they will be automatically available on the the other computer. One of the main advantages though is the speed. Especially when you want to run the same product, like e.g. Pagico, on several computers. Just put the database in your Dropbox and it will always be available and updated on the fly. As a save backup system I think it misses some advanced functionality like many backup providers have.
One of them is Mozy. Backup is again extremely easy, just add a computer, login, select files to backup and that's it. It seems to be rather save, compared e.g. to Google.
Some functionality:
I think both Dropbox for sharing files and Mozy as real backup system are great products. They have free accounts with 2 Gb, so you can test it thoroughly. For more space or unlimited you have to pay, Dropbox is a bit high priced (99$ per year for 50Gb, 199$ for 100Gb), although you can have more computers attached for the same price. Mozy asks 4.95$ per month per computer for unlimited space. For a one year contract get 1 month for free, for a 2 year contract get 2 months for free.
If you want to share pictures, Wuala is perfect. Box.net is more for corporate and groupwork, see it as online SharePoint document sharing.
I know there are many more, of course other systems can have the functionality you need.
Pagico
Just got a mail that Pagico 4 is available as a beta. If you do not know Pagico, read about it at pagico.com. In short ...... Pagico keeps track of all your tasks, projects, and contacts. It is available for Apple, Windows, and Ubuntu.
I translated all versions including this one into Dutch. BTW I do not have any commercial interest, I just happen to like the software. You can download the beta now.
I have had a major issue at Hostmonster and had to re-install a backup. Well they don't do backups, at least not when you have more then 50.000 files. Hm .. this is a serious issues, as no backup was available, not so much for the weblogs I am running as I like to experiment, but more for Moodle setups I have. This made me rethink the provider. I started this one now at Fatcow, it has backups and is also faster. For the rest I think it is more or less the same, although at Hostmonster it is easier to add scripts. At Fatcow you can add some scripts from a list, the rest you should install yourself.
I am now adding stuff into the b2evolution weblog system, which I really like. I think it has more possibilities then Wordpress, although it is also a bit more difficult to use. One of the big advantages is being able to add many different blogs to the same install. One of the disadvantages is the fewer Skins, for Wordpress there are much more and also commercial ones I use at www.hpkok.com, which is really attractive I think.
See what you can do in Photoshop, some are really funny :-)
Check out www.worth1000.com 
For the company we are testing Joomla and for myself I now also installed Joomla 1.5.X to test all options out.
Having all websites in one I think is a good idea and this might lead to:
As I really like Squarespace I am trying to recreate everything now in Joomla. If not possible, I will stay at Squarespace.
